Come level with me

Recently Blizzard announced the lastest WOW expansion and some of the details really tickled my fancy.  The basic concept of an expansion focused around Alliance / Horde conflict is kind of meh, as I don't much care, but admittedly it is pretty hard to top the previous expansion where heroes basically went and killed Satan himself.  Once you do that, you really might as well go to war with each other, right?

The thing that caught my attention though was the revamping of levelling throughout WOW.  The old world will be changed so that all zones now level up with the player, though each zone will have a minimum and maximum level.  Noob zones will be 1-10, the rest of the old world is 10-60, Burning Crusade and Northrend are 60-80, Pandaria and Cataclysm are 80-90, and I assume the rest is being left as it is.

Right now if you are levelling you will find that you constantly outlevel zones so by the time you finish all the storyline the monsters are trivial and everything is a bore.  Plus if you are in the middle of a zone and you do some dungeons you can't go back to the zone because nothing gives experience anymore.

Also heirloom items that you hand off to your low level characters wreck the game.  They give bonus experience so they exacerbate the problems I have described above.  Gaining more experience faster actually makes the game *worse*.

As a consequence the levelling game sucks.

But when the zones level up with you this problem goes away.  Suddenly you can take breaks from a zone and do other stuff or level professions or run dungeons and then get right back to it and the zone will be a challenge and give meaningful rewards.  You can do whatever zone strikes your fancy instead of having to travel halfway across the world to find an appropriate place to be a hero.  You can follow all the storylines if you want and they won't end up being worthless or trivial. 

I LOVE IT.

I haven't wanted to level a new character in a long time but these changes are making me think about doing it again.

I do have one request though:  Make it hard.  All of these changes will be good but the levelling game right now is so trivial that it is hard to be engaged with it.  Make the monsters tough!  Let us die if we screw up.  People who don't like levelling get a free max level bonus with every expansion anyway so it hardly even matters.... just let the people who truly enjoy levelling actually have a gaming experience instead of a time passing experience.

Heck, if making the game have any challenge is out of the question then give us a hardmode.  Put an NPC in major cities that we can talk to that will make all monsters in flexible levelling zones +3 levels on us and give 25% more experience or something.  The zones will suddenly feel hard and we will have to be careful and I will *totally* do that.  The noobs can still have their mindless grind and the people who want everything to be challenging all the time can do that too.

You are doing a good thing here Blizzard.  And I know, years ago I would have told you that this idea wrecks immersion and feels bad and blah blah blah.  I was wrong.  Zones scaling with the character is the right way to be.  So do it, but please make sure that crusty old veterans like me can have our old school challenge back.  I want to plan.  I want to think.  I want to worry.  And when I fail to do these things, I want to die.

Make it happen, and I will go back to the World of Warcraft.  In 2005 I levelled up and hunter called Bluecape with his trusty wolf friend Ahortes.  It was challenging, and fun, and glorious.  Give me that again, and I will once again entrust you with my addiction.