I, for one, think the revamping of the leveling zones is a heck of a lot of work (as opposed to "Blizz is lazy"). I thought they would never approach it because it's such a large and difficult task.

However, I also think it was badly needed, as someone who has leveled more toons 1-60 than there are character slots. Northrend quest hubs puts the vanilla content to shame.

I'm actually of the opinion this shows Blizzard being the exact opposite of lazy.

How many times have we asked for flying mounts in Azeroth only to be told "That would be a lot of work?" I know this is only a single example, but it's a pretty good one. I'm also excited about the fresh start - I've never, NEVER been able to get a second character to max level. The closest I have is a Death Knight, and let's admit it - that's cheating. I've tried power-leveling, leveling guides, leveling with my dad, and every time, I just get... bored. Or I hit a zone like Stranglethorn where I hate myself because I'm going to be stuck there for the next 15 levels.

Getting rid of those little annoyances may make all the difference. It may not. Either way, it'll be nice to be able to go back to Azeroth and have a reason to be there other than leveling mining from 1-350 (or something equally annoying)

*Edit* GAH! Inadvertent first. Bornakk, where's my piggy-back ride?

The re-vamp of Azeroth is a HUGE undertaking.

I would venture to say that this expansion will require more work than the last two combined.

Creating 10 levels of new content on a blank slate is one thing. Going back and re-doing 60 levels of content, adding phasing technology, new quests, and the capability of flying mounts, is a pretty massive undertaking.

So, no, Blizzard is not getting lazy. Cataclysm will be an enormous expansion, and will not only add top-end content, but will change the entire game from level 1 on up. It's huge, and I'm excited about it.

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Q u o t e:


The terrain is not guaranteed to change in every zone, many zones are likely going to stay the same terrain-wise but the questing will get the clean up.

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That's cool. I understand that...as for all the room in between zones, will they just be large mountain ranges?

I am just hoping and praying that the Old World revamp will include a lot more quests that involve war between the Horde and Alliance. Give us quests that involve attacking the opposing factions settlements. I don't mean the NPC only settlements either, but the player quest hubs as well.

Cataclysm, imo will be the best Expansion Blizz ever put out.

1) Wow is getting old in comparison to lots of the new MMOs that will be hitting the scene over the next 12 months. The old world content currently is nothing more than a HUGE area of waisted space. Lowbies can't even find groups to complete little things like Mara, or ST, stuff that I took for granted as I was leveling up years ago.

2) Lots of elements of the vanilla Wow has been lost since the introduction of TBC & Wotlk that made the game somewhat dull. 1 particular element that I dearly missed was the epic South Shore vs Tarren Mills world PVP. Isle of QD in TBC was a minor fix but didn't replace the epic world PVP that was in WOW & lets not even mention WG.

I about cancelled my account due to the nature of WOW being reduced to nothing more than instanced PVE & instanced PVP (Arenas), and the mindless Battlegrounds full of players soo dumb you can't tell the difference between a real player & a bot. NR was nice when it was new, but it got old quick. Needless to say, the game got mindless, easy, dull & boring.

The revamp of old world content will guarentee the return of World PVP as it was in Vanilla WOW. Battlegrounds will once again be meaningful as it's going to be rated. To be honest, I wish Blizz focused PVP around BGs vs Arenas. PVP is almost impossible to balance because the original design of wow was balanced around the group of 5/10/40 in open world environments, not the 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 pillar PVP that we know of as arenas.

Hopefully the graphics of at least the landscape will be up to par with the newer MMOs like AION that will be hitting the scene shortly. The one thing Wow has going for it is, it's undisputed proven model of success & polish. Unlike other MMOs that seem to come & go, at least I know that I'll have a character & a game to come back to if I decide to take breaks. I can't say the same for other MMOs that tried & failed.

I'm in full support of the next Expansion, it should bring the fun back into the game that was lost soo many years ago.

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Q u o t e:


The terrain is not guaranteed to change in every zone, many zones are likely going to stay the same terrain-wise but the questing will get the clean up.

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Will there ever be Warcraft 4???

I know people who played Warcraft 3, and will never play WoW (no matter how hard I try to get them to play it) but would play Warcraft 4 if it ever was made.

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Q u o t e:
I am just hoping and praying that the Old World revamp will include a lot more quests that involve war between the Horde and Alliance. Give us quests that involve attacking the opposing factions settlements. I don't mean the NPC only settlements either, but the player quest hubs as well.

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So you can finally show your L33T PVP Skills again on level 45 guards?

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Do you all think Bliz is being lazy just revamping old content, bringing back old bosses instead of actually spending some time and making new content and new bosses with a story line that takes more than 2mins to think of. I see a steady decrease in the time they spend on making gear look halfway decent. Really seems that bliz is taking the easy and quick way out on everything now. I guess the more money you make the less you care about your customers satisfaction.

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Um... how is redesigning and rewriting the entire fricking world "lazy"? It would be much less work to simply provide additional content. This kind of revisioning a large MMORPG has never been done, to my knowledge. Ambitious, yes; foolish, maybe. But lazy? Not at all.

While I loved WotLK, and to a lesser extent BC, Cataclysm is the expansion I've been waiting for. In my opinion, it's always been easier to create an entirely separate continent that you have to zone to, while leaving the original world virtually untouched. We had no reason to go back to the old world at all, and so players have been just getting more and more disconnected.

I've always felt that there was enough content in the old world to support an expansion IF they remade the world so that it could support flying mounts... and I was right. And what's more, we're getting WoW's story advanced. So far from being lazy, the developers have been working very, very hard to improve WoW.

And I like it.

Yeah, I think of this a big "Clean Up" expansion that is long overdue. Besides, there will be new zones, new races, and new content. Sounds like a massive undertaking to me.
I'll take eight!

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Q u o t e:


Yes. The new system will avoid requiring you to run back and forth between continents to find the right quests to do. Instead there will be a natural flow all the way through.

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I'm looking forward to this, there are a few times when leveling that quests seem to dry up. If you can make the flow better while keeping the branching options (heading north into ashenvale instead of south into 1k, or staying at Northern eastern kingdoms instead of going south to STV, badlands, etc) then I would be really happy.

Also it may be a good idea to keep just a few multi-continent quests, they tend to feel epic just from the distance you have to cross. Maybe keep a few just for nostalgia too.

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Q u o t e:
Think of it like this, would you rather have this cleaner leveling system, the guild leveling system, and the new path of the titans max-level progression system or more zones/dungeons to level up through?

We want to hear your thoughts on things especially since we are doing something very different this expansion, but if things don't become constructive the thread will be locked.

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I think revisiting the old world is a great move to make and one that I think satisfies more of the wow population than it disappoints. My reasoning?

- Every expansion we're pushed farther and farther away from our homes and origins around azeroth. We're forced to discover new lands and new dungeons which are rising to the surface with new threats. Sure, that works and its fun. But while you're going off clearing new dungeon after new dungeon, you can't help but think, what of all the old ones? What happened to the threats of the world we once "cleared"? Bringing Rag back in his "full power" is brilliant IMO. Not only does it satisfy the nostalgia nuts who loved the old world bosses and raids (myself included), but it brings it back in a new and interesting way which makes it seem like a whole new boss. Traveling to the Plane of Fire, Rags homeland, to take him head on? Yes please!

- Leveling in vanilla was fun... at the time. It was new and exciting and even the annoying quests you didn't mind doing because you hadn't done it before. You just wanted to see what happened. With Bc and even more so with WotLK, I feel like Bliz has taken leveling to a whole new level of fun and excitement. They've improved upon much (not all) of the annoyances of vanilla questing and really have seemed to get a grasp on how to implement quest lines. Instead of using these new techniques throughout level 80-90 content on some other continent from where we got our starts which has been the pattern for the past few years, why not take these methods and apply them to the experience we all once loved that is Vanilla wow? Make 1-60 new and exciting again, make players WANT to reroll and continue to explore more than just end game content. Once again, brilliant move IMO.

- Finally, the old world always seemed.... incomplete to me. Between unused zones, giant gaps of land between oceans and current zones, and just all the lost potential of areas, BC and WotLK used their continents to the fullest and made it feel like a real world to explore, not just a series of open areas surrounded by walls and connected with a few narrow pathways. Using the Cataclysm to complete the world, to tie it all together and make it feel just as much of completed continents as Outland and Northrend felt, is just the right way to go. Flying mounts in azeroth is something the Community has been crying out for since BC first dropped. Anyone who complains about that now, I would just love to meet you in person so I can slap you myself.

Blizzard has learned so much in the past 5 years to improve an already great game (while not everything they've done to the game is great, imo, they have still improved upon alot of key aspects), why not keep the original world alive and implement this there as well as with the new content.

TL;DR - Blizzard is making the right move with the general direction they are going. New and fun content doesn't always need to be a new continent... =/

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Q u o t e:


So you can finally show your L33T PVP Skills again on level 45 guards?

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World pvp doesnt exist on PVE servers, what do you want us to do - bgs, arena??

I'm not arena player but bgs rock.

Personally I think it's bloody brilliant on Blizzard's part to do this. There are a lot of zones that experienced players avoid like the plaque while leveling and several that are just unused now because they used to be the 58-60 zones (EPL, Silithus, Winterspring).

New players will get a better leveling experience, experienced players leveling new toons will get something new to see.

After playing this game for 4 years, I'm happy to see these kind of changes.

Of course, they could've just said "you'll be able to fly in Azeroth" and I'd be happy too :-)

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Q u o t e:
Do you all think Bliz is being lazy just revamping old content, bringing back old bosses instead of actually spending some time and making new content and new bosses with a story line that takes more than 2mins to think of. I see a steady decrease in the time they spend on making gear look halfway decent. Really seems that bliz is taking the easy and quick way out on everything now. I guess the more money you make the less you care about your customers satisfaction.

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I'm 78% satisfied with what I see coming from the next expac.

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Q u o t e:


Lazy would be going back and NOT redoing old Azeroth. They had to actually reprogram every single zone basically from scratch to make it such that people could fly in Azeroth. The fact that they're redoing everything so you will be able to fly everywhere really speaks to how they were NOT lazy.

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this made me LOL

I sorta felt this way when Wotlk came out. Only because it only felt as if the only thing they did was create a new continent, reuse an old raid, and create two one boss raids.

After seeing what they plan for the next xpac they have deffinetly put more work into this one (maybe why there wasn't such a large amount for wrath?). If you look at it you are sorta getting 2 new continents, 2 new races, 5 new levels, 3 more BGs, countless new UI changes, 4? raids at launch, countless other things.

By the sound of what I've seen so far Cat looks like it may be bigger than BC and Wrath combined.

I'm quite happy with the redesign of the old zones.

I've seen what happened in EQ as they kept adding more and more zones with every expansion. In the end, most of the world was simply unused. There were zones nobody went in for days and weeks since there was no reason to. I don't want to see that happen in WoW.

Also, Bliz always has to keep in mind potential new players. How do you join a game that has 100+ zones? It is simply too overwhelming.