General [Suggestion] Make blizzlike experience the default (but still allow 3x rates and perks)

[Nezive]

I always find it amazing that despite the age of the game, there are still newcomers, even on unofficial servers like here. They usually get introduced by friends already playing, sometimes come from retail, but there are also newbies who have never played WoW before, do not know anyone here and just happen to find this server via reddit or some random forum, wanting to "give WoW finally a try". It really shows the beauty of the game.

I do not know how prevalent these absolute new players are, but I just recently saw three of them. I am talking about players who are leveling their first ever character and are starting their journey learning the absolute basics, like how to move or target things. People who are still amazed at the grand scale of the world, whose jaw drop when they first enter their capital and for whom leveling is still one incredible adventure. We all had this feeling of noobiness, when everything was still new and we neither had an idea of what endgame was nor did we care about it at the time. I think this is a feeling that everyone should have the chance to experience.

In my opinion, the current default of 3x XP rates goes against this. Players outlevel content too fast, and as thus do not get the chance to finish the zones and complete some of the more epic questlines. What's worse, newcomers are completely unaware of this. The XP rate can be modified by a hidden command that almost everyone who played on private servers know about, but not the newbies for whom it would actually matter. Certain game concepts may not get introduced because they outlevel the quest designed to bring it to the player's attention. They are always behind on the intended level of gear and also have not enough gold to purchase better ones. Class mechanics may also get introduced much faster than intended for them. This hurts experienced players as well who may have to group with them.

Similarly, I believe the perks the Alliance is getting also take out certain vanity of the game that newcomers may still want to experience. It is confusing that reagents do not get consumed, that all flight paths are discovered (even though the introduction quests tell otherwise), that there is a permanent rested bonus, etc. Note that the reason behind the perks is to pick Alliance over Horde in an effort to balance out the population. Alas, anyone picking Alliance just because of the perks already knows about them, whereas complete newcomers are likely oblivious and they would have picked Alliance anyway.

Therefore I propose to:
 - Default XP rates to 1x for newly created characters (or accounts). The rates could still be changed to 3x via the .xprate command as is possible now.
 - Default to disabled Alliance perks for newly created characters (or accounts). People could still enable them with the .toggleAlliancePerks command as they can already do now.
 - Advertise both these commands in occasional server messages, possibly in a way that implies that these commands are mainly for experienced players who already leveled a bunch of characters and just quickly want to get to max level.

My experience with these new players comes from Netherwing, but I suggest these changes implemented for all 3 servers (including Mistblade vol. 2.), especially as leveling in MoP is faster already. I believe the changes would benefit the community as a whole in the long run, but more importantly help new players experience the game in its own, intended pace. Once they learn about XP rates and perks, they could still change it, but then they made the decision and it was not made for them.

What is the community's opinion on this proposal?

[Query]

There is an option to set XP to 1. You have to use a command ".xp <rates you want until 3"

[Nezive]

2 hours ago, Query said:

There is an option to set XP to 1. You have to use a command ".xp <rates you want until 3"

I know. This is about the default value, which currently is 3. Please read my post for the reasons why I think a default of 1 would be better.

[Aithne]

It wouldn't be. More people want x3 than x1, and the people with the less common desires should be the ones putting in work to achieve it. Default states are there so that the majority automatically gets an experience close to what they want, and for levelling, default x3 (and automatically updating to people to x6 upon buying the boost) is what makes the most sense.

[Query]

The issue with x1 is that most people don't care about the whole leveling process and just want to jump straight to endgame as fast as possible.

Sadly x1 servers are a thing in the past for most private server players and it's seen as a deal breaker for most people and that would severely hurt the population health of the realm

[Aithne]

An interesting piece of stats: out of 5000 characters created close to the server launch (on MoP, since you mentioned that you would apply your changes to MoP too), only two of them set their xprate to 2, and 21 set it to 1. This is what we normally call "negligible". There are also a few hundred that manually set their xprate to 3, 6 that had an xpboost active the last time they logged in AND manually set their xprate to 6 at some point, and the rest, the overwhelming majority of characters, had their xprate on the default 0 value, which returns 3 if the account has no xpboost and 6 if it does.

You'd have to ask someone with access to TBC for TBC stats, I don't doubt that more people want slower levelling there, but it very likely still wouldn't be a good default state.

[ICritMyKilt]

I would say the overwhelming majority, even with the new players, given a choice at first login, would pick the highest XP multiplier option available.  There are those that relish the leveling experience and those that are hardcore RP and enjoy the story and want to experience all the quests and don't care about the time it takes. On the other side of that coin is the vast majority of us who either, eagerly await what comes next and are in a hurry to see what max level and cool epics gets us, or have leveled every class to max at least once, and we do not care about the journey.

I'll be honest, the draw back to fast XP rates is that you do a few quests and you have out-leveled the zone and you need to move on.  Leveling a pandaren hunter was an aweful experience for me because I blasted through the zone and actually hit a point where the next quest was grey to me and I had some issues finding some quests that would push me through to the end of the quest line so I could get off the starting area.  Doing lots of running to complete a few quests then do lots of running to the next area for a couple more quests is the annoying trade off for not having to do every quest in every zone and leveling taking much longer.

I probably wouldn't mind the slower leveling as much if there were also better dungeon queue times.  Some of those old dungeons that I haven't run in ages could be fun if the queue times weren't so abismal.  My retail dungeon queue experience was, as long as you had a tank or a healer, dungeon pops were instant.  Maybe 3x XP or lower pop than retail is to blame for this, but on MB1, dungeon pops are long, even for tanks and heals, until you hit 90 heroics.  At 90, the queues some days are short and some days long, but if you have tank and heals, it is generally really fast. As always, DPS are $0.10/dozen.  I'm honestly hoping that dungeon queues are cross realm between MB1 and MB2 at launch and maybe I can level some of my alts and do some old dungeons for that sweet nostalgia.  I'm afraid that the 3x XP may mean that a lot of people skip the dungeon queues and just blast through zones burning up quests and racing to 90.  Personally, I'd rather level in dungeons doing dungeon quests and collecting all the gear, but it seems that I end up doing a lot of quest grinding with very few dungeons popping inbetween.

[Wolfenstein]

Overwhelming majority prefers higher rates which and adding additional step needed for every player to start playing is an unnecessary complication. We will not be changing default rates.