Not that lore is really tied into the arenas, but it could easily be made to fit. Something along the lines of "oh you're ready to battle for your side, here take some swanky kit fitting your rank sgt. toomuchcoffeeman". Or something.

Everyone had a carte-blanche of arena gear to choose from. The level of the gear was determined by the rating of your team. No diminishing returns, new season = start with whatever the best gear you had last time around.

Everyone with a more or less equal rating (which are matched anyway) would be able to compete on a more or less equal ground and it would be more down to skill, teamwork, rock-paper-scissors luck and technical aspects like fps, lag etc.

World pvp would be as fucked as ever but that's nothing to worry about really. It's usually just about whoever gets the jump and/or who has the biggest friends list / guild when shit gets campy.

If Bliz would just dare to think a bit outside the box, arena could really be a almost separate game within the game satisfying the most hungry of the pvp'ers, competative or casual.

I do see the downsides and obvious pitfalls of a system like the one made up above, but it would allow Bliz to go haywire on PvE loot without affecting their precious tournaments in the arena.

The EQ progression also worked a bit better due to most expansions not having a leveling increase so all that was released was just harder raid zones at the same baseline. Gaining 10 levels in the first expansion isn't insignificant, especially considering in WoW being higher level makes you godly, whereas in EQ being higher level certainly made things easier, but it was a more group oriented game by comparison.

What he means by progression is item progression. Once upon a time in EQ, if you wanted to make any initial headway in Luclin, you needed to have done TOV a bunch for the upgrades, or Kunark > Velious, and now, there are still guilds doing GoD/OoW content in order to do the DoN and DoD raid content...which is basically a pre-requisite for PoR content and onwards. There is group content upgrades in between, a lot of it, but if you did the previous tier of high end content, you typically got a ton of great drops per week which would help with the current content tier.

Thinking more about it - it's in fact a non-discussion.

Any time you raise the level cap and release new abilities/gear you will inevitably obsolete old content. The only discussion seems to be how much of the old content should be obsoleted. Should Blizzard have tuned level 70 quest and world drop gear to T1 level, T2 level or T3 level?

Bearing in mind that this expansion conincided with a switch from 40-man raiding to 25-man, I can see a very strong argument for tuning it to obsolete all prior instances, however much that hurts in terms of "wasted" content.

Let's say they'd tuned level 70 gear to T2 level instead of to T3 (as at present). So once you hit l70, MC and BWL are obsolete. You still need to gear up in AQ40 and Naxx in order to take on Karazhan, Gruul/Magtheridon etc.

It's been enough hell for the existing 40-man groups downsizing - can you imagine the logistical difficulties of starting a new guild at level 70 under the above scenario? First you have to recruit enough for 40-man and then downsize again, then upsize... it'd be double the nightmare.

Even then, when the next expansion comes out and the level cap goes to 80 - by then gear and intrinsic abilities would have to trivialise Naxx. So should groups still be forced through the 40/10/25 treadmill even when they need none of the loot, just for keying purposes?

I can't see it. Resetting is inevitable, it's just a question of how hefty the reset is. And then, quite apart from the above, there's the justifiable feeling of "why should I buy this expansion when I can't play any of the content in it - all it's useful for is the raised level cap so I can do the old instances". Especially in the current circumstances with raid sizes, a full reset just makes most sense.

The comparison to EQ is flawed in another way - as I hear it, EQ expansions were much more frequent and correspond more closely to Blizzard's content patches. And there indeed we *do* see new raid content getting released without obsoleting old content. So it's a series of cycles. Linear progression for a while, then a reboot, then linear progression for a while. Seems much more palatable than making casuals drop further and further behind.

Retuning I could buy - if they brought out versions of AQ40 and Naxx tuned for level 70s in average blues, so they could experience the content and the lore, while the hardcore just ignore that and move straight on to the new instances. The retuned top level instances could serve as the starter instances for the next expansion. It'd save some design time and a *lot* of artists' time. Would be just as much time for the tuners and itemisers, of course. But a strict linear "you must do this in order to gear up for that in order to gear up for the other" just leads to the majority of the player base being marginalised.

Maybe it worked for EQ - but as I said above the expansions see to have been smaller, and EQ *certainly* never had the depth of casual raiders that WoW does. I guess the lesson to Xi is "there's more suck out there than you think, and they're all paying customers".

AQ and Naxx should be easily conquerable by a group of reasonably geared and skilled level 70 players. The gear would not have to mudflate immensely to make this possible as you'd have 10 more levels of stats, and resist checks vs mobs. In addition this would allow players to "zerg" said old world instances if they so chose to do so.