What is Valuable and Who Decides it is?

Luke: Is the Dark Side stronger?

Yoda: No... Quicker, easier, more seductive.

--From The Empire Strikes Back

Okay, after being a Classic Andy for what's likely the millionth time since roughly July 2014, I began to have some second thoughts. 

What if I am not remembering things correctly? What if what I like about Classic WoW has an analogue in Retail? What if I'm letting my dislike of the state of the game over a decade ago color my opinions too much?

Well, the TL;DR is that I decided to do something about it:

This screencap is obviously not when she was
brand spanking new. You'd have thought I'd have
remembered to take an initial screenshot, but nope.

I believe this is called "putting my money where my mouth is".

For the record, Livona here was created on Wyrmrest Accord-US, an RP realm with a "High" population. In the era of shared (aka "dynamically merged") servers, this may not mean much. From wowrealmpopulation.com, Wyrmrest Accord has ~10.5k active characters...

Snapshot from wowrealmpopulation.com
as of May 11, 2025.

Although given the current state and capability of Retail WoW to create innumerable alts, this might represent only 500 individual accounts. Okay, I'm kidding, but you never know.

As you can see, Wyrmrest Accord is roughly 33% Alliance. So, not a 50/50 split, but decently sized enough that I ought to expect to see some bodies out and about. Look, I'm no dummy, and Wyrmrest Accord has been around as an active server since 2009, so it's likely that I shouldn't expect that many people in any starter zone. My previous foray into Retail with new toons confirmed that, but I decided I was going to try this for more than just a few minutes.

I figured I'd go to a zone that I was intimately familiar with, and one that hadn't changed since Cataclysm: Elwynn Forest.

It still feels weird entering into Goldshire and seeing
a Flight Point there. I mean, it's a ~3 minute run up
to Stormwind, so you're not saving that much time.

Now, I knew that the Cataclysm changes meant things were different in Elwynn as compared to the OG Vanilla version, but I couldn't remember just how jarring things were. Therefore I decided to approach this as if I were brand new to the game and didn't go to Exile's Reach (or did it once and wanted to start over with the "original" experience). What would make sense? What wouldn't? How would I feel as I played the game?

I discovered very early on that I wasn't going to be able to remain objective, because I did have opinions, and those opinions came to the forefront from practically the 3rd or 4th quest:

You're kidding me, right? Have you seen how full my
health bar is and how little effort it took to revive you?

I mean, look at the comment by the NPC that I healed on the battlefield.* I had hardly even done anything in the game and I was being called a hero. For a person who prefers IRL to fly under the radar, this is somewhat disconcerting; I kept expecting someone to pop out from behind the tree in the screencap and say "HA!! FOOLED YOU!!"

But beyond that, what stood out to me the most about the very beginning in Northshire Abbey was that the quest text there implied you knew things about the pre-Cataclysm era of World of Warcraft**. A new player won't know that, and if you relied too much on what might have been there originally in-game, you'd only confuse a new player further. 

Before you point out that a new player might have been expecting to go straight away and play The War Within, I'm not going there. I don't think that's likely to be the case. A new player to WoW probably has the vague idea that the game is OLD now and they will likely have to start off somewhere else first before they can get to the current expansion. They're called expansions for a reason, and they don't replace the old game, only add to it. 

I did notice that the number of quests in Northshire Abbey were cut by quite a bit, despite all the trainers and other original NPCs still present in the game. Yes, there aren't a lot of quests around the Abbey to begin with, but the speed of completion was still record breaking for me. It usually takes me about 20-30 minutes to be off to Goldshire in Classic Era, but even with me loitering around a bit I was out of there in about 15 minutes. If I'd have pushed it, I could have been done with Northshire Abbey in about 6-7 minutes, and most of THAT would have been spent running back and forth from the nearby vineyard.

So, I was off to Goldshire, and since I was on the way, I thought it a good idea to go visit Stormwind's bank to drop off some of the initial gear that I already had replaced. In Vanilla Classic, if you were lucky you might have gotten a couple of pieces replaced by quest rewards, but in Retail everything was replaced by the time I reached The Lion's Pride Inn. 

I'm not sure what I expected to find in Stormwind, but looking like Classic Era servers right in the middle of TBC Classic wasn't it:

I saw the same toon by the same NPC over the course of
a couple of hours. No, I wasn't playing straight over those
few hours; I just did a half an hour here and there over the
course of the entire day. I had things to do, after all.

I eventually found a few toons around:

Note the Naxxramas Tier set on that Caster beyond
the Darkmoon Faire Mage on the right. I think it's the
Discount Naxx reskin from Wrath of the Lich King,
But I wasn't paying too close attention at the time.

But they never lasted long. And to be fair, they were the only people I actually saw in the game up to that point. I didn't see a soul in Northshire Abbey or Elwynn Forest at first, even though I spread my game time over several hours and a couple of days.

(I will come back to that later.)

After leaving Stormwind...

I see they finally repaired the damage caused
by Deathwing to the entrance. I think it was still in
a state of disrepair in Mists in 2014.

...I resumed questing in Elwynn Forest.

Even though I was L6-7, the "Report to Westfall" quest was already available if I wanted it --I didn't-- so I continued to accumulate the "traditional" Elwynn quests: the Maclure and Stonefield farms, and the nearby Fargodeep Mine. Instead of the giant pig named Princess being halfway across the zone as in Classic WoW, Princess is right in the field beside you as you're talking to the quest giver. Also, unlike Classic WoW, she's not accompanied by two extra members of her "entourage", which means the fight is actually quite simple, despite her size:

Somebody has been feeding that pig Miracle Gro,
because she's a lot bigger now than in Classic WoW.

What got me was that the turn-in text block doesn't look like it had been changed from Vanilla WoW:

"Ma'am, she's right behind me. Can't miss her."

Despite that, the quests I ran into were largely the same as their Vanilla counterpart. Thankfully, you didn't need any knowledge of Vanilla WoW to understand the context, so that worked. But there was one big difference between the Vanilla WoW and Retail WoW versions of the zone:

"What on earth are you doing out here?"

In Vanilla WoW, the mini-boss Goldtooth is at the back of the Fargodeep Mine, which makes it a challenge to get to. Before I hear any complaints about how easy Vanilla WoW really is from a complexity standpoint, I have to point out that typically the Fargodeep Mine is where a toon will likely die for the first time.*** Respawns and the narrow passages make any mine dangerous, but to get to Goldtooth you have to go all the way to the back. Oh, and you likely have to fight a few adds when you pull Goldtooth. Here, being outside the mine and off without any nearby adds, he's pretty much a sitting duck. Even if Goldtooth were at the back of the mine, I doubt he would have posed much of a challenge. Hell, my health bar didn't go beyond the halfway mark until I decided to test how much of a wrecking ball you are with WoW's greatest enemies, Murlocs.

I had to actually go back the other night
to get this screencap, because I was kind of busy
when I last went through here.

Like the jingle for DoubleMint gum, murlocs like to double (or triple) the fun by having multiples attack you. In Vanilla WoW, if the mines don't kill you in Elwynn, the murlocs likely will.**** The Retail WoW version of the Elwynn Forest murlocs did not disappoint me, as I fought packs of 2 or 3 at once. While I didn't die at all, that pack of 3 that jumped me before I could eat and regain health very nearly did me in. If I were more cautious, and if I hadn't had the experience of invincibility up to that point in Retail WoW, I likely wouldn't have pulled that many murlocs.

So there I stood, at L9, after about 90 minutes of actual playing the game, although I might be generous on the 90 minute mark as I was screwing around a bit, making trips to Stormwind to dump stuff into the bank, taking screenshots, and hunting for other people in the area.

I did finally find a few people in Goldshire:

"Love me two times girl
One for tomorrow, one just for today
Love me two times
I'm goin' away...."

I caught these on screencap just before they went "WHOOSH!" up and out of sight.

"Oh, right," I mumbled. "Flying is allowed everywhere."

That being said, I didn't see a single low level toon in Elwynn Forest at all. 

***

So... What did I think?

Let me describe my experience leveling 8 toons at once in Anniversary Classic: when you do the same quest 6 or more times, you find it hard to sit there and read the quest text again. Really, after about the 3rd time doing the same quest I just kind of click through to the end, because unless I want a specific screencap or something, I know what's happening. There have been weeks where I've been doing the same quests in the same zone on ALL of the toons, and it blurs together after a while.

Now, switching to Retail WoW and intentionally wanting to read the quest text to see what differences there are between Retail and Vanilla did not help me. In fact, I felt a stronger pull to simply skip reading the quest text than if I'd been playing Vanilla. Why, you may ask?

This:

I was going to crop it, but you know, it works fine as-is.

Everything I need to know is right on the map, and if I don't care to pull that up on-screen most of the relevant information is up on both the mini-map and the quest tracker on the right. I've never used the Questie addon, so I can't tell you if it has the same information, but this kinda-sorta pushes you into going faster than you may want to. Providing the data to a player without any expectation is one thing, but there's an implicit expectation here that the player will utilize the info to progress as quickly as possible. 

The removal and/or streamlining of quests in Northshire and Elwynn wasn't designed to explicitly unclutter the old zones, it was to provide the player with an overall improved experience. Taking Goldtooth out of the cave means you don't have to risk anything to go in there and eradicate him. You also don't need another body to go in there with you in case you get jumped by 2 or 3 more kobolds. The zone becomes more solo-friendly and faster to progress through as a result. 

By comparison, if you go to Elwynn on the Anniversary servers or Classic Era servers, you'll always find people asking to group up for Hogger. In Retail there's no need, as everything is soloable. Group content is segregated in a separate area, and while you can manually group up the expectation is that you can use the automated processes to handle the group creation. 

And let's talk about the elephant in the room: Retail WoW is old. I mean, really old; like "Morrowind was the current Elder Scrolls game in 2004" old. And the Wyrmrest Accord server, having opened about 16 years ago, means likely 95% or more of the server population is at or near max level. Still, I wasn't expecting there to be nobody in Elwynn Forest. Blizzard could have simply turned off access to the zones entirely and nobody would have noticed. If this were Classic Era --and the lack of population was the reality for Classic Era a few months into TBC Classic-- I'm sure there was an internal drumbeat within Blizzard to simply turn those Classic Era servers off. Nobody was playing, so why keep them turned on?

The thing is, Retail's design provides an outlet for collectors and completionists to go back and poke around and do all the things.

Oh, and allow the rare newbie to come along and try their hand at the game.

I used to rail about how Blizzard, by reworking the Old World for Cataclysm, inadvertently cut off their own pipeline of new players into the game. Instead of a natural progression from Vanilla -> TBC -> Wrath -> Cataclysm, what ended up happening was Cataclysm Vanilla -> Old TBC -> Old Wrath -> Cataclysm. The timeline got screwed up, and the game no longer made internal sense unless you had played the game prior to 2010. Now, I'm not so sure that's the case. 

From what I've played and observed, Retail WoW is relying less on the world and a cohesive story to bring in and keep players and relying more on what has been WoW's traditional strength: its gameplay.

Whatever you may think of the storytelling in Retail WoW, gameplay can make up for a host of sins. WoW's gameplay is far smoother in Retail than in Vanilla; the drops come more quickly, you know what to do without having to engage your brain and figure it out, the feedback loop of quest acquisition and completion is finely tuned, and the game world is designed to progress you through it faster. Hell, as a Rogue I discovered that stealth meant almost no penalty to my traveling speed at all. I was zipping through the Fargodeep Mine --because OF COURSE that's what I'd do-- as if I was running through the thing. I know how long it would take a Vanilla Rogue to make it through (assuming that a Kobold didn't see through my stealth), and here in Retail I was cruising along as if they weren't even there. 

You could say the game doesn't waste your time, because the game doesn't value the time spent in the old content. And if Blizzard doesn't and the existing player base doesn't, why shouldn't you? 

Or maybe, to turn it around, why should you value the old content? Take away the transmog and the achievements, and what do you have? Without external rewards, why go?

Classic WoW has that "why go" question already answered: people make their own fun. The players came up with Hardcore WoW Classic and made it popular before Blizzard jumped on the bandwagon and created official hardcore servers. Classic Fresh became a player driven thing on a Classic Era RP-PvP server before the announcement of the 20th Anniversary servers. I still recall the New Year's Eve 2023 gathering on the Season of Discovery RP server in Stormwind, with people basically having a good time while the countdown to the 2024 was underway.

The thing is, I never hear about people doing goofy things or making their own challenges for old content in Retail WoW. That doesn't mean it's not there, but outside of a few things --such as that Pandaren who makes it to the level cap by picking flowers in the Pandaren starting zone-- all you hear about in Retail WoW is about what's going on in the current expansion. What is keeping Retail WoW players from following in their Classic brethren's footsteps? Nothing, really. 

This loops back to the title of this post. While I progressed through Retail's Elwynn Forest, I kept wondering why the Retail community doesn't consider this content to be valuable. Is it purely conditioning, or is it a "follow the leader" mentality that keeps people from doing things if there isn't a reward attached? Without achievements or transmog, is there no interest?

I'm uncertain you can say this about other older MMOs. I've been on SWTOR and LOTRO --the old LOTRO servers, not the new ones-- and judging by the activity in both MMOs, the intro zones remain very active with new toons. If you told LOTRO players that Ered Luin or The Shire isn't valuable to LOTRO any more, I'm pretty sure there'd be a riot.***** But in Retail WoW, there'd likely be a lot of agreement with the sentiment that Elwynn Forest is no longer valuable to the game.

I don't know the answer to make old content more valuable beyond the carrot approach that Blizzard already has tried. It could be that all of the people who see the old content as intrinsically valuable have migrated off of Retail WoW and onto Classic WoW, and those remaining in Retail don't see the value in old content beyond the metagame rewards that Blizzard offers. If anybody has ideas, I'm all for it, because there's all this content that is basically unused, and it certainly seems like the people most likely to utilize it don't even play this version of the game any more.

***

Oh, and one more thing. I discovered that collecting herbs gives you more XP than fighting enemies at level:

Now I know why that Pandaren thought leveling via gathering herbs was a good idea.

*Because the Priest wasn't doing much of anything, mind you, and sent me in his stead.

**For example, Milly Osworth's initial quest text for Extinguishing Hope starts with "Times like these make me long for when the Defias were still around. The cataclysm has opened a pathway from the Burning Steppes and now Blackrock orcs pour into Northshire Valley!" (From Wowhead, because I forgot to take a screencap.) You would have had to have known about the Defias, or at least be familiar with them to truly understand Milly's comment, and if you were paying attention to the quest text you'd likely have pulled up the map to try to figure out what Milly was talking about. But of course a new player will have Burning Steppes as a big ol' blank space once you found it because you haven't revealed the map yet. The quest text could have easily been tweaked to make it more understandable to a completely new player, removing some specifics that old players knew and just emphasizing the criticality.

***I've played Hardcore WoW Classic. I KNOW.

****And if you survive that, then the Defias Pillagers in Westfall are waiting for you.

*****Assuming people didn't think you were one of several well-known shit-stirrers on the Gladden-US server and dogpile on you for causing trouble.

Meme Monday: Bird RPG Memes

Courtesy of being serenaded at midnight the past few nights by a mockingbird, I conceived of this particular penance to get the damn bird to shut up.

Yeah, if only that worked IRL.
From Imgflip.

Oh, I GET IT. The early bird gets the worm...
From @swordscomic and dndgear.com.

I dunno. This would be pretty epic if they were geese.
From Camp Dragon.

Well, that's really intimidating.
From Pinterest.

For all of the people who wondered how an ancient
dragon deals with kobolds and whatnot around them...
From Imgflip and @chickenthoughtsofficial.

And Travis Hanson can draw RPG comics for
me ANYTIME. From Travis Hanson (naturally)
and his Life of the Party.

They're a What, Now?

Well, that was my reaction to Nixxiom's latest video on ranking Allied Races from Worst to Best.

Okay, just to get the obvious out of the way, I am aware that the concept of Allied races popped up in Battle for Azeroth (if not all of them), but beyond that I was rather blissfully unaware about anything beyond a couple of names. (::cough:: The Vulpera ::cough::) 

Vulperas. You know, the fox people.
From Facebook and Disney. (Naturally.)

At least in terms of races, I've run into Kul'Tiran and Highmountain Tauren courtesy of Kamalia's blog, but beyond that* a lot of these allied races were kind of just lore points in the past. They were NPCs and whatnot that you encountered along the way, you saw them in an expansion, and then left behind.

Or they were turned from "good" to "bad" (or "bad" to "good") in some weird soap opera-esque manner.**

I guess that means that the Zandalari are the Millhouse Manastorm of the WoW races.

Et tu, Millhouse? I should have just left you
in The Arcatraz to rot. From Wowpedia.

Still, watching this video left me confused. If all they are is simply reskinned other races --Vulpera notwithstanding-- then why not have them as cosmetic options from the get-go? If they are more than a simple reskinning, then hasn't Blizzard made their balancing attempts all the more difficult due to all of these new races to work with?

Eh, whatever. If it works for people, it works. I just look at it as the Paradox of Choice writ large.

From LinkedIn about The Paradox
of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

*And Void Elves, because I can see at least one of them in every graphic concerning Retail's current expansion.

**I'm looking at you, Marlena Evans from Days of our Lives. Am I still salty about that? Uh, kinda, yes.

When Exploring is the Expectation

Not that much to really talk about for this update, aside from the fact that all of the toons involved with Operation: Spread the Love are now at L30 or L31. Which makes it just past the halfway point in levels, but in terms of the leveling process, it's likely more along the lines of 1/3 of the way through to completion. 

Nice to see you, Az. At least you're not threatening me
with bodily harm for the lack of good daggers you've got.
This listing is as of May 7th, 2025.

Why do I say 1/3 of the way through?

Because the amount of XP per level increases by a lot from here on out, and the corresponding speed of leveling slows down quite a bit. Back when I leveled Briganaa for TBC Classic, I did have one great advantage over Vanilla Classic leveling: the mid-30s and mid-40s doldrums were smoothed out in TBC Classic by the addition of more quests and a quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh and an enhancement of the quests in Ashenvale.* With those additional quests in place, and a couple of extra Flight Points sprinkled throughout the two continents, it became easier to get around the world. 

I'm of two minds on the speed of transportation around Azeroth with TBC Classic: a few places that from a game perspective truly needed Flight Points got them --Emerald Sanctuary in Felwood for one major example-- but with those additional Flight Points came the drumbeat for more FPs to be added to the game, which ultimately led to what feels like 10 million of those things in the post-Cataclysm revamp of the Old World. The world shrank and became less about leveling being a major part of the game as the focus shifted strictly toward whatever the current expansion was and explicitly toward Endgame.

I'm also at the level where ranging farther afield becomes the norm, as quests take you all over Azeroth. Sure, you could spend your time in limited locales on the Eastern Kingdoms or the Kaldorei lands of Kalimdor, but beyond the run to Gnomeregan (for the Horde) or to Shadowfang Keep (for the Alliance) you don't have to get out much until quests push you into exploring the opposite continents more thoroughly. 

I remember back in 2009 when I got my first quest to visit Booty Bay and I thought "Where the hell is THAT?" I was determined to figure this out on my own, so by the time I actually got to Booty Bay for the first time it felt like I'd stumbled across this near mythical place. In reality it was very much less so, but nobody told me I could take a boat from Ratchet to head to Booty Bay, so I never knew that. I mean, the Horde used Zeppelins, it was the Alliance that used boats. Hence, I never put two and two together that Goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel would allow all players to utilize their ships to travel between continents. Given that when I visited Ratchet there typically wasn't a ship there, so it never occurred to me to loiter around to see what happened when one arrived. I mean, I had Mankrik's wife to find, and on a PvP server I very much avoided any contact with Alliance personnel.**

That spike in tension whenever you saw a member of the opposing faction --particularly if they had a Skull where their level number would be-- can only be likened to being ambushed in a survival horror game. Such as what it's like if you get blown up by a Creeper from behind in Minecraft.

HOLY CRAP do I hate these monsters.
From Exitlag.

Oh yeah, I've been noodling about Minecraft lately, but that's neither here nor there. The "Normal" survival game world is the closest I've been to those early days playing WoW, where you're minding your own business and then BOOM you're dead, and there's some Rogue teabagging your body.

It's a nice complement to me fishing to end my game time on the Anniversary servers, as if my heart needs the exercise or something.

Now, where will I end up in two weeks' time? No idea, but I doubt I'll be much farther along than what I am right now. I've got until Q1 of 2026 before TBC drops on the Anniversary servers, and what I'll do once that happens is pure speculation at this point. Maybe I ought to do more speculating while I fish a bit.

*Particularly at the "alternate" locales for quests: Forest Song for Alliance and Zoram'gar Outpost for Horde.

**Remember, I played Horde back then.

Meme Monday: Playing with Family and Friends Memes

Oh, I have my share of stories playing games with the family. Sure, there's the MMO runs with the mini-Reds, but there's also the times playing games where things go crazy or people get upset. Because you family knows how to push your buttons, after all. Then again, playing with friends can end up the same way...

From Pinterest.

Uh, my warm summer nights would be spent
with mosquitos biting me. From Imgflip.

Okay, that was a bit much.
From Reddit, of course.

I have never flipped a game board. However,
I've been playing games where someone DID
flip a game board. That was NOT fun.
From Memesmonkey.

I'm Just Playing With My Dolls Again

Okay, I don't have any dolls, or what adults would call "action figures".

From TheGearPage. And Spaceballs.

But I do have MMO toons. 

I spent a bit of time yesterday visiting some of my old characters, just to check them out for a bit. Such as Dalaak here, my original SWTOR toon.

Hello, big fella.

Or my original LOTRO toon, Aranandor, when he's not lounging around Bree.

There's also my GW2 toon, Mikath...

I still think that the toons and NPCs in GW2 all look
like the Beautiful People, with flawless skin and
impeccable grooming. The beat up outfit notwithstanding.

Or my friendly Vulcan from STO...

And his entire officer corps, too!

And there's also that crazy Dunmer from ESO...

Those loading screens show the actual armor
worn, not the outfit she actually has on. That's one thing
that Retail WoW does better, at least.

But I guess that this wouldn't be a post about MMO toons if it didn't include the instigator of this post, WoW:

Hey, Lady. Long time no see.

Or even longer, really.

Okay, that wasn't the actual version of WoW I was talking about, but this one...

I occasionally go to the loading screen just to see how long it's been since I last logged into Retail. If I see "Gear Update" listed on all of these toons, I know it's been some months, and likely at least one major/minor patch in the interim.

Those are four of my most played toons on Retail --the original Azshandra isn't there-- but given how things progressed in Classic WoW, it just didn't feel quite right. Therefore, I tweaked the composition a bit:

There. That's better.

The gear (and levels, to be honest) are all wrong from my perspective, but I'm not planning on doing anything about that. At least now the names are correct on that Warband.

There are other toons I have from MMOs I no longer play* such as Age of Conan, Rift, or Neverwinter, that would require me to install the games again to simply take a screenshot of the loading screen. And then there are games that no longer exist, such as Wildstar, ArcheAge, or TERA. I do miss Wildstar, but not the other two.

Even though I really have no desire to play some games (or specific toons), it's nice to pull them up on screen every once in a while just to enjoy how they looked, and the memories they recalled.

*Again, I'm surprised that Age of Conan is still hanging on after all these years.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: And corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.

When Thought Experiments Get Out of Hand

Speaking of anachronisms...

Given how Retail WoW has developed over the years, why is leveling still a part of the game? 

That has been one of the items I've been pondering over the past several days. It's not a new opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but the leveling experience ceased to be a focus of Retail WoW players for as long as I can remember. 

If the Old World zones back in 2009 were as populated now as they are on the 20th Anniversary Classic Servers, I'd have likely found leveling incredibly difficult. Remember, I began playing WoW on a PvP server, and if every zone had a crowd like Hillsbrad Foothills had, I'd have spent most of my game time running for my life. 

Or dead. Yeah, I'd be dead.
I pulled this out of my archives just because.

Since those zones weren't that populated --because most people were at max level in 2009-- that made my original leveling experience easier.

Yes, I do love the leveling experience in Vanilla Classic. While I dislike the XP boosts that the Classic team regularly puts out, at least they do pay lip service to the time honored tradition of actually leveling a character.

But that's the pre-Cataclysm WoW environment. Since that time, as WoW's game world has become bigger and the level cap has grown larger, the actual process of leveling itself has become more and more streamlined. Paradoxically, the emphasis placed on the current expansion --and getting players as quickly as possible to the level cap-- has skyrocketed as well.

So that begs the question: why have people level in the traditional way at all when a new expansion drops? 

***

It's not as if what I'm suggesting hasn't been thought of before. After all, Blizzard loves to roll out level boosts late in an expansion --frequently with gear upgrades to help you once you reach the level cap-- for at least several years now. What I'm asking, however, is why are they even bothering with the leveling journey in the first place if the entire focus of the game is at the level cap. 

If people are zipping through the leveling zones to get to max level as quickly as possible --or the actual leveling process is so streamlined as to be little more than a visual novel with a few "kill ten rats" quests-- then why not eliminate the leveling process itself and start everyone at max level when they purchase the expansion? 

I'm not saying to eliminate the leveling zones themselves, but to essentially make them optional. If people are zipping through quests, not bothering to even read quest text, then why not leave the quests for people who actually want to read them and let everybody else just rocket on ahead and do what they really want to do? 

***

Am I playing Devil's Advocate here?

A bit, I'll admit.

There are days when I feel like I'm the only person in the world who enjoys the leveling process itself, and during the last Retail expansion I played --Mists of Pandaria circa 2013/2014-- it actually took an effort to slow down my leveling so I could enjoy the game. It also took a bit of an effort to handle the Mists intro areas when the gear I was wearing were Cataclysm quest rewards and random drops from the mid-Cataclysm zones such as Uldum; I could tell that the development staff expected the average Mists player to have at least a full Heroic dungeon set when they crossed to Pandaria*, and there was at least one mini-boss quest that was effectively a gear check in the Pandaria intro zone that you had to pass before you progressed further in the story.

Nostalgia aside, however, I think the time has come for Blizzard to seriously consider eliminating the leveling process from Retail. If enough people are blitzing through the zones (or really don't care about the story except for the "get gear/renown/etc." part), why not give the players what they want and just let them skip the leveling process entirely? Or, knowing how Microsoft and Blizzard thinks, offer players the opportunity to skip the leveling for a price. Instead of Early Access, allow those players the opportunity to start the next expansion at max level for an extra $30. All the try-hards can go straight into their gearing process while those that actually care about the story and the questing zones can go do those. Blizzard can even institute layering to separate the paid boosts from the levelers, so you can prevent the boosters from farming all of the World Bosses and gathering nodes.

Before anybody brings up the elephant in the room --PvPers and gankers-- institute a simple change to the PvP rules: for the first month of an expansion's release, max level toons can only engage in PvP with other max-level toons. Not with NPCs. Not with lower level toons of the opposite faction. That keeps those who paid for the privilege of skipping the leveling process from interfering with the fun of those who did not. 

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. As for me, I'll be back on the Anniversary servers, leveling at my own pace.

*It's not an accident that the level boosts provided to players have included a set of basic gear so that the boosted players aren't too underpowered in the current expansion.