So it goes nowhere and peters off into irrelevance?

Horizontal progression can be done well, but in WoW’s original structure? WoW vanilla certainly WASN’T horizontal, you just switched from mainly level-based progression to equipment. And raids demanding both preparation work and farming to gear up.

Side-grades are no-grades. Cosmetics? Really you think cosmetics alone sustain a whole game to play for years.

WoW does need progression, it’s a progression-based game. What it doesn’t need is adding pieces while removing previous ones. WoW should be about the long journey, without the rush. And challenging, more complex at whatever level you can afford. Make it require effort, give it depth, give it breadth. Horizontal progression in itself just closes it into a box that will become irrelevant 6 months after the hype dies off.

This will be wielded just as another proof to indicate that people love classic WoW just because of nostalgia, and not because modern WoW is seriously fucked in its idiotic, senseless game design. It’s just another cripple straw man to prove players wrong.

This, especially, is a contradicting point. So let’s discuss.

A progress-based game means you keep playing as long there’s content to chase. The content provides eventual power ups, that then lets you bite in new pieces of content that require the new power level as their floor. This is basically how all the main leveling to whatever level-cap, works.

The problematic part is the “expansions/resets that wipe the slate clean given that’s how they’ve always done it.” Because that’s entirely wrong. Expansions DO NOT NEED BE resets. Expansions should be expansions. New ceilings to reach, so that new floors are set. They shouldn’t overlap, like they are doing in retail. WoW = linear progression. Base game to 60 > exp 1 > exp 2 and so on.

Retail WoW is: tutorial island > new expansion > endgame. All other expansions? They got ditched from the progression, and every new expansion overlaps and replaces functionally the previous. It’s not outright deleted, like those GENIUSES at Bungie have done in Destiny (enjoy, retribution), but it’s still functionally useless, and so tucked away and made irrelevant.

We merely needed a WoW that keeps all content alive and in its best shape. Functionally relevant, given the value it deserves.

(my view still as it was)