As World of Warcraft: The War Within paid early access ends, Blizzard makes leveling slower in the MMO's new expansion, and the community's not loving the timing

World of Warcraft's new expansion, The War Within, has been met with mixed reactions due to a recent change in leveling difficulty that was implemented after early access players had a head start, creating a disparity in progress for standard edition players.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is well and truly out now, but it's technically been playable since August 22 via the pricier edition that came with early access. As the rest of the MMO's community piled into an expansion that many players, including our friends at PC Gamer, really seem to like, Blizzard announced a change to the early game experience that would make the new level grind a bit slower, and while you can reasonably argue that the change is a healthy one, the post-early access timing of it hasn't gone down swimmingly.

In an August 27 forum post promising changes for today, August 28, community manager Kaivax explains that WoW players coming into The War Within with tip-top gear were "extremely powerful relative to that initial content." Kaivax stresses that, yeah, "it is entirely intended that effort put into gearing translates into a significant combat advantage at the start of a new expansion," but not this much. 

The power gap was apparently so big that many players couldn't even finish a normal ability rotation without killing everything nearby halfway through. With that in mind, Blizzard planned hotfixes to "adjust the scaling of enemies in War Within leveling content to increase the power of lower-level enemies, bringing the duration of combat more in line with expected WoW behavior. These changes will be most noticeable at level 70, and will have a reduced impact as your level increases. Enemies at level 80 and above will be unchanged." 

In other words, lower-level enemies will be a bit tougher, meaning killing them and grinding levels will take a bit longer. According to Wowhead's data mining, at level 70 enemies got a whopping 123.2% HP buff and a 116.2% damage buff, with these buffs falling off dramatically with each level down to just 5.9% HP and 5.2% damage at level 77. At level 78 and 79, mobs actually seem to have received minor HP and damage nerfs. 

There's fair debate to be had over the importance of the leveling grind in a new MMO expansion – that is, why not let players get to the good stuff a little faster – and the church of player retention in live service and MMO metrics. Some players are also understandably concerned over what this change means for players and characters who weren't sporting high-end gear and will now slog through buffed enemies. But it is also true that games can get dull or outright crumble on a systemic level when they're just too freakin' easy. If mobs are dying to my setup rotation before I can even pull out the showstopper skills, what am I doing here? Fighting flies with hammers? 

New WoW expansions always have their growing pains, but rather than the leveling change itself, players on the WoW forums and subreddit seem more annoyed by the fact that this change only dropped after early access players got a sizable head start on the leveling and alt grind, enjoying this apparently unacceptable power delta the whole time. Standard players were already behind, especially on alts, and now leveling in the new expansion is mathematically slower.  

I don't readily believe that some sinister designer on the WoW team was, with steepled fingers and a witchy cackle, plotting to pull the rug out from under those dirty, standard edition peasants just to make paying for early access look even better. But the optics aren't great, and more than anything this feels like a pothole that Blizzard could've easily swerved. As many players have proposed, delaying this leveling change by a few days to help equalize the playing field probably would have prevented a lot of grumbling without seriously harming the War Within launch experience. The best time to drop this update was probably either a week ago or a week from now. By putting it out today, Blizzard has kind of pissed off as many people as possible. 

Coincidentally, one World of Warcraft grinder hit The War Within's new level cap in just one hour, beating their rival by minutes.