Why Classic+ needs world level scaling

I want to start by saying that I have absolutely no insight into, or knowledge of, Blizzard's process for creating Classic+. Everyone has different ideas about what Classic+ means to them, and this is really just a brain dump from someone who has been playing WoW and its various versions for 20+ years and wants to see the Classic experience live for another 20 years.

I know mob scaling is a Retail feature, but I think the way it has been implemented there misses what a genuinely scaling world could mean for Classic+. To me, one of the things that makes Classic special is that the world itself feels like the main character. I think there is fairly broad agreement that Classic+ should preserve the original world, expand on existing lore and unfinished locations like Grim Batol and Timbermaw Hold, and put more emphasis on exploration, discovery and adventure. Where I think we're missing a bigger opportunity is in how we keep that world relevant as the game continues to grow.

Imagine we're a year into Classic+. Most players are level 60, professions are maxed, we've completed everything that was added during the levelling process, maybe have a few alts, and we're excited for a new patch. Blizzard announces a Grim Batol patch and, naturally, we expect a raid, perhaps an attunement process, a main questline, new gear, profession items and a new 5 man dungeon. All of that is great, but how long does that content actually last? For a lot of players, we're probably looking at a week or two before a large portion of the playerbase is back to raid logging. So how do we make that patch feel like it has actually changed the world rather than simply giving us another piece of content to consume?

This is where I think world scaling could be incredibly powerful. Take the Wetlands as an example. It's an Alliance levelling zone, and we already have quests dealing with the Gnolls and Rethiel's efforts to cleanse the area. Now imagine that the Grim Batol storyline causes those Gnolls to rebuild their forces. Their camps become more organised, a new faction such as the Greenwardens appears, and Rethiel calls on both the Alliance and Horde to help deal with this growing threat. Perhaps a Horde forward camp is established in the Wetlands as part of the wider conflict. Suddenly, a zone we thought we had finished years ago has become relevant again.

The important part is that we don't create a separate level 60 version of the Wetlands. The original content stays exactly where it is. A level 23 Alliance player can come into the Gnoll camp and experience the same quest and the same mobs they've always had. But when a level 60 player comes into that exact same camp as part of the new Grim Batol content, those same Gnolls scale up to become level 55–60 content for them. It's not a second camp, a different phase or a new set of mobs sitting somewhere else on the map. It's the same physical location and the same creatures, but the world is capable of supporting different levels of progression at the same time.

That creates some really interesting possibilities. A level 23 Alliance player could be completing the original Wetlands quests while a level 60 Horde player is fighting those exact same Gnolls for a new faction, reputation, profession material or Grim Batol related quest. The level 23 player doesn't suddenly have their levelling experience ruined because the mobs have become level 60, but the level 60 player isn't sent to some isolated endgame zone either. They're sharing the same world. On a PvP server, that could get messy very quickly, and I think that's a good thing. The level 60 Horde player is still a level 60 Horde player, regardless of the fact they're standing in a level 20 zone. If they start attacking Alliance players, those players can call for help, level 60 Alliance players can arrive, and suddenly you've got a genuine world PvP conflict happening over a Gnoll camp that was originally designed for level 20 players.

That's the kind of thing I think Classic does really well. There is friction because the world isn't neatly divided into "levelling content" and "max level content". Why should the entire level 60 population disappear into a handful of max level zones? Why can't the levelling world and the endgame world overlap? Why shouldn't a level 60 player have a reason to travel back through the Wetlands, Redridge, the Barrens or the Hinterlands because something is happening there?

And it doesn't have to be limited to scaling mobs. A new patch could change the existing world in hundreds of smaller ways. A faction could establish a settlement, an old town could be rebuilt, a mine could become contested, a previously insignificant NPC could receive a new questline, new rares could appear, professions could gain recipes requiring materials from old zones, or a storyline happening in one part of the world could spill into several neighbouring zones. The important thing is that we're using the world we already have instead of constantly creating new places for players to abandon once the next patch arrives.

Over five or ten years, I think this could make Classic+ feel completely different from Retail while still retaining the thing that makes Vanilla so special. Imagine looking at the map after years of playing and actually remembering what happened there. You remember when a faction established itself. You remember when a town was destroyed. You remember fighting over a mine. You remember when the Gnolls rebuilt their forces. You remember a war spilling from one zone into another. The world develops a history because the content isn't simply replacing what came before it.

That's ultimately what I mean when I say Classic+ needs world level scaling. I'm not suggesting that every mob in Azeroth should simply scale to your level, or that a level 20 player should suddenly encounter level 60 mobs everywhere. I'm talking about allowing the same world, the same locations and even the same creatures to remain relevant to different stages of the game simultaneously. Keep the original quests, keep the original progression and keep the original world, but allow new stories and new levels of content to grow around them.

Classic+ shouldn't just be about adding more content.

It should be about making the content we already have matter again.

Don't keep building new worlds for us to visit.

Make Azeroth itself worth coming back to.