Having played World of Warcraft (WoW) since its beta days, I’ve witnessed my fair share of changes to the game, which is why a recent article at WoW Insider prompted a couple flashbacks. One change mentioned in this article is the predecessor to the current rest XP system, which I only vaguely recollect:
… it was less of a reward for taking time off and more of a penalty for playing too long. That’s right, if you played longer then a certain amount of time it would decrease the amount of experience you received, as a way to insinuate that your character was getting too tired to go on and that he needed a nap at the nearest inn. With the revamp in 0.8 they removed the penalty and normalized it to the way we see rest state today, going from rested (with bonus exp) to normal (without bonus exp) and not below.
I’m actually quite fond of the old system, in that it truly rewarded casual gamers, and prevented hardcore gamers from pushing to the level cap in record time. With all the item-farming, reputation grinding, and quest rewards that can be done outside of any experience reward, WoW offers plenty for people to do. While there needs to be a fine balance between when one loses an ability to gain XP and when one can freely level up, I believe that line is a reasonable one, and one that would have drawn out some player’s experiences in Azeroth.
The only annoyance with this type of system is for late-comers to the game, who want to power-level their way to the level-cap such that they can play with established raid guilds. For these types of situations, perhaps Blizzard could shift the XP-over-time line to provide longer hours of XP generation, or simply leave it and instead offer more XP per quest/kill (as they intend to do in the next patch). Combined with a system that only tallies time when in-combat, hardcore gamers could still reap the rewards of farming and crafting, thus still giving them something that casual gamers don’t have, and yet everyone would be at a closer level range when grinding toons rolled at the same time, despite difference in play availability.
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