Burning Crusade slow leveling

Sometimes one forgets the difference between a "beta" and a released product. But with the latest patch to the Burning Crusade beta, Blizzard sent me a painful reminder that they are still working on balancing everything out. They "nerfed" leveling in a way which would have had half of their customers coming after them with torches and pitchforks if they did this in the release version. But for the beta one has to expect hard changes like that. What they did was making leveling a lot harder, by upping the xp requirement per level after 60 by about 40%.

So getting from level 60 to 61 used to need 415 kXP, but now needs 580 kXP. I'm level 62, and instead of needing 500 kXP to advance, I now need 700 kXP. How much more effort is that? Well, if you make xp only by killing mobs of your level, without rest bonus, and without quest xp, you now need to kill 400 mobs more *per level*. Obviously that makes the Burning Crusade "longer", without actually adding any new content. I'm not really happy about it.

To use old Everquest terminology, all levels after 60 are now "hell levels". That is if you plot the amount of xp needed per level (195 kXP to 58, 202 kXP to 59, 210 kXP to 60, 580 kXP to 61, 660 kXP to 62, 700 kXP to 63), you immediately see the jarring break in the curve. Now somebody who has been level 60 for months, and is happy about *any* level advancement, will sure be able to live with that. But later, with people reaching level 60 after the expansion comes out, advancing after reaching level 60 will feel like walking through treacle.

8 months ago I wrote a blog entry named Bad design by bad testing, where I said that Blizzard holding a contest where you get a beta tester slot by grinding excessively would lead to the data coming out from the beta test being skewed towards excessive grinding. I hate having been right about that. Somebody not really aware of the nature of the beta testers observed that many of them hit level 67 in a week or two (you can't really advance much after that, all the zones higher than that aren't open yet). And based on that flawed observation, they slowed everybody down. I think Blizzard should tone down the xp per level requirement a bit again. What should not happen is that if you do all the quests of a level, you still haven't got enough xp to level up, and are forced to grind some mobs just for xp.