Blizzard recently announced two major, related changes to the pre-80 game. The first is that players will receive experience for battlegrounds, which should put an end to twinks ruining games for characters that are actually leveling. However, to still allow for the possibility of twinks, they will get siphoned off into their own category of battlegrounds if they enable a special "No experience" mode.

That "no experience" mode (NXP) is going to also add a new wrinkle to how players view PvE, I think. In the past, people have asked about servers where they could play just to level 60 and stop...while those people wouldn't be accommodated by the rest of the server population, at least they *CAN* legitimately stop at level 60 and run Molten Core and Zul'Gurub to their hearts' content.

It also adds a level of play for people who are truly completionists by nature. I have often been piqued by the idea of playing a character that does all the starter zones, then all the second tier zones, and so on. The only problem is, after you finish one zone, you've outleveled the others! What fun is it doing Wetlands when you've already done Ashenvale and Duskwood, and are sitting on level 35? You could also see how many or which achievements you can get by a certain level.

Players who are dedicated to playing their **character**, and not just gaming the system to get to the cap, would probably love an opportunity to experience the entire game -- at appropriate levels -- with one character. In addition to that, I have a feeling that many leveling players would jump at the opportunity to earn some extra cash if Blizzard implements a quest experience->gold conversion for NXP players the way they do for level 80. I mean, way back when, how many of us really struggled to get mount money together or to cover some other major expense in the early going?

I would have a lot of fun reliving the early game by playing a character that actually does everything, and does it bit by bit. Other players are going to be happy capping themselves at some point and just playing the game from there, particularly on RP servers. Considering I'm a little jaded by the whole raiding thing these days, I wouldn't mind having an alt whose goal truly is not "get to level 80," because how much fun are most of your alts when you hit the cap? At some point, your alt becomes a liability to your main, or becomes your new main, due to the things you have to do with it to "progress."

Blizzard has attempted to create something for PvP that I think will actually have a tremendous influence on the PvE community. I may be thinking a little too idealistically here, but I'm going to bet that small sects on each server will level-cap themselves and run old content together. Maybe there will be an NXP raid guild on your server. Although I doubt I'd want to do it four nights per week, I might get a thrill out of going back to that one night a week. (And no, I wouldn't want to run Molten Core indefinitely until they shut down the servers. I'd move on eventually...to Blackwing Lair.)

Let's face it: even if you don't consider yourself a likely candidate for NXP'ing one of your characters, now or later, you can probably think of someone who would. Here's to hoping this change makes for an interesting counterculture in the game.

Sadly, I have a feeling Blizzard will probably not incorporate the NXP = gold conversion into the game, which will kill off a considerable amount of support for what could be a really fun change. When it costs 10 gold to activate the mode and 10 gold to deactivate it, not too many players are going to flick it like a light switch every 2 levels, and certainly not for the purpose of completing quests for money. Honestly, I think the gold cost is rather superfluous anyway, because the purpose of the mode is to be able to separate twinks from non-twinks. Isn't it going to be a drop in the bucket of twinking finances if they can pay 10 gold to keep their character as-is? And how many of them are really going to turn it back on? Maybe a 10-gold one-time fee if you're REALLY trying to suck money out of the system, but I think that's still kinda pointless. Get rid of this and give us gold conversion instead.

Blizzard, for the sake of the PvE community, I hope you go through with the changes you propose, but give us exp->gold and remove the NXP fee. I think it will enrich your game considerably. Your old world zones will actually see some life in them, and not just three people passing through. Your old instances will actually get run on occasion. Your old-time PvE'ers who want to relive those days, and your new-timers who want to see what old raids were like, are going to already band together to try the obsoleted raid zones, provided they can actually find enough like-minded people to pull it off. You'll still get your intended effect on the twinks.

You are on the verge of making what is possibly one of the most genius changes to the game, perhaps without even realizing it. Just give it some legs.