The way too fast level progression in MMOs is what ruins community! Few people play every day, but in modern MMos if you are away a few days, all your friends and guildmates WAY outlevelled you. How can people play together like this? In days of SWG or EQ2 I always played with guildmates, and we proceeded through the same areas and quests together, because it took a long time. Now, swoosh you are 20 levels higher on a weekend.
It just ruins MMOs.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
From reading 10 years of reading hardcore vs casual threads: Slow R Hardcore.
Doesn't matter what you're discussing--transport, leveling speed, progression and/or quality of life improvements of any variety. Fast R Bad, Slow R Good.
Depends. It only works in P2P and maybe even B2P titles. Since F2P usually creates some artificial extension of the game by making it unnecessarily grindy, hence encouraging cash shop purchase or such. But in P2P you can strike a balance between grind and progression, turning the reward into a milestone, not just a reward. So yes, I'd say that the progression is way too quick, but that doesn't mean that it should be as slow as it was in Everquest. Maybe somewhere inbetween?
Either way, that's not to say that it cannot exist in free to play markets, but most F2P games are still trying to milk their customers.
Originally posted by gkb3469 In my opinion i prefer no levels and skill based only. The more you use it the stronger you get with said skill.
i like that idea an gear could require certain level skills too use, more rare epic gear could have close same stats but lower skill require too equip, so people want it. or similar ideas like that would be fun
main issue with that would be if no levels is be very easy too kill noobs if their was pvp as their no level barrier
There are plenty of ways around that. To start, killing newbs offers no reward. Now, there will always be those that are just doing it for teh lulz, so there are solutions for that, too. My favorite is in Puzzle Pirates. Attack too many lower level players and a big black ship comes sailing out of nowhere and kicks your ass. Of course, that only works in MMOs where newbs are pretty useless, but that's the case in almost every level-based MMO anyway.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
For the type of mmos that were released in the past two years, it's too slow, because it's totally pointless.
Questing has turned into a shameless way of extending play time of thin mmos just long enough for the 1st month sub or until you spend in the cash shop. Get rid of it completely imo and build better mmos.
Yes its too fast because developers are still using a "bar" to measure player progression and people want the bar to move faster, so the developers do just that. A leveling system like Syrim , Darkfall or Mortal Online is far more interesting. People will spend a year developing their character and not even mind.
Actually the way Darkfall handles mob drops is the best I've seen as well. Mobs don't drop gear they drop materials and broken gear pieces used in salvaging and crafting.
Throw in the occasional epic gear drop as well and it keeps it interesting. So skill gains, and crafting for gear in my opinion is the only way to fly. Everything else is just like watching a clock.
Ironically enough, all 3 of those games use "bars" to measure player progression. They just have more than one.
Players will always try to find the fastest / most efficient way to do something (or at least what they perceive to be). Thus, when you have games centered around linear progression (a lvling bar), you get people rushing to cap faster & faster. Furthermore, developers understand this better than most of us players do, and so they are constantly re-calibrating these games to make the lvling rush less of a determining factor. Otherwise you have games where a select few players rush and rush and rush, and don't sleep, work, eat, spend time w/ their families, etc. and get a huge advantage over the majority of gamers (who have obligations / lives outside of video games). When that happens, most of your player base tends to stop playing, because they don't enjoy games that are 'too grindy'.
The solution, is to have games that are much less reliant on a leveling mechanic to progression. The only problem w/ this, is so many players are used to the carrot on a stick method of gameplay, that many are completely unwilling to give other design types a fair chance.
I've been in the camp where I work 60 hrs a week and where I work 30 hrs a week. Where I can play a game 4 nights, 8 hrs straight and where I do well to get 12 hrs a week in.
When an MMO lets either camp dictate 'fast' it takes a side. One guy needs a week to level out, the other guy needs a month and that's the problem with the debate, "leveling too fast". Both guys are paying $15 a month. If they aren't it's pay to win. I'd rather see basic goals like level cap be simple and effective. As long as there are levels the only thing most people are going to be looking at is end game anyway.
It depends what consequence you define as the parameter for "too" fast. To me, the main consequence of concern is longevity, which is meant to indicate how long any given player continues to enjoy the game as well as how long the game maintains a healthy overall population.
Concerning longevity, I've always viewed it as a function of two primary factors: how fun/long the leveling process is, and how fun/long the "end game", whatever that may entail, is. The current model of MMOs is such that when players start a new MMO, the immediate goal is usually to reach max level. Once there, they embark upon a brand new journey through "end game content." Done well, games have enough end game content to keep players busy for months and months, until more content can be released, then again, and then an expansion with yet more leveling and new end game content, seemingly ad infinitum. Except it never is.
There inevitably comes a point where a player has consumed off of the current content, and then repeated it again...and again...and again. At this point, players usually turn to leveling alts and experimenting with other classes to preoccupy them until more content is released. Eventually, however, a player will have every single class leveled. I consider this a critical point where the game is on the brink of losing this player's interest for good. When you have no more leveling to do and no more end game content to do, you're left logging in just to stand (or jump) around in town.
A Case Study: WoW
I use early WoW as the quintessential illustration of this. In Vanilla, leveling took a decent amount of time - not a lot, like, say, vanilla FFXI did - but a decent amount of time. Once you got to level 60, however, you had a ton of dungeons and raids to work through. The whole dungeon/raid "end game" thing was new to a lot of players too, so it wasn't as mundane as this might sound today. For the most part, players were busy straight into the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. With this expansion came a shit ton, that's right not just a ton this time, but a shit ton of end game content. So much that not a single guild in the entire world had beaten all of the current raid content 5 months in when Blizzard released the next tier comprised of two full raids. 3 years in, players interested in the end game model had been utterly consumed by the seemingly endless amount of content.
However, as the pace simply couldn't be maintained, by the end of TBC, and after the first big content nerf, the majority of players suddenly had gotten through all the content and had finally gotten bored. So what did they do? They leveled alts! Few players had more than 2 or three max level characters at this point in the game. Sure, some outliers had several and many others only had one. But, factoring in the first big nerf to leveling EXP, there was a mad rush to level more characters by the end of TBC. This carried over straight into WotLK, which featured a drastic decrease in initial end game content. Compared to the 15 dungeons, 3 major and 2 supplementary raids that launched with TBC, WotLK only launched with only 12 dungeons (every one of them significantly easier) and only 1 major raid (a remake) plus 3 supplementary raids. The end game content this time around was easy enough that it was beatable within the very first week, and then farmable in a single day after that. This led people to continue leveling alts throughout the course of the expansion. Many players had nearly every single class maxed by the end of this expansion, leaving no more leveling to be done during subsequent expansions. This was, I think, a huge contributing factor to the eventual decline of players over the ensuing years.
Now most of this is just my own hypothesis based on some of my own subjective experiences, but I think it sounds reasonable and would warrant some sort of statistical study on the part of developers.
Depth and length of end game + depth and length of leveling process = longevity of the game. Do note though that length alone will never suffice. Leveling still has to be engaging and fun and decidedly not grindy, or you risk deterring players before they ever get to the point where they'd consider leveling even one class to max level, let alone multiple classes eventually.
Originally posted by maplestone There's a fine line between enduring progression and leaving players feeling like Sisyphus.
And each player has a different line
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
People want faster leveling because we have been grinding out levels in MMOs for 15 years. It is old hat. That ding that felt so magical in 1999 doesn't even raise an eyebrow anymore. It is time to move on.
The time has come for the levelless MMO. How many millions or billions of dollars have been spent on power leveling services or people trading accounts because people don't feel like grinding levels anymore. That is money that is just going out the door. This is why Everquest Next is going to be such a break through. It is not going to be the same old grind again.
What people really want is slower meaningful progression NOT slow leveling. Levelless MMO design will give us this. That item you got from a named monster on the first day won't be something you throw away 2 hours later. It could be useful for weeks because there is no outleveling it. Sure you will find better items eventually but it won't because you are simply racing from quest hub to quest hub.
I think it's definitely too fast but since you have to have some kind of progression in MMOs and people want to see that progression happening regularly, they have to do something that will show people that they are actually getting somewhere. Personally, I think we should do away with ever reaching the end of leveling. It should last forever. Barring that, just have a ton of levels in the game. Make level 1000 the end of the game and make sure people can't go up a level more than once a day. It might take 3 years to hit max level but people still get that "ding" and can see that they are getting somewhere without hitting endgame in 3 days.
Here's the delima...how to make progression appealing in a game, but also, have great balance.
Lets say for arguements sake that it takes roughly 6 months at a players best efforts to reach max level. Now how long will the game be able to sustain him/her at max level before they lose interest? What will they impliment into the game to hold their attention, expansions/new content?
If there is no max level within a game, is there a means for players starting 2 years after games launch to EVER be compedative with players who will always be 2 years ahead in their character development? How will the developer overcome this issue?
You see, the simplist (I'm not suggesting it the best) way to develop a game is to create a cap that holds players in one place for a period of time while entertaining them with additional content specifically aimed at max level. This gives new(er) players opportunity to catch up before another expansion is released and the floodgate opens again for a few more levels.
The real issue begins when a game reaches multiple expansions. Again, let's hypothesize and say that the original game + first expansion takes roughly 6 months each to reach max level. Now the second expansion is released and some friends of mine want to take up the game and play with me. At the current rate it's going to take them a full year before they even reach the current expansions content + another 6 months to level that to be on par with me. They realised this and decided to not play the game.
Conclusion: A long/slow progression is probably appealing and a great idea for a new game that does not have expansions/new content for higher levels. This idea would not work for a game with expansions (particually multiple expansions) unless the time to progress through older content was reduced somewhat.
Yes, but this is a game design issue. In Asheron's Call, it took several years before the first player ever hit the max level. (126) Even so, max level was just max 'level'. You could still raise stats and attributes up to a separate skill cap far beyond that. So 'level' was just a way of keeping track of how much XP you had total.
If you were in your 50's, it might take you a week to hit another level or 2. If you saw someone in your 80's, they were powerful compared to you, and if you saw someone in their 100's, HOLY CRAP. You may not have known HOW powerful they were, and in what areas, as it is totally possible to gimp yourself in the game, but you knew they had the potential to be more powerful than you.
Even after Tim the Enchanter hit level 126 for the first time ever, it still took a year or more before it started to become normal. A few more people hit max level in that time, but it was still months and years before EVERYONE started approaching that level. Even so, the game was made in a way that allowed level 80s to do the same content as the 126's. A level 50 could group with a level 90. Etcetera. For a game to still be unique and new 3 to 4 years after release back then is incredible. It had so much content that nobody was bored by max level. They were just getting to content they never even knew existed. And with the monthly updates, content was constantly added for free every single month.
Games need to get away from levels and skillpoint-based abilities like WoW with its skill-trees. They need to shift toward skill/attribute based games that allow differentiation between builds. Allow people to make their own builds, instead of guaranteeing that everyone is a cookie-cutter of one of 3-5 possible builds in a class. Let people make their own classes, and decide how to approach the content themselves. Make content difficult, and keep people around for the long run instead of worrying whether they're going to blow through everything in a month and be done with your game.
this past april i was in hospital to get a tumor removed from my head of all places, i had my laptop with me, and in the three weeks i existed in delirious, drug induced la-la land, i managed to start Aion, and level a cleric to 50, and he was geared great.
the day i got home from the hospital, and of the heavy meds, i loaded up AION, played 5 mins, and uninstalled., i couldn't really remember anything .
Level progression is way too fast. BUT devs create level progression nowadays for all the wrong reasons. Making the level progression slow with the current mechanics leads people to grind beyond belief on subscription mmos to pretend that the game has enough content to justify the sub. As for the non-sub games, its the obvious reason that they would need to put the slow leveling so they can sell exp potions.
When we talk about mmos needing to innovate, its not just about innovating graphics or action vs tab target.... its about innovating the entire core game as well.... that includes progression, leveling, npc/mob behavior. Everything.
Yes its too fast because developers are still using a "bar" to measure player progression and people want the bar to move faster, so the developers do just that. A leveling system like Syrim , Darkfall or Mortal Online is far more interesting. People will spend a year developing their character and not even mind.
Actually the way Darkfall handles mob drops is the best I've seen as well. Mobs don't drop gear they drop materials and broken gear pieces used in salvaging and crafting.
Throw in the occasional epic gear drop as well and it keeps it interesting. So skill gains, and crafting for gear in my opinion is the only way to fly. Everything else is just like watching a clock.
Agreed; I liked this approach as well. Skill gains is the way to go, but it can't be DF1's asian level of grind either. I'd say in a month a player should be able to pvp with the best(But lose to a better skilled player) yet still have much more things to progress in.
The time has come for the levelless MMO. How many millions or billions of dollars have been spent on power leveling services or people trading accounts because people don't feel like grinding levels anymore. That is money that is just going out the door. This is why Everquest Next is going to be such a break through. It is not going to be the same old grind again.
How would this actually work though. Just a gear grind? Sounds really boring. I want a way to see my character progress and improve. Not just get better gear. Otherwise it's not an RPG and I won't be playing. Sure maybe you could level up skills like in EVE rather than having classes but I just don't see how you can have an RPG without leveling up *something*. This is my main problem with GW2. Most levels in that game don't really mean much in terms of improving skills so there doesn't seem much point in playing just to get stuff that makes you look a bit cooler.
What people really want is slower meaningful progression NOT slow leveling. Levelless MMO design will give us this. That item you got from a named monster on the first day won't be something you throw away 2 hours later. It could be useful for weeks because there is no outleveling it. Sure you will find better items eventually but it won't because you are simply racing from quest hub to quest hub.
This part sounds good to me but the people trained by Blizzard to be loot-addicts would probably hate it.
From reading 10 years of reading hardcore vs casual threads: Slow R Hardcore.
Doesn't matter what you're discussing--transport, leveling speed, progression and/or quality of life improvements of any variety. Fast R Bad, Slow R Good.
Funny, I associate "hardcore" more with rushing through to the end game (aka "real game") and blitzing content so you have bragging rights on doing it first whilst wanting to "stop and smell the roses" and experience content slowly like it's actually a world you're going through seems like a more casual playstyle. All depends on how you define those terms I guess.
Comments
HELL YES!
The way too fast level progression in MMOs is what ruins community! Few people play every day, but in modern MMos if you are away a few days, all your friends and guildmates WAY outlevelled you. How can people play together like this? In days of SWG or EQ2 I always played with guildmates, and we proceeded through the same areas and quests together, because it took a long time. Now, swoosh you are 20 levels higher on a weekend.
It just ruins MMOs.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
From reading 10 years of reading hardcore vs casual threads: Slow R Hardcore.
Doesn't matter what you're discussing--transport, leveling speed, progression and/or quality of life improvements of any variety. Fast R Bad, Slow R Good.
Depends. It only works in P2P and maybe even B2P titles. Since F2P usually creates some artificial extension of the game by making it unnecessarily grindy, hence encouraging cash shop purchase or such. But in P2P you can strike a balance between grind and progression, turning the reward into a milestone, not just a reward. So yes, I'd say that the progression is way too quick, but that doesn't mean that it should be as slow as it was in Everquest. Maybe somewhere inbetween?
Either way, that's not to say that it cannot exist in free to play markets, but most F2P games are still trying to milk their customers.
There are plenty of ways around that. To start, killing newbs offers no reward. Now, there will always be those that are just doing it for teh lulz, so there are solutions for that, too. My favorite is in Puzzle Pirates. Attack too many lower level players and a big black ship comes sailing out of nowhere and kicks your ass. Of course, that only works in MMOs where newbs are pretty useless, but that's the case in almost every level-based MMO anyway.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
For the type of mmos that were released in the past two years, it's too slow, because it's totally pointless.
Questing has turned into a shameless way of extending play time of thin mmos just long enough for the 1st month sub or until you spend in the cash shop. Get rid of it completely imo and build better mmos.
Ironically enough, all 3 of those games use "bars" to measure player progression. They just have more than one.
You're asking the wrong questions.
Players will always try to find the fastest / most efficient way to do something (or at least what they perceive to be). Thus, when you have games centered around linear progression (a lvling bar), you get people rushing to cap faster & faster. Furthermore, developers understand this better than most of us players do, and so they are constantly re-calibrating these games to make the lvling rush less of a determining factor. Otherwise you have games where a select few players rush and rush and rush, and don't sleep, work, eat, spend time w/ their families, etc. and get a huge advantage over the majority of gamers (who have obligations / lives outside of video games). When that happens, most of your player base tends to stop playing, because they don't enjoy games that are 'too grindy'.
The solution, is to have games that are much less reliant on a leveling mechanic to progression. The only problem w/ this, is so many players are used to the carrot on a stick method of gameplay, that many are completely unwilling to give other design types a fair chance.
I've been in the camp where I work 60 hrs a week and where I work 30 hrs a week. Where I can play a game 4 nights, 8 hrs straight and where I do well to get 12 hrs a week in.
When an MMO lets either camp dictate 'fast' it takes a side. One guy needs a week to level out, the other guy needs a month and that's the problem with the debate, "leveling too fast". Both guys are paying $15 a month. If they aren't it's pay to win. I'd rather see basic goals like level cap be simple and effective. As long as there are levels the only thing most people are going to be looking at is end game anyway.
It depends what consequence you define as the parameter for "too" fast. To me, the main consequence of concern is longevity, which is meant to indicate how long any given player continues to enjoy the game as well as how long the game maintains a healthy overall population.
Concerning longevity, I've always viewed it as a function of two primary factors: how fun/long the leveling process is, and how fun/long the "end game", whatever that may entail, is. The current model of MMOs is such that when players start a new MMO, the immediate goal is usually to reach max level. Once there, they embark upon a brand new journey through "end game content." Done well, games have enough end game content to keep players busy for months and months, until more content can be released, then again, and then an expansion with yet more leveling and new end game content, seemingly ad infinitum. Except it never is.
There inevitably comes a point where a player has consumed off of the current content, and then repeated it again...and again...and again. At this point, players usually turn to leveling alts and experimenting with other classes to preoccupy them until more content is released. Eventually, however, a player will have every single class leveled. I consider this a critical point where the game is on the brink of losing this player's interest for good. When you have no more leveling to do and no more end game content to do, you're left logging in just to stand (or jump) around in town.
A Case Study: WoW
I use early WoW as the quintessential illustration of this. In Vanilla, leveling took a decent amount of time - not a lot, like, say, vanilla FFXI did - but a decent amount of time. Once you got to level 60, however, you had a ton of dungeons and raids to work through. The whole dungeon/raid "end game" thing was new to a lot of players too, so it wasn't as mundane as this might sound today. For the most part, players were busy straight into the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. With this expansion came a shit ton, that's right not just a ton this time, but a shit ton of end game content. So much that not a single guild in the entire world had beaten all of the current raid content 5 months in when Blizzard released the next tier comprised of two full raids. 3 years in, players interested in the end game model had been utterly consumed by the seemingly endless amount of content.
However, as the pace simply couldn't be maintained, by the end of TBC, and after the first big content nerf, the majority of players suddenly had gotten through all the content and had finally gotten bored. So what did they do? They leveled alts! Few players had more than 2 or three max level characters at this point in the game. Sure, some outliers had several and many others only had one. But, factoring in the first big nerf to leveling EXP, there was a mad rush to level more characters by the end of TBC. This carried over straight into WotLK, which featured a drastic decrease in initial end game content. Compared to the 15 dungeons, 3 major and 2 supplementary raids that launched with TBC, WotLK only launched with only 12 dungeons (every one of them significantly easier) and only 1 major raid (a remake) plus 3 supplementary raids. The end game content this time around was easy enough that it was beatable within the very first week, and then farmable in a single day after that. This led people to continue leveling alts throughout the course of the expansion. Many players had nearly every single class maxed by the end of this expansion, leaving no more leveling to be done during subsequent expansions. This was, I think, a huge contributing factor to the eventual decline of players over the ensuing years.
Now most of this is just my own hypothesis based on some of my own subjective experiences, but I think it sounds reasonable and would warrant some sort of statistical study on the part of developers.
Depth and length of end game + depth and length of leveling process = longevity of the game. Do note though that length alone will never suffice. Leveling still has to be engaging and fun and decidedly not grindy, or you risk deterring players before they ever get to the point where they'd consider leveling even one class to max level, let alone multiple classes eventually.
is mmo progressions too fast?
> No , it slow , not too slow like old days but still slow.
should mmo lvling be slower?
> No , i hope it faster , maybe no leveling are better.
is it fine the way it is?
> No , it not fine at all , need to change a lot.
I think OP problem here isn't level progression speed , but gears progression.
Currents game design are [level up > do new quest > get quest gears > raid in dungeon > get epic gears] repeat... .
You have new gears nearly as soon as you level up + fast leveling speed.
>That is the problem
I prefer slower gears progression , not slow leveling.
It's way to fast. My preference is for there to never be a level cap. I feel you should always be able to progress further if you so wish.
When I play MMORPGs .. I expect to play for years, not months.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
People want faster leveling because we have been grinding out levels in MMOs for 15 years. It is old hat. That ding that felt so magical in 1999 doesn't even raise an eyebrow anymore. It is time to move on.
The time has come for the levelless MMO. How many millions or billions of dollars have been spent on power leveling services or people trading accounts because people don't feel like grinding levels anymore. That is money that is just going out the door. This is why Everquest Next is going to be such a break through. It is not going to be the same old grind again.
What people really want is slower meaningful progression NOT slow leveling. Levelless MMO design will give us this. That item you got from a named monster on the first day won't be something you throw away 2 hours later. It could be useful for weeks because there is no outleveling it. Sure you will find better items eventually but it won't because you are simply racing from quest hub to quest hub.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Here's the delima...how to make progression appealing in a game, but also, have great balance.
Lets say for arguements sake that it takes roughly 6 months at a players best efforts to reach max level. Now how long will the game be able to sustain him/her at max level before they lose interest? What will they impliment into the game to hold their attention, expansions/new content?
If there is no max level within a game, is there a means for players starting 2 years after games launch to EVER be compedative with players who will always be 2 years ahead in their character development? How will the developer overcome this issue?
You see, the simplist (I'm not suggesting it the best) way to develop a game is to create a cap that holds players in one place for a period of time while entertaining them with additional content specifically aimed at max level. This gives new(er) players opportunity to catch up before another expansion is released and the floodgate opens again for a few more levels.
The real issue begins when a game reaches multiple expansions. Again, let's hypothesize and say that the original game + first expansion takes roughly 6 months each to reach max level. Now the second expansion is released and some friends of mine want to take up the game and play with me. At the current rate it's going to take them a full year before they even reach the current expansions content + another 6 months to level that to be on par with me. They realised this and decided to not play the game.
Conclusion: A long/slow progression is probably appealing and a great idea for a new game that does not have expansions/new content for higher levels. This idea would not work for a game with expansions (particually multiple expansions) unless the time to progress through older content was reduced somewhat.
Yes, but this is a game design issue. In Asheron's Call, it took several years before the first player ever hit the max level. (126) Even so, max level was just max 'level'. You could still raise stats and attributes up to a separate skill cap far beyond that. So 'level' was just a way of keeping track of how much XP you had total.
If you were in your 50's, it might take you a week to hit another level or 2. If you saw someone in your 80's, they were powerful compared to you, and if you saw someone in their 100's, HOLY CRAP. You may not have known HOW powerful they were, and in what areas, as it is totally possible to gimp yourself in the game, but you knew they had the potential to be more powerful than you.
Even after Tim the Enchanter hit level 126 for the first time ever, it still took a year or more before it started to become normal. A few more people hit max level in that time, but it was still months and years before EVERYONE started approaching that level. Even so, the game was made in a way that allowed level 80s to do the same content as the 126's. A level 50 could group with a level 90. Etcetera. For a game to still be unique and new 3 to 4 years after release back then is incredible. It had so much content that nobody was bored by max level. They were just getting to content they never even knew existed. And with the monthly updates, content was constantly added for free every single month.
Games need to get away from levels and skillpoint-based abilities like WoW with its skill-trees. They need to shift toward skill/attribute based games that allow differentiation between builds. Allow people to make their own builds, instead of guaranteeing that everyone is a cookie-cutter of one of 3-5 possible builds in a class. Let people make their own classes, and decide how to approach the content themselves. Make content difficult, and keep people around for the long run instead of worrying whether they're going to blow through everything in a month and be done with your game.
i can sum it up this way:
this past april i was in hospital to get a tumor removed from my head of all places, i had my laptop with me, and in the three weeks i existed in delirious, drug induced la-la land, i managed to start Aion, and level a cleric to 50, and he was geared great.
the day i got home from the hospital, and of the heavy meds, i loaded up AION, played 5 mins, and uninstalled., i couldn't really remember anything .
have games gotten easy? um ya.
over 20 years of mmorpg's and counting...
Level progression is way too fast. BUT devs create level progression nowadays for all the wrong reasons. Making the level progression slow with the current mechanics leads people to grind beyond belief on subscription mmos to pretend that the game has enough content to justify the sub. As for the non-sub games, its the obvious reason that they would need to put the slow leveling so they can sell exp potions.
When we talk about mmos needing to innovate, its not just about innovating graphics or action vs tab target.... its about innovating the entire core game as well.... that includes progression, leveling, npc/mob behavior. Everything.
As long as there is a visible path to power it will be too fast or too cheated.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
Agreed; I liked this approach as well. Skill gains is the way to go, but it can't be DF1's asian level of grind either. I'd say in a month a player should be able to pvp with the best(But lose to a better skilled player) yet still have much more things to progress in.
MurderHerd
How would this actually work though. Just a gear grind? Sounds really boring. I want a way to see my character progress and improve. Not just get better gear. Otherwise it's not an RPG and I won't be playing. Sure maybe you could level up skills like in EVE rather than having classes but I just don't see how you can have an RPG without leveling up *something*. This is my main problem with GW2. Most levels in that game don't really mean much in terms of improving skills so there doesn't seem much point in playing just to get stuff that makes you look a bit cooler.
This part sounds good to me but the people trained by Blizzard to be loot-addicts would probably hate it.
Funny, I associate "hardcore" more with rushing through to the end game (aka "real game") and blitzing content so you have bragging rights on doing it first whilst wanting to "stop and smell the roses" and experience content slowly like it's actually a world you're going through seems like a more casual playstyle. All depends on how you define those terms I guess.