One thought I had is that maybe you could force the player to make their time, or genuinely suck later on. For example, you can easily have mobs with maximum level requirements, so they are only for low level players. Give them no drop items. And then make those items some of the most important items in the game (think of resist gear and utility items like instant invis clicky, jboots, etc). And bingo, if you go blasting through the levels like a spaz, you'll miss out on all the stuff and suffer later on.
But maybe people would rebel against that. Or maybe it would harm the freedom of people who do already play intelligently, because they can no longer just explore and have fun and instead have to specifically find a route through the game that takes them through all these key 'checkpoints'.
I would rebel against that. I think an MMORPG should give you as much freedom as it can allow without compromising, here you arent only suggestion the optimal path being clearly laid out, but also spiked with penalties if you stray from it? I didnt think that is the kinda of game you look for, because after the first clueless week there will be a clear, set-in-stone A-B-C-D progression line that EVERYONE has to follow, or reroll a new char.
What you're basically asking for is where every mob is like an elite like EQ was. I would actually love that. Monsters should be monsters. You should want to avoid them unless you are prepared to fight.
Every mob might be too much for todays gaming world, but whole areas definitely. Vanilla WoW was fine in that regard with many regions of pure elite mobs. The game failed to provide rewards for tackling them so they werent used and later removed, though.
Let's get real, you were pretty much the same character level 10 to 80 in GW2 with a few higher stats. It was garbage they way they did it.
It's actually one of my favorite parts about the game. But then again my favorite game wouldnt be level based and GW2's system (and it's downleveling if you are too high for the content) get you close to that.
Putting infinite levels in front of someone is just going to promote people to get to the level ceiling as fast as possible. It's human nature, it'll always be that way. I mean if you give people 500 levels. People are going to look at it and say, "What the fuck?" Once you start designing something to say "impossible to get max" or "making levels trivial, but we give you a lot of them!" is just bad. If your level becomes trivial, then just stop using them.
If you have to have a number just use completion percentages or something similar.
My point is if levels are irrelevant why have them? Why not replace them (or attempt to) with something more interesting or failing that, something different.
500 levels maybe looks reachable. 10,000 looks like a slap in the face. So you're right, take them away. You can throw out the whole level grind and instead allow players to allocate xp towards skills and stats as they like. See EVE or PS2. A system like that needs to come with a very broad sidegrade variety so people can drain their xp away. the character doesnt get much more powerful like with levels, but has more options to prepare for specific encounters. Some might come out as metagame must haves but so what, you still get more options that will be useful at times from playing more, without dwarfing the player that has less time to invest.
I was just using GW1 as an example to the fast leveling issue brought up.
Other than that it was highly instanced. Which I don't like. GW1 was a great game and did a bunch of things much better than any other game (even GW2) but it had it's issues as well.
edit: One of the things GW1 did very well was the limited skill bar. You only had 8 to chose from. Much of your power was based on hunting for new skills (and choosing the right skill set for the encounters). Which is another great way to get away from standard leveling.
And GW1 even allowed dual classing, the combination possibilities were huge. There was the usual meta the elitist jerks players demanded, and thats fine for that kind of player, but there were also tons of options. You could screw up your character and be useless, so maybe take steps against that (Gw2 did but went too far towards safety, and as a result has filtered skills down into very few boring choices), but otherwise give the players freedom.
We need EVE style leveling in a fantasy MMO imo. Or at least try it. Would work awesome in a sandbox fantasy game. Queue up the skill you want to learn and then go about playing the game. This system doesn't gimp the casual player from a combat standpoint and is also a excellent way to gate progression.
This concept is being executed on a smaller scales in Dragon's Prophet. Depending on player reaction I would expect to see it introduced in more titles.
Problem is the game sucks, so any good features it has will be overlooked because it will crash and burn.
And damn did this thread move quickly this night, I thought we actually had new information =( ... but its just the repeat of page 50 - 60 from 5 weeks ago. I wonder if the Info SOE wants to give out at the Fan Faire will be enough to allow for more focused discussion and not just repeated what we'd like to see without any relevance to the product the thread is about.
