World of Warcraft: Current Year

I wouldn't be surprised to see a crop of MMOs ditch leveling. If only because of costs.

Draegan_sl said:

I wouldn't be surprised to see a crop of MMOs ditch leveling. If only because of costs.

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Leveling is not going away, as artificial as it can be at times. The whole thing that hooks players to MMOs is the ding grats, you're more powerful! thing. The numbers don't even matter; WoD could've been a 90-95 expansion and we wouldn't know the difference as long as the DPS/HPS/Tanking vs the mobs was the same. Next WoW expansion could be 100-105, or 100-110, or 100-200 and it's all the same as long as players and mobs are balanced against each other. They have to keep that ding grats carrot in though.

When it comes to costs, yeah, WoW has a huge glut of newbie zones. It being a 10 year old game I think they've done a pretty good job trying to revamp the old zones into relevance. If they had to relaunch the game from scratch they could certainly get away with half of the leveling content with nobody noticing.

I'm not saying you do away with the "ding grats" feeling. There are just other methods to give that to your player base. For example, you can do a whole progression system just based on achievements. So instead of needing to finish ten Kill 10 Rat quests and Finish a KillCastleBoss quest chain, you can fill those in with achievements.

The difference is very subtle. It's the same thing as EQ had you kill 1000 mobs, but Blizzard made it so you had 10 quests to kill 100 mobs. It's the way you package things. TSW was kind of like this.

Your ding grats feeling doesn't come in seeing you get Level 10. It comes from you getting a new ability or piece of "meaningful" equipment. A simple definition of "meaningful equipment" is like getting a shiled upgrade in Zelda, or getting the boomerang.

Call me old fashioned but I wouldn't play a game without a levelling system, it would feel wrong to me. Much like I don't play Gw2 because they don't have the Holy trinity, so you can see how non progressive I am in terms of rpgs.

Seems pretty stupid of you. I would play any game if it was fun.

Draegan_sl said:

I'm not saying you do away with the "ding grats" feeling. There are just other methods to give that to your player base. For example, you can do a whole progression system just based on achievements. So instead of needing to finish ten Kill 10 Rat quests and Finish a KillCastleBoss quest chain, you can fill those in with achievements.

The difference is very subtle. It's the same thing as EQ had you kill 1000 mobs, but Blizzard made it so you had 10 quests to kill 100 mobs. It's the way you package things. TSW was kind of like this.

Your ding grats feeling doesn't come in seeing you get Level 10. It comes from you getting a new ability or piece of "meaningful" equipment. A simple definition of "meaningful equipment" is like getting a shiled upgrade in Zelda, or getting the boomerang.

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So same exact thing as leveling except you make it more confusing to compare your progression vs others and your own past? Levels are fine.

I'm still confused why you think having levels makes a game unnecessarily costly. Most of the problems you're thinking of are just part of having a 10 year old game. I don't think the WoW dev team looks back and says "Aw man, nobody is in Westfall. All that time and money we spent 12-13 years ago was a complete fucking waste." I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the story from leveling quests back in the day. It made the world feel like a real, fleshed-out place. And the progression through the levels was an important part of your own personal journey. When you saw a level 40 Paladin on his shiny horse ride past you as you were killing kobolds you thought "Wow what a badass. Someday I'll be that guy." You didn't right-click his portrait, compare achievements, scroll through to find what he had and you didn't, then go look up a walkthrough on where to get them. It's hard to remember what a good leveling experience is like because we're all on our 100th alt and just want to catch up as fast as possible.

Whether you have progression based on levels or gear or achievements or whatever, any mmo will have content that will eventually become obsolete. It's impossible to design content that will still be relevant in 10 years without any changes. It's insane to try to force relevancy by putting brand new players directly in the 'end-game' content and expect them to stay content there.

Not me man, fuck that. All about the numbers!

But on the real PRX ruined any fun I would ever have in GW2.

DavivMcD_sl said:

So same exact thing as leveling except you make it more confusing to compare your progression vs others and your own past? Levels are fine.

I'm still confused why you think having levels makes a game unnecessarily costly. Most of the problems you're thinking of are just part of having a 10 year old game. I don't think the WoW dev team looks back and says "Aw man, nobody is in Westfall. All that time and money we spent 12-13 years ago was a complete fucking waste." I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the story from leveling quests back in the day. It made the world feel like a real, fleshed-out place. And the progression through the levels was an important part of your own personal journey. When you saw a level 40 Paladin on his shiny horse ride past you as you were killing kobolds you thought "Wow what a badass. Someday I'll be that guy." You didn't right-click his portrait, compare achievements, scroll through to find what he had and you didn't, then go look up a walkthrough on where to get them. It's hard to remember what a good leveling experience is like because we're all on our 100th alt and just want to catch up as fast as possible.

Whether you have progression based on levels or gear or achievements or whatever, any mmo will have content that will eventually become obsolete. It's impossible to design content that will still be relevant in 10 years without any changes. It's insane to try to force relevancy by putting brand new players directly in the 'end-game' content and expect them to stay content there.

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Can you really not see why it costs a lot of money to create leveling content when the majority of time spent on a single character is not in the leveling content? I am only discussing content within a single expansion cycle. Obviously shit gets old and becomes unused.

And what is up with your retarded Paladin analogy? You saw a badass looking character and you looked forward to being a badass like him. That was because he had shiny gear on with a cool mount and maybe you saw some really cool skill animations. His level meant shit to you. Any sort of progression system rewards players with new shiny. It's the nature of RPGs.

Also, when the fuck did I ever say a different progression system would keep content relevant for 10 years? It's too early in the day for this.

Draegan_sl said:

Can you really not see why it costs a lot of money to create leveling content when the majority of time spent on a single character is not in the leveling content? I am only discussing content within a single expansion cycle. Obviously shit gets old and becomes unused.

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Most players don't raid, according to statistics released by Blizzard, some don't even reach the level cap (LFR is not raiding, it's a tiny step above watching a cinematic because you can choose the camera angle). So yeah, levelling is here to stay and for once I'm grateful, I love levelling and exploring, while on the other hand I find retarded killing the same boss over and over, because RPGs are not that. Okay, MMOs are not RPGs since eons (Ultima or maybe Vanilla/RoK EQ), but I still believe that a numeric progression as a character level makes more sense than one with item level, which is the same fucking thing, except it's RNG based and it's also scaling at a ridicolous pace.

Of course we could be all "hero_01" without any number whatsoever and just learn new skills by exploring or defeating monsters, but having 30 skills instead of 10 is the same as being level 30 or level 10. Flavor doesn't really matter. I for once like the D&D style of a numeric level progression, because when I started playing D&D in 1986 with my red box, reaching a new level was a big deal and I'm still attached to that concept.

Well. By nature of having a progression system, you will have content that goes mostly unused a few weeks/months into the lifecycle of the content. Much like leveling content, your introductory stuff will only be used by noobs and only for a short period of time, compared to the "endgame" content. Either way you are spending money on content that will not be used for a large portion of the populace once they hit higher tiers of content. Instead of leveling content, you have dungeons/raids that reward you with progressively improving tiers of equipment/abilities that once you complete them you will have no reason to do again. By simple nature of being a game, these introductory dungeons/raids will have to be less challenging than each progressive tier, especially if they are communicating the mechanics of the game to players.

I guess when it comes down to it, there isn't a lot of difference between the concepts, simply that one has some increasing number and the other is... an increasing number. Except while "level" can be easily compared vs. power levels, having achievements or something else determine your power level means either a more complicated/convoluted system or very little meaning to getting those achievements/etc in the greater scheme of things. Or it is a game where relative power levels don't mean much over time, which won't have very much long-term hold when a MOBA would have the same ephemeral offering without needing the time investment.

Definitely starting to see a lot more issues with switching out/replacing/removing a normalized leveling system.

Miele_sl said:

Most players don't raid, according to statistics released by Blizzard, some don't even reach the level cap (LFR is not raiding, it's a tiny step above watching a cinematic because you can choose the camera angle). So yeah, levelling is here to stay and for once I'm grateful, I love levelling and exploring, while on the other hand I find retarded killing the same boss over and over, because RPGs are not that. Okay, MMOs are not RPGs since eons (Ultima or maybe Vanilla/RoK EQ), but I still believe that a numeric progression as a character level makes more sense than one with item level, which is the same fucking thing, except it's RNG based and it's also scaling at a ridicolous pace.

Of course we could be all "hero_01" without any number whatsoever and just learn new skills by exploring or defeating monsters, but having 30 skills instead of 10 is the same as being level 30 or level 10. Flavor doesn't really matter. I for once like the D&D style of a numeric level progression, because when I started playing D&D in 1986 with my red box, reaching a new level was a big deal and I'm still attached to that concept.

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You're all pretty dense here.
I'm discussing getting rid of levels as a mechanic. As in, you gain 10000 xp you go from level 5 to 6 then you gain 12000 xp and you go from level 6 to 7. You can wear item A at level 6 and can go into dungeon A at level 7
Instead you find some other metric to gain power and access to new content.

You didn't need to level up in Zelda and a lot of people seemed to like that game.

It's just another way to mask progression. And because you don't have a strict power curve of numbers, you can create content that more naturally fits together in the same content space, or even reuse content within the same content cycle of an expansion. EVE does this to some degree, and a lot of other skillbased games.

I'm not advocating giving people a "max level" character with a set of gear and just starting the game.

Devs can't even design enough engaging activity at max level right now. You think scrapping the entire leveling system and telling them to fill it with unstructured gameplay is going to be any better?

Draegan_sl said:

I'm not saying you do away with the "ding grats" feeling. There are just other methods to give that to your player base. For example, you can do a whole progression system just based on achievements. So instead of needing to finish ten Kill 10 Rat quests and Finish a KillCastleBoss quest chain, you can fill those in with achievements.

The difference is very subtle. It's the same thing as EQ had you kill 1000 mobs, but Blizzard made it so you had 10 quests to kill 100 mobs. It's the way you package things. TSW was kind of like this.

Your ding grats feeling doesn't come in seeing you get Level 10. It comes from you getting a new ability or piece of "meaningful" equipment. A simple definition of "meaningful equipment" is like getting a shiled upgrade in Zelda, or getting the boomerang.

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I think your system would work but it doesn't have the immediacy of dinging levels, so wouldn't be as popular. Most players like leveling and like the ease of saying to their friends, "I just dinged level 37!" (heard that last night). If you take away that feeling of accomplishment then you need to replace it with something as good or better. Achievements usually aren't as good at that, and they require more thought from the player than levels. Levels also indicate information to other players much more readily than achievements. GW2 created 80 levels instead of the 20 in GW1 is because they gave up trying to convince players it didn't matter.

Levels are simple and for most players, keeping things simple is the surest road to profit.

Draegan_sl said:

You're all pretty dense here.
I'm discussing getting rid of levels as a mechanic. As in, you gain 10000 xp you go from level 5 to 6 then you gain 12000 xp and you go from level 6 to 7. You can wear item A at level 6 and can go into dungeon A at level 7
Instead you find some other metric to gain power and access to new content.

You didn't need to level up in Zelda and a lot of people seemed to like that game.

It's just another way to mask progression. And because you don't have a strict power curve of numbers, you can create content that more naturally fits together in the same content space, or even reuse content within the same content cycle of an expansion. EVE does this to some degree, and a lot of other skillbased games.

I'm not advocating giving people a "max level" character with a set of gear and just starting the game.

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So you replace levels with.. gear? Achievements? Abilities? Skills?

Zelda is not an rpg and is a single player game. When comparing relative power levels to content, in mmos you compare to other players, which requires some easily understood metric of how that comparison rates. This dungeon would be difficult for x level, but y level (x+#) can do it no problem. Solution? Get to y level and do the dungeon. You -can- replace it with gear/achievements/skills/abilities, but it is effectively the same system. The only difference between "you should be level 10 before you try this content" and "you should have bronze armor and an iron class weapon" or "You should have earned this achievement for killing 50 kobolds (same as leveling to 10)" in order to a do a dungeon is in how that numeric description of power is displayed. Is it level, or gearscore, or achievement rating, or ability tier? Those are all leveling mechanics. And, with the original complaint being wasted development time, you still have to develop for content that isn't going to be used by players for a very large portion of their gameplay experience unless you are literally starting your game at WoW Mythic DDR levels of raid shit. Otherwise you will always have "wasted" content, and wasted development hours on what would be the endgame.

Getting rid of levels doesn't solve any of the issues you originally took a stance on, simply it removes a number that you don't like and replaces it with another one that you do. But it is still a numeric description of relative power, and thus the same as an indication of "level" earned from experience.

I guess you unimaginative twats can have fun with wow for the next decade.

Shrug. Stick with your levels.

Did levels fuck your sister? Why so mad?

You're starting to sound like those people who are obsessed with getting rid of the 'golden triangle' of tank/healer/dps. There's a reason it's in every mmo: IT WORKS!!! Just like levels.

Come up with an ACTUAL replacement for levels and you'll get some interest on your side. You can't just say "I dunno, I came up with the idea you guys figure out the details." And stop fucking bringing up Zelda. You can beat Zelda in a couple hours with your starting stats. No fucking shit it doesn't have levels.

Zelda does have "levels", you basically level up when you get that new sword that doubles your damage or the red ring that reduces your damage taken by 75%. It's a single player game though. If they put a quest into an MMO that doubles your damage or reduces your damage taken by 75% it becomes mandatory. Your character is trash if you didn't do those quests. It's an alternate form of leveling and not as gratifying as dinging 99-100.

Don't get me wrong, I get a huge 'ding grats' rush when I'm playing Zelda and get that new sword that doubles my damage. I just don't see it working well in an MMO.

Draegan_sl said:

I guess you unimaginative twats can have fun with wow for the next decade.

Shrug. Stick with your levels.

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I believe you are arguing semantics.
No levels, just a power gauge hovering on the head of the characters, the more shit you do/kill/loot/explore/burn the higher the power gets, so we can compare values in the city-hub. Where's the difference?