Speed of leveling

[Dennis Evans]

Ok let me preface this by saying that I just this morning downloaded and played for 3 hours EQ2 (free version) and at the end of that play session (which was better than you would think after all these years) I was at level 9 and had almost 15 abilities.

This felt way to fast and confusing as you couldn't really learn anything before getting something else. And it left you exploring only the areas immediately surrounding the quest hub and never seeing any other part of the zone. Much the way WoW has been since 2004 with it's rapid pace to get capped and play endgame. But shouldn't the game be the endgame? Shouldn't every part of the journey matter? It's a balance I know and it isn't easy to find a common ground for everyone and my thinking isn't popular but maybe some will understand.

I feel that leveling in Pantheon is superior and with a few tweaks here and there could be ideal. I know for many of you it feels slow but to me it makes each level feel meaningful rather than just a random number to watch progress. I feel as if the fighting should be the primary way to gain experience as we are all in this for that reason, to make strong characters and have epic fights and any experience outside of that should be trivial to progression.

Thoughts?

[Phantom Limb]

I agree with this in terms of modern MMO’s and their pacing. People mistake “slow” for boring or grinding, but when the whole world itself is a dungeon or raid. It’s just incomparable to most other MMO’s other than EQ99 or the older ones. And that’s what pulls me in, I love that I can genuinely take my time and not feel any FOMO whatsoever. Whereas WoW and FF14 and most (not all) modern MMO’s keep rushing you to max and throwing too many hubs full of fetch quests. Pantheon doesn’t do this, and they don’t even have their RPG Quest Systems in place yet! So that says a lot about the game for me.

[DiceWrangler]

Leveling speed has been majorly increased in mature MMOs (like the 20+ year-old games you mention: EQ][ and WoW) since the majority of the server player population has characters at or near max-level and the devs want new players -- or alts of existing players -- to catch-up quickly. In other words, the leveling speed of those now-mature MMOs used to be much, much slower than they are now.

[FireKat]

Originally posted by DiceWrangler:

Leveling speed has been majorly increased in mature MMOs (like the 20+ year-old games you mention: EQ][ and WoW) since the majority of the server player population has characters at or near max-level and the devs want new players -- or alts of existing players -- to catch-up quickly. In other words, the leveling speed of those now-mature MMOs used to be much, much slower than they are now. [/quote]

Vanilla 1.0 WoW was pretty slow back in the day but no where near EQ levels of slow :P.

[Rabbit]

And still even today, players complain in WoW that the leveling takes to long. ...

[thanoskulo]

When eq2 launched lvling was way slower than pantheon what you experienced at eq2 now is the wowification that happened to the game through the years

[D1Z4STR]

You don't play EQ2 free version, if you want a proper experience play EQ2 Origins.

[Veeshan]

Careful not to fall into the trap so many of them do.* It would not be called "superior" to design a game in this way, with slow leveling. That would be just as wrong as confusing action combat for being somehow "better" than this. That's a category error; we do not refer to design as good or bad. That would be like saying chess is better than checkers.

We can say this or that design is more or less popular, or more or less fits a specific demographic's tastes.

Casual arcade style intense action MMORPGs are more popular, not better.

Careful use of terminology here will help clarify that you are not claiming that our style is somehow better than theirs. As if they are somehow wrong in their preference.

*Allow me to rephrase this. "Be careful not to fall into the trap so many do."

[Dennis Evans]

Originally posted by D1Z4STR:

You don't play EQ2 free version, if you want a proper experience play EQ2 Origins.

I read on the forums that was the best experience but with Pantheon this year and Monsters and Memories next year I feel like I would be hard pressed to invest the time. To their credit the game performed well on my system and was a very playable experience but like wow it felt so trivial to level as you bypass the zone before youve even seen anything.

[Phantom Limb]

Originally posted by DiceWrangler:

Leveling speed has been majorly increased in mature MMOs (like the 20+ year-old games you mention: EQ][ and WoW) since the majority of the server player population has characters at or near max-level and the devs want new players -- or alts of existing players -- to catch-up quickly. In other words, the leveling speed of those now-mature MMOs used to be much, much slower than they are now. [/quote]


This is very true but there are tons of modern games that just straight up launch with this rush mentality, no matter how long they’ve been out for.

[Veeshan]

Originally posted by Phantom Limb:

Originally posted by DiceWrangler:

Leveling speed has been majorly increased in mature MMOs (like the 20+ year-old games you mention: EQ)( and WoW)

This is very true but there are tons of modern games that just straight up launch with this rush mentality, no matter how long they’ve been out for.

The issue though, the question, is whether this is due to what players want.

Every new P99 server launches with XP boosts and Bots and adjusted loot, adjusted being code for more available.

If even the old school hardcore crowd are rabid for quick advancement, is the fact that this is technically new content enough to counter that?

Or should this transition to Locust Mode be the new norm?

[Tanist]

1-20 is extremely fast and I agree... problematic in the function of play. It should take at least 2, maybe 3 times longer (if not more) than it does to get to 20 to at least slow down the play.

Now the problem with that currently is there is very little content for such a slow based progression, so that in and of itself would create issues if the leveling speed were slowed down a lot.

I think once they have all the content in and fleshed out, they should look closely at balancing this better so that it takes much longer to go up the levels. As it is now, with soloing being very common in the 1-20 game most people can hit 10 in a day of normal play, and 20 in about a week. This pace is contrary to this style of game and if kept to would invalidate everything they put effort into the game on the way to max level as everyone would just plow up to the the cap and complain about nothing to do.

Also, by having the early game move so fast, it causes modern MMO gear issues where players swap their gear out too quickly. This is a problem in a camping style game for rare mobs items as the time spent to gain the rewards is invalidated rather quickly due to level progression speed.

So I completely agree, but I also think this is something they will tune later when things are filled out a bit more.