Both WoW and DAoC have had to deal with an aging game population. One of the issues faced by their faithful players is that leveling an alt can be a painful process.
In WoW, Blizzard has dealt with this by making the doldrums levels (20 through 50) a faster grind via quests giving more experience. In DAoC, this has been done by giving people with a max level character the ability to use a /level command to automatically level their toon to 20 (or 30 in the cases of some underpopulated factions on some servers).
Both of these solutions have problems.
- In the case of WoW, you’re still doing the same grind and the same quests, and you still have to level twice to get new abilities (barring talent-based ones). Also, the people playing WoW for the first time do not have the curse/blessing to go through the same leveling experience that others did, which brings with it more gold by the time they reach 70 and a better feel for their character class.
- In the case of DAoC, the issue was that the starter zones were extremely inhospitable to new players to the game. When old players that could offer a sense of community and game-based-wisdom would simply /level past the starting zone, new players got none of the enjoyment that the original players had.
One proposal to deal with this, which WAR might also employ, would be to let a limited form of /level exist. This /level would become available after “ding”ing any level. Once you hit level two, you could /level which would also propel you to level 3. You would not be able to store these levels, so you couldn’t skip past the leveling experience in which you would interact with new players to the game.
Also, WAR alt-rollers would benefit in that they would get a talent point for every level they attained in addition to any skills that become available with the 2 character levels they gain if they choose to use /level. Finally, in WAR, a significant potential problem is not feeling like you can enjoy scenarios for the full leveling experience if you become RP capped before you ding a new character level. In this system, it would be rare to have capped your RP even if you leveled exclusively through world-pvp or scenarios.
In conclusion, there are better ways to reward your player base for level’ing to max and rolling an alt than simply reducing the experience per level or granting a /level to 20. This is but one of many solutions.
September 30, 2008 at 12:37 am |
The problem with mmos is that they are not what they used to be, there is no more 9 out of 10 players that never played mmo before. Everyone knows this stuff from the feet to the head, its old, its same again and it is boring