Putting A Break On Leveling
One of the better guild ideas I’ve seen over the years are the guilds that have a program deliberately designed to level an entire group of players together without getting level spread to hell and back. This could be a guild specifically made for this purpose, or just a subset of alts, but the concept is the same:
- The first week everyone makes a character and plays it until they hit a specific level cap.
- There is a night or two toward the end of the week where the whole guild rounds up these characters to run a dungeon or do an activity together, not worried about being mismatched in levels.
- The next week the level cap is increased just enough so that everyone will be able to meet it, and the process repeats.
The idea here is to artifically slow down leveling to a pace where everyone in the guild, no matter what lifestyle, can sustain. It keeps people together without feeling left behind. I joined a guild once that did this, and it really was pretty neat to be a part of that. I didn’t feel the pressure to quickly level, and as a result, I spent more time doing non-XP-related activities: crafting, exploring, chatting.
When LOTRO first launched, it opened up a couple weeks early for their pre-order “Founders” to play, but with a catch — we could only go to level 15 and no further. It was the one and only time I’ve ever played a MMO where a very low level became the “end game”… and it was a blast. People invested in alts, guilds formed, crafting ran rampant, and there was just a more relaxed atmosphere to the game.
So considering all this, I wonder what it’d be like if a MMO company released a server that incorporated this — an initial, artificially low level cap that slowly went up over the weeks, forcing the bulk of the playerbase to stay in the same (growing) level range. Perhaps once the highest level is attained, the game would allow everyone to play there for a week or so, then “reset” to the low level cap once more without deleting that end game character (who could be played again once the cap raised to the maximum).
- Posted in: General
This kind of idea is definitely more applicable to some games than others. My guild originally tried this idea in WoW. Unfortunately as the game went on the number of players that were hitting that level cap, and being there for days with nothing to do but craft, began to increase and the number of players that couldn’t even meet the cap remained consistent.
So the more active players began to grow bored, and the less active players still managed to fall behind the leveling curve.
I think in the end, unless the system has a means of turning off xp completely, that level capping a guild as it progresses just isn’t feasible. If you can turn xp off then the capped player can still farm mobs for crafting mats, dungeon crawl etc.
Personally, I think it’s a really interesting idea and would probably enjoy the heck out of it.
Unfortunately, I think the more amorous among us would hate it because they’d hit that cap early in the week and run out of stuff to do a few days later. I’m pretty good at tuning out whining on a game’s official forums but I think that’d be a recipe for a flood of “WTF Fantasy Company! Come on!” posts.
The idea is similar to one that Tesh and others had some time ago: MMO life in cycles. Chars getting older, dying, the world changing or maybe even re-starting from scratch.
Not all of these ideas would not work with today’s MMOs, but maybe it is an idea for the future.
In this day more and more MMORPG’s seem to be leaning towards the solo adventure while leveling making grouping much less important.
The game I have been currently playing, LOTRO I leveled my latest toon from 0 to 60 pretty well completely solo even though I have been gaming within a guild of friends all along. I am doing more and more with my guild mates in terms of game ending instances, but after doing each multiple times it does get a bit much!
I think this method of leveling as a group is very inherent to a game like DDO, where doing dungeons as a group is more benificial that trying things solo. You could easily set up a group of individuals that would level/do dungeons together. I played DDO off and on since its release but never really was able to get into it (I think the highest level I reached was 3), but heck this new direction the game is going is giving me that itch to give it a go once again.
It would be just like the old days when playing D&D around the table!
I had some friends that have done this in just about every MMO that play. The few that level quickly end up with quite a few alts.
I like the idea of the entire server being slowly opened up. It would be great if there were events/battles/crafting/etc that the players could perform to continuously raise their servers level cap.
I would hate this. I’d feel too much pressure, what if i couldn’t get online enough to level one week and i fucked it all up. I’d be too worried about level and not enjoy the game.
What if for those who are more than a certain number of levels “behind the curve” of the rest of the players, they would receive an increased XP rate until they got within striking distance of the pack?
I think that would be great. I miss the feeling of MMOs having “worlds” that I play in as opposed to “content” that has to be experienced and beaten.
An artificial level cap would be great with that mindset now.
Ultima Online’s Siege Perilous server did that. It limited how much skill a person could gain per day, and because of that and a separate ruleset, the server was considered more “hardcore” than others. I never gave it a shot when I was younger, but it sounds really interesting now.
I love the pic
Nice idea in theory, but when I looked at the launch of the two WoW expansions (forgive my lack of creativity here, it’s what I know best) – the first people hit 70 / 80 after 24h of play time already.
Same when new servers are opened, it hardly takes longer than 3-4 days until the first level 60 pops up – sometimes it’s closer to 48h after launch.
Your suggestion might work in a game with a really slow levelling progression, like in Ragnarok Online (which I played for a while as well) – but still there you had one or two classes (Mages and Archers) pop into the 60s or 70s on the first day (often in a 2man team with a healer) and all other classes were much more gear-dependant and could hardly match that speed. OK, the level cap of 99 with a exponential progression was *not* reached so quick, but I still think this won’t work in any game unless you really make the steps artificially small, as in 10,20,30,40,50 – upped each week.
I tend to be an aggressive leveler. I always read quest text, and I enjoy the ride, but some of the fun for me comes from doing it in the most efficient way possible. In WoW, when Wrath came out, I hit 80 and then spent two weeks waiting for everyone else in my raid group to catch up. It was a loooong two weeks.
If an MMO was to do something like you’d suggested, there would definitely have to be enough to keep someone like me busy in the space between hitting the cap and it being raised again. I don’t think leveling a bunch of alts would really cut it.
I like the idea but it doesn’t work in practice as people always want to level at different speeds. I think a good solution is for games to have mentoring mechanics. I think EQ2′s mentoring ability is fantastic as it allows anyone to play together from any level. Every MMO should have it.
@Longasc Would love to see evolving worlds with cycles
I think it would be really exciting to see a MMO in which a player can actually make permenant changes to the world based upon their actions!
We Fly Spitfires beat me to it. EQ2 and CoH both have mentoring capabilities, and CoH has the Sidekick ability (raising someone up to the higher character’s level rather than vice versa) which kind of emulates the idea in some ways.
EQ2 also lets you turn off combat ex, quest ex, or both, so if you want to play more but don’t want to outlevel friends for some reason, you can.
I still think its a neat idea, though. Wouldn’t be commercially viable to build a whole game around it, but if it could be a ‘special rules’ server in a game, I bet it’d get its fair share of players.