Gaming: Five Levels is Too Much: Beta Review of Lineage 2

[Soukyan]

People who gain a sense of accomplishment from enduring the repetetive levelling treadmills that are the major mmorpgs need some counseling, imo.

If I want to get a sense of accomplishment, I'll clean out my garage, not sit in front of a computer monitor for weeks on end to the detriment of my life. Games are to be fun, and that's it. If it's not fun, it's not a game.

But hey, as long as people are broken, others will capitalize on it.

A direct result of the move of "civilized" culture from hunter/gatherers to agriculture based. Mind you, it's a long timeline to look at, and I'm not suggesting that tribal societies don't have their own sets of problems, but at least in tribal culture, you had to pull your own weight if you expected to eat. When you ceased to be a contributing member of the tribe, you were on your way out as far as life was concerned. It may seem a brutal way of life, but just look at some of the things we "civilized" people do. Assisted suicide? Death penalty? Well, I'm sure you can see the similarities and differences and the pros and cons of each so I won't get into it here, and as I said, it's a stretch... but plausible.

[Xilren's Twin]

I'm tempted to say that Soulflame thinks "levels cause brain damage," which I seriously disagree with. Please clarify.

How about "levels cause lack of brain activity in most dev shops" instead?

So what's wrong with levels qua levels? It's what's built around the levels that is important. L2 abuses levels. I think EQ is all about collecting, treadmills, and levels, and I hate it for that. WoW and CoH have something else in the game other than a mindless treadmill (yet I still wish they had more). I strongly agree that the game is about the journey, and if the journey's not fun it doesn't matter what else is in the game.

That's what's being said here.  It's not levels = auto suck, but if the primary attraction of a title is the leveling curve that most likely it will.  Gameplay that holds your attention is the thing.  Keep em active and having fun and who cares what level they are?  When I wrote that "what I want from an mmorpg", I full recognized that I am a niche, not the mass market who already likes games like EQ and L2.  I don't expect to see an mmorpg with most of what I want any time soon, so I will stick to "fun" gameplay at the expense of "world".  Which is why I'm playing CoH.  I fully admit, I expected too much from mmorpgs too soon; so I'll judge them purely based on fun rather than the depth and breath of the gameworld for proabably another 10 years at least.

I'm starting to get frustrated with that. Either I grind so that I can play with my friends, or I do the fun stuff and get stuck grouping with randoms. Are levels the cause? If we got rid of levels completely, would something else core to the game break? If not, would more than thirteen people play the result?

Level's aren't the cause per se, but lazy implementation of them can lead to all sort of self induced gameplay headaches.  Typically, what we have seen is dev's take a leveling scheme ala D&D and drop it wholesale into an mmorpg without thinking it through enough to spot the problems and design good ways to deal with them.  Pen and paper RPG are typically based on small group of players have a directed adventure and leveling as a result of playing through the story.  Even single player crpg's tend to follow that pattern.  MMORPG's?  Adding the massive nature and persistence of the shared world makes them so different they might as well not even be called "rpgs" Fer instance, PvP in a level based mmorpg can be a nightmare unless it is designed not to be; simply throwing the switch that allows players to attack each other does not a fun pvp system make.  That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, just that it hasn't been done well yet.

Best example in recent weeks?  Without a doubt, CoH's sidekicking.  A simple solution to allow lower levels to play with their higher friends and actually contribute without imbalancing the rewards either gets.  I expect most future titles and even a host of current ones (i.e. DAoC is already experiementing with this) to "borrow" this idea.

Xilren

[HaemishM]

That's where I come from. What use is it to rail against a society that has made levels an essential de facto component of RPGs? I think "RPG" is the title given to a game with levels.

Again, you are incorrect. Completely. Just because the CRPG industry has completely lost its fucking mind, doesn't make their skewed perceptions of RPG's correct. RPG's and levels are not exclusive to each other.

If this was 1997 and the only MMOG on the market was UO, would MMORPG's HAVE to have levels? Because UO didn't have levels, it was all skill-based. Just because EQ and its mentality has attached itself to the MMOG industry like a goddamn leech doesn't mean RPG's = a game with levels.

I'm starting to get frustrated with that. Either I grind so that I can play with my friends, or I do the fun stuff and get stuck grouping with randoms. Are levels the cause? If we got rid of levels completely, would something else core to the game break? If not, would more than thirteen people play the result?

Levels aren't WHOLLY the cause, but they are a symptom of the greater problem, lack of imagination. Developers think the only way they can maintain a large player base for a long period of time is to segregate content by levels, then make those levels take increasingly obsessive amounts of time to get through. They haven't built in any more gameplay than a single-player game like Prince of Persia (and I'm including CoH in this). They've just made it take longer to access all the content. CoH has a lot of different strategies and such, but they segregate the strategic sections into level bands. The reason they get a pass is because each of the level ranges is fun in its own right, because of good, core fundamentals. L2 does not do that, and neither do a lot of the games on the market today.

Again, levels aren't the cause, they are the symptom, the crutch developers use to lengthen content consumption without really making any more content available.

[Heresiarch]

Just because the CRPG industry has completely lost its fucking mind, doesn't make their skewed perceptions of RPG's correct. RPG's and levels are not exclusive to each other.

I think we're all arguing past each other.

I agree that most dev shops lack brain activity. I touched on that a bit on a post in a newer thread.

The biggest problem I have with levels is not grouping with my friends.

I think time-based limitation of content is cricital to maintaining a player base over time, yet I'm willing to grant that I might be wrong.

I wonder what the long-term effects of sidekicking are. Once a handful of people get to the level cap, will everyone constantly re-explore the most lootarific dungeons? Or the most fun? Will the level designers out-compete themselves to the point that no-one goes to Sol-B ever again? Will players fixated on the biggest and the mostest get bored of the one biggest and mostest and quit after a month?

The stupid, boring, bad-developer-no-donut response is "fuck it, levels." The better developer response is "damn, we thought about this for months, and really, this is the lesser of two evils. Either all of you rush for Uber Dungeon and quit, or we have level-based access to content." The best developer response is "[new approach X that no-one on this thread has mentioned yet]". Maybe sidekicks will actually be approach X. Um, I'll be back in a month?

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What reward is a level if it is easy to achieve? What reward is it playing with your friends if you are always the bitch^H^H^H sidekick? If all of my friends already have all the cool abilities, then what do I contribute?

I feel left out of the Scarlet Monastery (current L39 "end-level" instanced dungeon in WoW) because, even though I've run it, everyone else that I group with has done it so many times that I'm always the passenger on the journey. The level cap is one way of letting me group with my friends, and yet as the sidekick it is less rewarding than discovering a new zone by myself. "Ooh, cool, I found Feralas!"

Which is yet another problem. The rest of guild: "finally, you schmuck, we've all snuck past the guards and explored the whole zone, noob."

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One of the things I most want in WoW is a shared player reputation system, so that others can flag the asshats so that I know not to group with them, since I'm not grouping with my friends. Or, to be in a bigger clan, or one with fewer asshats of its own. All of these are solutions to the problem of: I can't group with the people I want to group with because of level-based access to content.

And I want to group with those people because I made friends with them in the last game I played. (or in RL, but RL can go rot)

So why not encourage me to make new friends? Maybe I'll have more fun that way.

[Soukyan]

Which is yet another problem. The rest of guild: "finally, you schmuck, we've all snuck past the guards and explored the whole zone, noob."

So why not encourage me to make new friends? Maybe I'll have more fun that way.

Sounds like those are not very good friends. Good friends wouldn't diminish your enjoyment of a new experience, although perhaps boredom drives some people to say stupid shit like that. I wouldn't know. ;)

I agree that encouraging people to meet other people with similar playstyles/playtimes/etc. can be a good thing. New friends are never bad and can only help to make the whole experience feel that much more robust.

[eldaec]

Again, levels aren't the cause, they are the symptom, the crutch developers use to lengthen content consumption without really making any more content available.

True - but it is worth recognising that in leiu of a way to provide conetnt at a rate much higher than even current EQ, levels are the only way anyone seems to have found to keep populations high enough to justify any new content at all.

Planetside is an example of a setup that already offers non-level based pvp centric MMOG play without any sort of treadmill.

But it's populations are too low to justify adding any content. I'd contend it's populations are low precisely because people quit when they had 'done everything' after a month.

And without content gating I don't see how you provide enough content to prevent this - a single player game rarely has enough content to run for a month at a content-burn rate set for 'maximum fun'. It's difficult to see how this can be achieved in a MMOG.

I agree treadmills suck. I intensely dislike levelling from 1 to xx just to get to the 'real game'.

However, at the moment I can't think of an alternate solution.

[Sky]

Planetside is an example of a setup that already offers non-level based pvp centric MMOG play without any sort of treadmill.
 
 But it's populations are too low to justify adding any content. I'd contend it's populations are low precisely because people quit when they had 'done everything' after a month.

Like how people quit playing chess because they've consumed all the content. Or Civilization.

Those are the models for online gaming, or should be. Repeatable experiences ad nauseum because /playing/ the game itself is fun, not reaching some forced goal of an underwhelming nature (foozle and/or treadmill).

Keep setting up games where you can 'burn' through the content that is apparently the only good thing about these crappy games, and you'll keep getting these crappy games with artificial retention methods.

Is Planetside perfect? Nothing is, but it at least seems to be the only premium online service that 'gets it', so I vote with my dollars (and have a lot of fun besides!). I won't reward the seemingly constant flow of crappy EQ clones and treadmills, which most people around here seem willing to do, hoping it will somehow be a good game. It won't be, it'll be more of the same, until you stop rewarding that design philosophy.

All the board discussions in the world won't change the core flaws in mmog design. Only cash flow, which the people who make these games possible actually care about, will.

[HaemishM]

I think the only solution is to change the entire model of the way MMOG's are built, bought and paid for.

Get rid of the free month. Fuck it, get rid of the box and offer the game as a download. I mean really, is the box sale, with all its required expenses really so much more profitable than a download? Bandwidth is expensive, but is it more expensive than dropping 200k CD's over a six-month period, of which 190k sell the first week? Stop targeting the crowd and target the niche. Why buy server capacity for 100k, when 50k is profitable?

I think MMOG's are trying to be too much to too many people at the same time, and it's costing all of them users and money.

[Sky]

I think MMOG's are trying to be too much to too many people at the same time

The only reason I really even comment on the genre these days is to add in my lonely voice, repeating my recent mantra: "Don't put your EQ in my Planetside..."

If you like EQish games, play them. Don't attempt to crap your mechanics into every game on the market.