Rate of Leveling and the New Player Experience

[Demonjustin]

The practical problem is that it fixes nothing in the long term. You double XP now, maybe attract a few short term players. What do you do a year from now when that XP rate becomes the new normal and people still feel like they're levelling too slowly? Remember a few months ago when they increased the movement speed? Remember how awesome that felt at first? Does anyone even notice that any more?

I keep seeing all these people who have this attitude of "I hate so many aspects of this game, can we please change them?" Like that doofus Crevox, who's average post went something like this:

"I went through the Chains of Promathia missions and it was the worst experience in all of creation! I hated hated hated hated hated it! It was like having my skin peeled off! Please get rid of this aspect of the game because I hate it so much!!!!!"

His feedback when it comes to earlier things in the game is actually far more valuable than most of us who are on these forums because he's actually a new player who was doing it all. He came here with a few friends and by the end of it was the only one left. That would seem to be the best kind of feedback you can get actually since it's an objective look at it rather than people like us who did it when it was harder and despite what we may think we are bias toward leaving it as it was due to the fact it simply doesn't hurt us and we've already done it. As for the whole idea of always asking for more, I admit that is an issue, but really the only changes they'd need to make to XP is kill the stupidly huge slope that develops at 50 and it'd be fine. Up till 50 RoE and pages make leveling quite fast and keep it going at a nice rate, once you hit 50 the slope that develops in your XP is so noticeable and so slow that it just becomes a boring drag at that point. This extends from normal jobs to Monstrosity as well and is actually why almost all of my monsters stop at level 60, the 50+ slope kills leveling being at all enjoyable to me.

Changing this slope and then adding an advanced level sync system where the party leader can select the synced level so that missions and such can be done at certain levels would be perfect and no one would be hurt nor their experiences ruined. People who want to level fast, would level fast. People who want to level slow could sync themselves to lower levels to get that very same feel, and do missions at lower levels as to make them harder and more challenging providing all of those same experiences we all had when we were forced to do them at those levels.

Making changes to really awful things that a big swath of the players hate, such as say the glacial levelling pace pre-Abyssea, or the insane repop time of TOAU beastman kings, makes some sense. Because that's an actual improvement to loyal customers. But trying to bend over backwards to appeal to your most demanding and difficult to satisfy customers is no way to run a business. Because you're not going to win new customers. You're going to get some temporary string of new blood for a very short time, then you'll be right back where you started and have to up the ante again.

If that's the case then so be it, but this player base is shrinking on many servers and it's not an issue that's going to be fixed by leaving old content as it is when new players have to trek through it all before getting to where everyone else is. I'm not saying focus everything on that, I'm saying make a few small but largely meaningful tweaks to the older parts of the game and remove some of the old game prerequisites from things so that players can more easily join the game and get into it.

You know, I don't like fighting games. Too fast paced and chaotic for me. The Smash Brothers series is really popular. But I don't go and, like, demand that the game be slowed down to be turn based instead of everything happen simultaneously. I actually accept that there are video games I don't like. It's an attitude some people can't accept. If this game is really so crushingly awful, don't play. It's a GAME. It's supposed to be fun.

That's a stupid argument. Oh, I don't like how something is, but rather than providing feedback and asking for things to be changed that seem to drive people away I should say nothing and just not play it at all, even if what I'd be asking for wouldn't change other people's experiences in a negative way in the long run.

[Zarchery]

That's a stupid argument. Oh, I don't like how something is, but rather than providing feedback and asking for things to be changed that seem to drive people away I should say nothing and just not play it at all, even if what I'd be asking for wouldn't change other people's experiences in a negative way in the long run.

The comment regarding fighting games was not "love it or leave it and don't give feedback on things that dissatisfy me". The point was that you don't ask for an utter overhaul to the very fundamentals of a system just because you don't like it. At some point it crosses from "I don't like these little details" to "I really hate all of this".

[Zarchery]

His feedback when it comes to earlier things in the game is actually far more valuable than most of us who are on these forums because he's actually a new player who was doing it all. He came here with a few friends and by the end of it was the only one left. That would seem to be the best kind of feedback you can get actually since it's an objective look at it rather than people like us who did it when it was harder and despite what we may think we are bias toward leaving it as it was due to the fact it simply doesn't hurt us and we've already done it.

The thing is that he was relentlessly complaining about easy content. Like I said, the bar was already considerably lowered from our old days, and he's all bent out of shape that it was still too hard. So what, we lower the bar further? Then what do we do a year later when the next Crevox comes along and is like "I wanted to reforge my artifact armor, but it took an entire hour to get all 5 original pieces! I hate this stupid roadblock! It's like Chinese Water Torture!!!!"

And it's like Lithera said, the dude ran into overdrive and burnt himself out after TWO MONTHS. Is that really what we need to rejuvenate the game? Whiny players who burn themselves out after two months and hate every minute of the experience?

[Demonjustin]

The thing is that he was relentlessly complaining about easy content. Like I said, the bar was already considerably lowered from our old days, and he's all bent out of shape that it was still too hard. So what, we lower the bar further? Then what do we do a year later when the next Crevox comes along and is like "I wanted to reforge my artifact armor, but it took an entire hour to get all 5 original pieces! I hate this stupid roadblock! It's like Chinese Water Torture!!!!"

And it's like Lithera said, the dude ran into overdrive and burnt himself out after TWO MONTHS. Is that really what we need to rejuvenate the game? Whiny players who burn themselves out after two months and hate every minute of the experience?

You see this is where the mistake is made. You even just specifically said...

Like I said, the bar was already considerably lowered from our old days, and he's all bent out of shape that it was still too hard.

I moved your bold a bit to cover what I'm talking about specifically. It's not hard, no one said it was hard, he even said a few times it's not a matter of difficulty but rather the very lack of it. Playing the game he was a SMN, or rather is a SMN as I've seen more of his posts around as of late and I'm happy he's back or around still at very least. Playing as a SMN you have to do multiple fame quests just to get to the point you can do the fights, so you can do fights that unlock the summonings for your avatars, normally that's already a pain but stack on top of that the whole trek to get Alexander and Odin as well and it's just a bunch of boring weak fights you have to do.

The entire reason any player would burn themselves out the way he did in two months isn't because the game wasn't necessarily for them, it's because the speed at which you can pick up and play the game is pathetic. You can compare your experience to his or any other new player's but it's nothing even close to what it was then. Saying things like "The bar was considerably lowered from our old days" just goes to show you're not thinking of the fact that in the old days, these things were spaced out and not expected of someone instantly. A SMN wasn't automatically assumed to have done all of CoP and gotten Alex/Odin, a DD wasn't assumed to have finished CoP for a Ring, a DW job wasn't assumed to have gotten Suppanomimi from DM already. These are all things we assume of people today just like PLDs have Ochain/Aegis and BRDs are 3 song, we expect these things of players by default at this point, as such new players are supposed to rise to this and achieve these things as they're starting off. If you make a brand new character, don't interact with anyone you know, do everything completely solo, and try to make it on your own without asking any favors or anything of that sort, it feels a lot harder than you'd think it is to get everything done in todays game even with all of the things they give new players we didn't have back then.

No one ever said the old fights are hard, the problem is the stupid high amount of time it takes to get them done so you can be at even the basic level everyone's expected to be at right now with missions and quests. Two months, is roughly the time it took a player to get into this game, and he burnt himself out on it because he tried to catch up within two months rather than taking even longer to get to the point of being able to play with others in events like Skirmish or Delve, where, you know, other players are. If we are to fault players for that, then we are only asking for no new players to even bother joining this game anymore.