Quote Originally Posted by Hyrist View Post
I disagree.

No matter how many exploits you will attempt to plug, the players who are obsessed with progress will always find an exploit. Manaburns, Arrow Burns, TP Burns, Astral Burns, are all evidence to this from FFXI.

Conversely, Power-Levling is not a common practice even with it as easily available as it is here in FFXIV.

The speed of leveling is not the problem - it is the long term reward for content is. Think back to Chains of Promithia, how many people still do ENMs? How many people REMEMBER all the ENMs? Or BCNMs? The only ones that are recalled are the ones with rewards that benefit high level players. The span of how quickly or how long it takes to reach that level doesn't matter.

It does not really matter how you slice it - without flat out removing levels there is going to be content that is overlooked unless you make it relevant to endgame players. Period. If it is relevant to endgame players, the level the content is introduced is irrelevant. Therefore the solution is to make low to mid level content significant to endgame players. Then you make it so that low and high level players can play side by side in this content, and you have a system that kills the absolute rush to endgame.

The leveling speed is completely, and utterly irrelevant to the solution. The accessibility and significance of low and midgame content to higher level players is.

I'm sorry. I understand the concept of going on a journey and working to be better is significant to you. But Leveling is not the only means in which this feeling can be established. Slowing down leveling, however, does significantly slow down accessibility for players to play together, because those at endgame will have endgame concerns, and those who are leveling up will only have leveling up concerns.

Without bringing these two together, we will play together less, unless you force people to play together by choking out solo content. The point of this game is to play together. So the solution to that must make it so that players are enticed, rather than forced, to play along. If you make it forced, by dragging along the leveling span, we will bleed players like water from a broken dam.

If you make content profitable and accessible to everyone, then the leveling span is insignificant, you're growing into a stronger character/player by gaining real experience adventuring. Sad that the solution is so binary, but the problems here are that severe.
I would like to entreat you to entertain conjecture of this:

A serious array of content at different levels of the game, all of them capped, and with auto level-sync features enabled. All of this content grants relevant gear that doesn't become obsolete (perhaps because it scales its stats as you advance in level). Make it difficult to obtain (I am not saying statistically impossible, mind you), but also make the content grant tangential rewards that, on their own, justify the time and energy expenditure on said content. Do this through organic planning that goes beyond the current level cap for the game, so that you don't find yourself constantly superseding items that were granted in past content. Or if you can't totally do this, at least keep revising the stats of the old gear, so that it never loses its viability in game.

I totally agree with the statement in which you affirm:

Therefore the solution is to make low to mid level content significant to endgame players. Then you make it so that low and high level players can play side by side in this content, and you have a system that kills the absolute rush to endgame.
If this is a puzzle for the developers, then it's one totally worth their time to try to solve.

What I don't agree with is this:

Therefore the solution is to make low to mid level content significant to endgame players. Then you make it so that low and high level players can play side by side in this content, and you have a system that kills the absolute rush to endgame.
It's my opinion that speed has less to do with the fact that end-game-level players refuse to look back on past content, than with the fact that celerity of leveling makes the process feel perfunctory, almost unnecessary, and ultimately boring. It also tends to burn the real end-game content quickly, since the population gets to it too easily, and bores of it as fast. Then, the only solution is to add more content. This is not bad, but it ends up producing a game along the lines of World of Warcraft which, for all its virtues, felt de-centered, disperse, almost to distraction, and with a fundamental lack of connection--even worse, connectivity--between all its disparate parts. People moved away from the previous expansion and never took another look at it, because it fell passeé, superseded.

R