Quote Originally Posted by Colvin View Post
not that I am advocating that here but there are games that do that.

Additionally, I think the leveling process is fairly antequated in general, at least in MMOs. The point of the leveling process in RPGs has always been so your character has the sense of growing with the story. In MMOs you dont grow WITH anything. It is just you mindlessly banging away at regenerating monsters. Having a class-specific storyline that you can go through to grow as an individual is far more interesting IMO reguardless of length.

It has been years since I liked grinding, but I really felt it when I was playing BLU mage. I loved the story to unlock the job, and the going out and learning new abilities was fun (for the most part) because it didnt take nearly as long to do, but still had an investment. Either way it wasnt just another set of me going out there and hacking away at things. The actual physical leveling of the BLU really seemed to weigh me down at that point like "oh.. I better go out there and grind the next 10 levels so I can learn abilities" I didnt care less about the grinding, it was the ability gaining I liked.

Right which is the content problem, if levels are just gained through mindless killing, and boring drag on quests then its going to feel like a boring grind. There is no reason you couldn't have job related quests as you are leveling to break up monotone, also sprinkling in this Idea of active time events in areas for exp plus low level dungeons makes it more fun.

The thing I like about leveling is, it prevents you from participating in end game right away, you have this "level up process" which promotes learning of the job/class (You gain the one ability and then that you can play with for a while before obtaining the next) and you have the excitement of obtaining new abilities soon and gear (Which yes the quest thing does this... but that's easy if you're already 50 and you just steam roll w/e quest it is and smack them all down right in a row in the portion of a few hours.) If the content was laid out as I said above it could be a lot more interesting and fun, and maintain a sense of something to work at and look forward to as you see other high levels of your chosen class/job around you.