Quote Originally Posted by Raymeo View Post
The leveling experience in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games

A Visual Timeline

1999: Leave town in a party of multiple players, and venture into an open world to grind mobs, free to set your own pace.
2004: Leave town alone, and venture into an open world to grind quests, free to set your own pace.
2009: Don't ever leave town, line up in a queue to enter a linear closed off instance with multiple players, pace is bottlenecked by controlled daily/weekly experience bonuses.
2014: ???

It's now 2014 -- time for us to settle into the next five year chunk. As we prepare for the new leveling standard that will usher us through the next half decade, what are your predictions about what we will end up with?

According to the trends above, we should expect to be left with "zero colors" for the new generation. On the other hand, last year showed some interesting hints of developers experimenting with open world, multiplayer grinding: a new "color combination", with FFXIV's FATEs being the most familiar example to those reading this.

So what do you think -- will the trend of the past 15 years continue, or will we finally start seeing the pendulum swing back toward the true definition of an MMORPG experience?
From what I heard, Everquest Next is trying to go to the old school style direction of "let the players do what they want".