More Horizontal Progression please

[Fendred]

Horizontal progression was one of the main reasons I quit Ragnarok Online. As other people have said, it necessitates having abysmally low drop rates on items to ensure that people don't get their gear too quickly or easily, the end result being that you can grind for a particular piece for months and never see it drop once.

And then once you finally do have it... okay, that's great, then what? You have nothing to aim for because you've already got that piece of BiS gear. It leads to either tremendous stagnation or massive frustration after a while depending on whether you do or don't get the drops you're after.

Older raids in vertical progression games had the exact same level of grind for items, and people didn't have anything to do once they had the best equipment in those kinds of games as well. The problem you are referring to has everything to do with Ragnarok Online being a Korean grindhouse MMO and nothing to do with horizontal progression. The pacing in older korean games is not that appealing to a western audience. It's just way too slow.

What is Horizontal Progression? How does it differ from Vertical Progression? Is there such a thing as Diagonal Progression?

Seriously I don't know. This is such an obscure term. It's a game not an elevator.

Lets say they have the next raid in some kind of frigid northlands. As a result, players need to gather sets of gear that provide protection against ice damage to survive the environment and its denizens. That is what horizontal progression is. Instead of raising the item level, the raid set has some kind of situational stat. There are various reasons why this is useful, such as countering power creep in a game, but the primary reason a lot of people are asking for it is that WoW didn't do so hot after it raised its level cap too many times. In addition to lowering the value of older content, It eventually became impossible to reconcile the pace of leveling required by the various zones in the world with how long it took to reach max level. Eventually, players found themselves outleveling zones merely by questing in them long before they ever finished the quests required to see how the story unfolded in each zone. Now they just let people buy their way to max level because its too broken to fix.