No level sync, yes stats sync

[Jojoya]

Its a better experience than having everything stripped away and spamming 1 for 20 minutes.

That's your choice to enter into lower level content. If you don't like having your abilities stripped away, stick to level cap content. Problem solved.

I mean, the answer is actually pretty simple. You don't scale down. You scale up. Every piece of content should be max expansion level (yes, making everything be "lvl 90 dungeon trash mob HP" or "lvl 90 dungeon boss HP" isn't difficult. I believe in our indie developer) and anyone below that just gets a percentage buff echo. Simple and elegant.

I hope you realize that means getting new content even less often than we already do. They would have to rework every single dungeon every expansion for the new level cap.

It's much better to leave the system as is. If you don't want to be scaled down, don't do the low level content. Do level 90 content instead.

[Ransu]

That's your choice to enter into lower level content. If you don't like having your abilities stripped away, stick to level cap content. Problem solved.

That mindset is why older content is getting trusts. Less and less people are playing lower level content because square refuses to fix the issues. Even now leveling an alt through the MSQ for the luls I've had nearly hour long queues in certain dungeons.

Low level content is boring for new and old players. They need to fix the core problem of there simply being too few skills at low levels. Either solve the progression of skills problem or make roulettes feel less of a chore and let us keep our skills. The status quo is not good for anyone right now.

[Alenonimo]

I actually don't find old content boring nor that it takes too much time to get used to a lower set of abilities.

I also don't see how they would solve your issue, since they definitely can't go back and edit every dungeon every time there's any patch or expansion.

In fact, I think it would cause even more problems if this were even attempted. If the skills were all dumped at you at Lv 1 then it would be much harder for a new player to learn them. If the skills are different from a new player in any way, it would cause attrition, which is one of the things that they spend most time fighting against in the game.


Your reward for doing the roulettes are supposed to be the currency that you receive when doing the roulettes. If you think that is unsatisfactory or not enough to bring you back to do them, then that is a thing that you could ask them to tweak.



Maybe increase some of them or add extra ones like gemstones or allied/centurio seals. Heck, they could add a random currency and you would only find what you got at the end. For example, you do Main Scenario roulette and find out you got like 8000 MGP as a participation bonus, plus 250 Skybuilder's Scrips for being an adventurer in need.

That would spice things up, huh? :P

[Ransu]

SWTOR scales their content every expansion. It can't be that complicated if that ghost of a development team can do it. As for currency. Meh, not worth it. Hunts are faster. Only reason to do some of the roulettes is for EXP and even then its not really worth it most of the time. So ya, the rewards from roulettes are meh.

Also, no one is saying all skills should be dumped on you at level 1... That's dumb. They have in fact however been taking skills away over the years and moving them to later levels to keep ability bloat down. Pre-level 30 content wasn't always just a single button for most classes/jobs back in the day. All I'm saying in that regard is if they don't want to do scaling and let us keep our skills then they need to work on redesigning progression through the older levels. Start introducing abilities earlier so the jobs feel more alive instead of feeling like empty shells even at level 60 and introduce traits that upgrade them to the higher level version later.

[Jojoya]

SWTOR scales their content every expansion. It can't be that complicated if that ghost of a development team can do it. As for currency. Meh, not worth it. Hunts are faster. Only reason to do some of the roulettes is for EXP and even then its not really worth it most of the time. So ya, the rewards from roulettes are meh.

Also, no one is saying all skills should be dumped on you at level 1... That's dumb. They have in fact however been taking skills away over the years and moving them to later levels to keep ability bloat down. Pre-level 30 content wasn't always just a single button for most classes/jobs back in the day. All I'm saying in that regard is if they don't want to do scaling and let us keep our skills then they need to work on redesigning progression through the older levels. Start introducing abilities earlier so the jobs feel more alive instead of feeling like empty shells even at level 60 and introduce traits that upgrade them to the higher level version later.

Then what's supposed to make leveling the jobs feel meaningful at higher levels if most abilities are frontloaded in the first 50 levels and you get almost nothing but traits after that? Passive increases like those the traits usually give generally aren't felt.

I think the issue on the new player side is more from the pacing of the MSQ at low level compared to how rapidly classes/jobs will level unless there is no access to any sort of XP bonus. If the MSQ moved as fast as classes/jobs get leveled, no one would think twice.

The solution to that might be coming with 7.0 considering YoshiP wants to create a new entry point to the MSQ for new players. But we'll have to wait until the FanFest to find out if it's happening next expansion, and how they're addressing it if so.

Regardless, I'm still not going support changing from level sync to power scaling in lower level content. I've been the power scaling route in other games and it was never been a good experience for me, nor had it been a good experience for the new players based on their comments after I got to the other end of the power scale.

How many games continued to have positive active growth in their players base after using power scaling, and how many saw their player base slowly die out? That's not an attempt to say that the power scaling itself was the direct cause of a game's decline but rather that it did not fix the issue that was at the root of player dissatisfaction, nor did it counter that issue by creating a better experience in other ways.

[Ransu]

Then what's supposed to make leveling the jobs feel meaningful at higher levels if most abilities are frontloaded in the first 50 levels and you get almost nothing but traits after that? Passive increases like those the traits usually give generally aren't felt.

The same thing that should make leveling through lower levels feel meaningful... There are so many skills they could introduce earlier and still have enough left over to continue to introduce at later levels including traits that upgrade those skills to new animations/procs/potency.

[Jojoya]

The same thing that should make leveling through lower levels feel meaningful... There are so many skills they could introduce earlier and still have enough left over to continue to introduce at later levels including traits that upgrade those skills to new animations/procs/potency.

You're talking about 100 levels that those have to be spread out over. A lot of jobs max out around 24-26 abilities (not counting role actions) that will be set up on hotbars at a given time. if 10 of those are getting learned in level 1-15 and another 10 in levels 16-50, that doesn't leave much to learn over the next 85 levels. Traits don't cut it as being interesting things to learn when all they do is passively enhance a skill we're already using so it just has a flashier animation and slightly increased potency.

That could be a good discussion by itself, but it's really getting off topic for this thread and I don't want to totally derail it.

I think the core of the problem is players expecting action game play in a story driven RPG. Action games will dump you into the big skills almost right away. RPGs have skills slowly build up over time, just as they would in real life. With level sync in dungeons, we're re-experiencing what things were like when we were first starting out and that gives us a greater appreciation for how much our characters have learned since.

There's plenty of content to do if someone wants to be using their max level toolkit whether that's doing max level content or doing lower level content unsynced. The options are there. Switching to a power scaling system would take away that option to re-experience what things were like when we were first starting out.

There are still plenty of players happy to do the roulettes even with level sync. Someone at max level who dislikes level sync doesn't need to think that the poor sprouts are being ignored. Duty Support doesn't exist because fewer players are doing roulettes. Duty Support exists to give options to someone who prefers playing solo or would prefer to learn mechanics before jumping into a group of random strangers, which all too often are harshly judgmental of new players in other MMOs so new players fear the same experience here.

[Seraphor]

A level 80 rotation (not even level 90 yet) is on average 3 times as potent as a level 50 rotation, not even accounting for a difference in stats. All those extra skills and traits with their increased potencies stack up quick.

So what would happen when you can do a low level dungeon three times as fast depending on the level of the players you queue in with? Would you prefer to run through Sastasha in 15 minutes, or 5 minutes?
All of a sudden, it becomes disproportionately favourable to want to kick out those newbies and pull in someone who's level 90 doesn't it...

That mindset is why older content is getting trusts. Less and less people are playing lower level content because square refuses to fix the issues. Even now leveling an alt through the MSQ for the luls I've had nearly hour long queues in certain dungeons.

Low level content is boring for new and old players. They need to fix the core problem of there simply being too few skills at low levels. Either solve the progression of skills problem or make roulettes feel less of a chore and let us keep our skills. The status quo is not good for anyone right now.

I've never had any problem getting into lower level content via the roulettes...

Speak for yourself. I have no problem scaling down to a level 50 rotation.

[Upirlikhyi]

I think the level synchronization system should be changed to make the game much more fun, I mean, if I'm already level 90 it's ok if I play low level content they adjust me to that level, but please don't adjust the skills anymore learned, it doesn't make sense to reach level 90 and play level 50 content without having the best abilities, I understand that the damage, resistance etc is reduced, but leave the abilities active, please.

It makes perfect sense if you are level synced to 10 to only have level 10 abilities.

[Upirlikhyi]

SWTOR scales their content every expansion. It can't be that complicated if that ghost of a development team can do it. As for currency. Meh, not worth it. Hunts are faster. Only reason to do some of the roulettes is for EXP and even then its not really worth it most of the time. So ya, the rewards from roulettes are meh.

Also, no one is saying all skills should be dumped on you at level 1... That's dumb. They have in fact however been taking skills away over the years and moving them to later levels to keep ability bloat down. Pre-level 30 content wasn't always just a single button for most classes/jobs back in the day. All I'm saying in that regard is if they don't want to do scaling and let us keep our skills then they need to work on redesigning progression through the older levels. Start introducing abilities earlier so the jobs feel more alive instead of feeling like empty shells even at level 60 and introduce traits that upgrade them to the higher level version later.

SWTOR level scaling sucks. When a death field kills 5 mobs because you are max level scaled to 10 is insane. And that was implemented a while ago. The "ghost team" just revamped it to make comps effective. And the main skills don't scale anymore. I play SWToR and its crazy doing a lower planet and having max level skills. Takes all the fun out of the game....IMHO.

That's why I like the scaling in FF14. You can't just overpower everything.