Bug or feature?
Many games with expansion packs have started speeding their players to the end, so that they can be where all the other players are (and need to buy the expansion pack to advance). WoW does this most visibly, even before having you invite friends for triple xp and zebra love. The Lord of the Rings Online™ made the early levels faster and started running nigh-continuous bonus xp weekends, weeks, and months.
City of Heroes may have done this with Mission Architect. Farming is more or less constant. You can pick the enemy best optimized for your character or make your own perfect foe. Grab friends, smash, repeat. A single run through a good farm will get you to level 20. This differs from normal powerleveling because Architect can be set up to auto-sidekick everyone to the same level range. You no longer need bridges, care in mission selection, or anything: pick your ideal enemy, fill a mission with copies of that one guy, and smash. If that is too hard, add pets that will increase your defenses.
City of Heroes, however, has no endgame. There are a few hard things to do at 50, but mostly you can just keep running missions. A variety of tools let you do pretty much anything at 50 that you could earlier, so it is always better to be higher level, but it is not as though you are raiding or something. Getting to 50 means being 50, maybe farming for those purples.
City of Heroes is, however again, very alt-friendly, complete with sales of extra character slots of more alts. Want to try a new character? Bam, level 20 in an hour, try a dozen new powers. Out of character slots? Bam, $20, 5 more. If people are racing to the level cap and re-rolling, that can only mean more money. Or they quit, but your most competent power-levelers are long-term players who came to peace with the lack of endgame years ago.
: Zubon
Feature.
It’s the only way to stave off altitis burnout due to grind in a DIKU class-based system. Devs are just trying to keep their games alive.
Problem with this is, I prefer the low-end of pretty much every MMO (and RPG) I’ve ever played. I like to play characters with a strong sense of place and a clear, emotionally satisfying connection to a simple, comprehensible role; the blacksmith who takes his hammer out of the forge to help run off a gang of bandits terrorising his village, the hedgewitch going just a little deeper into the woods in search of a cure for the plague that may or may not spread from the city…
Where I get off the bus is when my character is supposed to be a “hero”, recognised by nobles, saluted by guards, let alone getting a statue of him erected in the King’s Palace. And fighting gods and dragons? Give me a break, please!
Back when I table-top gamed in the 80s, our group never went above AD&D level 8. By that point everyone was going “this is getting a bit ridiculous now, I can’t take this seriously” and we’d all re-roll and start over. We played loads of game systems and generally never went much above the equivalent of AD&D level 5.
For my money, all the fun is in the low levels, which is why all MMOs I have ever played have been the most fun in their first 18 – 36 months. After the first couple of expansion, almost all games start to hyper-inflate; everything is gods and demons and heroic archetypes and nothing really matters.
So long as there’s a perpetual string of new MMOs, this is fine; I also replay the low levels of game I like many, many times. I also don’t have any objection to other players jumping over the lower content – why they want to rush to get the less-entertaining stuff mystifies me, but then so does much human behavior.
Just so long as MMO companies never start actually to remove the low level content, and so long as they allow players to opt-out of the acceleration (as EQ2 does so well), then everyone should be happy.
“Zebra Love”? You know how many visits we’re gonna get just for that alone?
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Dev&Number=13427300
Cracking down…
So City of Heroes rules: bug.
I’m playing LotRO with my better half (the first game she’s really taken to), and it’s hilarious because she’s been complaining about the xp adjustment. All our characters gained 3 levels overnight, and she was upset because a lot of quests she was looking forward to doing instantly went trivial.
We’ve been playing with a lot of alts, too, so I suspect she might not be so upset once we slog through some of the same content (and killing billions upon billions of trolls for deeds) on other characters.
But, it’s great hearing a relative newbie to these games complain about leveling faster. ;)