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. ;)

Cracking down…

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.

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.