[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels [WAS Virtual goods--Oh, the controversy!]

[Byron Ellacott]

On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 04:17, John Buehler wrote:

> Yes, this means that annoying newbies will be spamming people for
> a high level group that will loan them levels.  Such is life.  But
> it does permit high level players to revisit low level content,
> and it solves the problem of friends who get ahead of friends in
> the level grind.  Something that I also find frustrating.

In PnP RPG land, if a new player comes to join an established game,
they would typically be introduced at a level similar to the rest of
the group.  This isn't really practical in an MMO, however.

But then, in PnP RPG land, the level of the group is more or less
irrelevant.  The (skilled) GM will be providing an adventure they
feel suitable for the group's abilities, both the players and their
avatars. As long as all the avatars are at roughly equivalent levels
of ability, there's no problem.  Even if they're not, a skilled GM
can tailor the adventure to be engaging for the entire group.

But once again, that doesn't translate well to an MMO.  For a start,
the GM is now catering to a simultaneous audience of thousands, not
dozens or less.  That audience is all at disparate levels of both
player and avatar ability, and all clamoring for a grand adventure.

If your MMO has, say, 20 bands of levels: 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, ... or
just 1, 2, 3, ..., you could attempt to generate engaging content
for each of those 20 bands of levels.  But it's been pretty well
established that content creation is (currently?) not easy to do,
especially not of a quality you'd want for a grand adventure.  So a
good shortcut is to create the vast bulk of your content for the top
one or two bands.

Unfortunately, that leaves the other 18 or 19 bands out of luck.
For them, the point of the game is now to reach that top band or two
of ability, and they will optimize their means to do so: ie, grind.
You're no longer going on grand adventures and incidentally
levelling, you're now specifically doing things for the sake of
levelling.

In my view, the greater tragedy is when people mistake levelling for
what should be the "real" game, which is having those grand
adventures. Passing through levels as quickly as possible becomes
the goal of the game, and when they do this in a short space of
time, they will say the game is too easy.  When a development team
agrees, the game is made slower, and people spend MORE time passing
through the level bands that have little or no content!

I can only see one solution: create engaging content for all levels
of ability.  Of course, the caveat is the high cost of creating
engaging content for many levels, which suggests that the concept of
the level of ability as a means of tracking progression is not
suited to MMOs.

There's a whole convoy of truckloads of consequences there, and I'd
prefer to see if anyone wants to discuss those before I try (and
fail :) to propose alternate ways to reward achievement.

--
bje, not speaking for my employer
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