[MUD-Dev2] To Level or Not to Level

[Vincent Archer]

According to Jeffrey Kesselman:
> People hate leveling.  They hate it in large part because we as game
> developers make it unpleasant to do.  There is a reason its called a "grind"
> and not a "picnick among the flowers."

They don't hate levelling per se. They hate levelling for levelling's sake.
That is why games are adopting the WoW model, because in WoW you don't
level: you go questing.

The game makes you wander from place to place; you rarely stay more
than 20-30mn in any given location before you've exhausted the questing
in that area. And, while you're moving from place to place, at one point,
you get a pavlovian ding! "Hey, I just dinged!"

There's problems associated with it, of course. As any exploration and
discovery, it works well the first time. The second character is going
thru the same paths, which means the discovery effect is gone. And after
3 characters, it's over. But overall, it *does* make a good enough job
to have people forget they are levelling (except the usual obsessive
compulsive who want to race to "the max", which you can't fully please
anyway, no matter how you arrange your game).

Game that still feature a "grind" in levelling tend to be extremely niche.
You can have a grind for many activities (crafting for example), but
grinding "xp" is no longer a viable way of enticing a large playerbase
to play your game.

-- 
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)