In the past few days the mentorship system has been brought up in a few threads and it made me think about evergreen content that could apply not only to a particular range of lvls, but to pretty much everyone.
We know that Nodes will have mobs with a wide range of lvls, but what about other types of content like quests, bosses and gathering. Should they somehow adapt to the server population's progress and have parts of the content that would attract both high and low lvl players?
I was mainly wondering about it because this will be very important after the game's release. Even if artisanry is separated from the adventure lvls, sooner or later all the people who started playing at the release will become high/max lvl. And the further away from the release we go, the higher the % of those high lvls will be.
The recent thread about leveling was right about one thing, it's really difficult to begin your journey in an old game that's filled with purely high lvl characters. Most mmos choose to only introduce content at max lvl and pretty much remove the entire lvling process from the game, so that anyone new could immediately join up with other players. FF14 lets high lvl players downgrade themselves to the dungeon's stage of progress (and might be giving some additional rewards? I'm not sure about that).
I personally dislike both of those solutions and think that Ashes will be in the perfect spot to try something new with their Node system. They'll already have the wide range of mobs in most locations, so, in theory, it should be somewhat easy to just relate any low lvl quest/boss to a high lvl reward (by including high lvl mobs in the content), even outside of the mentorship program. I feel like this would not only make the game way easier to pick up, but would also encourage early relationships between new players and veterans. And I think that this could allow Intrepid to develop new content for all lvls of players, instead of just the max one.
The main issue with this that I can see is, obviously, the balancing of rewards. If the rewards are too great, most max lvl players will just make alts and help each other get the rewards quickly, w/o really interacting with the new players. And if rewards are shit - no one will help the newbies.
Do you have any ideas how this could be balanced? Do you think that the mentorship should be the main and only system that addresses this issue? Do you have your own idea of how to design content that could bring all lvls of players together? I think we're still at the stage of development (the non-existent stage that is
) where this kind of feedback could help Intrepid plan for the future much better.
