Making levelling interesting for veteran players

I'm sure I'm not alone here when I say that as a veteran mmorpg player I find levelling new characters very easy and very tedious. I honestly can't remember the last time an mmo challenged me while levelling and typically the only thing that drives me through it is the thought of end-game content or an engaging story. This is understandable because developers need to cater the levelling to brand new players. Make the levelling too hard and you'll drive away newer players and the playerbase will dry up.

In single player games you often have various difficulty settings to cater to lots of different players. This is great but doesn't translate well to mmorpgs where you could have a veteran and a newbie questing in the same area. You can't just increase the stats of the mobs for the veteran player because then the newbie would struggle. You could decrease the stats of the veteran but this would cause issues of scaling at end-game, plus this wouldn't necessarily make the game harder but just the levelling to take longer.

This is the other problem. You can't just alter the base stats and expect that alone to engage players. Anyone who has played WoW Vanilla/Classic will tell you just how boring it is. It's not even that it's harder, it just takes a lot longer to kill anything and level up. I don't know about anyone else but I'd love to see mobs that force me to use my entire toolkit. The game gives me CC? Make me use it. The game gives me interrupts? Make me use them. Of course if they added these mechanics in, new players would struggle. You could potentially make it so that the mobs only use more advanced tactics on veteran players but what happens when a veteran player groups up with a newbie?

Has anyone got any ideas on how to make levelling engaging for veteran players? Or is it just something we have to put up with?

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Damokles

I dont think that leveling alts will be so bad in Ashes tbh. The main problem why leveling alts gets boring in most MMORPGs, is because you know all the zones after some time.

This is easily prevented in Ashes by choosing to level in another totally different node and then just transfer to your main node. Dont forget: all nodes will be like a starting zone and an endgame zone wrapped in one ;D

Wandering Mist

Damokles wrote: »

I dont think that leveling alts will be so bad in Ashes tbh. The main problem why leveling alts gets boring in most MMORPGs, is because you know all the zones after some time.

This is easily prevented in Ashes by choosing to level in another totally different node and then just transfer to your main node. Dont forget: all nodes will be like a starting zone and an endgame zone wrapped in one ;D

It's not even about levelling alts but levelling in general. For most veteran players there is no challenge in levelling so unless you are invested in the story you are just trying to get through it as fast as possible to reach max level.

Damokles

Wandering Mist wrote: »

Damokles wrote: »

I dont think that leveling alts will be so bad in Ashes tbh. The main problem why leveling alts gets boring in most MMORPGs, is because you know all the zones after some time.

This is easily prevented in Ashes by choosing to level in another totally different node and then just transfer to your main node. Dont forget: all nodes will be like a starting zone and an endgame zone wrapped in one ;D

It's not even about levelling alts but levelling in general. For most veteran players there is no challenge in levelling so unless you are invested in the story you are just trying to get through it as fast as possible to reach max level.

The thing is, that most people figure out how they play their class during the levelig process (which i can imagine being even more so with Ashes having all the augmentations involved).
That means, that you cant just skip it all if you already have a character of another class for example.
Leveling will always be a thing that you will have to deal with, and to be honest, i love the leveling phase in mmorpgs. ;D

Marzzo

They could offer veteran players the option to use high skill floor abilities that makes everything go faster, if you can handle the difficulty.

Wandering Mist

Marzzo wrote: »

They could offer veteran players the option to use high skill floor abilities that makes everything go faster, if you can handle the difficulty.

What do you mean by "high skill floor abilities"?

Noaani

High skill floor builds are what I am hoping the game will, and not just for leveling.

With a high skill floor, a build is almost worthless unless you are a skilled player. The "floor" or base skill level needed to play the build is higher than for other builds, but it pays off by having a higher ceiling as well.

Wandering Mist

Damokles wrote: »

Wandering Mist wrote: »

Damokles wrote: »

I dont think that leveling alts will be so bad in Ashes tbh. The main problem why leveling alts gets boring in most MMORPGs, is because you know all the zones after some time.

This is easily prevented in Ashes by choosing to level in another totally different node and then just transfer to your main node. Dont forget: all nodes will be like a starting zone and an endgame zone wrapped in one ;D

It's not even about levelling alts but levelling in general. For most veteran players there is no challenge in levelling so unless you are invested in the story you are just trying to get through it as fast as possible to reach max level.

The thing is, that most people figure out how they play their class during the levelig process (which i can imagine being even more so with Ashes having all the augmentations involved).
That means, that you cant just skip it all if you already have a character of another class for example.
Leveling will always be a thing that you will have to deal with, and to be honest, i love the leveling phase in mmorpgs. ;D

That is the theory yes, but it very rarely happens in practice. You aren't going to learn how to use a combat system unless you face opponents that force you to use that system. BDO is a classic example. I levelled from 1-50 in that game just by spamming my left mouse click. I didn't read any of the class abilities or learn any of the combos. Why? Because I never needed to. Why waste time learning and using fancy combos when it's far more efficient just spamming 1 ability all the time?

BDO isn't alone here either. When was the last time you needed to use CC while levelling? You don't. Yes you can but there's really no benefit to doing so.

Jahlon

There really isn't any good way to make "leveling" fun by means of grinding on mobs. I don't care the level of Monster AI, MOB grinding will always be a mind numbing experience.

Now, Intrepid has said they have some plans to make the leveling interesting, and we won't be blitzing to max level in a week, the goal is roughly 45 days for max level.

Wandering Mist

Jahlon wrote: »

There really isn't any good way to make "leveling" fun by means of grinding on mobs. I don't care the level of Monster AI, MOB grinding will always be a mind numbing experience.

Now, Intrepid has said they have some plans to make the leveling interesting, and we won't be blitzing to max level in a week, the goal is roughly 45 days for max level.

I would argue that even with a good story or non-grinding levelling, if the combat doesn't engage you as a player it's pointless. I actually really enjoyed the storylines of BDO, B&S and TERA but their combat ruined it for me.

A lot of the Ashes sceptics have one common concern - the combat. They want the combat to be engaging, but what a lot of them don't understand is that combat is a 2-way street. Not only do you need to make the character combat interesting, but you need to have interesting opponents to use it on.

Sarevok

When BDO first launched the leveling proved to be tedious from the beginning as the AI was beyond mind numbing. As Wandering mentioned though, the combat is what kept a lot of players in that game. I loved BDO's combat and it helped the grind not suck so much. I'd love if AoC was about to take that joy of the fight BDO gave me but make the leveling process so much more enjoyable. There will obviously be grinding required so long as IS designs fun classes with engaging combat.

I hope their writers are going to immerse us in a very interesting lore driven campaign to make leveling exciting. Based on my name some will get this reference but I'd love if they could take story-telling like in great RPGs, such as Baldur's Gate, and apply that to AoC. Give us this long but engaging story that makes the player want to read or listen (if they add that) to the NPCs. I rarely stop to read the text boxes because the overall story I have never truly cared for in an mmo but I'd be willing to if it was interesting.

Please let me level from PvPing. I would be so happy if IS found a way to make PvP almost as effective, if not equally effective, way to level in the game. Caravans, guild wars, battlegrounds, whatever. I'll grind played players all day and happily instead of mobs or quests.

mcstackerson

I know i have ranted about this a lot but i think the biggest issues with leveling is how it's a requirement with the primary cause of this being how much vertical scaling happens during the process. For starters, the scaling limits the content players can do as well as forcing the developers to limit content's rewards to only being relevant to characters in it's level range. Another consequence of this is that while there are usually other forms of progression that don't require you to level, they are made a lot easier after you level because of how much content that is made available to you from leveling.

I think the first step to making leveling interesting is to remove it as a requirement for most content so players have more freedom in choosing what they want to do when they play. If this is done, i think you have a little more freedom to make the experience interesting as players are no longer forced to grind through it to get to your current content.

Jahlon

Wandering Mist wrote: »

Jahlon wrote: »

There really isn't any good way to make "leveling" fun by means of grinding on mobs. I don't care the level of Monster AI, MOB grinding will always be a mind numbing experience.

Now, Intrepid has said they have some plans to make the leveling interesting, and we won't be blitzing to max level in a week, the goal is roughly 45 days for max level.

I would argue that even with a good story or non-grinding levelling, if the combat doesn't engage you as a player it's pointless. I actually really enjoyed the storylines of BDO, B&S and TERA but their combat ruined it for me.

A lot of the Ashes sceptics have one common concern - the combat. They want the combat to be engaging, but what a lot of them don't understand is that combat is a 2-way street. Not only do you need to make the character combat interesting, but you need to have interesting opponents to use it on.

Well yes but now you have shifted from "leveling" to "combat"

And the combat being immersive is a whole different issue.

Ferryman

There could be different level quests available where the hard ones guides players to more dangerous areas and accomplish more difficult missions. Some quests could also be long, more like a juorneys rather than short tasks. These harder quests would of course offer better rewards and much more experience points than the basic ones.

Ferryman

Sarevok wrote: »

I hope their writers are going to immerse us in a very interesting lore driven campaign to make leveling exciting. Based on my name some will get this reference but I'd love if they could take story-telling like in great RPGs, such as Baldur's Gate, and apply that to AoC. Give us this long but engaging story that makes the player want to read or listen (if they add that) to the NPCs.

This is one really good option and maybe there could be race, class or religion specific storylines and campaigns which would offer players variations during their journey and totally new experiences when leveling alts.

Wandering Mist

Jahlon wrote: »

Wandering Mist wrote: »

Jahlon wrote: »

There really isn't any good way to make "leveling" fun by means of grinding on mobs. I don't care the level of Monster AI, MOB grinding will always be a mind numbing experience.

Now, Intrepid has said they have some plans to make the leveling interesting, and we won't be blitzing to max level in a week, the goal is roughly 45 days for max level.

I would argue that even with a good story or non-grinding levelling, if the combat doesn't engage you as a player it's pointless. I actually really enjoyed the storylines of BDO, B&S and TERA but their combat ruined it for me.

A lot of the Ashes sceptics have one common concern - the combat. They want the combat to be engaging, but what a lot of them don't understand is that combat is a 2-way street. Not only do you need to make the character combat interesting, but you need to have interesting opponents to use it on.

Well yes but now you have shifted from "leveling" to "combat"

And the combat being immersive is a whole different issue.

Combat makes up a large portion of the levelling process in many mmorpgs, and usually when a game has a rubbish levelling experience it's down to the combat, not the story or the side activities.

Wandering Mist

ferryman wrote: »

There could be different level quests available where the hard ones guides players to more dangerous areas and accomplish more difficult missions. Some quests could also be long, more like a juorneys rather than short tasks. These harder quests would of course offer better rewards and much more experience points than the basic ones.

Now that I would certainly enjoy, as long as the increased difficulty had suitable rewards attached to it. Runescape does this very well with it's quests which are all rating in terms of length and difficulty and of course the longer and/or harder quests offer much more exp than the easier quests do.

Ferryman

Sarevok wrote: »

Please let me level from PvPing. I would be so happy if IS found a way to make PvP almost as effective, if not equally effective, way to level in the game. Caravans, guild wars, battlegrounds, whatever. I'll grind played players all day and happily instead of mobs or quests.

This is another good idea. There could also be PvP quests which flags the players as combatants and that way enables PvP encounters and promote palyers to participate more to open world PvP.

Ferryman

Wandering Mist wrote: »

ferryman wrote: »

There could be different level quests available where the hard ones guides players to more dangerous areas and accomplish more difficult missions. Some quests could also be long, more like a juorneys rather than short tasks. These harder quests would of course offer better rewards and much more experience points than the basic ones.

Now that I would certainly enjoy, as long as the increased difficulty had suitable rewards attached to it. Runescape does this very well with it's quests which are all rating in terms of length and difficulty and of course the longer and/or harder quests offer much more exp than the easier quests do.

Runescape is a good example here and I remember how satisfied it was finally accomplish those long questlines. On top of that some quests could be related to professions so players could level their artisan skills at the same time when leveling up the character. This would also offer a different kind of path from basic combat oriented leveling and could be at least nice variability if nothing else. Also those players who focus more on lifeskills would be most likely pleased.

Balrog21

I have to chime in here on this, I do second the original post....and i just started playing ESO and i love it. I haven't had any fetch quests yet, the quests are rich and intriguing along with lore sprinkled in for fun.
The combat is fun and interesting, the different amount of builds and play styles you can do is nice change of pace.
The game is a bit overwhelming at first and still is to me. I'm not rushing to 50 I'm taking my time and I'm enjoying the journey immensely.
If AOC can make it fun and entertaining while I explore the world, they will have me for the life of the game.

Plateau

Wandering Mist wrote: »

ferryman wrote: »

There could be different level quests available where the hard ones guides players to more dangerous areas and accomplish more difficult missions. Some quests could also be long, more like a juorneys rather than short tasks. These harder quests would of course offer better rewards and much more experience points than the basic ones.

Now that I would certainly enjoy, as long as the increased difficulty had suitable rewards attached to it. Runescape does this very well with it's quests which are all rating in terms of length and difficulty and of course the longer and/or harder quests offer much more exp than the easier quests do.

This is the only thing that I have hope for in the Leveling process. There might be a few dungeons or quests designated as optional extra-hard content, which have more mechanics and skill tests. But they can't make enough of that content to satisfy veterans entirely. It's just not feasible to make two separate leveling experiences, one for veterans and one for newbies.

So I expect that veterans will rely mostly on grinding the same normal-difficulty stuff that newbies get. Of course they'll seek out higher-level quests and more efficient grinding paths, while skipping anything below their level, but that doesn't necessarily make it more challenging or interesting; it mostly just increases damage and HP numbers. Hopefully the tried-and-true tactic of fighting many mobs at once, to make better use of AoE and DoTs, will speed things up a little bit.

But yeah, I'm not hoping for much. And I doubt they can can even reach those few hopes before the end of the betas.

And I'd be willing to bet that the story and lore is absolutely garbage on launch. Intrepid is counting on the player-driven stories and all the different progression systems to push players through the leveling process. The dungeons/end-game raids/node events might have some decent plot behind them, but I predict that 90% of the leveling process won't have any narrative flourish worth mentioning.

If Intrepid makes a point of hiring 20+ writers in the next year, I'll change my expectation. Otherwise, it's just logistically impossible to make good leveling stories for every region in the game, while also letting players choose their course.

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