Our goal is to make it as hard as possible while remaining fun.



Thus, we'd prefer to have levelling be as fast/slow as it feels "good" to be in the various zones. We have a ton of zones, and they are quite large, and have distinct subzones (especially zones we've worked on more recently; some zones that were started long ago we didn't have as clear philosophies on such. One learns through Friends and Family, entering full production mode, etc.). We prefer that no grinding be necessary and that even repetitive quests can count as grinding.



Through the power of Rest XP/weekly levelling quests we reserve the right to catch up casual-I-can-only-play-for-a-few-hours people up a bit with the "we are swapping 3 college roomates in 8 hour shifts a day with poopsocks nearby to try to hit max level in record time" crowd. Which does exist. We don't mind if that latter crowd has to grind, actually, but it's hard to make just that class of folks grind without the assumption being that we're making the 40-hours-plus a week crowd grind too, so we're erring on the side of little grinding being necessary.



Sorry for the nuanced answer.



Over time, players are like like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and "life will find a way" - people will find the most trivial ways to rush through the levelling content and get to the elder games.



That requires a mixed philosophy on our part - if a non-fun way of levelling is the most efficient, we would be smart as game designers to make a fun way of levelling be MORE efficient, which sometimes means gimping the XP semi-sploit so that players aren't incentivized to play in a boring way.



Which pisses off the class of players who just want to trivially level because they have done it before so they can get another alt up into the elder games, and on them that means we'd be enforcing more boredom.



So simultaneously, because we actually have deep elder games (and/or will by launch where we are mid-implementation or iteration on some) it's pretty reasonable to over time make it be a bit more efficient to level, because some players will be hooked on Warplots/raids etc. and will want to do those more than the levelling game for their Nth character. So it's a balancing act with probably no one-size-fits all solutions.

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