Avatar-skill-based with a low power tier curve solves most the problems.

spend a short-week to get to the maxium effectivness in one set up, but keep advancing unlocking more abilities that you can swap in and out to tweak your set up/build further and eventually open up completely new options to yourself. Granted you wouldn't be more powerful DPS/HPS/Tankiness/crafting/Whatever you'd just have the ability to do more stuff and have more options.
 

Levels are the pure single play element in RPG's, so they pull back mmos. Bad aspects of char levels in MMOs according me are:

1. Levels difference restrictions (resistance, reduced damage, miss etc) prevent cooperative play between players with different levels. This reduces the massiveness of the game to limited range of players.

2. Freedom of the character development. Different classes represent different predefined developement of skill based system. This restrict variety of the masses.

3. Level/quest grind shift player decision what to do and where to go.

Yes it's broken because as you advance the world becomes smaller and smaller and all the content previous becomes useless. Also you can't play with your friends straight away and need to get to end level first before youc an join them which sucks. Levels also creates an end game which sucks because then suddenly you can't advance your character.

Originally posted by CreamSoda

 

Originally posted by PatchDay

I know most will disagree with me because we are all deeply entriched in grinding up to our ears. But I personally feel that "Levels" are contrary to what MMO should be about. People always say they are here for the community, etc but really how do you factor in "Levels" into this?

I join mmorpgs to play with friends. If my friend advances too quickly, now I am left behind. That my friend is crappy in my book

So then what I would like too see is the Level treadmills removed. There are surely other ways to reward players and keep them around. But I guess MMORPGs have to deal with massive latency issues huh. Thus, they have to keep dangling carrots infront of our faces to keep us from noticing how dull the game really is

 

I think Levels made sense in the context of single player RPGs, coops, and pen & paper but in MMORPG setting they are holding the genre back I'd say (actually Levels fubar coop RPGs as well)

Actually so what I desire is an MMO, a pure MMO that either detaches the RPG altogether and/or merely has minor RPG elements where you design a template upfront that s fully leveled, and from that point forward you can experience the real game

 

Levels are a way of giving people a unified goal when done correctly.  In past games big gaps between levels would not make your going out with your friend irrelevant.  At the same time a game with many levels gives a main long term goal. 
 

I feel that not having levels in contrary to RPGs.  You don't just assume the character you are.  You grow them over time and you need a number of some sort to show your devotion and hard work on a character.  Once you just give everyone max level what are you playing for?  If the answer is gear or money and not friends then levels are not the problem, it's you.

An MMORPG to me with no levels would just be silly.  Why? because you have yourself a game which has instant gratification like a console game.  I don't want to pick 1 game to use as an example but if you were to give me one I could spin some analogies that might make sense. 

So let's look at what you want an MMORPG with 0 levels.  You log in and group with friends you may have a certain goal you may not.  Questing, treasure hunting, what ever it is.  It has to be fun right?  How would you excel at things with no levels?  Wouldn't everything be accessible to everyone if there was no levels?  Even if it was for menial tasks like picking a lock?  My point is there would be no challenge, there would be no sense of accomplishment.

I think of games with out levels I think of stuff like Fight Night, Madden, GTA4, MGS4.  To me an RPG is defined by levels on all scales.

No disrespect but I dont think you have thought this through fully. Levels really are not required in a roleplaying game......well at least not in the way they have been implemented anyway.

Imagine it this way. All characters enter the game with a pool of points that they can distribute however they choose. One person may choose to be very strong, be skilled with an axe, has some wilderness survival skills and has an afinity with animals. Another may choose to put their points into merchant skills, tailoring, a bit of divination magic and some arcane lore. The characters would be equal in terms of points spent but they would be very different to each other, serving completely different roles.

So how do these characters progress and improve? Well firstly the strong guy might use his axe a lot.......so slowly over time his strength and skill with his axe would improve. However the skills he is not using as much would decrease through lack of use. He could always pick those other skills up again and become good at them by simply using them. The merchant might focus heavily on making clothes and trying to sell them.......so over time he will begin to excel at that.

Other ways of progressing would be the amassing of wealth, making friends and contacts & becoming a known character. The strong guy may become a master with the axe and learn to train highly skilled animals. The merchant might become rich by selling fine clothes to the wealthy and become adept at using magic to spy on people. Basicly the characters would learn to fulfil a role in the game world.

Health points would never change.......afterall why should they? You dont have high and low level people in real life so why have them in games?

The reason why levels are not neccessary and in fact are broken in mmos is because all of these games focus on the individual rather than the community. The only thing you can affect in these games is yourself. Its like everyone is playing their own single player game in a mutually shared gameworld. None of them are roleplaying games at all as the players are all playing with and against the computer. Levels used to work ok in single player games because there was a beginning and an end......once you reach the end of the game its over and you have won. This cannot happen in an online game......everyone is the "main character" or "the star of the show" which does does not work......and yet they keep trying to implement this single player method repeatedly.

Unfortunately I just think it is because the people that happen to be involved in the making of these games dont have the creativity or imagination to realise this. They just cant break away from the way single player games have been made and just keep trying to repeat the same old formulae. Its a shame really but the human race has always been incredibly slow ad adapting to change. People can only work with what they have already seen and perhaps gradually tweek things. Eventually we will probably see a game that actually takes full advantage of the fact that it is online but I feel that it wont be for a long time. For now we are stuck with online translations of single player games.

Monkey see monkey do.

Originally posted by Midnitte

I believe it is broken, just look at the recent update in WoW where you can get 100% more EXP and summon a friend if you get them to make a new account.

I wish games would be more dynamic instead of just an endless grind to level up. RPGs (unlike MMORPGs) have evolved to where you don't always level your character but individual skills based on how and how much you used them and other factors, one of the major reasons I enjoyed Fable even with it being so short.

While I don't think they'll change the way it works in WoW or any other current MMO out right now, I certainly hope future games don't follow the trend.

Thats crazy, I predict a few months after WOTLK comes out they will give people the option to start a toon at level 60 and drop them off at their factions starting hut in Shattrath with 1000 gold. People will start whining about having to level to get to play death knight and Blizzard will give them what they want.

Originally posted by Torak

I ran across this today

www.massively.com/2008/09/01/how-fast-can-you-go-from-0-to-60/

Apparently a new Blizzard promotion is doling out "free levels". They are not the first, Mythic did something similar with DAoC back many years ago enabling you to make all of your toons level 20 once your first toon made it to level 50.

Now this brings into question the whole point of playing an RPG because that is what MMORPG in fact are. 

MMO's as I see it are devolved RPG's that focus strictly on the math portion. Everything from point grinds to levels but have very little in terms of freedoms. In fact some MMO's are far more linear then single player or even console RPG's.

But when a company does something like this...gives out free levels...isn't the message "if you do "X" we will let you bypass the boring grind we have created"?

Now if these games were truely "RPG's" levels would in fact be irrelavent. In fact some of the better RPG's don't even have them.

Story and freedom of choice / action have always been the hallmark of a good RPG. What MMO's really have that? Only a very small handful.

Are the true colors of the MMO grinds finally coming out? MMORPG's as they are currently designed nothing more then dull grinds that everyone just wants to bypass anyway so they can "get to the good stuff"?

Do you think devs are finally going to face that?

Or do you think levels are something that need to stay as a focus in MMO's despite the fact that its just an arbitary rule convention that most companies have stuck because EQ and a few other pioneer games did it?

The acronym "RPG" is very confusing because it is used to describe Paper and Pencil games like Dungeons and Dragons, and it's also used to describe computer games like Knights of the Old Republic.

Does anyone actually think that a paper and pencil game of Dungeons and Dragons has anything to do with a computer game like KOTOR, besides the math?

This doesn't change unless there are live Game Masters involved. Until then, it's just the math, and the levels, or skill levels in computer games. You aren't going to play any role without a game master, like you were playing a pencil and paper game.

There are a couple of routes you can go.

1. The Never Winter Nights type of game, that includes a GAme Master. They are also releasing a Dungeons And Dragons 4th Edition online table top, so you can play the game online with your friends and a Dungeon Master.

2. Ryzom has a player content creation feature, sort of like a mini NWN inside the MMORPG.

It's my understanding that City of Heroes is working on a similar feature that will be implemented soon. I think this is a good idea, although I haven't played the Ryzom player created content yet to see if it's any good.

Originally posted by Midnitte

I believe it is broken, just look at the recent update in WoW where you can get 100% more EXP and summon a friend if you get them to make a new account.

I wish games would be more dynamic instead of just an endless grind to level up. RPGs (unlike MMORPGs) have evolved to where you don't always level your character but individual skills based on how and how much you used them and other factors, one of the major reasons I enjoyed Fable even with it being so short.

While I don't think they'll change the way it works in WoW or any other current MMO out right now, I certainly hope future games don't follow the trend.

 

 

Using skills over and over to increase them is my least favorite system, and I didn't like it in Fable.

It's very contrived in a game.

Why? Because in a game, you're supposed to be playing the FUN parts, and not adding in the boring or not fun parts.

For example, you don't go to the bathroom in a game, although it would be "realistic".

Look at real life. How would you get good enough with a bow to go bow hunting for deer? Just get a bow, and go deer hunting every weekend until you got good at it? Absolutely NOT. You would practice on a target for months, until you got really good at hitting the target, and THEN you would go hunt live deer.

Do I want to "practice" in a game? No, that's like going to the bathroom.

Let's leave that part out, and play the fun parts.

I think the idea of levels as currently implemented in most MMORPG's today is broken.

Toss in the current quest based game play geared towards those levels and its very hard for veteran players to include new players in their activities.

Look at early  WOW as a classic example.  Most players found themselves in new player guilds, and locked out of the upper tier raiding guilds until they completed their apprenticeship by reaching level 60 and gearing up with the appropriate blue gear before being admitted to the raids.  I hated the model at that time (no idea if its changed much since TBC)  but I still see it in too many games today with it as well.

Contrast that with EVE.  Within 3 months of joining, I was flying in 0.0 with players who had 3 years experience.  My first month was as a tackler, but within a month I was in a Stealth Bomber and killing other players almost efficiently as any veteran.

Now, 15 months after I first started, I'm in an empire based corp thats fighting a war for survival against a war-decing merc corp.  I am flying my ships along side many new player who have 2-6 months experience, and we all fight in the ships that are most appropriate.

OK, enough with EVE mechanics, point is, in our corp vets fight side by side with new players, and there's no artificial levels that prevent us from doing so. 

I think more games need to try to find ways to minimize the power of levels and find other ways to incorporate advancement into a player's character.

In EVE, players are measured by how many ship types they can fly, and how well they can fit/fly them. Also, the ability to amass ISK is measured, sometimes against the various methods players use to accumulate it.

We also have killboards, which are fiercely competitive, with players struggling hard to maintain their standing.  Other people measure their mining abilities,or trading abilities. (over the weekend I discovered a player who's net worth in merchandise for sale in empire is easily  over 15 billion ISK, no telling what his total net worth is)

So don't assume the only way to measure success in an MMORPG is via levels, that's narrow-sighted in my opinion and I think if more players tried a game designed w/o them they might think a bit differently.

I'm not shocked.

Wow has ben out for 2 years and 8 months now, most old timers are lvl 70 and low levels are deserted; in a game where what matters it as the current max level, it's only logical that players do not go trough the hassle of lvling.

Yet i agree that the whole leveling formulae is broken if we come to a point where the process of lvling is seen as a chore that players want to skip as fast as possible.

Blizzard spent years creating this gameworld and balancing the lvl progression trough the zones and exp gains by quests/grind, and everything is put to waste with triple exp weekend or exp bonus or whatever.

The same problem occured with EverQuest where 50% of the game is left as a living zoo of the past glory of the game.

Now, lvling makes everyone equal; skill-based progression is a little tougher because there comes much more variety in what a character as to offer, and also a bit of randomness as to who is the most useful player in a raid environement.

With a lvl based progression, everyone is the same at max lvl, except for certain skills which can be reallocated at will against a in-game money fee.

Lvling makes sense when a game first comes out; it stops making sense where every new expansion is geared toward the max-lvl players.

Same old thing: developpers need to learn to reuse old content and transform it into higher lvl stuff instead of creating new area and emptyiong the old ones. i's called dynamic content, everyone has been asking it for years but apparently its too much work...

Levels are just a way for developers to quantify an avatar's training, experience, and/or skills.  In that regard, they are really no different than skills or skill points.  It is not really the levels by themselves that are bad, but how the developers use them.  Most developers seem to like to hang skills, abilities, spells, and skill points off of levels like ornaments on the branches of a Christmas tree.  That is a big mistake and makes a game too linear.

Take WoW for instances, all skills, spells, skill points, talents, and even equipment are dependent upon the avatar's level.  It would be much better if Blizzard would seperate everything and make each an independant form of progression.

Levels work best when they aren't used to balance content in a game.