Whether you are in favor of getting rid of levels or not, I think it's too late for them to do that right now.

HOWEVER, what I think they should do, is NOT increase the level cap in expansions, and make them kind of like how GW1 expansions were.  Where you get 80 pretty fast, and most of the world consist of level 80 zones.  But you want to explore them because there are "goodies" (skills in GW1) spread throughout the world, and you need to see a large amount of the world to get them all.

As for what kind of goodies could be put into GW2...I think that maybe they should add new special skills to the expansion that are only attainable by special mystic forge recipes or something.  And you would have to get the ingredients for these recipes by going to specific places in the world.

The skills could even be cross-class PvE only skills that were mainly for fun stuff.  Or even emotes or something.

Originally posted by motmot84
Removing level progression and make all areas accessible at once any time will opt people to skip story/content and just go to the high-end map. This will lead to lack of immersion in the game. Heck if you're gonna remove levels then remove other maps as well.

I'd argue the opposite really. If levels were removed than all maps would have the same value and people could spread out without losing Karma points due to lesser rewards. It would probably add to immersion as people are free to roam as they pleased without being herded into one direction. 

Okay, seems some people are confused in here.

Skills != Levels.

UO does not have levels, it has progression via skills.

EVE does not have levels, it has progression via skills.

All MMOs have character progression, that is one of the defining mechanics of (MMO)RPGs. That dosn' mean every MMO has levels or skills. However, a skill-based progression system is quite different from a level based one.

Yes, most of us know this, just made me cringe to read someone call a new character in UO "level 1".

Wanted to chime in on the remove levels thing as well.

It's not feasible the way drops and resources are implemented in GW2. It's a much bigger task than just removing the levels on characters, zones and MOBs.

They would have to re-itemize the entire game, and the result would be negligible since GW2 is still a themepark at its core.

There would still be no reason to visit the areas with the lower tier resources, since the population will progress past them as the game matures. So crafting and weapon/armor/item wear and tear would need to be redone as well. Now this has to happen anyway if they want crafting and the player economy to be viable at all tiers anyway, but they'll most likely leave it and concentrate on expanding the highest tier horizontally.

Which is what will most likely happen with GW2 overall. I think, and hope, that 80 is as high as we'll ever go. They stretched out the 20 levels from GW1 to allow for a more flexible approach in terms of advancement and sense of character direction through the leveling process.

Thus, I doubt that they will continue the GW1 style with "mini" standalone expansions and do regular expansions, that focus on expanding the game horizontally, focused on level 80 content.

However, the short version is; the way GW2 is designed, just removing levels wont amke for a better gameplay experience, so there's really no reason for ANet to dump resources into it at this point, neither should we really wish for it.

Stupid Idea OP...

Most people love when numbers proof that they are advancing... the level numbers are perfect for this.

GW2 has by far the best zone level system around.

Originally posted by Creslin321

Whether you are in favor of getting rid of levels or not, I think it's too late for them to do that right now.

HOWEVER, what I think they should do, is NOT increase the level cap in expansions, and make them kind of like how GW1 expansions were.  Where you get 80 pretty fast, and most of the world consist of level 80 zones.  But you want to explore them because there are "goodies" (skills in GW1) spread throughout the world, and you need to see a large amount of the world to get them all.

As for what kind of goodies could be put into GW2...I think that maybe they should add new special skills to the expansion that are only attainable by special mystic forge recipes or something.  And you would have to get the ingredients for these recipes by going to specific places in the world.

The skills could even be cross-class PvE only skills that were mainly for fun stuff.  Or even emotes or something.

I wish Anet would put the elite skill search (or even better - a weapons skill search) into GW2 like they had for GW1.  You know, kill a certain boss and learn their elite skill.  Would love to see that.  Maybe some of the Champions could have certain weapons skills you could learn to mix and match like they did with GW1.