I know we are well past the point where this probably matters, but I think a good chunk of issues could have been solved if you made leveling to 60 way slower and harder. Hear me out:
It feels like a good chunk of the player base made level 60 pretty early. At the point, a lot of stuff seemed to come off the wheels:
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there’s a ton of 60+ content the development team seems to be actively working on. The main quest feels unfinished, there were world bosses and places that needed fixing, whole quest lines were bugged. It was a mess.
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once you make 60, a lot of people found out that you need to go back and farm tons of low level mats to level up your stuff. I don’t know if AGS thought we would just spend a ton of time at low levels farming all this stuff, or if it really was the intention for me to go back and farm 90,000 low level crafting materials if I want to level up my crafting professions. Seems like most of us got to 60, and now we have to divide our time between the 60 content, and if we want to craft, just running through low level zones farming supply caches and crap.
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Everyone seems singularly focused on Voidbent and crafting super high level items. There so much wasted material between 1-60. Why am I crafting all this stuff?
So as a solution, I think what would be really good, is if you made getting to 60 super slow. Like waaaay slower. I’m talking EverQuest hell level for those that remember it. This would solve a bunch of problems:
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You’d have more time at lower levels to enjoy content and craft. Right now The mantra is pretty much: “you’re gonna replace that in two days anyway so don’t worry about the loot in here.” Longer time spent at levels means people would care more about dungeon loot and crafting items.
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it would give the devs much more time to fix the 60+ content that wasn’t finished while everyone is still grinding.
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you’d still have a much broader player base I suspect. A lot of people got to 60+ and the wheels kinda came off. Now you’re just gonna have super casual players who ARE taking their time leveling, and the super hardcore who have the stomach to farm a 9 to 5 job and craft voidbent and all that.
It just feels like the fact that you could race to 60 took the wind out of all this content 1-60. Again it goes back to that “you’re gonna replace that and just farm for gear score or faction tokens at 60 anyway.”
I know we’re concern about making this accessible, and maybe the answer is giving a much higher rested XP bonus or something. It just seems like a lot of people would have felt much better about this game had we like, just gotten 60 now, and found Malevolence and a lot of other stuff like OPR in better working order. Just my two cents.