Alright so this is a pet peeve of mine, the leveling experience is keeping many of us from doing what we actually enjoy in the game. The 1-60 experience is basically a ridiculously long tutorial that takes a hundred plus hours to get through when everyone pretty ‘got it’ in the first ten… So why not make it ten hours long instead of a hundred?
Due to a lack of PvP level scaling combined with an obscenely high level cap and not enough
meaningful PvE content to justify that cap, I’m wondering why the cap was set so high in the first place. Not only that, I’ve been testing this game since 2017 and I recall reading threads complaining about the leveling experience and shortly before launch this year, they actually slowed down the leveling experience by 30-40% to make people “take their time”.
No one is going to fondly remember fetch quest #4518812 five years from now so why does it exist in the game? How much development time was spent scripting these boring themepark fetch quests that everyone hates but does out of necessity to get to the finish line? Why weren’t those resources allocated towards embracing the sandbox, improving the emergent gameplay that should be the pillar that all MMOs are built on, adding new mechanics, improving some of the many shortcomings that this game already has etc.?
Overall I feel like the leveling experience is a missed opportunity to do something more interesting and only exists as-is to appeal to some antiquated skinner box mentality of seeing a number go up high and artificially extending playtime during the new player experience. Frankly I’m worried that even once I hit the level cap, I’ll be burnt out, quit until some major updates come out near expansion-time and they’re just going to raise the cap again and we’re all going to go through this ridiculous charade if they decide to go with vertical progression rather than horizontal progression.
It’s a shame because if they went in a different direction and say lowered the level cap to 20 and stayed at 20 forever Guild Wars 1-style even after expansions, we could have a bunch of endgame zones at launch, those zones would remain endgame-viable and not tossed to the wayside because an expansion coming out therefore keeping the base game alive, players would be able to engage in content such as territory control PvP they enjoy a hell of a lot sooner, all future content could be about expanding our playstyles rather than constantly raising our armor values and damage numbers.
tl;dr - level cap should’ve been lowered and embrace the sandbox by creating systems that encourage meaningful player interaction instead of scripting hundreds of boring fetch quests that no one will remember a month from now unless you’re still doing them
This is one of my favorite videos on this whole subject that is probably a lot more concise than my rambling and I highly suggest watching it to understand what I mean by any of this. Give it a watch if you have some time. TUN: Un-Ruining the MMO