The Daily Grind: What do you think about experience scrolls?

Pan, you said it best. If a game has to entice players to play by selling cheat items to help you quickly level your character, there is something wrong with your game.

It's the same with consumables and useful gear. I won't play any game that offers a pay-to-win strategy in a game.

@Dan
That's not even pay-to-win, that's pay-to-not-play.

Pan said it perfectly, i'd vote it up a million times.

Or it's catering to a market of users that have next to no patience and just want the end results as fast as possible.

WARs levelling I find is actually quite enjoyable, but like most North American players, there are some with too much money and no patience.

I mean if farmers already offer power levling, why not capitalise on it? It's not pay to win or anything, if anything you'll end up at a level where your gear is just very out of date leaving you at a disadvantage for a while.

Offering players the chance to pay to avoid playing part of a game is insane - it just convinces more players that the endgame is the place to be and that the core PvE gameplay is an unnecessary grind, and thus the perception becomes the reality, and longevity of MMOs decrease further.

If the devs/publishers think skipping gameplay is a popular feature that players will want to pay for then maybe they need to examine WHY players want to skip parts of their levelling progression - if they reduced the grind and made basic gameplay more fun maybe players wouldn't be so quick to jump past all the monotony to get to the fun bits.

Funny that you should mention Guild Wars, since the game allows players to hand over money so they can skip past the tedious part of unlocking all skills in pvp.

Since Guild Wars is all about using the right skills at the right time and most of your time will be spent on unlocking skills/runes (unless you run about gathering titles or different armor for vanity), that's as good as buying a fully max level character in other MMO games.

Yeah it can be handy in CoH to avoid missing content you can outlevel, but personal I dislike there being content in games that you have to remember to do by a certain level or completely miss - it just means you end up having mandatory content on most of your characters (e.g. in CoV I make sure I do the mayhem mission for every 5-level range, because the explore badge in each one is tied to an accolade badge that grants +5% hit points).

At least a lot of CoH's content scales to player level and the difficulty settings you select - and if you do miss something you can usually "flashback" to it via Ouroboros (time travel area) - I wish more MMOs were like that - options are good.

This. I mean, put bluntly, it is, and I think that's why it's crossing a line for many people. It's on the shadier side of a midway point between cosmetic/fun/meta microtransactions and a buy-to-win model. This is why I'm wary of microtransactions and their potential effect on the "game" part of MMORPG; games have rules, and if one of the rules of the game is "You must put in X amount of time and work to be very powerful," then this kind of thing is essentially allowing people to buy the chance to skip a turn. Part of the social structure of MMOs hinges on the knowledge that everyone's in it together and we all have the same trials and frustrations and woohoo-I-did-it moments, and it cheapens it somewhat to know that if levels 23-34 are really chafing my ass that I can go drop some money and skip it, and everyone else can too. It erodes and divides the culture.

We could all probably argue until the trumpets sound over whether or not the current rules of having to level are outdated or not, but as of right now it's mostly what we've got and if even the people behind the game are starting to treat their leveling process as a punitive thing that smart, savvy players can bypass with a quick visit to the friendly and easy-to-use cash shop, we're not really playing a game any more, are we? Unless that game is "Buy Experience: The Real-Lifening."

Lol. Whatever, Tempus Apologist....I mean, Magus.

...and thanks for pointing that out, Irem. :)

"Lastly, it is not cheating. It is a game, with mechanics that if not elegant are part of the design. If you think it is like cheating you are confusing a game with real life."

Most games have rules. The mechanics, in the case of MMOs, are the rules. They're the things that everyone has to think about and plan for in order to be successful. It's not "confusing a game with real life," it's pointing out that MMOs are games. If the rules you've implemented are so horrible that you're letting people pay to ignore them, well, that's maybe something the genre as a whole needs to take a look at.

"In my near decade of MMO gaming, my own opinion is that complaints about 'short cuts' usually come from gamers who don't want others to avoid what they couldn't."

There is value in the idea of an online game being as level a playing field as possible. After hearing all the sneering coming from people in WoW who bought the $25 star horse mount about the "poor people who are so jealous because they can't afford it and I can," I was pretty disgusted. Suddenly, we have a fake class system based on who has more real life money--awesome. It's one thing when the devs tweak the leveling curve or quests to be less punishing for -everyone-, and another when they're saying, "Oooh, but for our super special LOYAL customers who are willing to give us even more money, you can skip entire levels!"

You ignore the other fake class system that has led to people up in arms about this, availability of time. Not all of us need to lord it over others about money we have to spend and also we don't feel bad when for instance we get an xp bonus of some sort to make up for time we don't have.

The number of rants I have read over the years from people who fail to appreciate not all of us can or would choose to play the epic amounts of time they do is many. Don't think money is the only factor leading to people looking down their noses at others.

Bottom line is this is always an argument about trying to make people play one way. People should have choices about how they play and others should not get upset about it.

"Bottom line is this is always an argument about trying to make people play one way. People should have choices about how they play and others should not get upset about it."

I'm disappointed that there are so many people who seem thrilled with the idea of skipping content because "It's MY game and I want to play MY way and if I want to buy levels and armor upgrades and bypass all that stuff I don't like, I should be able to, because that's MY right to spend MY money to get ahead."

Choices are good to a certain extent but when we're talking about radically changing the way things work because people are tired of the model, then yeah, I feel like it's okay for me to be a little upset about it. I play MMOs for reasons that are apparently vastly out of sync with what the market now wants. Realistically, I understand that there's no way to stop it, and obviously more people enjoy things this way, so there's nothing I can much do but shrug and look for a game that still caters to the way I like to play. But my choices are getting kind of limited, here. Back when I first started playing MMOs, if you couldn't put in at least a little time and effort, you were probably better off finding another hobby. Now if I want to play something that rewards the things I like to do, well...I'm probably better off finding another hobby.

Eventually someone will release World-of-Farm-and-Grindcraft as a niche title and I'll be perfectly happy, but while I don't expect the genre to be static or just as I like it forever, it's hard not to be peeved slightly that something I enjoy so much is rapidly becoming something I don't.