The Daily Grind: What should expansions do to the level cap?

@pcgneurotic

I disagee. This is the reason that I don't play CoH anymore. It turned into a real grind after about 30 levels and it never increased the cap. Re-rolling gets old after a while.

I'm done with WoW, played to 80 on 2 characters, but Blizzard has the right idea. I play for the story aspects of the game. I love questing and 5/10 mans. If the game isn't moving forward story-wise, I'm probably not going to stick around too long. I also like the resets at the beginning of each expansion. It gives each expansion a newness feeling, which is good imo.

The one thing I would change with recent gear dependent games is to add more ornamental armor into the game. If people are willing to invest huge amounts of time for pets, mounts and achievements, why not also use ornamental armor as a reward incentive, especially in PvP? I never understood why WoW made PvP = PvE. It should be it's own mini-game and not stat reliant.

The fun should be the competition, not the gear reward. In theory, gear rewards in PvE should just be a gating mechanism to get to new encounters rather than rewards in of themselves too.

Conversely, if devs hold to a level cap, they ae effectively forced to become more creative and innovative in designing systems of alternate advancement, often lateral, and preferably optional, depending on player interests and playstyles. They have to develop more narrative content to advance story, and create different kinds of challenges for the player.

The cleverest of all are the systems that work in resets in some form. Things that encourage you to alt and/or revisit old content. Resets (or easy respecs, rather) of build to change up playstyles. Remorting is a system more commonplace in the old days of MUDs, but the idea is that once a player hits level cap, they can choose to go back to level 1 to work through the content again, but keeping some skills that make them stronger in the long run. Kingdom of Loathing does this to fairly good effect. Arena ladder that reset on a weekly or monthly basis for different people to get chances at high scores. The entire server reset of A Tale in the Desert is a complete reboot, if a little too drastic for most.

An alternative is not to have levels at all, or no level cap, and/or not have levels mean that much in the first place. Each comes with their own design pluses and minuses, but once devs have settled on one scheme, expansions should leave level cap increases the hell alone unless they really want to rethink all those crucial bits of the game and revise it carefully to accomodate the measly 5 or 10 level power increase.

And oh, the players expect it now that you've set the precedent. Hope you're ready for the same headache come the next expansion date.

ae = are
This comments system needs an edit function.

@Jeromai You are correct that in LotrO increasing the level cap makes sense. So, the issue is story. If the story supports it then the cap should increase. The first rule of screenwriting is 'raise the stakes," which means that each obstacle the protagonist encounters should be more difficult than the last until the story is finished. If a screenplay doesn't do this we as an audience lose interest until the story gets back on track. That's no guarantee of success of a story, but it's definitely the foundation upon a good one can be written.

So, the proxy for that in games like LotrO and, to a lesser extent, WoW is to increase the level cap and expand the characters access to power to meet and overcome these greater challenges. WoW's story is a jumble with only the vaguest sense of motion. LotrO's is well known and well-crafted, so all Turbine has to do is not screw it up too much and it'll feel justified.

I don't see how a game like Guild Wars can keep a sense of advancement post lvl 20 while at the same time increasing the character's power to overcome greater obstacles without some form of progression, be it gear, powers, skills, etc.

Ta,

Guild Wars just harnesses different advancement and achievement systems besides the simple "get xp, increase in level, and thus power" formula. It definitely has progression systems, it just doesn't blindly raise the level cap per expansion to make its previous content obsolete.

One critical driver for Guild War's PvE is narrative in the main storyline missions. One hits level 20 before one gets halfway through the story missions. But if you want to see how the big over-arcing story of your character and the world ends, you're going to play through it once anyway. Going through it unlocks areas and maps and other content challenges as well, a kind of content progression.

Nor do you really stop gaining xp at the GW level cap. Every so often you'll hit the criteria for the next level, and you gain a skill point. It still has the effect of a sporadic "ding" and the skill point can be spent on skills to increase power & effectiveness (sort of, see next paragraph) or to buy certain consumables.

GW limits the fielded skills to 8 of them, so having 50 or 100 or 200 skills at your disposal just increases the range of potential options for a power increase. I gather that Eve Online's a bit like that in the sense that it doesn't take too long for a newbie to be on par with a vet in a certain area, but the vet has leveled in other areas and has more options to pick from. This flexibility also allows them to include PvE-only skills that can be purposefully a little overpowered, for that feeling of increased strength.

To go along with that, enemies can be set at 4 or 8 or even 10 levels above the character level cap, and get pretty sturdy as a result. They follow the same skill synergy idea as the players, and get their own mob-only abilities, which can adjust the level of challenge without needing to muck around with levels.

And there's hard mode: more buffed higher level enemies with better skills and sharper, smarter AI that moves more quickly and goes for the weaker links in your party. It practically forces the player to get smarter as well, even if they use a prescribed build from the wiki, not just rely on increasing character levels and automatically increasing power to defeat an opponent.

GW also has an achievement system that starts out easy and increases to exponentially notorious levels for prestige title rewards. So folks who love Achieving can work steadily at incrementing little progress bars and thus have a meta-reason to replay content.

No level cap increase necessary, just fancy dangling of carrots to keep that sense of advancement going.

@Jeromai My point was (and I played GW for a while, so I get it) is that ultimately this is a moot discussion b/c the underlying issue is that of advancement. All of these systems are just versions of raising the level cap. In WoW you get access (or used to) more talent points to augment your existing skill set, while gaining access to a handful of new skills/spells. In GW, you complete certain tasks and you get another skill point to use to distribute amongst the skills in your current build as well as completing other tasks that open up the opportunity to buy more skills to choose from

It's the same system, just differently organized. This is a semantic discussion about the primacy of a number... your 'level'.

The issue should be, "does the advancement system of the game match the story and style of the game." For some games a level cap increase is proper, for others a skill advancement style thing works.

Ta,



At the core of the

@Tom L
I get what you're saying regarding it being essentially the same. From the perspective of a player who wants achievement and advancement focused things for his main character to keep doing, in order to stay subscribed to an MMO, yes, they are essentially the same carrot on stick.

However, my argument is that by going vertical and increasing level caps, a lot of other things are inadvertently affected, which may be damaging in the long run.

Besides all that I've mentioned above, there are issues of where the general population tend to be. They will chase the increasing level ranges and end up settling near the cap. This ends up creating empty newbie and lowbie zones as most vet players race away from the starting point, making it less attractive for newbie players as it's hard to find anybody populating the zone to play with. In a game with shallower level caps, alt-ism is a popular way of extending the game's lifespan, and the lowbie zones see a little more life.

Newbies also may look at a game which has 125 levels and become intimidated at the thought that they'll never reach the end point and give up before even trying.

I'm finding it hard to see good arguments for increasing a level cap that cannot be fixed by introducing other systems of advancement and achievement. Would any who support level cap increases care to supply some?

I'm of the opinion that MMO devs would be far smarter to avoid all the problems of an ever-rising level cap by not touching it and just working on those said systems of advancement that broaden the game horizontally instead of vertically. The overall effect of keeping Achievers stuck to the game is still the same, minus level cap increase problems.