The Daily Grind: Should more MMOs implement sidekicking?

@FrostPaw

I like that idea.

@Dumac

Concur.

If games would concentrate more on the levelling part iso end-game and make it more meaningful, people wouldn't mind making new characters to play with others. It's pretty much the 'trick' Pen-and-Paper RPG's use by bringing out new settings etc. , and one of the reasons why some of them are in their decades.

That being said, NPC 'henchmen' are certainly a feature I like, as the anonymity of the Internet makes players much less social , unlike Pen-and-Paper RPG's (Grumpy Elf had an interesting Post on this as well).

@Dumac

I don't get how you could be opposed to one artificial attempt at undoing the imbalance caused by levels then suggest they use another artificial attempt at undoing the imbalanced caused by levels. Doesn't really matter if you reduce the level of the high level player (City of Heroes) or increase the levels of the monsters to match the players (Guild Wars' hard mode), it amounts of just about the same thing. Only adjusting the players down to the appropriate level instead of balancing all of the game's content for all of the level ranges takes a lot less work/time/money.

@(Unverified) I totally disagree with this. Your solution to wanting to play with your RL friends that are of a different level is to make a new character? So say you're at end game, you should make a new character to play with a friend who is 2/3 through to end game? By the time you catch up to him, he'll be pretty close to end-game too.

This makes no sense.

@Ehra
Guild Wars' hard mode has nothing to do with player levels... It is another beast altogether. In Factions you can get to max level before doing a quarter of the content, and the rest is wide open for everyone... or it would be if it weren't for the story locking you with missions, but you get the point.

GW also doesn't have that secret stat that gives monsters resistance if they are a few levels above you. You know when theoretically you could defeat a monster that is 20 levels above you, but you can't because the game is giving it resistance and your otherwise powerful abilities fail for no sensible reason other than to keep you in that developer designed path.

I feel like if games just got rid of that mechanic it would have a dramatic impact ... You would play through content because it's fun and not because you need to if you want to reach the good bits. And you wouldn't need artificial stat manipulation like sidekicking. It would possibly cause some imbalance, but we have all sorts of imbalances already anyway, we could learn to live with it.

@Dumac

I didn't say GW's hard mode messed with player levels, but what it DOES do is take old content and bump it up to being relevant to max levels. This has the same downfalls you pointed out with sidekicking (mainly being that it's an artifical fix to a problem presented by levels) without any of the main benefits (allowing high levels and low levels [or new players and veterans, if you prefer] to do the same content together) of sidekicking.

Not to mention that GW's hard mode only works for instanced content, while something like sidekicking/exemplaring works just as well for open world content. Heck, even Guild Wars 2 is going with a sort of automated sidekicking/exemplaring system (auto adjusting player level based on the level of the zone they're in).

@Ehra

Yeah, I don't get what you're saying. 90% of Guild Wars content is made for level 20, which is cap. When they added new content they did not raise the cap like other games, so again most of the content is for level 20. It's part of the ArenaNet mantra: End-game begins at level 1.

@Ordegar

I don't understand what's so hard to get. Dumac said his issue with sidekicking was that it made levels irrelevant, so why not just do away with levels altogether? But then he suggested using a system like Guild Wars; which just took low level content and added a max level version, which essentially does exactly what he faulted sidekicking for without having the benefit of letting low levels group with high levels and not be useless.

That Guild Wars makes it so it's extremely easy to get to the max level should reinforce the point he made about sidekicking; that there isn't much point in having the levels in the first place. Which, in theory, I agree with, but then he went and used hard mode as an example of how to 'do it right' even though it has the same failings as sidekicking without the advantages.

@Ehra
I didn't use hard mode as an example :) Hard mode is a bit of an artificial way of adding more content, but that's a different subject.

Levels ARE relevant in Guild Wars though. You need to level up to gain skill points and learn skills, and get attribute points. Even when you are level 20 your character is not done with learning new stuff. But this is not something that will keep friends from playing together. The mission locks are, but the game design itself isn't.

@gandales
The old Sidekicking system could be exploited to easily bridge players. It has been revised so everyone is the same level, so no bridging is possible. Of course, powerlevelers are a determined, ingenious bunch, so there are other ways to do it (including exploiting the Mission Architech), which is why MARTy was developed (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/MARTy).

@heerobya

I hear ya brother...I hear ya.

The adventure doesn't seem to matter anymore. The fantastic journey, in a fantastic world. Now a days it seem that the kids just want to show off a series of numbers, laugh at other folks numbers, and be the first to have the biggest numbers.

What ever happened to the 'wonder' of an MMO? What ever happened to immersion and fun?

Now it's all end game ePeen wagging.

Kinda sad if ya think bout it.

@heerobya
Perhaps you should take a look at TSW:
No levels. No class. All characters can, eventually, learn all skills. From a character advancement point of view, it's most likely the closest thing to UO you will find among big games.
(Seems like it will have gear progression as a way of locking content, though.)