As I was going through my usual morning rounds of the MMO/gaming blogs, I just happened to be over at WAAAGH! reading one of Syp’s recent posts, T1 Forever!, and was thinking of posting a long and elaborate comment. Then it struck me: since I’ve already discussed Tier 1 scenarios and open RvR in a couple of recent articles, it’d probably generate a little more discussion if I were to post something here about it instead, and get a little back-and-forth going.
Syp’s suggestion, inspired by a similar (yet non-WAR related) post from a couple of days ago over at NecroRogIcon, is this:
Here’s a question: how many of you would bite for the ability to freeze your character’s XP progress at the end of a tier and keep them there, perhaps indefinitely?
To me, when I think of level-locking, it reminds me immediately of pre-built/sealed decks in collectible card games or online TCGs. It also brings to mind the “PvP-only” types of characters in Guild Wars, which were quite effective and enjoyable if they suited your playstyle (i.e. you didn’t want to experience any of Guild Wars’ PvE content.) Either way, it’s an idea I would really love to see instituted in WAR, as long as it’s done right.
To be honest, Mythic has a precedent of their own that they can look to in this case: they did institute a /level command in Dark Age of Camelot, allowing players to create a brand new character that they could then jump to level 20 or 30, ostensibly to help under-populated realms gain more high-level characters. However, most players used this to create a metric ton of alts in order to play in the lower-level battlegrounds. I don’t think that was Mythic’s intention, but as many have said before me, players will play the game the way they want to play it, not the way the designer wants them to play it. While this method didn’t exactly qualify as ”locking in”, it was definitely a way to skip though low-level PvE content and play strictly in a PvP setting. What we should keep in mind here is that /level was instituted was well after the game’s peak and well into its decline.
My suggestion: maybe Mythic could implement a separate arena-style system for T1 characters, outside of the game’s normal progression? I think it’d be more fair to separate “level-locked” players from people who just want to advance and play through Tier 1 normally, because the minute you remove a level-based progression for a select few players, you’re going to see a major shift towards twinking, which puts honest newcomers to the game at a disadvantage.
I don’t think Mythic wants to alienate new players who are just experiencing scenarios for the first time by having a bunch of twinked-out rank 11s who are just there to PvP when they’re not on their rank 40 mains, so separating them into their own scenario instances (which shouldn’t be all that hard, since your character would need to be flagged as “locked-in”, in any case) seems like a better route.
I know I’d be more than happy to create a couple of characters solely to dick around in Tier 1 forever. Wouldn’t you?
9 comments
Good thoughts — although I do want to challenge the thought that locking at a level would invite a horrific amount of twinking. Seriously, how hard could you twink a level 11? WAR’s gear does not provide the sheer level of extra power that, say, WoW’s does.
Another thought would be to create special scenario instances for locked characters vs. unlocked characters — let all the “twinks” fight amongst themselves.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant at the end by “separating them into their own scenario instances”. If I’m playing a locked Tier 1 toon, I’d probably want to face off against my own “kind” instead of a bunch of new players who would likely just get rolled, which doesn’t really provide much enjoyment for anyone.
As to twinking — it’s entirely possible, although much more difficult to accomplish than in, say, WoW. I’d rather not go up against a rank 11 all decked out in AH and oRvR influence blues and purples with my brand-new rank 2 toon if I’m a new player. :)
And with level-locking, that gives those perma-rank-11s plenty of time to farm influence to twink themselves out properly before outleveling Tier 1, which is generally the problem if you’re trying to get that Tier 1 oRvR inf gear.
In DAoC they not only had a /level command, they also had an /xp off command, and you could turn of xp gain for your character and stay level 19 or 24 or whatever level you wanted indefinitely.
Making rank 24 twinks for Thidranki was tons of fun, but it also was upsetting to players who did not have twinks.
Personally I would like to see an option to turn off XP in Warhammer.
I think that /xp off command must have been implemented after I stopped playing. :) That’s a cool feature, though.
I don’t think splitting off scenarios into locked and non-locked (normal mode) characters would be too difficult. It’s probably just a flag on the character so it should be easy enough for them to filter it out and throw locked toons into a separate scenario instance.
Non-instanced oRvR might be more of an issue, but it’s a lot zergier so I doubt it’d be all that noticeable.
The desire to stay in T1 should be an indicator that there is a problem with T4. Level locking is a quick fix to a greater problem.
I like the ’seperate the locked players’ idea though. It would kind of genreate a T1.5 though.
Syp said: “Seriously, how hard could you twink a level 11? ”
And there’s the rub. I think if you *could* level lock, it should only be at very specific levels: the levels that low toons are bumped up to in scenarios and oRvR (e.g., 8, 18,etc). Because, honestly, there is a big difference in power between an 8 and an 11.
Alternatively (and preferably, IMO), they should not only raise lowbies in RvR but lower highbies (is that a word)? A level 11 should have his/her ability effectiveness (but not abilities unlocked! or equipment stats) lowered to the same level. I think it’s pretty unbalanced in T1 when your opposing team consists of 50% 9-10 while your team is more evenly spread.
This would allow freezing your toon at any level without the twinking argument being very effective, and still allow a higher level toon to have a bit of an advantage, just not a game-breaking one.
Just to follow on my earlier post…
I think it’s important *not* to separate out characters for ‘twink’ scenarios. Highly populated servers might not find it a problem, but I can tell you on Burlock (the single English European RP server), it takes long enough as it is for a scenario to pop without separating the player base.
Interesting points…
If you were to split scenarios between locked and unlocked players, though, it might go nicely with some kind of scenario pooling across servers, à la WoW. That way you’d always be able to hop into a scenario, assuming 5-8 servers were pooled together for scenario instancing, and that would alleviate the problem you describe.
It’s something I think Mythic must already have considered, you’d think, since a game with a much larger playerbase has already had to do it. The only drawback I see there is that scenario wins contribute to victory points, so I’m not sure how they’d sort that out with pooled instances…
Thoughts?
I was really dissapointed when leveled up to lvl 12 and no more T1 SCs or the outdoor fights I liked
1 trackback
[...] info By shadowwar Categories: Uncategorized So, there has been a fair amount of talk lately about instituting a level locking system in this game similar to that seen in [...]