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 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.

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.

I like the ’seperate the locked players’ idea though. It would kind of genreate a T1.5 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.

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.

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.

Another thought would be to create special scenario instances for locked characters vs. unlocked characters — let all the “twinks” fight amongst themselves.