MMO Antiquities – Twinking

It is the time again where I reach into my “way back sack” and pull out a feature of MMO antiquity that has been lost to the modern “design within the rules” systems! Today I want to talk about twinking.

For those if you who’ve never heard the term; twinking essentially means taking a high level character, obtaining high level loot, and giving those items to your low level characters. This, in turn, gives those characters a disproportionate amount of power. According to design rules this is “bad.” It is, essentially, why you have level restrictions on all items now. Frankly I don’t see the problem.

Twinking got a bad reputation in EverQuest because people were farming rare spawns for items for their alts. This frustrated players of appropriate level because they couldn’t compete for those items. That issue is moot today, however, since there are no longer “named mobs” in a static location that drop items. You can’t go farm a frenzied ghoul these days. Instead you just find random diablo style loot scattered throughout the world.

There is also the argument of “earning” loot. I simply don’t buy this one either. It is, more or less, a jealousy thing. A character is a fictional piece of intellectual property. It can’t “earn” anything. Players, on the other hand, can. As far as I am concerned if I have any character that can achieve something then all my characters should benefit (within reason) from it.

Let’s look at the benefits of twinking.

1. Reply-ability of your game. Personally I hate alternate characters because I’m terrible at them. I level once per game, max out a character and push it to the limit of progression. For me, the “journey” starts at max level and ends when I’m standing over the corpse of the toughest raid boss. That “stuff” I did 0 to X just earned me the right to play the game. I don’t want to do that over again at the same difficulty. I did that once and once was enough. I want easy mode now. If I could give my character something to boost their power I’d be more inclined to play an alt.

2. Less frustrating for slower players. This might fly in the face of conventional logic but I frequently group on my alts (even though most MMOs try to make grouping pointless). I grouped with my alts in EverQuest. Instead of empty lower and mid level zones you’d at least have alts there to help slower and new players. They would benefit from having a powerful party mate. I suppose in the “solo is not only okay but better world” of today this isn’t much of a perk.

3. Helping friends catch up. Who hasn’t had a less hard core friend join a game a little too late and feel left out? I have it happen all the time. I would prefer the ability to give them some goodies to aid in closing the gap.

4. Bigger player economy. If you have more characters needing items you’ll have a bigger economy. People frequently shopped for alts in EverQuest. When I try to do it in Warhammer I can’t find anything useful half the time.

5. Less sting of class dislike. Many of us will stick out a class we hate because we don’t want to level again. If leveling was easier the second or third time we wouldn’t be as upset.

6. Less torches and pitch forks. People tend to collect at the top and become idle. We know what idle hands do. Put those folks back to work! See point 1.

So there you have it, six perfectly good reasons to remove or relax item level restrictions. I’d love to see the counter arguments to this in today’s system. Most of the ones I can think of are based in EQ1 and really have no bearing on the modern MMO. It pleases me that many games are doing other things for alts, such as giving them bonus experience or letting them start at a higher level, but if you’re doing that, why not take the next step?