On a personal note, I would like to see games use a faction system in conjunction with normal experience for character development. A faction system seems more real world to me. I could envision using the faction system in obtaining skills from trainers where experience could be used for gaining levels. I always like the EQ1 faction system even though it didn’t do too much, but I haven’t see new games build on the concept. Levels could give you options to increase your character’s main stats (str, stm, int, etc.), maybe give visual benefits (scars, larger physical size, etc.), along with base increases. Having two systems in parallel I believe opens a lot of creative ways for character advancement. Grouping may give a experience penalty but not a faction penalty which could promote groups. Given content can be more faction or experienced based. If you maxed your level, you could still gain faction to get additional skills. Similar to your idea of endless grind points. As you gain all your main skills (think of all three trees in WOW), you could go into other skill pools, some could be utility skills, some could be skills used by other classes.

p.s. Great job on the website and the articles!

I think a simple solution would be to have multiple ways of achieving the heroic levels. What if someone could do it by raiding, or a special quest chain? maybe a combination, reputations, etc… In short open up the options for someone to reach said heroic level. Like you said you want that bar ticking and you don’t want someone to feel locked out.

Oh I completely agree here. I just used raiding as an example. They could be achieved in any way the developer saw fit.

“I’ve frequently heard developers say they do not want players to get raid rewards without raiding”

This attitude needs to disapear. I strongly believe we need to move beyond that. Let’s say you put the coolest weapons in raids. To get said weapon you need to do a tier3 raid. To do the raid you need gear, HL3 and a good guild. If all your progression is in raids then your force your player to go through A-B-C and so forth.

No disagreement here. I’m a huge advocate for “bind on equip” and a totally open market. In my eyes if a guild wants to sell weapons to the competition. I’ve never made any headway with developers on that though.

PS: I’m playing devil advocate a bit here too not trying to say your wrong

I didn’t take it that way! I love when people disagree and agree with me. If I was afraid of taking fire I wouldn’t post or allow comments!

Guilds going back to do stuff for their members works well when the player pool is more limited. Let’s say you mmo is crazy sucessful and lot of people are playing there is less incentivce to do so. By having multiple path of progression your newer players have a way to catch up even if it’s slower or incomplete.

“I’ve frequently heard developers say they do not want players to get raid rewards without raiding”

This attitude needs to disapear. I strongly believe we need to move beyond that. Let’s say you put the coolest weapons in raids. To get said weapon you need to do a tier3 raid. To do the raid you need gear, HL3 and a good guild. If all your progression is in raids then your force your player to go through A-B-C and so forth.

Instead, make part of the armor attainable by crafting and HL levels can be also done by hard mode 5 man instances. Our newer player is still missing key rewards from raids (weapons) so he has incentive to go there. However he can bring himself to a power level high enough where he can join a guild working on the particular raid.

PS: I’m playing devil advocate a bit here too not trying to say your wrong

What if a heroic level literally gave you five points to each stat. A small upgrade but not a huge one. Perhaps to get the first few levels you only have to do content that six or twelve players can achieve in a night. This would preclude exclusion and being “stuck.” This is even more so if there were only five or so heroic levels total.

The examples you listed are good but they offer tough barriers of entry much like flags did in EQ1. That said, people did get the flags and guilds did go back to do them for new members. The key is just how steep the slope to achieve the levels is. Which is true for anything: gear, quests, flags and regular levels.

What will happen is that players in endgame will get sorted by HL tiers. While it may works fine at first where most of the player base is still progressing through endgame (at release of content for example) it will become a barrier for new players who start playing later.

Let’s say someone start playing with a 6 months delay. I heard from his friends the game is great and picks it up. Something you want to happen after and someone you want to keep playing your game. He makes his progression through the leveling content and at some point gets to endgame with no HL. Now let’s say he’s in a small friendly non-raiding guild with friends. He now has to jump to a raiding guild. All current good raiding guilds are HL4 at the end of content. Current HL0 raiding guilds are few and mostly populated by people who failed at raiding, drama or new players like him. Our new player can’t join the HL4 guilds since they have no interest in tagging him and finding a HL0 guild who has what it takes to progress will be very very difficult. Most likely the new player will be stuck at the beginning of endgame without possible advancement. Over time your game becomes more and more top-heavy and words spreads that its near impossible to start in your game.

This scenario has already happened in other MMO before. Final fantasy XI with all his attunement quests makes it next to impossible for a new player to progress unless he knows people in the right guild who will spend time to help him catch up. WoW is starting to suffer from the same problems with achievements. On some servers it’s impossible to get in a raid group for certain raids/guilds unless you already have the achievement saying you already did it.

In short you are replacing gear cheacks/quest checks with another kind of check. I sincerely believes the next big step in mmo will be to rethink the whole endgame progession.