Across 110th : EverQuest

Time for a very quick update on how my unexpected return to EverQuest is going. Amazingly well!

A bit more detail? Well, okay.

On Saturday morning my magician dinged 110. That, unbelievably, puts her at the start of the current expansion, Torment of Velious, at least in level range. Of course, she's not insane enough to try and go hunt there. Not yet. Maybe at 115.

Things have been moving fast. Two months ago she was getting to grips with the decade-old House of Thule. A month later she'd moved on just one expansion to 2011's Veil of Alaris. Two weeks ago it was 2013's Call of the Forsaken. And last night?

Last night she went to buy some spells in the Outpost in the uplevelled version of The Overthere that came with 2017's Ring of Scale. She'd been there before, to get her level 106 air pet, but she'd been very careful not to step outside the safety of the massive stone walls surrounding the friendly vendor area.

This time she poked her nose, very cautiously, outside. Maybe, just maybe, she might try hunting one, small creature. Something not too scary. Staying very close to the walls and the guards (not that they'd be likely to help). Ready at all times to cast Gate and book.

I knew it was taking a big risk but she was, I felt, about as prepared as she could be, short of waiting another level. At 111 she'll be able to buy, scribe and cast the spell that summons the current highest-available air elemental pet. She won't have the appropriate focus item to make it the strongest version it could be but it's the best she's going to get until the  level cap goes up again and that probably won't be for at least another  year, maybe two.

The sensible thing would be to wait for that but - dammit - I believed in her! I thought she was ready!

She ought to be, the money I've spent on her. Around the start of the month I made the hard decision to stop taking the easy way out when it came to making money. Instead of ending every hunting session by using the incredibly handy and accessible Barter system to sell whatever tradeskill mats had dropped, I set up my Bazaar trader on the other account.

Setting up and maintaining a trader in EverQuest is quite fiddly and very time-consuming. I'm not going to go into the hows and whys of it. It would take me all day. I learned the Trade trade back in the day, when Luclin was newish and every server had the maximum five hundred traders up at all times, with more waiting for someone to leave.

Most days now there are around a hundred and eighty traders on my server. Not the glory days but still a bustling marketplace. I spent a while checking the prices there against what I was getting from the buyers on barter and to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, it was obvious there was a lot more profit in selling to punters than to the trade.

That's not to say barter buyers rip players off. A few try it but most offer very fair prices for the convenience of being able to sell direct from the hunting grounds and not have to bother with all the rigmarole of trading. Nevertheless, if you can be bothered to make the effort, direct sale is where the money's at.

Over three weeks or so I made a couple of hundred thousand platinum and I plowed it all back into gear upgrades for the Mage. If I'd been planning on keeping her account subbed I could have bought better gear for less, which seems ironic, but I planned ahead  and stuck to the stuff anyone can wear.

She has Conflagrant items in sixteen slots now. That's the player-crafted gear you can equip from level 106. The  focus effects don't decay until the current cap of 115 so they're about the best Bazaar-bought kit a Silver account is going to get. I still have a couple more pieces to buy and that will be it for Conflagrant.

When she dinged I picked up several more items that required her to be 110. When I collect those last couple of player-made pieces, she'll be fully dressed in level-appropriate gear that should last her for the foreseeable future. Except for the shield slot. I just can't seem to find anything for that.

It all cost me a lot of money but I had to keep some back for spells. Apart from one or two key buffs and summons I hadn't bought her any new ones for about five levels. Time was when I would try to buy all the spells every level even if I knew she was never going to use them but at higher levels Magicians get a lot of spells and the price keeps going up and up. I'd be broke, fast, if I bought them all.

Instead I spent a good while on Allakhazam, reading them up before I took the Guild Hall portal to The Overthere to buy them. And even then it was confusing as hell. Every spell has a description plus a bunch of stats that supposedly tell you exactly how it works and yet more often than I'd like I still don't really understand what some of them do. Often the only way to be absolutely sure is to buy the blasted thing and fire it at something.

Even when I did understand what the spell itself did, I still had to correlate that with what line and/or school of spells it belonged to to see whether it would be enhanced by any of the Mage's various focus effects and AAs. It's a complicated process. But then, that's why it's fun. True, at times it makes my head hurt and I have to stop and take a break, but this degree of intellectual involvement is undoubtedly a key factor in the mysterious compulsion that keeps me coming back to this game over and over again.

It has occured to me that I could circumvent all of this, or at least all of the scrimping and saving and "can I really afford this?" and  "do I really need it?" part, simply by buying a Krono for around the price of one month's subscription and selling it in the Bazaar for several million plat. Then I could buy all the gear I need, all the spells and I'd be done.

What would be the point of that, though? For me, at least, it would be a disaster. I can easily understand why someone who wanted to get to the meat of the game, grouping at top level and maybe moving into raiding, would find it an excellent, time-saving and sensible option. For players like me, though, pootling along with just a summoned pet and an NPC who has to be paid to be my friend, how to make the money to get the gear and spells I need is the game. If I bought a Krono and sold it to gear myself I'd be putting myself out of business.

Back in The Overthere, at the spell vendor, I made my selections and slotted my new spells. I re-buffed myself with my new buffs. Very  nice. Then I looked at my new nukes and minions. What the heck, I'm here now. Why not? I can only die, right?

Back in the days of the original Kunark, The Overthere was an excellent zone to hunt. It's big, square, and flat, with excellent visibility. The low-level version also had a zone exit in the middle of each of the four sides, which made running to safety an option from just about anywhere.

I can't say if that last part is true of the high-level zone but the rest certainly is. As I stood on the ramp leading out of the Outpost all I could see stretching away on all sides was flat grass, low hills and blue sky. And a sabertooth tiger.

Just the one big cat. Nothing else in sight. I conned him. Dark blue, level 109. One level below me. Three levels above the air pet. Hmm.

I can't remember the last time I fought a mob just one level below me. Not this return to Norrath, that's for sure. Possibly not this decade. Could it be tougher than a dark blue named, though? I'd killed a few of those recently. Only one way to find out.

It was a long fight but I was always in control. The pet could take the hits, the merc could handle the heals, I could bring the pain. I remembered to check the xp when the cat finally dropped. It was about three times what I'd been getting on light blues in an expansion from four years earlier. Of course, it had probably taken me  three times as long...

But it felt good. So I did it again. And again.

In the end I spent about an hour in The Overthere, scarcely moving twenty meters from the wall, being extremely careful only to pull safe singles. I was acutely aware that one add would mean I'd need to gate.

I didn't get an add. I got one nasty surprise when I pulled a cactus and found my health dropping alarmingly even though the plant was securely stuck to the pet. My mercenary pumped out the heals and kept us all alive but it was a worrying moment.

I checked the combat log and thought I'd figured out what was going on. The next cactus I saw I pulled too and confirmed my suspicions. The walking succulents open with an AE shower of spines that has a DoT effect and a ridiculous range. I'd been hit by that even though I was fifty feet away at least.

This is why hunting in a new zone is always a huge risk. All kinds of things you weren't planning for can happen. It's also why finding new places to hunt can be such fun. Provided you don't die. That can put a crimp in the day's entertainment for sure.

This time the magician didn't die. A load of big cats did, some cacti, a small crab, a chokkidai (sort of like a dinosaur's dog). I avoided the rhinos. I remember them being a pain to hunt the first time around. Also the cockatrices; they have an incredibly irritating and often fatal stun.

I saw a couple of Sarnaks, one of Norrath's several sentient, bipedal lizard races, strutiing about importantly in the distance. I'd have like to have tried one but they were too far out and anyway they conned white and yellow. Level 110 and 111. Too high.

For now. But not when I get that final air pet. With a level 111 tanking for me I think I can handle a single sarnak the same level. I'm looking forward to trying, anyway.

All of which puts me so far ahead of anywhere I ever thought I'd be in EQ it feels unreal. I'm only two expansions behind! I'm only five levels off the cap! All thanks to the Overseer feature, which is now officially my second-favorite expansion feature ever, after Mercenaries. Both of those renewed not only my interest in playing but my ability to follow through.

My immediate plan is to drop back a few expansions and tear through some relatively easy mobs to make not experience but money. I'm going to let the Overseer quests take care of the levelling while I go hunt rich mobs for spell money. It's going to be fun.

Then, when I get 111 and that last pet, we'll see.

Change My Gamma : EverQuest

A lot of unexpected things have happened this year. Finding myself playing EverQuest again is one of them.

I really thought I was done with the old game. It wasn't that I'd never play it again but that I'd never play it seriously, again.

By "seriously" I don't, of course, mean grouping up for dungeons or anything silly like that. When was the last time I grouped for xp in EQ, I wonder? Over a decade, ago for sure. Maybe a decade and a half.

No, what I mean is focusing on a character, levelling up, finding better gear, going to new zones, upgrading spells, researching which focus items I should be using, learning new mechanics and systems. The kind of regular soloing I've been doing, on and off, now and then, for years. I really thought I was done with all that.

I've written enough about the Overseer feature Darkpaw added back in March. I won't go over it again, save to say that without it I definitely wouldn't be playing EverQuest, either "seriously" or frivolously. I don't think I'd logged in for the best part of a year before curiosity about how EQ's version compared to EverQuest II's tempted me to take a look.

Can we get a spot on this guy?

Overseeing turned out to be both entertaining and practical. It's great to see my highest character positively zipping through the levels, if a level every couple of weeks can be called zippy. I still wasn't doing anything you could really call "playing", though. Just standing around the Guild Lobby, setting quests from the UI and collecting the rewards.

Around level 97 I went shopping for spells. By late June I had a level 100 character and I'd never used any of them. It occured to me that I was going to end up buying a lot of spells I'd never use if I carried on that way.

I started browsing the Bazaar, thinking about getting some better gear but gear costs a lot more to buy than spells. You really don't want to buy it and never use it. I thought maybe I'd see how I got on with what I had, first.

By early July I was out hunting. It was going well. I spent quite a lot of money making bags so I could carry all that fat vendor loot. It was starting to feel like old times, only maybe better.

Cogs for cash.

Not having to rely on mob xp to level makes a huge difference to how much fun going hunting feels. Soloing into three figures, at least the way I do it, remains painfully slow. I can make a reliable eight or ten per cent of a level in a matter of minutes just doing Overseer quests whereas I can kill or quest for hours and barely move the needle. The standard EQ UI now displays xp to three decimal places. It has to or you'd think it was broken.

With Overseer questing making light of the heavy lifting when it comes to xp, soloing is fun again. When I take the mage out to hunt my main aim is to make money and I always loved making bank in Norrath.

Unlike EQII, which has had Weimar republic levels of inflation for years, EverQuest still seems to retain a rational relationship between in-game income and expenditure. There are plenty of upgrades for my level on sale in the Bazaar, priced in the thousands or low tens of thousands. In EQII you'd need to add several zeroes to that.

"Tens of thousands" still sounds like a lot for one piece of armor, fifteen levels below the cap, but I can net ten thousand plat in an hour just by killing mobs and selling the drops to vendors. I know several very lucrative spots no-one else seems to be using these days. With the mobs now conning green, shading to grey, I can pull  whole rooms and AE everything down at negligible risk. Every pull brings in hundreds of platinum in gems and vendor loot.

Did you remember to bring the torch?

Add to that the numerous tradeskill materials that sell to players though the Barter system and money just rolls in. And modern EverQuest has what I'd consider to be almost ironically state-of-the-art mechanics for looting and selling.

Clear a room and all the drops on all the kills appear in a window with multiple options to take or leave. Tradeskill items self-sort into separate bags. Open the Barter window anywhere in game and you can check who's buying what you have, then sell it to them and get paid instantly, emptying your bags and filling your wallet right there at your hunting spot.

If you pick a place to hunt where most things you're going to sell to vendors stack, you can pretty much kill indefinitely without ever running out of space. It makes the whole thing feel quite zen. If mass slaughter can ever be considered meditative, that is.

As I play more I gain confidence. Today I moved on from hunting in zones I'd almost completely outlevelled to ones that are still a tad low but which give marginally decent xp. The hot zone for level 90, Fear Itself, which I wrote about a little last week, is just about right for stress-free soloing at my current level of 103.

The main problem I was having there was the gloom. It was so dark I literally couldn't see where I was going. If the mobs didn't have their names in lights above their heads I wouldn't have been able to see them either, which would have made wandering around in pitch darkness tantamount to suicide.

I should probably look at all these settings one day.

Fortunately I finally remembered what we used to do to fix visibility issues in very dark zones in EQ. Ramp the gamma as high as it would go.

It's been a very long time since I changed the gamma setting in any game. I imagine most modern MMORPGs don't even have one. EQ still does, even if it took me a while to find it, hidden behind an "Advanced" button in the Display tab in Options. Once I'd found and fiddled with it the difference was like night and day. Literally.

True, everything looks washed-out now. Granted, the whole "Fear Itself" thing is considerably less terrifying with all the lights on. But I can see where I'm going and what I'm about to bump into, which is a lot more important. It's not like I'm playing EverQuest for the graphics, after all...

I've already started researching where to go next. The final set of Hot Zones (the system finishes at level 95) will take me into 2011's Veil of Alaris expansion. That's going to be completely new to me. I should think I'd be ready to give it a try when I hit 105. Ten levels seems to be a fairly reliable margin although twelve is probably safer, when trying to learn a new zone solo.

When you start reading this stuff up and making plans it means you're invested in the game, at least for the moment. I really never expected that to happen again with EQ.

Of course, it may not last past the weekend. I kind of hope it does, though.

So Stick Around : Neverwinter

Time was when games didn't care whether you came or went. If you were foolish enough to let your subscription lapse they'd make you jump through a few hoops before letting you back in and you'd feel lucky your characters were still there. If they were.

Not any more. Not for a long time. There's a farmer somewhere making a killing on fatted calves.

Even by modern standards, Cryptic's welcome mat is primped. Log in after a layoff, there's your name in lights. And "Neverwinter rejoices at your return!"

Yeah, right. Sure it does. Just give me the stuff. You know that's why I came.

It's not even been that long since I last played. The logon screen handily displays the last played date for every character. My last visit was back in March. It may have only been three months or so but I've already forgotten just about everything about the game. These things don't stick.

Doesn't matter. I didn't come to play. I came to claim those valuables. Didn't I just say so? Cryptic's twentieth is the celebration, apparently. I would have missed it only I saw Shintar flag up the freebies a few days back. I didn't want to miss out.

This is what you get:

There are similar offers in Star Trek Online and Champions Online. I could grab those too but even I balk at reinstalling a game just to get free stuff. Although I may still have STO, somewhere, even if it has to be more than five years since I last logged in. As for Champions, I did play once, very briefly, a long time ago, but it's never going to happen again.

It wasn't any of the listed goodies that got me logging in to Neverwinter again, anyway. It was something Shintar mentioned about bag space. She wrote "I was pleased to find... that my character's default bag had been increased by 12 slots". I'm all about the bag space, as is well known.

Only I couldn't find any bigger bags or bag expanders waiting for me. There's nothing listed on the claim screen and reading Shintar's comments carefully I realize she never said there would be. Looking at the wiki, it says the default bag, the Adventurer's Satchel, has 30 slots. My Warlock's has 42 and more than thirty of them already had stuff in when I looked. I guess she already got the upgrade.

I claimed the beholder pet and popped him out. He looked pretty good. I pawed through the various goodie bags. The free outfit looked spiffy so I thought I'd put it on.

The gear came in a Platinum Adornments Fashion Box. For some reason I had two of them. I opened one and looked for my new dress, hat and pants. Nothing. I checked everything in case they were in yet another box. Nope.

I checked all the tabs. Nada.

There's some sort of appearance system in Neverwinter. I vaguely remember it. I found the tab for that and clicked everything in there. No luck.

Well, I had another Fashion Box. I checked what was in it to be sure it was the same. It was. I double-clicked it, this time with my bags open so I could see where anything went. Nothing went anywhere except the Fashion Box, which vanished. Nothing took its place.

The gear's gone somewhere, I bet. I just don't happen to know where it is. Oh well, never mind. Easy come...

At this point I could have logged out. I'd achieved or failed to achieve everything I came for, after all. Only I didn't. I started fiddling about in my bags, opening this and that to see what was in it. For once I had plenty of bag space so it seemed like a good time to try. Although where I got that Greater Bag of Holding from I have no idea...

I spent a good while comparing insignia then working out how to apply them. I found a couple of upgrades sitting in my bags and put them on. After that it felt churlish not to go try them out.

I ended up doing two levels. XP seems to come fast in Neverwinter, not least because one of the insignia I slotted is a 62% xp buff. Also, because Neverwinter is fun. It really is.

Comparing Neverwinter to Elder Scrolls Online, from my perspective gameplay feels really similar. Upgrading is arcane but questing and combat are simplicity itself. All I do in both is click on an NPC and read some dialog while an actor reads it out loud. Then I follow a directional prompt across the map to an objective.

When I get there I hold down LMB until enough mobs die and/or I've picked up enough quest items. Occasionally RMB. If things look rough I hammer some number keys or Q, R or Tab, depending on game, all pretty much at random. That always does the trick.

Then I follow another prompt back, read and listen some more, get the goodies. Rinse and as they say repeat, ad infinitum.

The difference is in the entertainment value. ESO's quests, the ones I've seen, are dour, dull and tedious. Neverwinter's are sparky, sharp and frequently funny. The dialog is better-written, more naturalistic, with a lighter, defter touch and a more immediately engaging prose style. The voicework is livelier and lighter, more enthusiastic, more playful.

The atmosphere rings with adventure, excitement and intrigue. The action, the plots, they're much the same - evil cults, wicked necromancers, imminent threats -  but everything feels more Indiana Jones, less Apocalypse Now.

Every time I play Neverwinter I have fun. I don't know why I keep forgetting to log in. I expect I'll get a few more levels, miss a day or two, drift away once more. But I'll drift back.

And I'll always be sure of a warm welcome when I do.

Numbers Don't Lie : EverQuest

I've seen some unnerving suggestions we should all be using the unexpected personal time available during the extended lockdown to get stuff done. I like to resist such puritan notions, although I have done rather more gardening than usual and I just today took delivery of some paint and brushes in preparation for painting the stairs next week.

Mostly what I've done with the time is to write an inordinate number of blog posts. By chance I had the two weeks immediately prior to tlockdown off work as holiday, so I've now been at home for more than ten straight weeks and I've posted on sixty-three consecutive days, from March 28 until the post you're reading now. I might slacken off soon.

I do find it remarkably easy to do things that are similar to work but aren't actually work, as Mrs Bhagpuss pointed out to me only this week. Yesterday and today, for example, I spent several hours logging into EverQuest on three accounts and writing down, in longhand, the race, name, class and level of every character on every server.

It's a count somewhat compromised by a couple of factors. Firstly, there are those pesky Progression/Time-Limited and Special Ruleset servers. I can't log into any of those on two of the three accounts because only All Access members are entitled to play on them. I'm fairly sure I don't have many characters on those but there are bound to be a few.

Also, while I'm on the topic, I made a major statistical faux pas the other day, when I said that the recent mergers left Darkpaw with three such servers, to which they were about to add two more. I was radically under-representing the true position.

There are three preferred TLE servers, Mangler, Selo and Miragul, plus the two new ones, Aradune and Rizlona, but there are four more non-preferred ones, Coirnav, Ragefire, Phinigel and Agnarr, making a total of nine. That does seem like an awful lot of retro/nostalgia servers, especially after the least-popular ones were just merged.

The other element of confusion in my character count is the oft-mentioned tangled history of accounts played at various times by myself, Mrs Bhagpuss or both of us at once. Not literally at once, like some kind of bravura keyboard duet, sadly, but turn and turn about.

Also, there are some characters we both played and, to my considerable confusion, several whose origin and ownership I genuinely cannot recall. Since I'm now the only EQ player in the house I can, theoretically, play any or all of the characters whenever I feel like it, so I'm going to lump them all in together.

In total there are seventy-one characters, which is perhaps a little fewer than I expected. I can think of one or two that are missing. There was a time when Sony Online Entertainment didn't automatically transfer all characters on a server merge. Below a certain level, ten for example,they had to be logged in prior to the merge to prove they were still played or they'd flick into non-existence when the databases combined.

I had a monk on Rallos Zek and a ranger on Sullon Zek who met their end that way. Probably a few other low levels here and there encountered a similar fate. I'm still quite annoyed by the loss of that monk, who would have been one of my earliest characters. I played him quite a bit even if he did never get past about level six.

It's no surprise to find that the most played race is Gnome with twenty-two examples. Next comes Human with nine, something of a surprise, perhaps, but both Mrs Bhagpuss and I liked the original Human character models. I still do.

After that it's all fairly even. At the bottom end, the two Iksar are mine and the two Drakkin are both Mrs Bhagpuss's from, I think, our time in The Serpent's Spine. Ogre, Froglok and Halfling are the least popular with a single representative each, all of them mine.

The Ogre is my Shadow Knight. Ogres were preferred for tanking because of their total immunity to being stunned from the front. Other than that, as a very large race, they were a serious pain to play in confined spaces. If there wasn't a shaman on hand to shrink my Ogre SK he wasn't going anywhere near Lower Guk.

Halflings I always found embarassing, especially the males. I can remember exactly how my one Halfling got made, along with a good deal of her play history.  She was a Warrior, who I made at the launch of Tholuxe Paells server to partner someone whose name I've long forgotten. We agreed to start there as a duo and that's why I was playing an unusual class/race combo - it was all part of some prepared plan that fell apart in a matter of days when whoever I was supposed to be duoing with lost interest and disappeared back to their old server.

Tholuxe Paells itself is long gone, too. Dorothy's been shunted around a few times, ending up on Bertoxxolous-Saryrn alongside a whole crew of characters that used to be our Antonius Bayle team. Looking at her gear I can remember buying much of it in the Bazaar before having a good run out with her back when Mercenaries appeared.

Most popular class is a tie between Druid and Necromancer but that's a tad misleading. Unlike Mrs. Bhagpuss, I've never actually played a Necromancer at anything like the level cap of the time. Instead, what I tend to do is make a Necro for every Progression server. They have a huge advantage at low levels, with particularly powerful pets that can be had for the price of a few extremely commonplace bone chips. There are always a lot of necros on any new server.

Druids also solo very well but not until much later. They're a real pain to get started, not beginning to show their true soloing colors until the thirties. Both classes are excellent soloists and group members at higher levels, if well played. So many are badly played, though, it can often be a tough task getting the chance to convince anyone you're the exception.

The five Paladins are also a bit of a trick. Only one of those has ever been played properly and that's Mrs Bhagpuss's level fifty-four, who used to tank for us on occasion, back in the day. Three of the others are bank mules of mine. I tend to choose Paladin for that thankless task because it's the class I'm least likely to be tempted to play. To make sure they'll never leave Plane of knowledge, I recommend making the pally that most odious of races, a Froglok.

I was puzzled, then, to find I have a level 51 Paladin  on Firiona Vie. I am guessing I made that character to do something on the now-defunct Free Trade server Brekt, which was rolled into Firiona Vie in the last round of merges. I'm also guessing there was some option to start at level 51, something that has happened a few times. I don't think the character has ever been played and I can all but guarantee it never will be.

Level ranges are interesting. My highest character is my Gnome Magician on Luclin-Stromm. She was levelled authentically to the mid-60s, then boosted to 85 on a giveaway. She then levelled authentically again to 93 before settling down in the Guild Lobby to do the daily Overseer quests.

She dinged 98 this morning. My plan is to take her to one hundred doing Overseer missions before kitting her out with new gear and spells until I run out of money. Then I'll take her on a tour of some of the places she was struggling to level in at 93. Seven levels in EQ is a huge step up so I'm hoping that could be fun.

After her I have a whole bunch of eighty-fives, all boosted with Heroic freebies, and then my 84 Beastlord, who did every one of those levels the hard way. The level 78 necromancer is Mrs. Bhagpuss's highest character from back when she played. That was my Beastlord's main duo partner although you can see that I carried on for a good while alone afterwards.

Below that comes a huge slew of characters from the thirties to the sixties, reperesenting the peak of our involvement with the game. All of those have been played very extensively. Most of the rest are either classes or races I didn't get on with or stem from my determination to play on every new server when it launched.

Some of them have been around for a lot longer than their low levels might suggest. The level sixteen human warrior and level eleven human wizard, for example, are two of my very oldest characters. I still get them out and run them around, now and again.

I'm not sure this is the sort of thing those people advocating we all make good use of our enforced leisure would have had in mind but it is quite useful. It's not all that unusual for me to want to log in a particular character for some reason or other only to end up spending so long trying to find which account and server they're on I run out of patience before I find them.

There are also those few characters I discovered that I can't remember ever seeing before. A level thirty-five Druid on Xegony-Druzzil Ro, for one. Where did she come from? Or another Druid, level 39, on Bertoxxolous-Saryrn, with a name I entirely fail to recognize.

Mysteries that may never be solved. Or ever need to be, for that matter.

Throw Me In The Deep End, Watch Me Drown

Returning to MMORPGs you haven't played for a while is hard. It's become something of a truism to say that. Harder yet, verging on impossible, to begin from scratch in a game that's been around for a decade or more. Only this week, UltrViolet of Endgame Viable, talking first about the EverQuest titles then expanding to include the genre as a whole, said

"You simply can’t join in today unless you have the 20 years of institutional knowledge that comes from starting at the beginning. Actually that’s true of almost every MMORPG except World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2: If you take a year or two off of any MMORPG, you might as well plan on never coming back, because you can’t."

And it can be true, especially if you take the increasingly common boost options that jump your character somewhere close to the current cap. Indeed, in a reply to comments on his thread by myself and Wilhelm, UltrViolet clarifies his position, specifically on EverQuest II:

"I’ve always struggled with EverQuest II. I do okay with the lower levels, but there’s such an exponential increase in complexity as you gain levels that whenever I try to skip ahead with one of my free level boosted characters I just can’t make heads or tails out of it."

This is the crux of it, I think. Few, if any, MMORPGs become any less accessible than they ever were through the simple passing of the years, provided you approach them as though they had launched last week. Granted, changing aesthetic and gameplay standards may have rendered some games unattractive to the point of repulsion for many but that just makes them games you wouldn't want to play, not games whose complexities are beyond reach.

I was thinking about this today because I spent the morning playing DCUO. I had no plans to go back to Metropolis but a couple of news items popped about the game's ninth anniversary and I heard there were free gifts to be had.

This happened at the same time last year (Go figure! Anniversaries, eh?) when I logged in to buy myself a dog. On a sidenote, this is why I love blogging. Had I not written about it in two posts last January I'd have had no recollection of how I came to own Krypto or even that I did, although I'd have pretty soon worked it out the moment I logged in and saw him romping exuberantly around my Base. He's not exactly easy to miss.

What's more, the fact I was once in an all-female League called DC Bombshells would have completely slipped my mind. Female characters, that is. I probably didn't need to clarify that part. Given how unusual, even radical, a move that must have been for me, you might think I'd remember it. And I do - now I've read my blog.

Getting back to the point, one of the reasons I was keen to update (a 6GB patch) and log in was the lure of yet another max-level boost. I already have one boosted character in DCUO - possibly two - but you can never have too many. Also, I'd read that you don't have to use the boost right away; just logging in before the end of the month clips it to your account to be used whenever you feel the need.

DCUO's patcher is smooth and fast but six gigs still takes a little while. I passed the time by clicking through the link about the anniversary, which took me to the forums. There I found this thread which, I think, exemplifies the reasons it can be so difficult to restart an MMORPG by jumping in at the highest levels.

Captain1 Dynamo, the thread's author, takes several thousand words to explain, in mindnumbing detail, exactly why clicking on a boost that changes the number next to your character's name does nothing to prepare you for playing at that exalted level. He's absolutely right and not just about DCUO. It applies to most MMORPGs and for the same reason: endgame play is rarely intuitive.

Everwake was ranting about levels earlier in the week, complaining that they don't mean much any more. And he's right, too. Partly. As I said in a comment there, levels do still matter - just try going up against endgame content without them, if the game even allows you to try - but other things now matter as much or even more.

MMORPGs seem to have become games about understanding sytems and mechanics. The genre long ago abandoned "easy to learn, hard to master" if indeed it ever embraced it. It's true that newer entrants to the field have streamlined gameplay to a degree, particularly some of the F2P imports that few in this part of the blogosphere seem to play or write about, but not by all that much.

Looking at the newer MMORPGs I've played in recent years I certainly wouldn't describe ArcheAge, Black Desert, Blade and Soul or even Revelation Online as any easier to pick up and play than World of Warcraft Classic. If they seem easier it's  only because we, as veterans of the genre, have done a lot of the learning already.

As for the mid and endgames, every MMORPG, from the most hands-off, plays-itself mobile game to the extremely hands-on Star Citizen, comes drenched in convoluted progression mechanics that require considerable time and effort to unravel. Warframe, cited by many as an exemplar of accessibilty, confused me to the point where I gave up trying - and I was barely out of the tutorial.

DCUO is no exception. Even though I've been playing the thing on and off since launch - actually beta, I think - I've still never really understood many of even the more basic gameplay elements. There's a reason my bags are always full of exobits and Nth Metal - I've never had any idea what to do with them!

Until today. This morning I logged in to be greeted by a brace of overwhelming welcomes - firstly from Krypto, comically pleased to see me, and then the game itself, lobbing windows at me right and left. Being bounced at by a super-dog was new but the windows were very familiar. DCUO has always liked to start a session with a lot of "you should be doing this" advice, both in the form of pop-ups and voiced harangues from Oracle and the other super-nannies.

The suggestions on what's happening and where the action is are always welcome and it's nice to be pointed towards any free gifts that might be coming my way but for the first time I can remember, today I got some sound, simple, straightforward help with upgrading my gear. The reason it worked so well was that rather than explaining what I needed to do the UI did it for me.

I did still have to click things but arrows and visual prompts showed me what to click. For the first time I found myself using the heaps of stuff moldering at the bottom of my backpack to make my character more powerful. A paper-doll I don't recall ever seeing before appeared with my available Augments laid out clearly and the game led me through the process of choosing and improving them.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was idiot-proof. On first try I wasted a bunch of exobites upgrading the wrong sort of Augment for my power set but really, if a player doesn't know whether the character they made relies more on powers or weapons then they have no-one to blame but themselves.

I got that sorted before I wasted too many resources. Then I got rid of all the detritus clogging up my bags. It was glorious - for a moment or two. Then I went on a claiming spree to grab all the freebies going and that filled up all the space I'd just emptied.

Luckily most of it was Chroma options, some kind of new color range for armor, which vanished into my Style tab on a right-click. There were a couple of Base items including a Daily Planet Vending Machine. I got those placed right quick. That left a few things I didn't know what to do with so I auto-sorted my bags and pretended they weren't there.

With that done, I thought about following up some of the prompts I'd been getting. Hawkgirl wanted to see me on Thanagar. I've never been there. Didn't know we could, even. It sounded like a plan.

The usual problem I have at this stage is finding the portal. It often tells me to go to The Watchtower but when I get there it's half an hour of searching, every time. The place is the most confusing hub zone I've ever seen.

But wait! Once again, someone's been tinkering. I opened my map and clicked on the Warp option, which allows you to instatravel to certain places. I don't recall it ever let me go anywhere much other than The Wachtower and my Base. Now it has a list of choices including the open area for the current episode, in this case Thanagar.

I was there in seconds. Instead of spending half a session flying down endless metal corridors looking for a mission terminal and a teleport pad I took a quick briefing with Hawkgirl, spoke to some Green Lantern or other and a couple of Thanagarian officers to load up my mission journal. Then off I went to kill stuff.

Looping back at last to the opening theme, this is where I suggest that coming back to an MMORPG isn't as hard as all that. So long as you stay safely within the parameters the game sets, that is. In the end, it's all about the killing, isn't it? How hard is it to run around, find the baddies and shoot them in the head? Or in my character's case, kick them in the head, then beat them to death with a stick.

I've never been any good at combat in DCUO but I like it well enough in short bursts. I'm very well aware that the game becomes extremely demanding quite fast above a certain level but so long as I take care to stay within the limits of solo and open-world group play I can manage well enough.

It may even be that not being very good at a particular MMORPG makes returning easier. If all you really want to do is splash about in the shallow end then it really doesn't need to be any more difficult ten years in than it was at launch. Especially if someone takes the trouble to put out some flotation aids.

If you want to go down the deep end with the big boys and girls, though, well you're just going to have to learn to swim, aren't you?

It'll Squish: World of Warcraft

Perhaps the most interesting news to come out of BlizzCon this year, for me at least, was the full reveal of what's been called the "Level Squish" for World of Warcraft.  Rumor and speculation have been rife for some time concerning Blizzard's desire to cut the amount of levelling needed to reach the cap in WoW but now we have some actual facts about how it's going to work.

The official press release sums it up like this:

"Every Level Is Meaningful: Shadowlands will introduce a new leveling system, meant to provide a meaningful sense of advancement with every level achieved. Current max-level characters will begin Shadowlands at level 50 and work toward the new level cap of 60."

There's a lot more to it than just slashing the number next to your character's name by more than fifty percent. PCGamer explains some more of the detail:

"...when you start a new character they will start at level one in an entirely new zone designed to better showcase what makes World of Warcraft special and fun. Once you're level 10, you can choose an expansion to level through that will take you the entire way from level 10 to level 50. From there you can go onto Shadowlands. Each and every level will also unlock a new ability, talent, or some other upgrade so that each level is meaningful."

That's still only scratching the surface. Massively:OP posted a much more nuanced explanation of what's being proposed, drawn directly from the Shadowlands panel at BlizzCon, complete with screenshots of the PowerPoint presentation. The gist here is that, to quote Justin "Syp" Olivetti, "World of Warcraft’s leveling process will be more like a choose-your-own-adventure than ever before… at least for veteran players and their alts. For brand-new players, however, it’s more of a strict path".

The idea is that players coming fresh to WoW will begin in a brand new zone called "Exile's Reach". They'll stay there until Level 10, whereupon they'll "tackle a mini-dungeon with two bosses, visit their respective capital cities, and then be off to a one-two punch of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands for their 10-60 run."

Veteran players rolling alts will have a choice of Exile's Reach or any of the current starting zones. From there, after a trip to their faction's capital, they'll be able to speak to an NPC called "Chromie" to pick an expansion from any of those released before Shadowlands. That character will then be locked into the chosen expansion, which will provide sufficient xp to take them all the way to Level 50, after which it's into the latest content to finish the final ten levels alongside everyone else.

If you really balk at being railroaded this way then fine, Blizz is cool with that. You do you. As Syp puts it, "If you don’t really care about doing a specific expansion, you will have the choice to roam the world and do whatever you like".

Good luck with that, though. XP gain will also be increased (for everyone, whichever leveling path they take) by an estimated sixty or seventy percent. Since current Live rates already make it impossible to see more than a fraction of the content before outlevelling it, after Shadowlands releases Azeroth is going to zip past the windows of your speeding level-train in a blur.

I've been thinking about all of this quite a bit since I first heard about it. My initial reaction was something of a splutter. Really? How is this a good idea? Fix the problem of people not finding leveling engaging or meaningful by making it even less engaging and meaningful?

It seemed that the lesson Blizzard had learned from the enthusiastic take-up of Classic was "people like getting stuff for levelling so let's give them stuff every time they ding and make it so they ding faster so they feel like they're getting even more stuff!". They seemed to have missed the point that the reason people found that process so satisfying was a) because it felt like a pay-off for significant investment of time and effort and b) the new abilities received with each Ding made the characters feel more powerful, more flexible, more capable and more able to handle what came next.

By fast-forwarding the rewards so they come so thick and fast there's no time either to look forward to getting them or appreciate the difference they make to gameplay seems likely to defeat the entire object. It's hardly thrilling to gain the ability to breathe underwater if you never need to go swimming in the first place because none of your main sequence quests require it, for example.

Once the initial shock and outrage had faded, though, I began to come round to the proposed changes, at least somewhat. Playing Classic right now, I am already running into a bit of a wall through the combination of repeated content, lengthy travel and slow xp gain. What feels compulsively entertaining on a first run-through starts to seem less so on a second and third, especially when playing several characters of the same faction, concurrently.

This is largely a function of the retro nature of the Classic experience. Playing an unfamiliar MMORPG, it might take many months, even years, before the content begins to go stale, something that was even more true back in the Golden Age, when the genre itself was less well-understood. But Classic isn't new any more and neither are MMORPGs; that process doesn't take as long.

Retail WoW is already a very different beast from either Classic or the WoW of various periods in the past. And we have Classic, for those who want something approximating the original experience. In the future we might even have Classic servers for all the various Expansions, if the demand exists. Who knows where Blizzard will take the concept over the next decade?

Meanwhile there's the main game. And it is a game now, not a virtual world. The people in charge of WoW's future clearly see it as belonging to a very particular audience: people who want to Raid. Retail WoW has become a conveyor belt to some very specific content and the Level Squish is designed to make that belt move faster and deliver its passengers more smoothly to the endpoint.

Curiously, the specific way they've chosen to do it could have positive implications for players with no interest in raiding. What the new approach to levelling does is split the whole fifteen-year package into separate games, all of which end in raiding. At which point, if you don't like raiding, you might decide you've "won".

I've often suggested that one way to avoid the problems of power creep and content decay that plague every long-lasting MMORPG would be to maintain all the expansions as discrete entities. I imagine a system where characters have to graduate (or, as I'd lay odds it would be called, "Ascend") from one expansion to the next, maintaining continuity and integrity for the individual characters but, for the player, effectively starting over afresh each time.

WoW's new levelling game isn't quite that but it's a stepping stone towards it. Of course, it still points inexorably towards an end-game which, I believe, is of interest to far fewer potential customers than the original open world approach that once saw WoW reach twelve million paying subscribers. I don't believe the Level Squish will return the game to its former commercial success, let alone revive its lost cultural significance.

It might, however, make for an amusing series of vignettes. By focusing entirely on the storyline of each expansion and re-tooling the game so it can be played as a series of narrative-driven video games, each with its own, clear ending, Blizzard can lay WoW to rest as an MMORPG once and for all.

The extended virtual world motif never really suited a company that places far more importance on narrative than the form is able to support. By reverting to a focus on directed gameplay in service of a pre-written story, perhaps Blizzard will be able to take back control of a vehicle that long ago outpaced their ability to steer it in the direction they intended.

Looking back at posts on this blog it's clear I rather enjoyed the tight, disciplined storytelling in starter zones like Kezan and Gilneas. That's the direction WoW has been taking ever since the Vanilla era ended and perhaps it's where they need to go. WoW won't really be an MMORPG any more but maybe it will be a better game because of it.

Party On! : Secret World Legends

Anniversary celebrations in MMORPGs often fill a dual role. For current players they fit into the game's calendar as one of the major holidays but there's also an opportunity for the company to remind the world in general - and ex-players in particular - that their game still exists.

As every MMORPG developer from Daybreak to Jagex seems to have discovered, the most fruitful route to increased login activity is nostalgia and nothing brings on a burst of the old rose-tinted like a birthday rolling round. On the other hand, sometimes there are things in your past you don't want to be reminded about.

Two years after an apparently successful launch, Secret World Legends looks very much like an also-ran, languishing in the slipstream of another, more profitable, higher-profile franchise, Conan, which saw its own successful revamp in Conan Exiles. Many Secret World veterans have never forgiven the company for mothballing the original game in favor of the supposedly more mainstream revamp and even players who were willing to go along with the change have run out of patience with the glacial pace of new content.

I just noticed how thick the soles on my boots are...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Funcom's announcement of the Second Anniversary celebrations for SWL was received in certain quarters with a considerable degree of cynicism. Still, it offers a rare opportunity for the game to make an appearance on news sites, potentially bringing in some fresh (or more likely already-used) blood.

Talking about player retention in EVE Online yesterday, Wilhelm linked to a Superdata report that claims most new players beyond the two-year mark arrive as a result of recommendations from people already playing. A big bash like an Anniversary at least gets people talking. It's a start. I haven't heard anyone as much as mention SWL for months but over the last few days a few passing comments and mentions have cropped up in blogs I read. I doubt the game would have pinged my radar this summer had it not been for the publicity generated by the sophomore anniversary.

Two years may not seem much but it's probably a decade in MMO dog years. And let's not forget, The Secret World itself will be seven years old next month. Getting players to try an elderly game - or come back to give it a second chance - is hard enough. Getting them to hang around long enough to spend some money is a lot harder. SuperData estimate that just 2% of late registrants go on to play for more than thirty days.

You lookin' at my shem?

As far as inducements to stay go, there's nothing much new in this anniversary offer as far as I can tell, although I'm far from being an expert on SWL. TSW Database has an exhaustive breakdown of all the options, activities and rewards but I can't really tell what carries over from last year. I can't see much that would hold the casual player's attention beyond the duration of the event itself, no new storylines or explorable areas for example, while the official highlight, "brand new agents", involves a game system that's entirely unknown to me.

And yet, thanks to the Second Anniversary bash, it looks very much as though Secret Worlds Legends is back in my rotation. That's the rotation I don't actually have, of course: the random, whim-based, eeny-meeny choice I make most days, when I decide what I'm going to play.

I patched up and logged in a couple of days ago just to take a few screenshots and get some material for a post. I woke up conveniently close to the Argatha entrance in Savage Coast so I went to the hub to orient myself and sort my bags.

I guess this is where it all happens. Whatever "it" is...

There seemed to be a large crowd gathering next to a portal there so I hung around to see what was happening. When they all surged forward and vanished I followed them and in a few seconds I was unloading my pistols into the looming bulk of one of the PQ Raid mobs, a Talos of Gaia.

I used to love TSW's all-come, all-served hit point sponge open world holiday bosses. The only drawback was having to race all over the world while following chat and swapping channels (servers) to find one that was up.

SWL has done away with all that immersive, co-operative nonsense by putting the mobs on a fixed timer and sticking them in an instance with a portal in the game's main hub. Well, they did say they wanted to make things more accessible.

The effect is to turn the Taloses into even more of a loot pinata than they already were - and this in an event that has actual Pinatas that you hit with a bat. I am very definitely not complaining. I've done half a dozen so far.

Batter up!

They happen every hour, on the hour. Each kill gets you some drops and a shard that, when you collect five, combines into a Shem, the pet version of one of the bosses. I have two so far. Hang on, that must mean I've done ten bosses. Can that be true? I must be having even more fun than I thought!

There are login rewards and other goodies to be had but the surprising thing is that when each event ends I haven't been logging out to go play something else. I've been sticking around and playing the game.

In fact, I've done four levels. I roamed around Savage Coast for a while doing the League of Monster Hunters mission. Then I wandered over to Innsmouth Academy and did Carter Unleashed and a couple of others. From there I headed over to Blue Mountain, doing Ami Legend on the way, then the Sasquatch one for Sarge when I got to the military camp.

All of this is stuff I've already done in TSW.  I got almost to the conclusion of the main storyline of the original game and I've seen everything up to the end of Transylvania. Well, not every mission but all the scenery.

Some of it I remembered well, some only vaguely. One thing I did notice was all of it was a lot more fun. And when I say "fun" I mean "easy". I like The Secret World a lot but it was a slog. I was usually undergeared and always under-skilled. I died a lot and everything took ages. In SWL none of that happens.

Mobs die fast, missions take about a quarter as long to finish and the whole thing feels slick. What's more, my bags don't fill up with vast heaps of confusing drops that I have to spend hours sorting through and assessing. The few drops I get go straight into the Upgrade hopper and that's that.

I found myself wanting to play more and more. It had a lot to do with the addition of Levels to the game. As I was saying yesterday, the original TSW didn't use levels and at the time I had no problem with that, but I have to say that seeing that number tick up is a major motivator for me.

Levels are also more than just a cosmetic addition. If you don't level up you can't proceed with the all-important main mission sequence. I was ready to carry on with mine but when I finished Ami Legend (I think I was Level 22 at the time) the next mission on the tracker that came up was  "Level to 25". You can't make the importance of Levels any more obvious than that.

So that's what I'm doing. And I'm already nearly there. Wearing last year's party hat. Never in fashion, always in style.

Pretty much the motto of the whole Secret World franchise, I guess.

On The Level

There's been a lot of talk about levels of late. Blizzard began it with the suggestion that World of Warcraft has too many. Something ought to be done about it, they said.

Yes, but what? If anyone knew the answer to that, surely they'd have piped up long ago. How long have we had levels, now? I make it... hang on, let me think... oh, yes... forever!

Online gaming was an entirely new concept for me when I stepped onto the precarious platforms of Kelethin back in 1999 but I'd known what a "level" was since the early 1980s. Even then I was late to the party.

I first saw Dungeons and Dragons played at University, where the people playing it confirmed every prejudice about the practice I might have had, had I had any, which I didn't, because I'd barely even heard of it. Nothing about the game or its players convinced me to give it a second glance but circumstances will conspire. A year or two after I graduated I found myself spending almost every Sunday for five years, from midday to midnight, rolling weird-shaped dice and improvising, cast against type and loving it.

We started out playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first edition ruleset, which we just called AD&D, because no-one imagined there'd ever be another. Of all the myriad arcane rules and systems in the many books, by far the most prominent were levels.

Levels ruled all. A lot about your character could change during the course of a regular play session but when the number next to your name on the character sheet incremented, everything changed. Well, so long as you weren't a Fighter.

Levels didn't merely make you more powerful by increasing your stats and giving you more hit points. They gave you entirely new abilities, put new spells in your spellbook, allowed you to do things you could never have done at all before you leveled up.

Perhaps yet more significantly, as your level changed, so did the world and that change was as marked as any real-world shift from childhood to maturity. Claw and fang scraps with kobolds the size of dogs faded into memory as concerns turned to giants, dragons and other-planar powers.

That's the part I didn't like. I loved levelling, sure, but I wasn't keen on where the level curve was taking me. It was all very well gaining new powers and skills but having to use them on demons and demi-gods stretched my personal envelope of disbelief to breaking point.

The rest of the gaming group tended to agree. We got to around Level eight or nine then re-rolled to start a completely fresh campaign from Level one. When we got back to where we'd been, we dropped AD&D altogether and spent the next few years running through various RPG systems, always moving on when our characters threatened to become too godlike.

EverQuest in 1999 felt both familiar and strange. I'd played a few video RPGs in the eighties and nineties, several either based on D&D or using the genre tropes that megafranchise established. EQ had classes and races and stats and spells and magic items. And it had levels.

When I started, about seven or eight months after launch, it had fifty and lots of people had done them all. I came to a game that already knew all about endgame ennui. There was plenty of talk of "bored fifties".

To hear people waxing nostalgic about the golden days of "Classic" EverQuest, you might be fooled into thinking everyone was happy to live in that pre-lapsarian world. They weren't. The atmosphere I recall, both in game and on the forums, was an uncomfortable melange of hyperactive excitement coming from the ever-growing flood of new players like myself and an increasingly uncomfortable and cynical impatience that seemed to be settling over those who'd done their six months.

It must have been plain to the developers back then that something would have to change if the numbers were going to carry on heading in the right direction. The game was opening new servers regularly to meet the growing demand but how many of those players would stick around once they hit fifty?

The solution to the problem was already baked into the structure of the game, of course. More levels. Sony Online Entertainment set out on a course they and their successor, Daybreak Games, has followed unerringly ever since: expand the game, don't change it.

"Expansion", in this context, was a concept entirely new to me. I was familiar with Campaigns and Adventures but the idea that you might "expand" the entire game by adding more of what was already there around the edges seemed astonishing.

From the very start EverQuest expansions included a lifting of the level cap. The first, Ruins of Kunark, added ten, taking the total to sixty. That turned out to be a huge change. RoK was so vast  and those extra ten levels made such a difference to what was possible, it felt like a different game altogether.

From then onwards levels were doled out more sparingly. The next step up had to wait until 2002's Planes of Power, the game's fourth expansion and even then the cap rose by only five levels, to sixty-five, setting a pattern that has persisted ever since, with several expansions passing before another five levels are doled out.

The unnamed, twenty-sixth expansion this autumn will add the ritual five, bringing the grand total to 115. In terms of power, a Level 115 character will be to a Level 50 as a supernova is to a birthday candle. This brings problems.

As many MMORPG developers have discovered, even success can be problematic. By any measure, an online video game that can still maintain a population sufficiently large to justify the production of new, paid-for content twenty years on has to be taken for a success. But a success for whom?

Most long-running MMORPGs rely in very large part on continual growth, creating a sprawling confusion of continents and alt-planes, a palimpsest of contradictory systems and a plethora of arcane mechanics, all of which put up barriers to entry for potential new players. Those barriers can climb to impossible heights and the level cap represents the most insurmountable of all.

A new player may be willing to overlook the aging graphics. They can certainly learn the necessary systems and mechanics. Wikis and fan sites do a good job of cutting through the clutter, opening up the essentials to the light of knowledge.

All of that is manageable. Levels, as originally conceived, are not.

Even back at the turn of the millennium being Level 60 in EverQuest didn't make you seventeen per cent stronger than a Level 50. It added an order of magnitude  - at least. For that to make sense in gameplay terms, the lands those higher characters were exploring had to grow as well.

The mobs needed to be strong enough to put up a fight. The items they dropped needed to be powerful enough to provide a reward. The further the level cap receded, the more irrelevant the rest of the gameworld became.

A level 60 might not have been able to wander Lower Guk alone with impunity but a Level 65 most certainly could. By the time 2006's The Serpent's Spine expansion raised the cap to 75, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were able, gleefully, to duo through the Elemental Planes, leaving nothing standing where once, at cap, we'd cowered in corners with a full group, praying the puller wouldn't bring more than one.

I love that about levels. As a solo or duo player, an ever-increasing cap consistently expands horizons. When a new expansion arrives it's filled with places I can't see and mobs I can't kill. But all I need to do is wait.

In time a new expansion will appear and another and over time my number will float up. I'll pick away at what I can, take my xp where it comes and one day what was impossible will become possible, then easy, then trivial. It's the circle of life.

Or it used to be. Unfortunately, trivializing older content can be problematic in itself.

Veteran players often enjoy re-visiting old challenges and breezing through them without breaking a sweat, especially if there are still rewards there to grab. Some games facilitate that behavior or even make a feature of it, adding achievements and cosmetics that bypass level-based gameplay. It's an approach that works well with instanced dungeons, where over-levelled characters can monty haul at no risk without offending anyone. To the developers chagrin it's a solution that doesn't work at all in the open world.

Allowing high levels to operate freely with low in the same environment causes any number of issues. If there are targets of opportunity the high levels will monopolize them. If there's nothing of interest to the bubble of players sitting at cap in an aging game, that zone will be all but empty. Anything that relies on co-operation better have strong incentives for the capped players or it will fail.

In most older MMORPGs I've played, after a while there's been a call to re-purpose old content. It's not being used, say the players who aren't using it. Let's revamp the lot. Make all the mobs our level, give them the loot we want. So what if a few new players won't get to do what we did? When did you last see a "new" player, anyway?

Game designers are surprisingly resistant to such demands, luckily. There's the economic argument. Revamping content costs. Also someone created all this stuff and chances are they're still there, somewhere, caring about it. And, as Cataclysm showed us, players don't always take kindly to having their memories erased.

In latter years a compromise solution has appeared: level scaling. The world reflects the level of your character. Wherever you travel, in new content or old, the mobs will give you a tussle and the gear they drop will fit. It's a solution ArenaNet incorporated from the outset for Guild Wars 2 and which many other games, from Elder Scrolls Online to WoW itself, have adapted for retrofit.

And yet all those MMORPGs still have levels. GW2 has 80. ESO has 50. WoW has 120. And many games not only have levels but multiple level-like systems, carrying on way past the cap, with the direct intent of mimicing the same mechanics. Indeed, as I think about it, just about every MMORPG I can think of has levels, except for those few that replace them with "Skills", another, very similar discussion of its own.

Only yesterday I started playing Secret Worlds Legends again. SWL is the revamped version of  the excellent but under-performing MMORPG The Secret World, one of the very few games of its genre that chose not to use levels. When Funcom rebadged and remarketed the game in an attempt to appeal to a larger, more mainstream audience, one of the changes they made was to remedy that omission. I did three levels in SWL yesterday evening.

Players complain about levels all the time. Levels cause any number of problems, only a very, very few of which I've mentioned in this lengthy post. Almost every mature game nowadays includes multiple ways to speed up or skip over the painful process of leveling: instant max levels, xp boosts, heirloom items. Scaling content attempts to render levels all but irrelevant. And yet, here they still are.

Blizzard, worried about the ever-growing number next to the name on your character sheet, wants to squish it. But no-one's talking about making it go away completely. Whatever problems levels may bring, it seems not having them is worse.

There's more to say about all this and more will be said. Levels aren't going anywhere and neither are the problems they bring. For now, though, I'm going to pass the conch. I'm sure it'll come back around again soon enough.

Just like my next level cap increase.