I naturally outlevel my casual friends just from more /played time. I'm trying my best to slow down on my Lore-Master in LOTRO, but even my attempt to shift to crafting results in a fair bit of exp while I farm Wargs for leather. I've even passed Nelgdorf and Nazrin by several levels.

Being able to play compelling content together with my friends has been an issue in almost every MMORPG I've played, either because of myself pulling ahead or someone else.

City of Heroes has several tools to get around the problem, including the Sidekick system (which I adore) and now the Leveling Pact (which divides exp between two players, even while one is logged out). CoH's advances have been embraced by EQ2's Mentoring and Final Fantasy XI's Level Sync, but other games haven't adopted the ideas.

There are three reasons why I assume level disparity between friends is accepted (and even preferred) in MMORPG design:

• As Pacing for storyline, leveling is a good game mechanic, but it may be so finely tuned that it just doesn't allow for adjustments like syncing.
• Leveling independently is often considered as a rite of passage to 'know your class'. In other words, it's pacing for character growth. Any perceived boost may be seen by the playerbase as unfair gains: This was an issue in Age of Conan, where many players balked at the mentoring system until it was nerfed past usefulness.
• Level disparity feeds The Vision, which dictates that you should find and group with new acquaintances while you level up so you'll have sticky in-game-only friends at Endgame to make it emotionally difficult to leave the game.

Simpler and more apt for my current situation:

I wish LOTRO had something akin to Vanguard's Reduced XP Gain spell. Basically, some way to lock my level and not gain any exp until my friends catch up. I think nearly every MMORPG could benefit from a Level Lock feature (The Vision be damned).

Imagine players who would like to experience the old pre-expansion raiding content by locking their levels at the old Endgame. Or roleplayers who don't wish to grow up past Hobbiton. Granted, most would probably still prefer to be competitive at the very top of the scale, but what a natural way for developers to stretch content further, via player choice.

And it would as easy as candy to implement too.

I've requested a Level Lock feature via a post on Turbine's suggestions forum. I hope they're listening. =)

I'm a little late with it, but here's my personal recap of 2008 gaming to pile onto the bonfire. It was a busy year:

WoW: I started the year fresh from quitting WoW. After 3 years I had burned out. I piled on the criticism pretty thick for awhile, especially regardingly Blizzard's metagaming trickery, their tendency to stretch everything into a grind, and how their main storyline is reserved for raids.

Overall though, I still recommend WoW as the best MMORPG for any new player to try. The leveling, open world and dungeons are all superb.

My best days in WoW are in the past and it'd take more than one expansion to get me back. My lack of playing won't hurt Blizzard in any way, they'll keep on wearing money hats.

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AoC: If you read some of my early posts about Age of Conan, you might think it was fantastic. I did too, there were parts that were amazing, the combat and character animations in particular. But the devs at Funcom spent too much time tinkering with their combat system and working on features where they had no clue (like PvP sieges, ouch). If they had focused on their strengths (PvE questing and immersion), who knows how much better it could have been.

Who's going to trust Funcom now? Oddly, I still think The Secret World could be promising. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the storytelling stuff (it is Cthulhu-esque), but I'm probably in the minority.

In the end I realized AoC was fun played as a solo / single-player game, but as an MMO it was a mess.

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WAR: I didn't have as high expectations of Warhammer, but at release I was surprised with how good it seemed. WAR's world appeared to be complete with significant content. They sure fooled me, even for the first few weeks of launch. The storefront was full of shiny toys, but inside it turned out to be an illusion.

The Public Quests? One of those illusions I mentioned. The first few were great, but past those the scripting was lame, the mob AI even worse and the influence grind via repeating "kill 150 mobs" was just nasty. This is from the designers who criticized other games for kill X mob quests!

PvP-wise, WAR is the best there is for current MMOs. That's WAR's saving grace, but it's also something I criticize deeply, because it still has a long way to go before being great even in this one category alone. My experience in RvR wasn't really PvP at all, it was zerg-style raiding on Keep Lords. I hate zerging, so I'm surprised I stuck with WAR as long as I did.

Bottom-Line: I think WAR will do well as the PvP niche MMO. The classes are well balanced for the core PvP. There are enough people that crave that so much, they'll look past Mythic's failures and even declare it great, because they lack any other good MMO choices for PvP.

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CoH: I wandered back into City of Heroes briefly, but I found the changes minimal and what was truly different I didn't like. The 'crafting' feels wedged in and out of place, plus it spoils much of the game's original balance.

  ·  ·  ·

Vanguard: I purchased Vanguard this year after rumours that it had recovered from its failings. That was a dumb move. Ugly, ugly, ugly game.

  ·  ·  ·

Left 4 Dead: One of the few non-MMO games this year that had a strong effect on me. It has the best elements that many MMOs are missing: Cooperative gameplay that's satisfying as both PvE and PvP. It's fantastic. This will be a LAN favourite between myself and my gamer-nerd friends for a long, long time.

Valve really has me on board with Steam at this point. Now I wish every game (new and old) was available via Steam.

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EVE Online: Speaking of Steam, that's how I finally gave EVE Online a spin. It's involved. Really involved. The geek in me could get totally absorbed, but I prefer to play these games with my less geeky friends, not leave them behind in a stats obsession.

  ·  ·  ·

LOTRO: I'm still in the honeymoon stage with Lord of the Rings Online, so I have few complaints at this point. Everything has been great so far, I love the leveling pace and the attention to detail in everything from graphics, mob AI, lore, quest logs... even down to the facial and emote animations on the characters. This is the style of MMORPG I prefer, one with a lush rich world and a ton of side distractions so I can immerse myself into everything. Nelg, Lurch, Michelle and I have been playing non-stop. We'll be wrangling more friends in to join us soon.

I'll probably be in Middle Earth for awhile.

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Next up, my expectations for 2009...

I don't subscribe to the theory that gamers are anti-social nerds who hide in their basements and have no real friends. Too many MMORPGs seem designed around that cliché, that we're loners who need new introductions in order to play a social game.

Leveling systems are used as motivation for players to push through content. But players of disparate levels don't mesh well together, so grouping with your existing friends is usually tossed aside in favour of constantly finding new ones. Grouping and guild tools operate as a social introduction system, trying to integrate you with others at the same level.

It was understandable a decade ago. Back when Everquest was released, it was unlikely that your real-life friends would be playing an online subscription game, so you needed mechanics that helped you group with strangers. But now this genre is mainstream and even if players aren't together with their local buddies, they're bound to have strong bonds from other games as they migrate to the newer MMOs. Cross-game guilds are becoming commonplace.

Some games even require a large diverse population for the content to work correctly. WAR is the biggest example so far: if players aren't active and working together in any given area, the content just doesn't work. Players are sorted into level tiers, realms and racial pairings, so new bonds are needed between players even more, if only temporarily for the task at hand. This is supposed to be 'epic'.

But I already have friends.

I'm okay with adding a few new friends now and then, but I don't need a pool of hundreds of them. I'd rather concentrate my time with a few close friends that I can relate to. The 'epic' crowds are more of a sideline interest, I like them there, but not at the expense of my primary enjoyment of simply playing together with my friends. Most of the group and guild tools aren't helping that.

The number one reason I enjoy Endgame is because eventually I end up on even strength as my friends and only then can we enjoy challenging game content together. Unfortunately, most Endgame content then shifts to even larger groups (raiding, warband sieges, etc.), presumably to reinforce the need for yet more new friends.

When Cryptic created their Sidekick / Mentoring system to allow players to pair up and balance their level differences, I thought it would be a paradigm shift for all MMORPGs. I was shocked that Blizzard didn't implement the feature for World of Warcraft's release. I was also disappointed that Age of Conan gave barely more than lip-service to mentoring, it was poorly implemented and quickly nerfed because it didn't match their content. WAR has similar features automated within tiers for Scenarios and RvR, but again it's a limited and half-assed implementation that doesn't come anywhere close to resolving the essential problem while leveling.

I have friends. I'd like to play with my friends, not just chat with my friends while I play.

No wonder Left 4 Dead has had phenomenal pre-order sales, it's a game focused on small groups of players cooperating together. Friends. It's a a shame the MMORPG genre hasn't learned from the popularity of small-team coop games.

MMORPGs should focus on content that allows players to get together in small groups of their own choosing.

Please give me more tools and content to play with my existing small group of friends.

Update: Mythic may have some features in place to make their public dungeons a little more sane, much like their public quests. This post has been made without experiencing them first-hand, so I'm open to retracting depending on how it works once I've seen it personally. Regardless, I dislike the idea, why bandaid something that works so poorly when there are already better options?

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Public Dungeons suck, that is all.

Or at least, that should be all.

I'd have thought that this antiquated design in MMOs would have been long buried. a throwback from the early days of UO and EQ. Whether it's on a PvP server or PvE, making a dungeon open as a public space is a welcome invitation to the worse kinds of asshattery. Didn't we have enough of that already?

Anyone who's experienced one shouldn't need me to list the numerous idiotic activities that public / open dungeons attract, so I won't bother.

But Funcom revived this tired concept and made some public dungeons in Age of Conan. It was a huge mess and a low point for AoC and that's saying something. Now apparently Mythic has also left some of their Warhammer dungeons as open spaces. What were they thinking?

I can guess the intention, to have a bit of extra crazyness on 'Open RvR' servers. But shouldn't the designated RvR capture areas be the focal point for skirmishes, not some cheap ganking while players are occupied with a dungeon boss / mob?

If they've got to balance these dungeons for the extra sorts of 'activity' they'll have, then the encounters won't be well balanced for a standard 3-6 man team. That's a big disappointment to me, because the small team tailored stuff is the best fun I have in these games.

Note: There's a huge difference between Warhammer's Public Quests and a dungeon that's just left open. Public Quests have inclusion so that all players can participate and benefit, they're completely designed around having crowds go at them.

I'm really hoping they don't have much in the way of these open dungeons in tier 4, that would be a huge disappointment for me and such a waste of content that could be great otherwise.

"Unless Funcom somehow screws up"-- That was my mantra for over a year prior to Age of Conan's release. There were so many features that sounded great when discussed in dev interviews and on the AoC forums, I was so pumped for this game. Never before had myself and my friends / guildmates made such plans for a game prior to release-- and I feel burned for it.

I love the core game, the combat has been fantastic, visuals are stunning and the immersion is good as well. The city construction is cool, but turns out hollow since the cities themselves don't do much, especially on a PvE server where you can't run around and shoot arrows at each other from the walls.

Funcom has created what I feel is a great leveling up game with good solo fun, but it's not a compelling group experience. It's especially lacking in quality dungeons for small groups at Endgame. The crafting is bland and there are so few things to fiddle with besides just running around and killing mobs.

'Massive' Mistake?

Funcom is determined to push the 'massive' aspects of Sieges and Raiding, which is a direction leaving me cold. They're now working on even bigger Sieges, even bigger Cities and even bigger Guilds (in the form of Alliances). What happened to the original plans for PvP questing in the Border Kingdoms with smaller fights over resource areas and towers? Without that stuff, they have no initial buildup into Sieges, so they're trying to leapfrog higher to provide progression.

How can their game engine support 300-player Sieges? It doesn't even work well with the current Sieges or even their standard Raid size of 24. Anytime I've seen more than a handful of players casting at once, things get out of sync and characters pop in and out of existence. Hell, even just the streets of Tarantia the NPCs blip in and out. Their solution: Drop visual effects from other players? Ugh.

A perfect example of how screwed up their PvP system is: When a Siege is about to take place, all other players are kicked out of that Border Kingdom. Not that the Border Kingdoms have much to do anyway, they're complete wastelands, but this mechanic ensures Funcom will never be able to bring Border Kingdoms up to par with the pre-release expectations.

Even if they fix what's broken now, they're not even close to the Endgame they should have had.

I really feel as though Funcom has made the wrong game for their Dreamworld engine, which seems far more appropriate to smaller groups. It looks spectacular from a solo perspective. They should stick with their strengths.

Where I'm stuck

They're now dicking around with balancing, mostly for PvP and Raiding with a few things just thrown in to slow down the gangway pace of leveling. The glory of the combat is getting watered down fast as they reduce the number one fun factor of the game. Due to their recent changes to balance out the gender damage issue, my Polearm Guardian's animations seem stuttery and unnatural. =(

The Apprentice obliteration was a huge blow to my daily fun, the day it hit was the day I played significantly less since I can no longer team up in a meaningful way with Michelle or Lurch as well as most of my friends and family-related guildmates.

So what am I left with? I can compete with the 12-to-1 ToS ratio that's AoE'ing the snot out of the high end mobs in Kheshatta (no thanks) or I can do Villas over and over again. I can't even spend my time collecting resources for my Tier2 guild city because they won't fit in my bags unless I first spend 22.5g to progress my Architect skill. Crafting as a gold sink != fun. I'm left feeling very unenthusiastic for anything gameplay-related, I'm just socializing with my friends, which I can do regardless.

So it's moving on time

I'm going to be parking Bello, my level 77 Guardian for awhile. Perhaps a short while, perhaps a very long while, it all depends on whether Funcom brings in content I'd actually like to play. What's in the game at the high levels right now is lacking, I've just plain run out of things I'd like to do.

I thought I would have been able to hold out a minimum of six months.

Thanks to Donna for pointing this out to me. For a review made for comedic effect, it's fairly thorough. Some of it is bang-on:

I laughed, I cried, I reposted it here. =)

Oh and I admit, I do secretly dream of living inside a Boris Vallejo painting.

(Note: their video server seems a bit slow to get started, but if you're an Age of Conan player, wait for it. It's worth it, trust me).

Dear Funcom:

It's not the combos that make your melee combat so fun. It's easy to think that, but it's not.

It's the fact that I can swing a weapon and everything that it hits, it hits. It's running up to mobs and just going at it. That's visceral joy.

Don't nerf that. You'll be watering down the best part of your game.

Funcom's stealth changes have been decreasing the damage dealt on multiple mobs. I don't know all of the details, but it's a noticeable difference as I play. In the next patch, they're taking this even further:

So now we'll have to pay more attention to our targets.

Weeks ago I could handle 5 mobs my level with ease and even push it to 7 mobs (although my death rate would go up considerably). I'm playing a Polearm "Frenzy" Guardian, a class and spec that's specifically aimed toward holding and dealing with crowds of mobs.

Lately however, I cannot handle the same mobs in groups of 3 and even 2 can cut it awfully close. I could previously clear a Villa without any deaths as long as I paid attention, but now I'm dying repeatedly. I realize this is in part to leveling up higher, but even scaling back like that feels odd, shouldn't I be more powerful at Endgame?

I understand getting nerfed, I could accept that, but that's not what this is about.

The number one joy of this game has been the combat. I love not having to target, I love running in and grabbing mobs like some kind of berzerker warrior. I love that my polearm hits what it swings through, that it's NOT target-based combat. Or at least that it's less-emphasized on the target, there should only be a marginal difference. I should sweep my weapon through mobs again with the thrill of watching them all take noticeable damage.

Funcom, please, don't reduce the best parts of this game to appease players who are demanding what they're accustomed to in other games. I understand you want to balance, but don't water down your game in the process.

Let the balance-obsessed players decide to play the classed they perceive to be overpowered, they'll do that anyway. Don't nerf away the biggest thing this game has going for it. This is 100% about the fun factor.