I've run into some gaming blogs and posts I've quite enjoyed recently.
1. 18 Years Later, Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online? The comments are where the heart of it is, although they go a bit off in the middle, stick with it.
2. Raph Koster's Website, and two of those pages, A UO Postmortem Of Sorts and Popular Posts.
3. The Ancient Gaming Noob, and two of his pages on in-game economies: Yelling and Selling in Waterdeep and, relatedly, Charting the Relative Natures of MMO Economies.
I want to pull a quote from Koster's UO write-up:
We also wanted to get away from levels...For quite some time, I've felt that leveling is ridiculous. It's a useless, sparkling hamster wheel. In WoW and EQ2, the designers had to come up with ways to deal with it--eventually in EQ2, there was the "mentoring" system, where higher-level characters could mentor down in level to the level of a lower-level character for the purpose of grouping (thus the name mentoring). In ESO currently, they have essentially done away with leveling although it is still very much a part of the game. What I mean is that, your level is meaningless in terms of encounters--everything is, behind the scenes, scaled to max level--and so levels are meaningless for grouping (which itself isn't even needed much of the time). Yes leveling is still relevant for skills and gear, but it's just a shiny carrot.
(Edit: I just caught this post from Koster, Do Levels Suck? Really nice thoughts there.)
So I thought about it, and went back in my mind to the cannon for the mechanics of much of the fantasy-based computer gaming today: AD&D (let's be real here, 1st edition, which wasn't even called "1st edition" at the time since it was the only edition). This is true for single-player, single-player party (like Wizardry or Icewind Dale, or even multi-boxing in an MMO), multiplayer, and MMO scenarios. What was leveling like in D&D?
It totally made sense for players. No, wait, it was also horrifically problematic within the storyline of the game itself. Why?
Because elves. (Blame the elves, poor things.) Remember? They could live for hundreds of years, so in theory they could gain level after level, hundreds of levels beyond the capabilities and lifespans of their original human companions. Thus, the longer-lived races (like elves and dwarves) were level-capped, while short-lived humans had no level caps. This made absolutely no sense within the fantasy world, it was completely and solely because it would lead to 200 year old elves who were also level 200 magic users and would be like demi-gods, and that would imbalance the game. Of course there's a big "if" on that last one: only if DMs allowed it, which they didn't have to. Remember, in D&D1, IIRC in the DM's Guide, there was a paragraph at the back (or maybe the front) saying how these are not rules, they are just guidelines.
So one on hand, the origin of today's leveling (which probably has a history beyond AD&D, and does make some sense within lived experience) is terribly flawed. Yet it could have been dealt with differently (how many people actually played characters forever and would have actually run into level caps?).
And today's leveling has another issue, which is that every level is the same. At higher levels you need more XP, but the things you do give you more XP. It's not exponential, it's just linear.
This is part of a larger discussion in game design about where the skill lies and how to get more skill. Is it like Halo, entirely within the player? Does it mostly lie in the character, like WoW? Is increasing skill dependent on time (levels), or perhaps spending money (pay-to-play)?
I think it could be done differently. They never level up in the other fantasy game canonical source, Tolkien's imaginary worlds, although Gandalf is old and powerful with an intentional connection between age as experience and power as level. Skills could erode over time partially, or parts of them could and other parts could be maintained, or re-learning forgotten skills could come with a discount compared to learning them the first time.
