Shattered Kingdoms

I don't like this thread. Leveling is the best its ever been touching it at this point would be a travesty.

Actually I love this thread. Check out the poll results.

Ok I changed my mind I like this thread.

This thread puts the cart before the horse in many ways. Less easy does not automatically mean more exciting.

If you know where to find NPCs that consider as tough challenges to you that, in fact, are not, you've unlocked easy leveling. Easy meaning you can do it in the background at a good pace. You are able to be efficient and not spend many resources winning.

If you find NPCs that consider as tough challenges that are, you've unlocked tedious leveling. You can do it in the background, but you'll be doing it at a slow pace since you will spend one type of resource or another to a greater extent by defeating the challenge. You will have downtime.

Trying to draw blood from a stone by making the single most rote and repetitive task of any player outside of character metabolism can never provide a "fits all sizes" solution. There really isn't any way to provide an encounter where every character must choose between efficient and inefficient successful tactics depending on the varying situation. The classes are not robust enough.

Even though there are about 1368 things a mortal could ever possibly do, given a number of those will never happen (lol cast 'create item'), there's just not a common ability currency for builders to leverage. There's no uniting concepts like MMO aggro, 4E marking, 3E threat, and so on and so on that classes access and manipulate through different abilities.

We get throw scripts and prone instead. Has that made leveling more difficult? More challenging? More fun?

Leveling is, and has been for some time, FAR too easy. A range of characters' abilities/power is what used to make this mud fun. GM nowadays is the start to your character, not a pinnacle. That's really ridiculous. Leveling is not difficult, but for most people neither is anything else. If there was some separation in the levels of characters you couldn't whip up 6 gm chars to do whatever you wanted at any given point, and maybe more people would learn the ins and outs of a wide variety of things? As it stands it is really a twink mud of who can use what they have, knowing the other person knows they have it, to best each other. It's sad, really.

Why wouldn't you be able to get around with ease? Buy a couple invis potions and a flying pet and you're golden.

Personally, I've always loved the idea of a group of NPCs existing at each rank so that if you have a group full of people within that rank, killing that group nets you a quest-reward type conclusion that would give you a whole level. Dying to them would be death and a scripted junkloot. Risk/reward has always been what I think the game should be, and there should be scales of xp outside anything the game has seen yet (whole levels for killing a group for instance). It's how you meet hard, and not tedious.

Either way, Hello Kitty...I hate to say it but the game only being fully realized by GM has been the way of it for nearly all of the 10+ years I've known the game. It's why PK is so huge - it's the only difficult and variant enough exercise in the game. After a period of time anything becomes easy, and things noted as hard are uncovered and just not hard anymore. It's always going to happen in a static world. Separation in character levels has existed before, and it doesn't promote what you suggest. It promotes more time face-grinding random NPCs (including law NPCs) trying to XP instead of interact, it promotes an even LARGER disparity between twinks that shifts the balance of power, it promotes more item hording as only a small sect of the playerbase and even keep items, it promotes a handful RPers being completely shut out of certain events because it requires XP, or they're trying to play a controversial concept that earnestly promotes people trying to kill them...so they do get killed, repeatedly, and that earnest concept disappears forever.

You call it sad, I call it one of the best possible scenarios for a MUD with this kind of atmosphere and promotion of PK. It isn't perfect, but it could be a lot worse.

And magically know the location of every area you need to get to, and possibly just "happen" to know the portal schedule, and probably randomly have a friend who can open gates for you, right?

You said "an hour." It's not possible for most players to do in that time frame.

[REDACTED], I still don't know the portal schedule.

Me either, but getting invis, refresh, and a flying pet, is super easy.