Shattered Kingdoms

This has been answered before, although perhaps not in this incarnation of the topic. Making levelling faster just reinforces the mindset that you can't "play the game" until you get to GM (or master). If it's super-fast to level, then there will NEVER be anyone at intermediate level and therefore no intermediate level game. It's a vicious cycle. Instead of that, we should be encouraging you in every way possible to spend some time grabbing a status or two and then sitting back and roleplaying and interacting with other people your level.

And I don't mind saying that the SK Bonanza is not going to be a one-shot deal. There will be more dates in the future that will give out the accelerated levelling bonus. If you want faster levelling and you especially find it easier to do in groups, my suggestion would be to spend most of your time levelling during Bonanzas. Ideally you can get from Amateur to Journeyman in a weekend, and then spend some the time between Bonanzas interacting with other people who started that weekend and only levelling when it is convenient.

That statement just made me lose a bet.

Reading that post made me pretty happy, D.

SK has a lot of good history and it'll be neat when this stuff goes in and players can get more of it.

If you want people to stop leveling and do something else, you must provide an incentive. Currently, there is none. Pleveling is a significantly more efficient approach to leveling, and gets you into the fun levels much more quickly. There's just no reason not to plevel.

Here's a great example that multiple people have suggested (I believe Forsooth was the first): set familiarity to a daily timer, and halve the time it takes to go from newly discovered to get out and explore. This doesn't speed up leveling, but it rewards the people that don't want to level all day by offering an advantage to spreading leveling periods out. Additionally, it makes it much harder to trap yourself - as is, certain leveling areas are good across 10-15 levels, and using them up in the first few available levels can screw you over three ranks later. A daily timer would remove the necessity to plan out so much. Hell, even a weekly timer could work. If you want to increase that incentive even more, provide a regeneration bonus alongside 1st and 2nd tier familiarity (but for the love of all that's holy, don't incur a regeneration penalty).

Here's another idea, adapted from GemStone 3/4: instead of just executing a straight drop to xp gained when you're too familiar with an area, put that xp into a "reservoir" of sorts, which has a cap on it. This reservoir will slowly drain into your xp pool over time, granting you the xp you would have gained. The only catch is, you must be resting for this reservoir to drain. You could accelerate the rate at which it drains by being in an inn. The concept is essentially that you've learned too much at one time, and need some time to rest and process all that you've learned.

These are two easy-to-implement examples that would, IMO, relieve a world of stress from the process of leveling. The pressure to level is, as you say, self-created - but you cannot expect that pressure to be alleviated without incentives. With ideas like these two, I don't have to feel like I'd be wasting time by stopping to sit in the inn - in fact, I'd be using my time wisely by stopping and resting.

Think of all the benefits:

1) These are implementations that do not punish players. They limit the benefits of pleveling through reward. Players are granted a less stressful, more efficient leveling experience by taking breaks and going at a more consistent pace.

2) This is a direct funnel into fountain RP. With the recall points being outside cities (COUGH), these days casual RP is not easy to come by. Offering more incentives for people to sit down and rest, especially in inns, will almost instantly boost the available pool of people to casually socialize with.

3) This is an easy way to control the long-term pace of leveling. Three day GMs would no longer be practical by comparison. A level 50 not making use of these benefits would most likely spend 3-4x as many hours just leveling as the patient player. The option to plevel would still be there, and the rewards would be just the same - but the pressure is gone because proper incentives are provided.

That's my dream for SK leveling.

I should add: these should not be alternatives to making the pre-40 experience more meaningful. Obviously if you want to slow people down a bit, there need to be good, character-building opportunities available at every step of the path. Adding more fun options will absolutely reduce the pressure to plevel - but there need to be hard changes to the mechanics, first, instead of soft magnets, if you will. People will not pause leveling because of the cohort system. It's simply not a strong enough incentive, even if it's a good idea.

To be quite honest, and please don't hate me for saying this: With the number of players playing SK lately, I am extremely surprised the +experience aren't turned on weekly, and right now doesn't even look like monthly. There are active imms to hold small events, aren't there?

Another honest confession, again, don't hate me, even with the +experience turned on, sociable charisma score and green familiarity bar all the way, it still took the whole weekend to grind that last 4 levels to grandmaster. It really didn't make any noticeable difference.

Those of us who still play love this game. We wish more players to play with too. Everyday a conversation in the game comes down to this: "We are bored, and what are we playing SK for at Grandmaster?" Can anyone answer that one? Recently it's just relic trading and occasional skirmish in Teron.

EDIT: Minette quasi-beatmetoit.

Which is due in part, I think, to a much-waned playerbase. When there were people occupying the centers of most cities there was plenty of RP in there (and plenty of bad RP too, but whatever.) Heck, just meeting those people was incentive, especially if you needed a group to go somewhere. Under old numbers this system would have been unnecessary.

Inside of the current ghost-towns where you're lucky to meet 2 people at some hours, there is very little incentive. Correct. However, I don't think hard-coding some kind of leveling parachute in is going to really help the current state of RP much, and it's because of those numbers... its seems more like a limitation and commandment on the player. "Okay, now go hang out!" Right now the player would just get pissed off, because he'd probably have nobody to talk to and his leveling just got slowed. I think if we can first and foremost just solve the problem of player recruitment/sustainment then we can solve plenty of gameplay issues as a result.

In its current state, code-wise, I would not (and do not) recommend this game to my friends. It has enormous potential, but the simple fact is that the game is not fun until you've dumped 100+ hours into it. That is not a reasonable investment, IMO. Games I buy for fifty bucks are considered pretty long if they last forty hours - and that's okay. If the game started thinking in terms of making each hour count more (which is why I suggested those ideas - concentrating time usage into an effective manner), I think we'd be a lot better off.

Bringing players is a temporary solution. Fixing the code so the game isn't so ass-reamingly slow for the first 100 hours? That's what will keep players for the long run. We should be focusing on retention, not expansion.

Those are some great suggestions which I will seriously consider, Salandarin. If everyone put as much thought into solutions instead of just complaining about the problems, I think we would have a lot more success. Complaining doesn't encourage new people to try the game - it drives people away from trying the game. Continuous statements like "nobody is playing" just creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After re-reading your post I think I probably jumped the gun with some assumptions about your system, Salandarin. As long as it doesn't actually force a hand on the player/slow them down more than now I think it has a lot of promise.

Dulrik, I'm sorry if I came off exceedingly negative. Everyone is crowded around here lamenting days long past and I'm sure it gets old on you fast... in fact it probably got old years ago. But I'm here now and 100+ hours down the effin' sink, so there