Shattered Kingdoms

I have no trouble at all leveling.

I agree that leveling is too hard early on in the game. I think that there are a couple reasons why. Dying and experience gain. If I could make the following changes, I would today:

Lowbie stun - NPCs will not kill characters not at least of Journeyman level. They will stun you, but never kill. There's different ways I could see this being done, but it sucks when you leave your newbie school and get owned by a level 15 NPC.

Experience redistribution - Cut in half the experience point requirement for the first 25 levels. Divide those points equally into and add to the last 10 levels. I think of many RPG's and how quick you can level up and generally never face NPC death for a good long while.

I don't want to spend a day of my life to get a character to Journeyman status. I want to see what a class is like and get a feel for it before I have to invest days of my life to get most of the skills. I leveled a minotaur for the Bonanza. It took way too long to get to a level which was useful - let alone not weak. I definitely found it frustrating and less than fun.

Okay this is going to be a long post-

Lets review facts first:

*SK is virtually unplayable under lv 35, as mostly everyone is GM,
and GM's usually bother with other things and do not involve lower
level characters in them, such as trips to dangerous areas, PK, or
trips to level those 45+ characters.

*SK areas wear off too fast to allow 2 players who do not constantly
log on at the same time to level effectively in the same area. Yes,
familiarity will benefit everyone in the group, but the lower familiarity
player will feel he is being abused.

*The player-base of SK is not vast enough to have constant numbers
of rp-compatible leveling players so you can always find people to level
with. In fact, you usually don't, until level 40.

*(I may be wrong here so please correct me if I am)
Leveling as it is now consists of mainly of how much damage your
character deals to an xp-vomiting NPC. In other words, in a group
the higher damage output character will do better than a weak warrior
and the healer will only benefit by the typical xp you get off the heal
spell, without factoring in the difficulty of the NPC that is being killed.

*Leveling in SK = grinding. Wether that is grinding a spell or NPCs.

Now, to solutions:

What do we all want from leveling?

Q: Do we want it to be faster?
A: I don't think so. I mean, if it comes to that, D could just let us create characters at lv 50 and never bother with leveling altogether.

Q: Do we want leveling to be more fun?
A: Definitely yes.

Q: How do we make leveling more fun, but at the same time keeping it from going faster?
A: We find a formula. I'll use some random examples as they come to me right now.

When do we consider a character has been played long enough to be GM?
Let's say, at least 2 months of RL existence of the character, and 120 hours of playtime.

Should the character just receive levels while being idle? Hell no. But. Depending on the hours he has played and the time he has existed in the game, he should receive XP bonuses or penalties to his 'grinding' (aka usual leveling proceess), and general xp bonuses to anything he does.

For example:
Resting and chatting at an inn increases the amount of XP you will get from the next NPC you kill for X xp (see WoW, one of its coolest features imo)

Other thingies to make leveling more fun:
Receiving XP for taking damage.
Receiving XP for healing while engaged in a difficult fight.
Receiving XP for logging out after a long session of play.

On the other hand, to make leveling slower:
Introducing XP cap per day, after a certain level when the character
can be actually playable.


****

On a different subject, the entire PK frenzy of SK is forcing people to get to GM ASAP. Why? Because you're going to die and get jlooted by groups of players while you're sitting at the inn minding your own business and RPing it with, for example, the hammer of light.
Perfectly reasonable RPwise, but this sort of thing pushes people to avoid
RPing until they GM in fear that they may make powerful enemies who may kill them and handicap their leveling.

Solution to this:
Finally making cities secure. I am not suggesting creating safe zones or some such ridiculous effects, but: Introducing heavy security NPCs that cannot be controlled by tribunals in the key spots of cities such as the inn and temple, who immediately jump in the way of any attack, or who dispel
spells targeted at a player, giving a warning shout. From that point on the players have some time to prepare for battle and fight, or retreat from the inn altogether.

Another solution is to somehow change the purpose of PK.
As it is now, there is one major reason for PK, which is the same reason many people avoid 'fair' pk, and prefer to just gank others with the safety of numbers on their side.

Loot.

How to change this:

1) Fame/notoriety system.
Make it so that every time you kill someone lower level than you, you lose
fame and gain notoriety.

Of course these values should be universally good and bad, which means that evil characters would not be considered 'cool' for having a high notoriety.

High notoriety would make you unwelcome to cities and cause guards to follow you around just in case you do something bad, bards on the streets would shout about the cowardice of X the notorious, shops would refuse to sell some things to you, etc.

High fame would be the opposite. NPCs of your alignment/country would follow you around for being so damn cool, NPCs of other countries would think twice before attacking you, shops would lower their prices to you, etc.

Changes to fame/notoriety as follows:
Killing someone 1v1 = + fame.
Dying to a group of higher numbers than you = +fame.
Killing notorious person = +fame
killing famous person = -fame, unless you have the same 'degree' of fame with person you killed.
Killing lower level person than you = +notoriety

etc.

Well, just some ideas on the plate...

The fame/notoriety idea is actually pretty good.

I really like the fame/notoriety idea, in fact, I was going to suggest something along those lines myself regarding aging. Similarly, slaying dragons or other otherworldly monsters should also increase fame, once a month. It may be neater to discuss the whole idea in a new thread.

I do however strongly disagree with killing someone lower level = notoriety. That could open up a lot of problems when players simply go create alternative characters to cause trouble. Whether by deliberately provoking or 'feeding' another. Some people did that in WoW.

Heh, that was almost as long as something your character would say, Erevan!

OH ZING!

No no, seriously, you had some good ideas in there. I especially like what you were saying about "a formula that works", so I'm going to extrapolate on it and mention some areas I think are good and should be replicated for other areas. I'm sure after I mention them when I level my next character I'll see a billion people there. I'll give them all the benefit of the doubt and pretend they did it all IC.

Hopefully what I won't see is the immstaff descending as a host to destroy these areas. Sadly, my experience over my last couple of characters has shown me that it's all too likely. If it happens, let me just say now that I totally called it.

The pirate ship - this area is great for leveling. There are no law NPCs, so you can kill everything, and nothing (to my knowledge) is aggro, so there's not a lot of chance you're going to get killed - unless you attack one of the few superior NPCs. There is some danger because there are a lot of barbs down there that will ruin your [REDACTED] if you aren't paying attention. Also, if you do get killed, nobody likes pirates (IC), so you can always say "Oh woe, I was killed by pirates, please resurrect me" and you'll probably get a few tugs at the line.

Skybolt - I use this for my early levels, like, after I get out of newbie school. There are some NPCs there with a lot of HP and that are a little bit higher level than you, so you can go out there with a pet and really do some damage and get some good XPs - especially useful is the fact that there are some races out there with some racial weaknesses that you can really capitalise on if you've got the right class. Again, there are no law NPCs here, so you're fairly safe in the knowledge that you can run around killing things without getting punished later. I hated whichever imm changed the area because I used to love wolf's head gear, but I have to say that they did a half-decent job of making a leveling area.

Chancel - I'm referring to the chancel that was, not the chancel that is. If you removed harm from the dwarves, or assist, and removed aggro from the various NPCs like possums or whatever but GAVE them assist, you'd have an excellent leveling area. As it is, having 3 harm-spamming [REDACTED] roasting your [REDACTED] is not fun. Change it back, it'd be simple and it would make a good leveling area, and you wouldn't even have to roll back the AoE change.

If you use these areas as templates for leveling grounds, you'll see a few common strands.

1. Races with weaknesses to various effects.
2. Not law areas.
3. Few or no aggros/assisting NPCs.
4. Not killing the precious bunnies of love.
5. Lots of warrior types, or priest types, few sorceror or bard types.
6. Lots of NPCs.

If more areas were to be made following those ideas, I think we'd all be pretty happy. Sure, leveling would still be a bit of a grind, but it wouldn't be god damn irritating with lots of "Oops, you died" wrong turns that remind me of fighting fantasy gamebooks, or sorcs/bards that will bust the crap out of your armor, charm and sleep you.

That's my analysis.

Oh yeah.



This is a [REDACTED] idea. Do not even think about implementing it.

Seconded. It's way to easy for people to hoard loot and hide never coming out without having even more help to do it.

I agree with this 100%, I can't even count how many various characters I've started and spent 10+ hours on and then given up on because a lot of them suck horribly at leveling until like jman (shamans and priests come to mind, for me at least) unless you get a lot of help or use OOC info.

Oh, further to my last post, the NPCs in the areas should be very low level of the status above whatever level you're intending to level there. If you're a mentor, NPCs should be master level. If you're an apprentice, they should be journeyman-veteran.