T1 Forever!

Here's a question: how many of you would bite for the ability to freeze your character's XP progress at the end of a tier and keep them there, perhaps indefinitely?

Recently, as folks have hit rank 40 and started to roll an impressive amount of alts, people are rediscovering their love and appreciation for all things Tier 1. I'll admit it -- I didn't appreciate it as much my first time through it with Syp, but now with Thursday I waggled my toes in delight as I experienced the fast-paced leveling, the uncomplicated and well-polished scenarios, the easy PQs and the oRvR with influence rewards. Like most MMOs, Mythic gave an incredible amount of time and polish to T1 areas -- first impressions count, after all -- and people always have fond memories of their first few days in a game.

Warhammer is a bit of an odd duck in the MMOsphere due to their tiers and pairings. Other titles display some shade of this, but not quite as organized. It almost doesn't matter what level you are as it does which tier you belong to, dividing the game population up into four slices. Each tier has its dedicated zones, RvR lakes, oRvR influence rewards and scenarios that aren't shared with the other tiers -- and naturally, people tend to develop favorites and preferences for one tier over another.

For some, it's exciting to move out of one tier and into another; for others, it's scary and uncertain. Sometimes you feel like you're just getting the hang of that tier's scenarios when you're up and forced to go to the next tier and banned from the previous one.

Because of this, a vocal segment of players have been asking ever since beta for a way to halt XP progress in order to stay in a tier, either for a time or permanently. In a way that seems to go against the grain of MMOs at large -- isn't our whole purpose in these games to progress and level -- but I think it's a pretty reasonable request, especially for WAR, a game that prides itself on delivering a huge variety of playstyles and playgrounds for gamers to choose between. Why would it be so bad to let people pause at a certain tier?

Two answers to that pop to mind. The first is that Mythic wants as many players as possible to advance to the jewel of their title: end game open RvR and city capture, something that would be problematic if a huge chunk of players refused to get there at all. The second is that halting XP progress but continuing to accumulate gear skews us more into the arena of twinking.

Yet neither of those answers seem that valid. There will be tons of people at end game, as there already are, not because they're forced to be there, but because the end game content and rewards are considerable enough that people want to be present. As for twinking -- how twinked out could you really get in WAR to the point where your T1 gear would so overpower another player that they couldn't stand a chance? Not very; this isn't a game where gear really can dominate like that, perhaps until the echelons of the end game.

Unless someone can convince me that this proposed feature would severely unbalance the game, I have to stand firmly in the "go for it!" corner. It would give some players time to earn that oRvR influence reward they really want before being denied access to that RvR lake. It would help players pause their advancement to let a buddy or family member catch up. And it would cater to people who simply want to enjoy a particular tier without being pushed out of it before they're ready.