XP Booster Seats

The less we talk about the Bataan Death March that is grinding for the Keg End backpack, the better. You want to know how many explosive snotlings I've killed? Let's just say I got a bestial trophy for killing snotlings (that's 1,000 kills) two days ago. The UN has listed me as a war criminal for my attempts at genocide, that's how many I've killed.

And reading casual stories of "oh, I wasn't even trying and I got one on my second kill" makes veins pop out on my forehead.

So instead, let's discuss the universal happiness of the holiday XP boost. If you'll recall, for the next "few weeks" we get +10% XP in T2, and +20% XP in T3 and T4. Spiffy. Aside from a couple apathetic reactions, this has (obviously) been well-received by many, with cries of "don't take it away!" following soon thereafter.

On the surface, the jubilation over this XP leveling bump might seem like the natural reaction to greedy players who always want more, more, MORE! Give us a little something extra for nothing (plus fifteen bucks a month)! But really, I think it goes deeper than that.

It's no secret that many players feel as though the leveling since launch has gone far slower than expected. Part of this comes from beta, when the leveling curve was very quick -- presumably, so that players could test out a wide range of content faster -- but partially because one of the hyped features of the game was that WAR would be less about leveling and gear and more about combat and rewards. I know Mythic has to fight a million biased presumptions as players go into the game, and mine is no different. From all the pre-launch talk, I never once envisioned leveling to be anything other than a smooth, happy ride fostered by the many, many ways that you could earn XP: grinding, PQs, questing, scenarios, open RvR, and Tome unlocks. Actually, I once worried that we would level too quickly and outpace content that I wanted to explore thoroughly.

In practice, it turned out to be the other way. Leveling slowed waaaaay down in a patch prior to launch, XP from PvE turned out to be so much of a joke that they had to patch in repeatable quests just so that you wouldn't have to hop from pairing to pairing just to get enough XP to level, and RvR leveling became a very mixed bag. Some nights you might get a lot, and many other nights, the XP trickles in slower than fighting starter zone mobs when you were rank 1.

Now, I have no idea how long it takes the average player to go from rank 1 to 40, but if pressed I'd say "two to three months". The hardcore much less, the casual much more. Syp just turned 31.5, with the last 1.5 levels due solely to grinding (for... the... backpack of a thousand torments), and I don't anticipate her dinging 40 until February or March.   I'm using rested XP and those libram charges I got from the Atlas (the only good thing to come from those guides, imo) just to give me an added push.  Compared to the old days of first gen MMOs, a few months is positively lightnig-quick, and it even now compares favorably to modern MMOs and the time it takes to hit other level caps. Yet it doesn't seem to compare favorably to itself, and I've been trying to figure out why.

The first reason is that ranks grow less and less important as you get more of them. You get fewer new abilities and tactics and morales, they come less often, and by the time you hit 30 you've accumulated a vast bulk of the skills your character can perform. Hitting rank 29 means that you can participate in T4 content -- hitting 40 doesn't grant you access to any new content other than stuff that's just harder to do (like dungeons or city sieges) and requires more gear checks.

The second is that normal ranks aren't the be-all, end-all of character growth in WAR. They contribute to skills, mastery points, some tactics, some morales -- but they don't factor in renown ranks and the contributions they make to your virtual dude or dudette. Dividing character customization between ranks and renown ranks is an interesting idea, but it does mean that you're spreading one large chunk of content now over two systems, which means it gets a bit thin sometimes.

Because renown ranks are seen as the pinnacle of RvR, which in itself is the core of the game, ranks ultimately take a back seat in importance.  RRs are the ones that will be very long term, giving your character a sense of leveling growth for months and months past whenever your hit 40.

This is all to say, I'm very much for faster leveling or more XP in WAR.  It's funny that this game has revived the "hell levels" of EverQuest when it comes to the late 20's -- ranks that some people feel go so slowly as to make them want to give up their character and start an alt.

And speaking of alts, the speed of leveling in WAR is directly impacting my interest in creating any other characters.  I know it's always easier the second and third time around, but this first trip to 40 seems so insurmountable -- the sheer amount of PQ grinds and slow XP gains -- that my enthusiasm for trying out other careers is dampened.  I don't see why the leveling curve can't be faster to encourage more alt-making -- with 11 careers and 10 character slots per server, Mythic could be giving us a lot more incentive to make ourselves an army of characters to choose from on any given night, which has to keep interest high.

As someone speculated during our ChaosCast recording (coming soon!), Mythic might be using this holiday XP boost as a test run for a permanent change in the future, to see how fast we end up leveling and adjust accordingly.  I hope so.