Shattered Kingdoms

To be fair, about 300 of those hours were spent sitting at a fountain, playing cross-aura RP games.

It should be easy to level a character to GM so that players maintain interest in the game. I'm a veteran player - in fact, I have been around since beta. However, I spend most of my time playing MMOs nowadays.

When it is less time consuming and less of a grind to level a character to 70 on World of Warcraft than it is to achieve Grand Master on Shattered Kingdoms, it makes me reconsider even trying to play MUDs again.

I have tried to create new characters over the years, but I enjoy the pkill aspect of games more than socializing (roleplaying), and on Shattered Kingdoms, you really need a GM character to be competitve. And by competitve, I mean winning more encounters than you lose.

I have a mentor character right now and the grind factor is just starting to kick in. I might make it to GM, I might not. I know one thing for certain, though: I won't make another character in the forseeable future. There are just too many new titles releasing soon to spend time grinding the same NPCs over and over on a MUD - Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, etc.

Leveling shoul be easy. Otherwise, MMOs are going to continue to draw players away from Shattered Kingdoms. My two cents.

Because levelling is too much of a pain in the [REDACTED], and sitting doing "the fountain arpee" is more fun.

The problem is that D says he wants characters to be complete at master...and yet does not change the things that exist in contradiction to that statement.

Stat points being front-end loaded would be an excellent move in that direction, and to be fair he's stated some interest in that idea. Personally, I'm not holding my breath for even a firm nay or yay on that front, though. (This having been said without reading the thread dedicated to it.)

Skills not having full effect until GM (and there's more than just herbalism in that field) means that no character possessing those skills will ever, no matter what RP exists or how many hours go into character development, be complete before GM.

The fact that no Master (or even Champion) could have even the armor they can hold enchanted to a decent level to help them be competitive stands in direct contradiction to D's stated desire for characters to be complete at master. Sure, leave the near god-like gear near god-like, so that the armor that already comes that way is reserved for the "special few," but stop hamstringing people who genuinely WANT to have a complete character at master by forcing enchants to invoke log in thieves.

I'm not an advocate of cutting log in thieves out entirely at master, but it sure as hell would go a long, long way towards making characters complete at that level. At the very least, have armor and weapons remain at their base level after enchanting for the purposes of determining log in theft. For a champ 2 to ask an enchanter to spend sometimes 20-40 hours making a suit with competitive enchantments, only to have it taken on next log in and have to try to talk someone into wasting their time doing it all over again... It's completely counter to the idea that characters should be complete at master, and only encourages people to try to get to GM faster.

All that's a little off-topic, so I'll slide back into why leveling should be easier.

It's, beyond any other aspect of SK, a real [REDACTED] drag. I mean that in the most intense way possible.

Regen times are way, way low. I can literally void out on one of my characters before PE will regen from ~15% to something feasible while sleeping. That only encourages me to get up and walk away and find something else to do instead of sitting here staring at a screen that doesn't even have pretty area repop messages.

As someone said before, that doesn't encourage me to want to stick with one character longer. It encourages me to play Xbox.

Quite a few areas have "SURPRISE! YOU'RE TOTALLY [REDACTED] IF YOU'RE THE RIGHT LEVEL TO BE TRAINING HERE!" NPCs that will absolutely rip your face off, and said NPCs tend to be aggro. This is absolute garbage. Including such NPCs is fine...if you leave the choice to attack them to the players. As it stands now, these aggro leveling killers are also player killers, because after six, seven, twenty deaths at the hands of NPCs a missed look leads you into, it's just not worth getting back. Knowing any character you ever roll will probably have to face the same crap makes it not worth rolling characters at all.

Level is also a huge factor in what characters/factions take you seriously in SK. This is inclusive of not only GRP events, but also of day-to-day rp. If you con as kill naked to a GM, the vast majority of the time you're going to be completely ignored. Why? Because you need the PK to back up the RP in SK. And that's not a problem, on its own. It becomes a problem when the only way to be taken seriously is to ignore any attempt to RP seriously until you've spent 150-200 hrs grinding on NPCs. To be able to play the game and enjoy it should not first require an investment of soul-shredding, heart-rending hatred for the dulldrums of grinding incessantly, nor a bath in acidic frustration at having all RP, no matter how good, ignored because the consider command says to someone else that you're too weak to have an opinion that matters.

Granted, this is a problem with player attitdues as much as it is with leveling, but that attitude is NOT going away. It WILL not go away. So why would the powers that be in SK help it continue to exist and chase away good players because they are tired of being told to go grind?

Plus, every month there is a post about a GM pking someone who cons as kill naked and the whole community complains about newb killing.

You can't have it both ways- either you're treated with special OOC courtesy or you're a fully functioning member of the IC society.

Grinding is just boring. Even when you find a method that works every time, doing it over and over is just boring. It's natural for people to want to get over doing repetitive things and any way to speed that up is great.

On the other hand, it's weird to meet a new character, invest him and then have him be champion the next time you log on. It's about time investment, but people don't need to be bored.

Consider leveling in DnD tabletop with your friends. You level, but the focus of the game is never going and killing the same zombies over and over and over. If someone did that in DnD nobody would want to play. It's the same thing here.

While I disagree, I'll be civil since you at least attempted to stay within the confines of the thread. Thank you for that.

Everything starts at Master+ right now, and that's the way of things. Since SK is a RP/PK mud, you do need to be at a certain power level one way or another before you can influence the game in any way, shape, or form.

Warriors lose any properly enchanted gear before GM, and anything even normally decent before master.

Trying to land spells as a caster 40 -> 50 is an absolute nightmare, even if they don't have a fully enchanted kit.

As far as it taking 200 hours to level back in the day, that isn't really the case because back in the day leveling was a fairly simple procedure. You didn't have to go out to the ToM to level. You went in a two man group to the wastelands, which was just a hop skip and a jump from Teron. Also, once you got in the mindset to level, and found a place that matched your style/skillset and level, you could stay there for around 8 levels if you really wanted to. Now you're looking at about 3, before you start leveling slower and slower, and before anyone says the initial negative isn't that bad, they stack with your increasing level as well.

Just to throw out random numbers, but say the first is -10% and the second is -25%. That's going to be on top of the fact that you're now 3 levels higher than the NPCs you were fighting to begin with, this does so much to slow down leveling that nerfing of leveling methods is NOT needed. They did too much to slow down leveling in the first place, hence the initial tweaks to the familiarity system.

The key point of your post that I can disagree with 100% is that it'd cause more activities to be GM only, it wouldn't, because it's impossible to have more than 100% in this case. Everything is already GM only, or at least Master+ depending on class.

I'd also like to thank Finney for doing exactly as the thread initially asked

That should be the general format of anyone elses response. Why you think leveling should stay the same, or be made easier.

Even after master. All the AC10 ada I can think of is base level 45 or higher. Just to further reinforce the point.

Nope, lvl 40 most of it. And pieces that start with great MP as well.

Naw.

No, most of it is 45. Karnaks which starts with great MP is 46 or 48. As a matter of fact I can't even think of a single piece of non [REDACTED] ada that isn't 45+.