Shattered Kingdoms

Your argument is perfectly valid for people with huge amounts of time to blow on grinding, and who can stomach the idea of sitting in front of a screen watching the same damage messages scroll past for over a day of real-time.

Where it breaks down, and where this problem is most pertinent, is with casual gamers who do indeed have the option of playing open-ended, often multiplayer online games through a console or PC that DON'T require a full-time investment just to get started and be entertaining.

Sure, the leveling of this game could stay as it is, and it would maintain a bit of a playerbase amongst those who are "hardcore," but it will never grow significantly, and it will not be enjoyable to those who might like to pick it up for two to five hours a week. Using your numbers as the ideal, that's over a month of pure grinding just to have a character with a tiny bit of survivability. Add in some RP here and there, and you've pushed that timeframe up to two months or more.

No casual gamer, or busy person, is going to care to play a game like that, when instead they can power up their Xbox and play an interesting and ENTERTAINING game instantly.

See, the problem is the vast majority of people posting in this thread don't remember how things used to be. As someone who actually played when we had great numbers of people leveling has always been easier in the beginning and harder later on. However, it was a lot easier at the beginning and not as hard at the end. Took longer at the end? Sure. However, there was no need to gather groups to go to the ToM because there was no ToM, you just grabbed a friendly healer and went to the wastelands through a portal on the mainland, or find some high level NPCs in any area and kill those. There were a LOT more people that were PK/RP active at Master+ instead of the GM fixation we have now.

How things used to go were you'd just stroll over to Teron and pick up a serrated sword or studded steel staff depending on class and either grab some random armor, or convince a scout to skin you some copper/bronze.

You would then proceed to level like a fiend for 25 to 30 levels. Yeah, the first go around didn't go that quickly, but many people even with a small amount of RP could hit that mark in about 20-30 hours, but even n00bs with a bit of guidance could hit mentor if they wanted in under 50 hours. Then you could get some slightly better armor, or wait a bit and get some unenchanted supernatural skins.

While there were better paths to take while levelling, there was no way to completely wreck your leveling path. You were free to level wherever you wanted to within reason at any level. If you wanted to level off of a lower level group of NPCs within an area, you could, without risk of runing your leveling later(See: Morea and others)

Is levelling doable? Sure. However, it's actually not a complete chore during double xp, even if you still have to be extremely careful not to ruin your leveling path by going to an area too early.

There have been countless leveling nerfs, and although people don't take it into consideration, while there was a large effort to normalize HP across NPCs players do considerably less damage in melee than they did back in the day which makes leveling slower, no matter what.

Sure there are a lot of other changes that could be made to help make SK enjoyable again, this is just one of them.

Here is OA, again, putting words in my mouth that aren't even true.

Here are Sklz and OA again, giving me hope that this game could become playable again for me. Godspeed gentleman.

I, too, find that leveling is one of the major obstacles for me - however, it has the positive effect that once I actually get a char to GM I stick to it for a long time (that usually means about three months of hiatus between characters while I pull myself together to level one, though).

I like the fact that the bonanzas hold an extra incentive for even lowbies to stick around for it, but I could see leveling be easier - especially in the lower tiers, now with the enchant/level req change and so on. Boost speed up to master, and leave the rest - God knows it's hard enough from master to GM as it is.

Leveling is the single obstacle that prevents me from playing SK. Hands down.

And please don't leave out the improved regen rates, too.

To be honest, beside the coaxing of a friend IRL, the bonanza xp helped get me back into the game.

I think it would help at least to boost the xp gained from groups. The main thing about grinding is the boredom. I can defeat that sometimes if I have someone to rp with during resting times.

And just how many times have you outright stated on this forum, in the open, that you don't want leveling to be fast? That you purposely do things in an effort to slow it down? I'm not putting any damned words in your mouth that you yourself haven't already openly put there yourself. The paraphrase is not what you said, but it's the result of what you said, so I added it for emphasis.

1) Current Tlaxcala > Any solo levelling area SK ever had years ago. So your arguments about wastelands and stuff make no sense. Now you don't even have to go to such a dangerous area(even through a portal).
2) If done properly, you can hit GM solo without any need for help from anyone, without any assistance to even leave the areas of the main continent. ToM is overrated imo.
3) Today a player who knows what he is doing can solo hit mentor in about 30 hours, regardless of his class. On certain classes, he can do that in ~20 hours. If he gets dedicated help(a priest/shaman/paladin to spam refresh/frenzy on him as a melee class for example), he can hit master in less than 15 hours. A true newbie, a fresh player to the game, with some guidelines from a decent mentor(where to buy basic armor/weapons, where to learn skills/spells from NPCs, in what areas he can easily level up etc) can still hit mentor in less than 50 hours. I know this because I saw this happening 10 days ago.

Anyway, I have a question. How can you ruin your levelling path? I don't get it.

The only valid point that I saw in this thread is the wimping of damage generally, that slows down levelling. On the other hand, SK now is full of areas that practically give away XP with little to no risk(priest/scout NPCs perhaps?), something that didn't happen 8 years ago for example. So what time you were losing from resting after fighting that merc back then(who had berserk), you gain it now because you practically grind non stop NPCs that can't really harm you.

PS: You know there are ways to reach the outer planes through "portals", available to all if you do some exploring. Not wastelands, but close. And equally good XP and a group of 2 is enough for levelling, with less dangers imo than the current wastelands. At least I hope it wasn't taken out.

I agree that levelling is a painful treadmill. But speed isn't as much a problem as the boredom.

One of the leveling nerfs made was to limit how much XP you could get from going after high-level targets. The result is that there's no incentive for daring or difficult tactics. Indeed, there's an incentive against them because you run into the brick wall of getting no noticeable experience.

It's just not fun. Doubling the levelling speed helps, of course, but I'd really like to see the level-gap restriction go. And that's a solution that doesn't speed Master-to-GM levelling, if you insist on keeping it slow.