Shattered Kingdoms

Ive gm'd only one time. That was an accomplishment and took about 80 hrs.

Wasting 80 hrs on grinding is not fun, what the hell is spending 100 more hrs ontop of that just to get to champ/gm going to 'accomplish' or 'achieve'.

As people brought up, plvlers who get to 50 in 50 hrs can still get there just as fast. Know why? They pure level from the second they start the the second they gm, hardly ever talking to even one character besides for maybe a mentor or two on the way. And they know the best possible places to train and how long to stay and move onto the next place.

Training should be easier imo if you want even noobs to be able to participate in the game as well, dulrik. Making it harder is just going to frustrate these noobs or people who arent well at leveling like me for instance.

This is also how I feel, although I would emphasize pride over strive. Yes, it's a great achievement to get there eventually, and you should be proud of it, especially because it is something that no one should easily achieve.


Which is exactly why I've made it much easier up until expert and why I've created quest level ranges. I want to make it easier for people to get hooked on the game, and I want to give people every reason to enjoy the quests as they find them - without having grind-experts warn them not to do the quests because they "need them for later".


Now we have diverged. This becomes a feat of managing player expectations. Why do you continue to feel that you must grind to GM? The goal here is to get to Mentor relatively easily and then just PLAY THE GAME. If there is RP going on, do it. If there is PK going on, join in. If you want to explore, do it. If you want to quest, do it. If you run into people to level with, or you just want to go fight some monsters yourself, do it. If you play long enough, you will eventually reach GM without any of this perceived pain. Even if you never make it, you've had fun!

That's the concept I keep trying to reach and teach. And I'll keep making changes until the reality of the game finally gets there.

Misquote! T'weren't me, on that last one, D. You've got the wrong Jen. That was Jennbo.

Time-based leveling limits have always been the last resort. Absolute limits would frustrate some players and be contrary to one of the founding goals of SK - which is that we would rather persuade you not to do something due to consequences rather than make it impossible.

Up until now, I've known that "saving quests for later" was a big loophole, so thinking about time-based level limits wasn't necessary. Now that quests have finally been fixed, we'll see how things pan out.

Fixed for real this time.

Can we get a summary of this thread?

If GM were made a 250 hours or more achievement for your average SK-er, I honestly don't think I would have nearly enough patience to keep playing this game. Also I'd just like to point out that _any_ nerf to leveling speed is going to be a huuuge detriment to dragging in new players seeing as how that is already the ultimate bane of newbies on SK.

Pft, lies. World of Warcraft adds 10 new levels with every expansion and they're still growing in customer base.

People don't mind grinding. Grinding driving players away is a lie.

At one time it was 150-250 hour minimum to achieve GM. Not because of any hard-coded limits, that's just the way it WAS.

There's a martial arts slogan that goes something like this: Winners never lose and losers never win. I think that applies to any sort of gaming too.

Have you considered slowing experience gain when it reaches a certain speed? Just decide the speed you would like best for someone to level at, say one level per IC day. Then, if someone was gaining 2.4 ticks of experience per time tick, experience gain would be normal. If they were gaining more than that, the rate of exp would be slowed. Someone leveling at a faster speed than one level per 20 minutes would still gain XP faster than someone at the regular speed, but the time required for powerleveling would still be significantly increased without needing a hard "you can't do that until you've played for 100 hours" rule.

Naturally, you could make the rate different for different status levels. Experience at amateur would be about five minutes per level or something, while at expert it would be twenty minutes per level, and past master it would be close to an hour.

It wouldn't need to work exactly like that, but that's the concept. Someone going on a killing spree would gain less XP per kill than someone slowly working their way through the NPCs in the area.