Last week in Vague Patch Notes, I talked about leveling. At the very end of the column, I mentioned that slow leveling or fast leveling can be a problem. And this is true. The problem is that there is a sweet spot of leveling, but it is not the sort of sweet spot that can be navigated by making sure that your leveling takes X amount of time rather than X-1 or X+1. It’s going to depend a lot on the kind of MMORPG the designers want to have, and that’s not something you can sort out purely via math.
That being said, while we cannot find the algorithm that ensures your leveling is neither too fast nor too slow, we can discuss the symptoms of when leveling does wind up being a problem on either side of the equation. I’m starting with slow leveling not because it’s simpler but because a lot of MMORPGs that have been around for a while err on the side of faster. So when and how does slow leveling in an MMORPG become a problem?
Slow leveling was definitely a hallmark of older MMORPGs, which tended to be much more focused around more aggressive social dependency (and having to form a party to level is always going to slow down your progress) and oftentimes featured a much more extended midgame rather than an elaborate game at the level cap. For example, some basic math suggests that with good parties, it’d take about 250 hours to get to level 75 from 1 in Final Fantasy XI… which, if you play five hours a day, means it would take you about 50 days.
Assuming you got a party right away. Also ignoring farming for mandatory gear and food, leveling your subjob which you might need, and ignoring travel time. So it would probably take you longer than that, in other words.
If you look at that number and immediately find yourself saying that it doesn’t seem worth bothering, I’m glad you did because that’s a key sign of slow leveling being a problem. When you look at the amount of time needed to just level up and say, “That’s not worth it,” most people will just quit. And if your leveling experience makes too many players quit? It is probably a fair bit too slow.
That might sound bad enough, but it actually gets worse, if you can believe it. Not just because a lot of these classic experiences were very much slow to begin with, but also because a lot of them punished death by slowing things further. I would never say that City of Heroes had a horribly onerous leveling experience (though it definitely was slower at launch), but the idea of accumulating XP debt as you died meant you could get locked in a cycle of hurting where things were too hard for you, so you died, so it was harder to level past things, so things were still too hard and you couldn’t catch up.
See, a key benefit of leveling up is a feeling of a flow state. It’s not very scientific, but the whole idea is that every time you roll over the counter to a new level, you get a little dopamine hit for reaching the new milestone. When that state starts not being a thing, but instead you find yourself just sort of crawling forward, you stop being as engaged. You don’t feel as if your actions make incremental but measurable progress; you feel as if you just are hammering at a brick wall, and you eventually stop wanting to bother.
The obvious question is why this is a problem, and CoH is a telling example because while it did have a slower leveling experience at launch, the fact of the matter was that it was pretty much all right. For one thing, by the time you were in the mid-30s, you honestly had most of your cool and reliable powers already available. For another, you had enough stuff to do that you never felt as if you were somehow missing out. It wasn’t as if there was The Fun Game sitting off in the distance and here you were stuck in the bad levels.
When leveling is so slow that it feels as if you’re never going to be done with it, that’s a problem, but it becomes even more of a problem when everything you do for the levels below the cap is completely pointless. This is not a problem that every game – even older games – tended to have. There was a lot of stuff in FFXI that really did require people at the level cap, but it wasn’t exactly devoid of content below the cap, and there were a lot of pieces of gear that were so good you would acquire them at a much lower level. Heck, some content was level-limited, so no matter how much you leveled, you would be doing it at a specific level.
Moreover, you would need to get an entirely new gear set just for that because your gear did not scale down with you, which was a problem, but it was a problem unrelated to leveling slowly, so we’re going to push that off to another day.
I’ve talked a lot about how the ideal state of being for an MMORPG level cap is that you continue to do largely what you were doing before reaching that point, which is not exactly a revolutionary concept. But that’s not really the same thing as what I’m talking about here, although it is related. If a game is all about throwing cupcakes at monsters until they develop diabetes, it is possible for that to still be what you’re doing at the level cap. But if all the monsters you’re throwing cupcakes at during the level cap are in five specific zones, and all of the cupcakes you threw before then didn’t really matter or have any impact? You kinda wind up with an endgame that’s not only badly designed but makes the prior experiences irrelevant.
And that’s all right if, say, the prior experience took you a couple of days tops and covered four zones. But it’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to want to slog through for three months and dozens of zones that are never going to matter again.
When leveling is too slow to feel meaningful or achievable, when it breaks a sense of smooth gameplay, and it doesn’t feel like anything you’re doing while leveling is doing more than marking time? Leveling is too slow. It’s how leveling can feel slow even in games where objectively the levels go by pretty quickly. The slowness of leveling in FFXI is still an issue, even though with the game as it currently stands, you can actually get through many more levels much faster than before. It’s not a two-month affair to get to the level cap any more (I’ve managed to get to level 50 on an advanced job in about 18 hours of playtime on a fresh character), but you can still feel as if you’re just… grinding interminably for minor upgrades in a whole bunch of empty zones.
But what about the inverse? What happens when people decide that your leveling is too slow and boring, so it’s time to speed it up? Next week!
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
