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Thoughts on Level Caps?; Just wondering
Topic Started: Jul 5 2012, 03:10 PM (1,656 Views)
Ceremorph
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Dark Mistress of the Toolset
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It would make the life of PCs much more realistic. Epic PCs then would be more in tune with epicness, and more god-like, and would have been greatly earned.

And that right there is what I think distinguishes myself and some others, such as Ravel, from a lot of players. The word earned. That seems to come from a WoW place, where the amount of time one can spend accumulating power and gear determines their rank in the world. Considering that here we have everything ranging from people who spend 12+ hours a day logged in to people who might spend three hours a week in-game, all that epicness on a slow-xp server says is "I had the free time to grind my way to epics", and those balancing playtime with college, demanding jobs, or children would be eternally at a perceived disadvantage, doomed to never surpass L10.

Relatively easy leveling (compared to servers with things like permadeath, low xp, etc.) levels the playing field, and I think gives more to the laid-back attitude a lot of people say SCoD has. It allows everybody, even the three-hours-a-week player, the chance to buld a character who can survive every area on the server, as well as the chance to play multiple characters and for new characters to soon be strong enough to confidently RP with the Hildmors, Vorgazars, and Maelfinas of the world (see? I used different characters to make my point this time!).

Of course, a cap would do the same thing, but would also likely drive some players away who see the accumulation of power and gear as the primary purpose of the game; that may not be my view, but I can understand people who think that way. If they're interested in RPing, they can be just as entertaining as those of us who'd rather never grind a moment, while if they're not, well, I'll probably never get the chance to interact with them as they run with weapons drawn and gerbil-balls shining from one grind zone to the next.
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Agony_Aunt
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One thing i do like about our server is the mix of players we have. We have the hardcore grinders, the hardcore RPers, and everything in-between. You want a grind, you can find those who will grind with you, you want to RP, you can find them as well (of course, this is a generalization - sometimes it takes some luck, effort, or just knowing the players).

I think the relatively easy levelling, combined with the level 30 cap, satisfies a wide range of player types.
Stepped down as admin, but still lurking.
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Mabus
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Ceremorph,Jul 6 2012
07:06 PM
That seems to come from a WoW place,

First off, never NEVER associate me with that crap-of-a-game WoW. ::fuuuuu::

Anyway, it seems there are too many types of players to stick to any one plan overall. There's not a single way known to balance those who have too much time to play, those who don't have enough time to play, those who are hardcore grinders, and those who are hardcore RPers....and all those inbetween. Whcih basically means that any posts regarding these topics is generally useless.

In other words, things must all simply stay as they are.
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"In the end all things betray you. Honor. Ideals. Heroism. Allies. Comrades. Lovers. Your eyes. Your limbs. Your heart. And in the end, you betray yourself. And that is the greatest betrayal of all."

~Lament of the Cambion Zaxarus, hero of the Blood War.
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LiquidDreamer
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Darkrob,Jul 5 2012
12:08 PM
Don't care for capping. I don't feel it's necessary for online play.

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Whatever this is "Dog, dey be like, baller as *** y'alls. Dey is got PHAT ACs n dey abz is like pizschow, 'aight?"


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Silverfish
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We're lowering the level cap? Cool, do it. I'm all for it :3
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Mr_Otyugh
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Silverfish,Jul 7 2012
06:39 PM
We're lowering the level cap? Cool, do it. I'm all for it :3

Trolling are we? ;) if not, it was said quite a few times that nothing's being done to the level cap and such point of view is kept.
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Silverfish
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Awww... Well okay~ I'm easy either way.
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Agony_Aunt
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Silverfish,Jul 7 2012
05:30 PM
Awww... Well okay~ I'm easy either way.

Said the actress to the bishop. :D
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Mabus
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Well I think that lowering the lvl cap only caters to the Rpers. I love to RP, but I also like a good mix of RP and just going out and slaying and leveling. Usually later at night when there's little to noone else on, that's all one can really do. Lowering the level cap will only make me less likely to enjoy my time here. But that's just me. :nod:
(Account Name: Lazzdar)
"In the end all things betray you. Honor. Ideals. Heroism. Allies. Comrades. Lovers. Your eyes. Your limbs. Your heart. And in the end, you betray yourself. And that is the greatest betrayal of all."

~Lament of the Cambion Zaxarus, hero of the Blood War.
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Ravel's Heart
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Silverfish,Jul 7 2012
11:39 AM
We're lowering the level cap? Cool, do it. I'm all for it :3

That's kind of funny. <_<
"What can change the nature of a man?"
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Abby
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You asked for opinions... so here it is:

I love low level caps. Personally id cap it at 9. However on high powered place like Sigil probably 20. Everything after 20 is just ridiculous. Even with a 34ish DC Implode spell, I don't think there's anyone near Abby's level who can't fail it on anything but a natural 1, and sometimes not even then as there are people with feats that mean they don't fail even on a 1.

Epic levels are murder on party dynamics. Who needs a well balanced group when everyone is good at everything?

Also, you have to spread the content out over 30 levels so people have level appropriate places to go. That means at any given time, you've only got a couple options for challenging dungeons. If you capped at 10, for example, and had the same number of dungeons, there would be vastly more choices for where to go mash stuff... rather than the same 2 or 3 dungeons over and over and no longer being able to even go to low level ones.

Last, and what I hate most about high level range is that it makes new PCs coming into an older server feel useless until they catch up to the point where they can be useful. Sigil gets around this pretty well by having extremely easy XP. This however is the death of low XP servers without low level caps. Someone coming into a place where it takes weeks for the early levels and everyone is level 20+ is going to move on until they find a place where they can be in the action out of the gates such as Legacy which is E8.

When im interested in RP and immersion, I play E8. But if im not up for realism, I play sigil, because the setting and power levels don't even attempt to touch upon anything near canon realism. If you're going to go for an easy XP, high magic free-for-all... may as well go Sigil.
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Silverfish
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Abby,Jul 8 2012
04:17 AM
Someone coming into a place where it takes weeks for the early levels and everyone is level 20+ is going to move on until they find a place where they can be in the action out of the gates such as Legacy which is E8.

When im interested in RP and immersion, I play E8.

E8 is first of all the largest exceptional root system, which is a set of vectors in an 8-dimensional real vector space satisfying certain properties. Root systems were classified by Wilhelm Killing in the 1890s. He found 4 infinite classes of Lie algebras, labelled An, Bn, Cn, and Dn, where n=1,2,3.... He also found 5 more exceptional ones: G2, F4, E6, E7, and E8.

Thanks google!
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Cadence
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Epic level abilities (particularly spells) often often break the immersion for me. It seems a bit much when so many people can cast Horrid Wilting or Resurrection. It makes one jaded to terrifying areas like the Abyss or Carcerei (I'm guilty of this as much as anyone - one of my earlier epic characters on the server was an barmy old man who often said things like "I think I'm going to go for my daily constitutional in the Abyss, teehee!").

I like levels between 7-12, because at that point I think there is a lot of parity between class abilities and things don't just get that weird to the point where one decides to go jogging in the Abyss without a second thought. For Sigil, specifically, I think a good level cap would be somewhere between 15-20 *without* any modifications to the grinding area CRs: it would allow those interested in upper level spells/abilities to still play them, but also make areas like the Abyss more dangerous so that everyone will be more hesitant in venturing forth.

EDIT: I do realize that I framed my viewpoint poorly. Fear of epic grinding areas isn't the sole reason I am in favor of level caps, but just a good example. Another example has already been stated earlier in the thread- during DMed events, it becomes increasingly more challenging for a DM/EM to provide suitable obstacles that an epic can't just power through.
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Agony_Aunt
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Cadence,Jul 8 2012
07:48 PM
Epic level abilities (particularly spells) often often break the immersion for me. It seems a bit much when so many people can cast Horrid Wilting or Resurrection.

Reesurection can be cast at level 13. Raise Dead at level 9. Not really epic. Although, i did think they screwed up when they changed Clerics from using only 7 levels of spells and bumping it up to 9 (which was a mistake in general anyway i think), Ressurection should have gone up to being a level 9 spell (if not level 10!) and Raise Dead a level 8 spell.

Anyway, i digress....
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Ravel's Heart
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Abby,Jul 7 2012
11:17 PM
Epic levels are murder on party dynamics.  Who needs a well balanced group when everyone is good at everything? 

This is why some of the epic bosses are designed specifically to require very certain combinations of abilities to beat: in order to require a party.

I understand the idea behind it. I think the implementation has met with only modest success, simply due to the number of things it is possible to do at epic levels.

Once again, it is far easier to develop challenges for sub-epics than it is to develop them for epics, which is, of course, the point of the thread.

Quote:
 
Also, you have to spread the content out over 30 levels so people have level appropriate places to go.  That means at any given time, you've only got a couple options for challenging dungeons.  If you capped at 10, for example, and had the same number of dungeons, there would be vastly more choices for where to go mash stuff... rather than the same 2 or 3 dungeons over and over and no longer being able to even go to low level ones.


This is an excellent point, and is one of the reasons I dislike the way our XP penalizes people who have a greater than seven level gap. Every time I party up with someone then discover that we have a too-large level gap and subsequently break party, it irritates me.

This happened a lot with Pen when she was getting 500-800 XP/kill in the Abyss and then would join a party and get 30 XP/kill. I understand the reasons for it. I do think that it hurts lowbies, though, and discourages people from interacting outside their cliques.

All in all, good points, Ab. Nice to see you back, by the way. :)
"What can change the nature of a man?"
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