winkiller

The idea that just came to my mind (but sadly would have to have been implemented at launch) would be to have "snapshots" of your character. You have 1 "savepoint" per level that you can repeatedly keep current when you seem your spec/gear fit.

So, I am level 19 and got some nice gear. I "save" my lvl 19 snapshot.
I get a new Main Hand weapon, so I overwrite my level 19 snapshot.
Now I level to 20. My level 20 snapshot is automatically made when I ding.
and so on, and so on.
Storage space on the servers shouldn't be that much. 20 equip slots, action bar, a few talent points. No gear switching allowed.

 

Jaxtrasi

I have some practical experience of these issues both as an intermittent City of Heroes player (without the ability to Sidekick and Exemplar we would have quit long ago) and as a level 70 warrior who "trained" half of my guild through the post-50 content so that by the time they got to 70 they'd be ready for Karazhan.

So I stripped naked and went to work tanking Sunken Temple, Ramparts, and so on. Pulled too many mobs to try and get them to to learn to deal with chaotic situations. Intentionally broke their CC and demanded they reapply it. Basically acted like a dick and proudly saw them rise to the challenge. As we got to level 65ish I started having to use a shield (Hulking Shield ftw) and wear some pieces of armour, and by the time we hit 70 they were, in fact, ready for Karazhan.

I got nothing out of this process except some multi-mob tanking practice I could have got spending the time running Shattered Halls instead, time spent with my friends and guildmates who knew how to play. From that perspective, being able to exemplar down would be fantastic.

Talents are irrelevant. Taking a mentoring standpoint, you have clear goals in mind. You don't have to use Devastate if you don't want to (I used Fireguard and didn't bother to sunder rather than nerfing my weapon and tanking hard). You tailor your threat/healing/dps output to be appropriate to the group you're in. If you want to pewpew the instance to show how awesome you really are, you always have that option, but you're exercising intentional restraint and not doing so. No talent is so gamebreaking that its mere presence would make the slightest bit of difference if available at an earlier level than you would expect. Not Mortal Strike, not Shadowform, not Water Elemental, not Precision...

High level abilities are irrelevant. You have complete control over whether you use them. Many low level instances would be rendered trivial by the application of even a totally nerfed Seed of Corruption. On the other hand, if your 70->50 warlock is with friends in the Lyceum who lack a mage, you're going to be able to use it to get through what would otherwise be an impossible encounter.

Epics are irrelevant. If you don't want to wear them, don't wear them. Take a quarter, a half, all of them off - instant gear downgrading to Kara/Blue/Green level! Spell haste is not available in the Deadmines. Does it matter?

Like CoH, WoW is based purely on numbers. There are only a few critical, non-scaling ones. AP. Spell damage. Healing. HP. Mana. Mana regen. Hit, crit, expertise, etc scale perfectly well as it is and require no attention. Is 16% spell hit better than you would be able to get in the Deadmines? Yes. Is it going to alter your game experience in any noticeable way? No. The numbers that don't implicitly scale are trivial to explicitly scale. It would require a couple of hours research to find a reasonable divisor by level for what to cut hp to from any given level to any given level. Does it need to precisely match? No.

Give the player the ability to "scale down" to any level from 1 to 69. Their non-scaling stats scale down by an appropriate amount. Their abilities remain unchanged (except that they get scaled down in an indentical way to their stats). Their talents remain unchanged.

 

shabee

Maybe play an alt?

And keep him in pace with your friends, join the same guild, etc.

 

BFG

Read the thread.

He has several casual friends at different levels. Even if he rolled several alts, his friends still couldn't play together. And the friends won't roll several alts, they will quit the game (or did already).

Problem is not that hardcores can't play with casuals, but casuals can't play together.

 

Jaxtrasi

People seem to have real trouble understanding this point, so to follow on from BFG I'll try to illustrate a clear example.

We have three casual players. They have no intention of quitting the game in a huff for trumped up reasons. They play once or twice a week. They each (as you ought to expect from human beings) have very different things they want from the game.

A really enjoys playing with his friends. On his own he'd rather play a different game - perhaps he wants a heavier story experience than WoW can hope to provide and so works his way through Neverwinter Nights mods or point-and-click adventures. He's only paying his £9/month for the team game, and to him the idea of playing outside the group is extremely unpleasant.

B is obsessed with completing quests. He's taken this character around all the starting zones and completed every quest chain in every zone up to his current level. He refuses to move on to a higher level zone until he's cleared out all the grey quests everywhere. He is, naturally, overlevelled for everything he does but he's not playing the game for the challenge of it, but for the sense of achievement in ticking arbitray boxes.

C loves efficiency. He wants to "win" and he defines winning in this case as getting to 70 and getting an epic flying mount (which he's heard about). Although he doesn't have much time to play, when he does play he uses powerlevelling guides to make the most efficient use of his time and would be offended at the notion of, for example, completing a grey quest or a quest chain with an excessive amount of wandering around involved.

Although only A insists on *only* grouping, B and C are also good friends and enjoy playing together. Unfortunately C is levelling at about twice the speed of B. B is levelling at about twice the speed of A (if A is actually levelling at all).

What's the upshot of this?

A quits.

 

◊ Vectivus

And it's Blizzard's responsibility to re-imagine their game in a fashion that allows three people with totally different goals and playstyles to be able to magically be compatible?

Take the same example in the real world:

A is concerned about the environment, and likes to walk to work with friends.

B is obsessed with fitness, and jogs to work. He has less concerns about the environment, but doesn't make a negative impact.

C loves efficiency, and drives an SUV that could hold all 3 (plus a few others) if they elected to carpool. It's moderately environmental, but still does damage (which A abhors).

What's the upshot of this?

A gets a different job, new friends, or sucks it up and carpools.

(Translated: A plays a different game, games with people that play the way he does, or sucks it up and keeps pace with his friends.)

 

Jaxtrasi

I never said Blizzard should do anything.

If you asked me what I thought Blizzard should do, I'd say, estimate what proportion of your player base constitutes A. Estimate what proportion of your players base would quit once the As quit (which they will). Work out whether that proportion is large enough to warrant attention.

*Any* situation where we can say "changing a small thing about the game would allow us to retain this additional population of subscribers" (and it really is a very small thing) is worth at least cursory consideration for how large that population is.

Blizzard's aims *are* (explicitly) to have a lot of subscribers, and to appeal to many different markets. The notion that different playstyles might be compatible with each other violates exactly no principles of Blizzard's definable goals. You can assume anything you like about how MMOs ought to work, but the notion that barriers (however small) to players playing together for no exploitable advantage should not be removed is at the very least not inimicable to the idea of an MMO, and in my opinion strongly supported by it.

 

◊ Vectivus

I'm not arguing in any sense that Blizzard shouldn't make changes aimed at player retention, nor am I suggesting that their model isn't one that is profit-driven. There is nothing to prevent players from playing together built into this game anywhere (the lone exception being players who have not purchased TBC cannot access post-BC world areas). From a purely design standpoint, there is no 'problem' here. Johnny "Can't Keep Up" may not be able to gain as much experience when he plays with his friend Billy "Full Tier 6, SIT DOWN", but that doesn't appear to bother them.

Plus, didn't subscriptions just break 10M? I hesitate to guess that they're not particularly concerned about their player base shrinking.

 

Jaxtrasi

I'll use anecdotal evidence here not because it is sufficient to prove anything about a population, but because you appear to be arguing that a certain thing is either extremely unlikely or impossible. If you're not actually claiming that, I apologise.

I've spent some time extolling WoW's unexpectedly sophisticated co-operative gameplay to my peer group (and even pitched it to PC Gamer). Partly as a result of this recommendation, about half a dozen of my friends started playing around the time TBC came out. One has since quit, as he was a different level to the others and - this is critical - the superior gameplay that I sold the game to them on only exists when the players are at a similar power level.

I'm levelling a paladin just now. One of our warlocks is having fun twinking her through the Scarlet Monastery for crazy power levelling xp. It's fun for me, or rather, more fun than doing Thousand Needles for the eighth time. All of the low level players refused similar power levelling services from our high level players at that level. We promised them a sophisticated, complex team game and - although you may poopoo low level instance content - they got it when there were five of them at the same level.

As soon as one of them fell out of the same level bracket as the others, and as soon as he realised this made it unlikely he was going to be able to play in a team again, he quit. He still plays City of Heroes, though, because he can level at whatever pace he feels like and still play with his friends.

As I said, it doesn't prove anything statistically, but it demonstrates that your claim that Johnny doesn't care is also not proven true.