I’ve got a cycle with Warcraft. I resubscribe for a while, get a bunch of things accomplished, like hit max level in a new expansion, or gear up to a point where it slows down; then I usually cancel my subscription. At what point does the average person cancel their subscription with Warcraft? Is it when you can’t progress any further? Is it when you almost have everything you want? Where is the breaking point?

As you might of read, right now I’m playing my Death Knight that I had leveled up and played during the first few months of WOTLK. Coming back with a bunch of Naxx gear I had a lot of progressing to do. With the new Dungeon Finder tool I had a clear path to decent gear and a goal in mind. That goal was to gear up and get raid ready. Since I’m not in a Guild (my life schedule makes it tough to commit to a few nights a week in the middle of the evening), I was looking to get into a few PUGs here and there when I get an evening off. On Mal’Ganis you need at least a 4,500 gearscore just to get a sniff at a raid or two.

So I had my goal; hit a 4,500 gearscore with badges, then log on when I can and see if I can hop into a raid. So for the last two weeks or so I start grinding badges. In between dungeon runs I’m getting my jewelcrafting and mining up as well. It was pretty fun. I had a good goal in mind and I enjoy playing the game. Then the worst thing happened. I reached my goal on Saturday. I hit a 4700 gearscore and my jewelcrafting and mining are where I want them to be.

Why is this the worst thing that could happen? Because now there are only a few more upgrades for me. There is a slight upgrade for my breastplate with 50 badges. There are a few drops in the ICC-5 Mans that could improve my character a bit; namely a weapon, trinket and a neck. I hit my goal and my character progress has stalled with what I can do on my own, on my own time. The rest of my progress will now rely on other people forming raids. (Edit to add: I don’t count farming Frost Badges with the daily either. I have 38 Frost badges right now for my cloak.)

I’m not ready to retire my account again though. I’m leveling up cooking and fishing for the first time on any character in five years of playing this game and I still want to see some of those raids, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be playing. Will I be logging in most days now? Maybe not. Right now I can farm and fish etc. while waiting for the Dungeon Finder to get my into a badge farming group. Finding a PUG raid has me sitting in Dalaran waiting for Raid Leaders to spam an appropriate raid looking for DPS while I twiddle my thumbs waiting.

I guess it was bound to happen. My Warcraft comeback is numbered now unless I can find a really cool guild that won’t mind some guy joining that can play random days during the week. I doubt that will I will find one of those.

Does this same cycle happen to other people? When your progress any game has slowed down to a point, do you stop playing, slow down, or begin to lose interest? I think you can take this point and translate that to other games. For example, how many people that play Final Fantasy games keep playing after they beat the game? Every Final Fantasy game has extra stuff you could go for that make your character more powerful, but in the the end is unnecessary. I bet the number of people that do that is a pretty low percentage.

Take a look at Warcraft’s subscription numbers as they’ve improved the game. The barrier of character progress and things to work for has slowly grown for the base group of players. You went from 40-man raids that blocked a ton of players from new content and progress paths, to 20 man raids. This transitioned to 25 man raids and 10 man raids to raiding and daily quests with heroics to allow people to taste the purple koolaid. Daily Quests expanded A LOT over time to what you see today. Professions changed, reputation rewards became more open and it finally came down to badge farming with the Dungeon Finder tool.

As Warcraft grew up so did the options of progression paths. The result is fairly obvious. Give me people more stuff to do, the more they play. It’s amazing that some games don’t get this; or they do get this but they think a ton of levels and a long leveling curve is the answer.

Don’t get me started on DIKU games and leveling.

DIKU games have been in existence for a long time now and have reached it’s most mature and accessible form with World of Warcraft. Every DIKU game starts you off at level one where you begin your journey to Max Level. As the genre matures and expectations of games change, the leveling process has become more and more of a burden and hindrance than a fun game element. So why have levels at all?

In recent history we’ve seen a few games launch post World of Warcraft, but for the sake of this article lets take a look at Warhammer and Aion. Both games hit the scene with amazing initial sales, Warhammer had 800+ thousand boxes sold in the first month or so, and Aion has kicked off pretty well in the western market. Where do they stand now? Warhammer is all but canceled. Their retention rate was dreadful. Nothing official has been released about Aion, but if you take the pulse of a few online communities you’ll notice people quitting in large numbers. What was a huge complaint about these games?

The grind.

Both games were PVP oriented games. The draw for the game was the battle of territory and other things but all the “meaningful” fights were at the maximum level range. Many people left these games because the leveling content “got in the way” of the fun. This led to a lot of cancellations. Would these games have kept players longer if the leveling content was taken out?

If leveling content was taken out, what you would need in it’s place is a sort of build up period. Most players, given a max level character with a ton of abilities and other mechanisms, would be overwhelmed; especially new and intermediate players. A partial example would be what Blizzard did with Death Knights. They basically eased you into the mechanics and abilities of a Death Knight while allowing you to skip over a large portion of the game getting you to max level quicker. This was easier because only players with other max level characters could create them so you had a built in knowledge of outlier game mechanics already.

So where do we stand? We’ve taken out levels but we can just give people a full character. We need a way to introduce the game mechanics, class mechanics, lore and everything else to a brand new player without overload and make it fun at the same time. You also need to be able to give a player a sense of advancement.

I’m not going to write out a full design document (even if I knew how to do that) from my armchair but here are some things you need to tackle. You have to determine how old a given character needs to be before they are plopped into “max level” content. Is it 1 hour? 5 hours? Maybe it’s 20 hours? Regardless of what time you think it should be, but once you find out you have divide up that content into phases.

First phase would be a instanced tutorial that teaches you about the menu system, combat, and all the other newbie shit that you come across in most games. You can use LOTRO as an example.

Second phase would be using your character and completing a few objectives. If your game is PVP oriented perhaps these are a series of battlegrounds that you have to compete in while running around playing part in some story element getting you immersed in the world. This whole area is just another small instanced world with everyone the same “age” as you. In order to prove that you’re the right age to move on you can come up a few different achievements that you must complete. These can vary between classes or skillsets. But the one key thing is that advancement can not rely on other players. Remember, as a game ages, less and less players are in the earlier parts of the game.

The third phase can be just a larger version of the third phase. This is where the character gets all of it’s abilities, full masters all the combat and game mechanics and ultimately feel like you’re a fresh Max Level character.

To use an vanilla WOW as an example, the first phase would be your first 10 levels. You enter the newbie are and work your way through combat and other game elements. The second phase would be like levels 10 through 50. You learn about talent points, mounts, professions and other things like the auction house, guilds. The third phase would be levels 50 through 60 where you learn how to group up, fill up your talent trees and get all of your abilties. Toss in how to group or raid and you’re done.

This takes you from noob status to max level in X hours and now your read to raid/pvp until your heart is content. Now the real kicker is that once you complete one phase you can skip it with any other new character. It happens to me every game that I play, and I’ve seen it happen to everyone else, once you get halfway through your leveling curve you finally realize you hate your class and you want to start a new one. You usually groan because you’ve already invested so many hours already and you’re going to be behind all your friends and they’ll get to the fun part before you. You can alleviate this by allowing players to skip each phase.

In the end this allows developers to create more content for the “end game” which is usually very bare in most games these days to begin with. This gives players a sense of quick advancement and a better chance of getting hooked into their character and keep playing.

What’s leveling anyway? It a way to measure your characters growth usually over a long period of time. Kill the long period of time, grow your character quickly, then spend the rest of the time playing the game you bought in the first place. This might even save costs and time in the developers world by getting the leveling part out of the way and spend more time on the content players will spend the most time with anyway.

The Chinese version of Aion just finished up their Open Beta testing period and Rerollz finally got their hands on the game to give it a good test drive. You may know that the game went live in Korea last Novemeber, now in China and Japan soon to come. Aion is not slated to release until later this year for the North American and European audience.

So how is the game? One word: Impressive.

After installing the client logging in was very easy and cut right to the point. You didn’t have to go through a ton of opening movies and cut scenes just to get to the log-in screen like you do in Warhammer. It opened quick as well. The loading times and the screens are very quick. With a character created, you can go from your desktop to playing in under a minute.

Before we get to the game play we have to take a moment to discuss the character creation process. After you select your gender and class you get into the character customization screen. There are a few options that are different between the Elyos and the Asmodian. The Asmodian have tend to have a skin color that ranges from pale white/gray to a darker bluish tinge with less options of earthier more “human” skin tones while the Elyos have the option for those human skin tones. There are also some more varying faces and hair choices between the two but many are similar.

You can scale and change almost every part of the body and face with an extreme amount of customization. You can create characters that look human or lithe elves with pointy ears. You can shrink your characters down and make a wide range of dwarves and gnomes as well. Though not as deep as a City of Heroes/Villians; Aion boosts a wide arrange of tools to make sure no one looks like you at all.

There is also an option to select your voice. This option was not working when we went to test it.

If the description above is not enough watch this video as an example of what you have to work with:

With the birth of any MMORPG you generally have two different types of players. The first of the two are the folks you race to the top, grinding out levels at insane speeds, sleeping little and working less. The game is their life for a few weeks making sure they get to the top as soon as possible. The other group of players are those who take their time getting to the maximum level. They types of players vary in play styles (see: Casual vs. Hardcore), some play test every class before committing to a class, some play two or three characters at once, others just level leisurely by enjoy the game and not playing for optimal experience per hour. Both types inhabit every MMORPG but the question is, does the game dictate your play style or is your play style consistent through every game?

To give you a little background before we contemplate this question, let me explain my play style and how it’s been consistent up to the release of Warhammer Online. Generally there are a few games released every year that I look forward to trying out. I follow these game via several online communities I participate it and more often than not I gain access the beta program if it’s open to the public. So when it’s time for the game to be released I already know what class to play and how to play them along with other leveling and fighting strategies that makes most Prima Guides useless to me. Then when the game is released I jump on the game and it’s Race to the Top! I did this with almost every major release since Everquest, though I have to admit, many times I have not reached the top due to incomplete games, bad design or whatever reason you have for quitting a game.

The trend has held true for Warhammer. All the way up to the release of the game I was gung-ho and ready to smash my enemies. However something happened. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself playing more and more casually. Not necessarily in time committed, but the focus in which I was giving the game. I find myself not needing to race for each level, nor do I not mind exploring or doing different things as I level. This is the complete opposite on how I usually play these types of games. It was a shocking revelation. Nothing has drastically changed in my life either. I gave this phenomenon some thought today and here is what I came up with: There is no End Game.

We should all know what that term “End Game” refers to. It’s the part of the game that you start competing in once you reach the top end level. It’s usually the most entertaining part of the game, the most focused on (by the community) and the goal of most players. Get to the end and do the “real stuff”! Now one of the largest complaints I’ve had, and most other veteran MMORPG players have, is that the end game is never finished on release! Some may panic when they read “There is no End Game” and think the game is doomed to failure, or crash or whatever dark and drastic terms you may want to use, but you’d be thinking wrong. When I say there is no End Game, I mean that the whole game is the “End Game”. Every action matters. Your character is progressing through a series of events that cycle throughout the game from Rank 1 through 40 getting more grandiose the higher you are.

Now what makes me say this? Well look at the structure of the game in Tiers. In each tier you have a series of Scenarios, a few RVR targets and PVE content for each pairing. You start off each tier as the lowest rank, you gain renown and experience as you build your way through PVE and PVP content and you’re relatively weak at the beginning. As you gain ranks you become more and more powerful finally competing with the best in this group (or Tier). In a sense every time you get to the top rank of that Tier you’re competing in a local end game, not the End-End Game, but an early End-Game (does that make sense to you?). Once you out-rank the current Tier and move on you all of the sudden become the weakest again and have to start the leveling process all over again.

Here’s where Smelling the Roses becomes a preferred play style, for me at least. I can take my time and rank up through my current Tier, enjoy the awesome Keep Battles, earn rewards, and gear up my toon with the best I can get (sound end-gamish to you?). I can savor the power of my character in the RvR and Scenarios and really feel like the best in the game (for my tier!) and it satisfies my powergamer ego. When I finally do outrank my current Tier I then pull up my bootstraps and dig into ranking up again in the next Tier. I start progressing again and since it never takes long reaching the top of that Tier I again get the satisfaction of collecting powerful loot and becoming awesome again.

This is why I feel like this game will be successful. The game gives the player a sense of power and stature every ten ranks. This also may be more conducive to alternative characters and keeping certain tiers more populated allowing for a more healthier Scenario and RvR game which in turn keeps new players interested in the game.

Having said all that I’d like to say that I’m smelling the roses. I don’t feel that usually feeling of being left out or missing out on something because I’m not at the top Rank right now. Each Tier gives me the satisfaction of playing the game in all that it offers. Don’t confuse this with that everything is the same after you see the first Tier and you shouldn’t bother playing anymore. As you progress the Tiers become more dramatic, more involved, more EPIC so that is your drive to continue, but enjoy your story, read your Tome and certainly you don’t need to rush.

Benefit to Smelling the Roses: You stay with the bulk of the population during the release stage. Your scenarios and RVR areas will be more populated than they most likely will be later on which mean more Greenskins to smash!

Just in case some of you folks are wondering, barring the NDA, there is a mass of content at Rank 40 for everyone to do that is on an amazing large scale. So don’t panic.