Levelling System: A Plausible Growth

[Sangwa]

From what I've seen, in PS the first step is the hardest.

The system should be made in a fashion where in a few hours you can bring your character to evolve somehow: be it at magic, cooking, hunting, whatever. I'd make the first levels much easier to train then they currently are. It should be rather easy (let's say one or two weeks tops) to get your character to average level (i.e. less than half the max.) From there on, the difficulty should increase a bit faster (by requiring more tria) and as you reach Max minus 25 or 50 that's when it should get insanely hard. (The time and tria it currently takes to max should remain the same, what should differ is when it becomes harder).

Why? Because when you play a RPG you do it to see progress. If it takes you 10 hours before you can kill a different monster, learn a new spell or get a new recipe, then you get bored and change the game.
Also, if this wish was implemented, it wouldn't change the standard of difficulty in an absolute way. It'd just be more friendly to newer players and to people who don't want their chars to be maxed (the best in the whole wide world), but just skilled (able to actually do something) without spending decades for it. It'd also make some players respect the system, instead of avoiding it.

[Caraick]

I think the current system is harsh on newer players, who don't have the tria and progression points of other players looking to start on new stats.  For example, it took me much, much longer to train to level 30 swords on a brand new alt than it did to train to level 30 axe on my main character.  The difference here is that the cost of training levels, tria-wise and pp-wise, is so staggeringly high for newer players, who don't already have the stashes of tria, and multitude of pp's that most experienced players have.  What I'd like to see is a sort of balancing out, much like Sangwa says, that allows the game to be friendlier to newer players and characters. 

In the interests of realism, any sane person could pick up a shortsword, and within a few lessons, have at least basic knowledge of the weapon, and how to use it.  With the damages that one can deal with swords at the lower levels, a skill level of around 30ish would seem to indicate basic skill with the weapon, strictly in terms of damage inflicted.  As I said earlier, it took a good deal of time to train up to 30 in swords, even with ruined q1 broadswords that I supplied to the new character.  He/she/kra was also supplied tria, and had to earn the pp's required for each level.  That's a conservative testing, and it still shows the imbalance against newbs.

All that I'm doing here is emphasizing Sangwa's good points, the first step in PS remains unfairly difficult for new players, and if the goal of PS is to grow, and attract more new players, then something needs to be changed.

Thanks for posting, Sangwa 

[verden]

It all boils down to tangible rewards to the player, and how often they happen. Right now, the time it takes to reach a reward is prohibitive, especially for low level players. Increase the frequency and probability of rewards and these sorts of complaints will disappear. An achievements system wouldn't be a bad thing to add either, as it is a way to reward the player without necessarily giving them tria or loot per se.

[Candy]

To add to Verden's point, as a WoW player myself, many players including me spend a lot of our in-game time trying to earn achievements for the sake of it, and some even encourage player interaction (in WoW's case, one called "Duel-licious" requires one to win a duel, "Going Down?" - fall something like 65 yards in-game without dying - requires an alchemist or mage to help you out if you're not playing one, etc). It may be an unoriginal feature, but it works. Might kind of kill immersion on the RP server (unless there were reasonable achievements with a more IC way of acknowledging that you've done them), but it's something to consider.

[Sangwa]

Verden, Candy, your idea sounds good. But I don't think that it would, alone, help improve the fun one gets from training right after character creation. It's great to have a picture somewhere saying you killed 100 one-eyed-rats, but it'll just taunt you if you've done that and you still can't kill a diseased rat.

Plus, it would mean creating yet a new system (an Award System), when the developers have their hands full with the current ones and with some they've designed a while ago but haven't implemented yet.

[verden]

Its not the only thing that needs to be done, of course, and the achievements thing isn't really necessary, but the concept of rewards is important. The game itself needs to reinforce the play experience. The reward center of the brain is key to making players feel comfortable with a game. The longer someone new is playing without getting this reinforcement, the more likely they are to leave for good. WoW pays psychologists for this kind of input, and it works in the game.