Can someone remind me why we added such a grind to PlaneShift?

[zanzibar]

The way I remember it, some people were upset that particular skills could be maxed out after a couple weeks of play.  Maxed out characters were not entirely uncommon, although maxing out magic didn't mean as much back then as it does now because there was only one spell per way.

So leveling became harder, and more expensive.  And still people would max out their characters - although fewer than before.  And now it's even harder.

Am I remembering it right?  Is this a good thing?  Or a bad thing?

If playing the game means leveling your character, it's a good thing.  But with everyone (well, not everyone, but a lot of people!) leveling their character all the time, doesn't that mean they aren't doing other things?  When I think about what those other things are, I think of the different ways players interact and connect with one another.  Helping each other out, exploring the game together, etc.

When you're distracted by leveling your character, are you less likely to help new players?

These are just my thoughts of right now.

[Lokter Tarvitz]

The way i see it is that becuase being maxed is something that almost everyone wants to be, and becuase getting the levels is so time consuming that people dont bother spending time Role Playing and helping others, becuase they are so focused on maxing a skill.

Maybe if it became easier then people would level quickly and then have time for other stuff
It takes 45 minutes of running to get from Oja to BD for strength training, some people run that distance just becuase of training, but others dont go becuase they cant be bothered. 

SO in my opinion.. Leveling is good becuase it makes people travel around the world, BUT it can be bad when people focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.

[EDIT: Im not feeling too good so my post is just a random collection of jumbled up thoughts]

[neko kyouran]

We all want to be the red queen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen

People want to be the best so they train and train their skills, while others see that they are training so much and therefore they feel they must train even more if they want to be better than the first person who then sees this and feels they must step up their training in order to be better, who causes the other person to train harder who then causes......

I think you get my point.

[Prolix]

I basically stopped playing because it became too tedious to advance my character. Perhaps it was because I tried to train too many things but there was never enough money and a year later I was fighting the same gladiators/rogues because I could not kill anything stronger. Perhaps if I had acquired better weapons, the best I could make were around q150, I might have been able to fight other things but it got to the point that if I couldn't 1-hit kill them they did me. I suppose I should have spent more time training up my heavy armor but I had so many levels invested in light armor (80 or so) that it was hard to abandon it. The invested levels were also a factor against starting a new character, typically I like to advance a character as much as possible before advancing another but as I get older I have less time or inclination to do so.

As far as magic goesI never got too far because it seemed to me the only real way to level it was to cast pointless spell after pointless spell. For example, standing around casting rock armor repeatedly and never getting into a fight where it might do some good just so I can level brown way. There is far too much repetition in this game. Doing the same thing over and over should have diminishing returns as it does but there should be increasing returns for changing factors. For example metallurgy skill: the metals you can smelt at low levels ought to give practice at a base rate as now of one pp/successful smelting. When you advance to the point where you can smelt something new and you need much more practice to level smelting the new item ought to give significantly more practice than smelting the original. The way it works now it just takes longer and longer to advance anything. There does not seem to be much balance between how long it takes to learn anything and how much benefit it gives you.The difference between level 80 and level 81 in terms of ability is insignificant -- I defy you to notice it -- yet in terms of practice it is huge.

To answer the op's question, I believe it was made such a grind so more people would give up levelling in favor of role-playing. I may be mistaken but that is how I see it. Really the two should go together like peanut butter and jam.

[Nikodemus]

It should not matter how skilled you are, but how much fun you are getting from advancing. I believe that currently there are not enough competing activities and the main activity is solo fighting the mobs. It is the best way to advance.
IMO fighting needs to provide worse gains by making it less repeatable, while working in groups should provide better gains than working solo, because it produces less repetation and makes different activties more interesting.

Now, excuse me if i'm talking with generalities, but i'm not intending to create another lengthy post, like i and others did a lot before.

[zanzibar]

We all want to be the red queen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen

People want to be the best so they train and train their skills, while others see that they are training so much and therefore they feel they must train even more if they want to be better than the first person who then sees this and feels they must step up their training in order to be better, who causes the other person to train harder who then causes......

I think you get my point.

Reading about the red queen's race, are you saying that PlaneShift is trying to "keep up" with the levellers?

[Under the moon]

This is a testbed. More grinding means more testing, means more bugs found. PS is not a 'game' yet any more than a test rocket engine bolted to the floor for study can fly.

The grind will become less eventually.

[Tontow]

It should not matter how skilled you are, but how much fun you are getting from advancing. 

Yes.  Behold the fun I have in advancing!!! ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz


If it wasn't for the rare newb asking for help, then I would fall asleep mid grind - That is if my wrist doesn't strain first from training met.

[Prolix]

well I do enjoy finding bugs, a lot of time it makes my session if I can find something to report. Just today I found something to post on the tracker despite having said farewell to it looking at something else too. Of course my old bugs keep sending me email updates.

[neko kyouran]

Reading about the red queen's race, are you saying that PlaneShift is trying to "keep up" with the levellers?

More so that the people who spend all day long grinding away at levels when there are others things they could try out, simply for the fact of wanting to be the best, and in order to do so they feel they have to level more than the other guy, and that guy feels the same way.  Therefore they level to be better than each other, and in the end, they stay the same.

PS, the game, does not necessarily revolve around 'the level grind' concept to me.  Sure you can skill up various stats and abilities, but there is no set this lvl can't possibly hope to beat such and such level as other games like WoW have it set up to be. It's those players who "want to be the best" who do nothing but grind away all day long.

In time, as other aspects of the game develop, there will more than just the combat system as being one of the biggest parts of the game to be mostly developed.  And even the combat system now still has many tweaks and updates to go before it is solid.

[zanzibar]

I want to try out the new spells, but I don't think I'll ever be able to train magic enough.

[Vannaka]

Sure you can skill up various stats and abilities, but there is no set this lvl can't possibly hope to beat such and such level as other games like WoW have it set up to be.

That's very odd... when was the last time you played planeshift?

[Shaman]

World of Warcraft is extremely easy to level in. PlaneShift, on the other hand, is even worse than most Asian grindfests that are released on the market when it comes to leveling.

[neko kyouran]

Sure you can skill up various stats and abilities, but there is no set this lvl can't possibly hope to beat such and such level as other games like WoW have it set up to be.

That's very odd... when was the last time you played planeshift?

As examples:

In WoW, a character level 10 will never beat a lvl 70 character.  The combat mechanics are designed so that a mob that is over 10 levels to your own level is basically un-hittable, that is, no matter what you do using any ability, range or melee, physical damage or magic based, the attack will never land and all you get is a 'miss' in the combat log.

In PS, as it is designed to be, no character levels, just skills.  Depending on surroundings and other factors, a person with a skill level of 1 in sword combat can still defeat another character with a sword skill of 9000, if that person is proficient in another type of combat skill.   

Unbalanced game mechanics currently favor one type of combat based skill over others and those that train that skill typically dominate, but that is simply due to things being unfinished and unbalanced.

[Mythryndel]

Well, I have been around since February of this year, and I am nowhere near maxed out on anything.I was not around before a lot of the grinding stuff was added, but here are my thoughts on the current implementation:

I like the system in place for training. Find a trainer, train, practice, lather, rinse, repeat as desired. I do not like systems where you can simply respec your character and have them be awesome with a hammer, after only using a sword for the last 30 levels. I don't really know how I feel about the whole progression points thing, as the best way to gain them are from fighting, and after a month or two, you have more pps than you will even use.

As to the training itself... it is boring and tedious at best... and painful and costly at worst. I can finally smelt plat, which is nice, and is one of the few skills that will pay for itself rather quickly. However, my wrist hurt quite a lot after the week spent gaining the last 20 levels required to do this task. I tried stopping when I could smelt gold, but nobody was mining gold regularly, and so it wasn't helping me earn trias at that point. So I borrowed trias from a friend, learned to smelt plat, and was able to repay the loan quicklly as there are always people at the plat mine. *** side note, I am continuing to train plat and noticed that I only get practice points when I melt the ore, not when I cast the ingots... but I still get practice for both melting and casting steel ingots... I have to assume this is a bug and will be checking the bug tracker later today ***

I have yet to see a single level of magic be able to recoup the cost of training it. I agree with prolix here, the benefits are so limited that unless you recite a low level spell countless times to progress, you are not likely to do anything significant.

 I have also taken up crafting of weapons... which again... has yet to recoup the cost of even a single level. Nobody wants to buy the lower quality weapons, but this takes the longest to train of anything I have tried to date. I end up giving away most of my weapons to new players just to give practicing my skills in crafting a little meaning. If i have to buy steel ingots, usually costs around 1k trias for 1 steel stock. A sabre requires 1.2 steel stock to make... but I can only sell the finished product to a NPC for 168 trias... I cannot even recoup the cost of materials, let along training this way. The last level I gained in sword making (lvl 14, so relatively low level) took me an hour and a half to train. I set vlc to always on top and watched a movie while mindlessly clicking the anvil to train. I do not know if this is a chicken and egg problem, but nobody engaged me in conversation for that time either. I kept and eye on my main tab every time i gained some pps, and would have been grateful for some conversation to break up the monotony...

As to travel, I couldn't agree more that it is long boring and tedious... and does not allow someone to chat... except maybe via tell, group, or guild chat areas. Unfortunately, every time I have tried to suggest speeding up of travel, in almost any way imaginable, I get told by other players that it is a settings killer or no. Devs have not really chimed in on these discussions, but questing takes an insane amount of time, as does training at higher levels because of the distances involved to fulfill the current demand.

I am not asking to be able to be the best <fill in the blank> in a few minutes of game time, but I do ask that as things progress, that there is more concern given for wear on the players wrist/mouse, and that training tasks are not so mundane and monotonous.