Guild Wars 2

Last night I was happily playing my sylvari guardian, who is in the upper 20s now, level-wise, when some guildies extended the invitation to run some story missions. The guy with the missions was playing his level 64 engi. The other two were playing level 80s.

And I thought, well, heck, I want to join them but I’d like to keep playing my sylvari guardian. Alas! The party was down in Dredgehaunt Cliffs at the time, so that was out of the question.

So sighed heavily (I do that more and more often in this game) and switched to my level 80 ele.

And I thought, kitten it, why do we have so many useless, pointless, fun-killing levels in this game? In Guild Wars, post-Prophecies anyway, our characters hit max level pretty fast, and then all the rest of the game was laid out before them like a banquet. Nom nom nom!

And then I was reminded of how it was over in Paragon City, when we could scale up – or down! – to the party leader’s level, and I thought, kitten it, why can’t we do that here? It would somewhat abrogate this ridiculous fun-killing zone level gating nonsense and let people party together pretty much anywhere in the open world regardless of character or zone levels.

So I determined that the best course of action would be to post this here in the General Discussion sub-forum to see how quickly and fervently the idea would get shot down, while simultaneously waiting for it to be moved to the Suggestion box.

In the meantime, what do you – yes, you – think of the idea of characters Scaling to the Party Leader’s level in PVE? Discuss, please!

Great idea, but would probably be ruined by people ignoring low level areas to go farm Orr or frostgorge. They need to do things to discourage farming and encourage playing varied content.

It was originally a feature, but then…

One thing to note is that, earlier we talked about how we were going allow players to sidekick up in level we actually don’t have that functionality in the game and the reason we don’t have it is because when we were going through the game we thought one of the really important moments in the game was kind of that moment where you ran into something and you weren’t quite powerful enough to overcome it, or skilled enough to overcome it, and we wanted to give people the ability to kind of be able to build their character in such a way that you could by those moments instead of just bypassing them by getting artificially side kicked up a level. And so we don’t have side kicking up anymore in the game anymore except for in WvW. So if you want to think of how our dynamic level adjustment works is that it automatically happens downwards in PvE and automatically happens upwards in WvW. And competitive PvP obviously you get set to equal level everybody. So that’s kind of how that works now

Basically, it cheapens the leveling experience.

I don’t think it’s wise at this point in time because they don’t have the scaling system worked out quite yet. They still need work on the downscaling, and upscaling for LS stuff still makes you drastically sub par.

Beyond that, with up-scaling for general play, you get into farming issues, power leveling, more people simply skipping over the mid-tier play in addition to being able to completely skip starter play further killing the maps.

I don’t think the general idea is bad; my concern is with the abuse it could potentially lead to. And lets face it, generally speaking, if it can be exploited, the players do it unmercifully.

Healix.5819:

It was originally a feature, but then…

One thing to note is that, earlier we talked about how we were going allow players to sidekick up in level we actually don’t have that functionality in the game and the reason we don’t have it is because when we were going through the game we thought one of the really important moments in the game was kind of that moment where you ran into something and you weren’t quite powerful enough to overcome it, or skilled enough to overcome it, and we wanted to give people the ability to kind of be able to build their character in such a way that you could by those moments instead of just bypassing them by getting artificially side kicked up a level. And so we don’t have side kicking up anymore in the game anymore except for in WvW. So if you want to think of how our dynamic level adjustment works is that it automatically happens downwards in PvE and automatically happens upwards in WvW. And competitive PvP obviously you get set to equal level everybody. So that’s kind of how that works now

Basically, it cheapens the leveling experience.

Well. One might say the same of the insta-level-20 boxes, but the devs in their infinite wisdom gave us those anyway.

The fun of being able to play the characters I want to play while teaming with friends of mis-matched levels would, for me, at least, more than compensate for any ‘cheapening’ of the leveling experience. After leveling 8 characters to 80 and getting 100% exploration on one of those, I most definitely wouldn’t mind a little ‘cheapening’ of the leveling experience.

Side note: I’d also much rather have a level-granting box that took my guys from, say, 40 to 80, because for me the latter portion of the leveling experience is where things begin to get awfully dull.

Carry on!

Healix.5819:

It was originally a feature, but then…

One thing to note is that, earlier we talked about how we were going allow players to sidekick up in level we actually don’t have that functionality in the game and the reason we don’t have it is because when we were going through the game we thought one of the really important moments in the game was kind of that moment where you ran into something and you weren’t quite powerful enough to overcome it, or skilled enough to overcome it, and we wanted to give people the ability to kind of be able to build their character in such a way that you could by those moments instead of just bypassing them by getting artificially side kicked up a level. And so we don’t have side kicking up anymore in the game anymore except for in WvW. So if you want to think of how our dynamic level adjustment works is that it automatically happens downwards in PvE and automatically happens upwards in WvW. And competitive PvP obviously you get set to equal level everybody. So that’s kind of how that works now

Basically, it cheapens the leveling experience.

Not being able to win a fight because you haven’t put the time in to level is bullkitten difficulty. Upscaling wouldn’t avoid cases where you weren’t skilled enough as a player.