Quote Originally Posted by Khelendros View Post
This is actually not true according to Trion's internal numbers. While many people do participate in endgame and raiding a larger percentage enjoy the leveling experience a great deal. Trivializing that is dangerous and irresponsible and devalues the work the dev team has put in to creating that content. For 5 levels the idea was that it should take about a week or two for the average player with the last week being spent primarily on 64-65. At least that was the feedback most of us gave and I think what they went with. But I do think they didn't take base patron into account as all of use testers were patrons.
People completed this two week leveling period in a matter of hours anyway, that seems trivial to me. Trion seem to treat their leveling content simply as a way to push the player through the grind. Its to get you through the content, more than to be engaging in and of itself. In particular, there is a huge divide between the story they're trying to tell and what playing through the story actually entails. Its actually quite silly when you think about it, you get hailed as the Hero of the Village because you kill a bigger than average Werewolf in three hits. Its a way to get players to level appropriate mobs to fight, nothing more.
You say it devalues Developer time, but this is false. They're going to be designing the locations you visit, mobs you fight and item models you get anyway. Those still need to be produced regardless of how long you expect players to spend interacting with them. Quest content will still be completed, people will still explore for gathering nodes and artifacts. The content will still be consumed at the same rate, completely independent of how the leveling curve is set.

You say a larger group of people "enjoy" leveling, but perhaps a more appropriate word would be "tolerate". Do players, inherently, want to do it just for the sake of it? I'd argue no. It is mandatory for anyone who wants to do Endgame raiding or PvP. It is, effectively, mandatory for anyone who wants access to more of Telara to explore and happens as a side-effect of completing the main story and discovering the games lore. Then there are people who complete everything they come across, either for achievements, the rewards, or some compulsive need for completeness. If you take away these groups of people who are "enjoying" leveling and leave just those altoholics who genuinely like the experience would it still be a large group? Just because its practically required does not mean people are doing it because they like it, chances are they see it as a means to an end.

What would be the problem with having a much shorter leveling curve, and having the rest of their open world content available for max level? For example, a level cap of 30 with three or four leveling zones. Those who want to rush through leveling to raid can do so with a minimum of fuss. Those who want to enjoy solo play cap out fairly rapidly then have the rest of the world opened up to them for questing, exploring and whatever else they choose to do. Everyone's a winner here, including Trion, who have far less content redundancy to deal with. Along with Chronicles they have, potentially, got something to offer almost every kind of player with this model.

I still do not understand what, if any, benefits there are to steep leveling curves. Nor why players would specifically ask for such a thing, it seems entirely self-defeating.

People would seem to disagree. I got drawn into a rather pointless argument about this yesterday on the forums because one guy in particular got very hostile about the fact that every quest should be easily soloable which is not really the case. Each zone has at least one quest that typically will need another player
World Events aside, I never had much of a problem soloing everything I encountered with my Mage. It might not have always been particularly fast, but it was certainly doable. Very little of it was anything more than a moving DPS dummy. Your mileage may vary.

This is true up to 60 but not true as you level from 60 to 65. Several end chain bosses require you follow mechanics. Regulos is particularly unforgiving and seems to be the one that trips up alot of people solo. I'm glad they kept him to be somewhat challenging solo as it makes the fight feel much more epic.
This example just goes to prove the point I was making. Players at level 62-3 got hit with an incredible difficulty spike and were unable to complete a challenge they were presented with because the game up until that point had done nothing at all to teach them how to beat it. Rather than being gradually introduced to these kinds of mechanics over time, they were thrown in at the deep end and expected to swim. People, rightly, complained about it because they've never had to deal with anything like that before, so of course they kept failing.
Then there was the fact that it was that it was a purple boss, in a purple room, that shot purple AoE's that you had to stand in barely visible light red safe zones to avoid. Maddeningly unhelpful

This is just a silly paragraph. There are ALWAYS rifts up. You can switch shards in a matter of seconds so this is never a valid excuse. Most of the limits are limits in your own mind. There are always enough people for pvp as well. Dungeons, well thats another story. Not much to be done about that. IA's there is always a group. Always.
It might be true for you, however I have some pretty odd play times due to work, traveling and so on. In my experience, trying to find a group to do King's Breach at 4 in the morning is going to take so long that its just really not worth bothering with. IA's will be empty too, world events will almost certainly go uncompleted, as for PvP well... I ended up in a 1v0 match often when I queued. I accept that I'm in a minority here, but it is entirely possible for people who want to play exclusively solo to have similar experiences.

You're right, there will always be Rifts up, but they may not always be convenient for you to do. After all, traveling the length of Scarlet Gorge just to do a single Rift is quite a trek, you're probably better off just carrying on with whatever it is you're doing.