Just wondering how other people think about this...
I started playing STO 3 weeks ago (january 19, 2012) and I haven't been able to play as much as I would have liked. Still, I'm already at lvl 43 (Rear Admiral, Lower Half 3). I'm pretty sure that I'll make Vice Admiral before this week is over. So, in just 1 month I will have almost reached the max level. This seems very fast to me. Other MMO's I've played took me much longer to even get close to that.
I feel that maybe leveling is much to easy in STO. There is not much satisfaction in reaching the next lvl, when you have to do so little for it. Just do 2 episode missions or a couple of patrol missions and you hear "congratulations captain". Even after reaching Rear Admiral, getting to the next level (say from 40 to 41) takes very little time or effort.
When I started playing, I did not think I'd make Captain for at least some months. When I made Lieutenant Commander after just a few days I thought, wow this is great. Then a week later I made Captain. And another week later I was a Rear Admiral... It didn't feel like I accomplished much. Yeay, a new ship. Super, next week I'll get my next.
Don't get me wrong, I love the game! It just feels to me as if everything goes way to quick. So, like I said, I wonder how other people think about this. I'm looking forward to reading your replies.
I know some people will want to tear me apart for this, but the reason for the flat leveling curve is pretty simple - lack of content. The episodes are just about enough to get you from 1 to 50 with a few of them left after you hit the cap. There are some small gaps which you will have to bridge with a fleet action or two, but other than that, it's absolutely no problem to reach the level cap within a week or less. For the better or worse, if it took any longer, you'd have to do a whole lot of awful, randomly-generated exploration missions and dig around the user-generated content to get your level ups.
EDIT: That said, I'm not sure there's a clever, useful way to improve the whole leveling experience. I'd love being able to play for a month or longer before hitting Vice Admiral, but imagine the insane amount of episodes it would take to provide actual content for such an amount of play time. Maybe they should take the best, most popular user-generated adventures, put them on the "official" episode list and make them part of the leveling process. I wouldn't mind if the whole thing took a lot longer. I like STO a lot, but I just can't get myself to play it much after doing all the STFs and experiencing every episode 2 or 3 times. I want more stuff to do!
it depends when i started playing originally it took my 3 months (i am a casual player)
now when rolling another its a few weeks....but when you speed click through dialouge that speeds it up.
also the most important thing as to how fast you level up is ..You
do you play every day? is it an hour or several hours etc
There is indeed a lack of content, there can be no denying it, this past year was pretty hard (to put it as mildly as possible) when it comes to new things to do. My boss, who started playing the game when F2P launched hit 45 monday. He is about 80% done with the Romulan front missions right now, so he will likely hit VA before he even starts on the Cardassian front. Personally I see this as a major problem.
When he hit 45, he pointed this out to me, and asked what will he do when he finishes up all of the front missions, now that he is max level. While I can point out to him there are 6 weeks coming up where we get a new mission every week, thats still only 6 new things to play through. As far as goals for the future, the only real one left before him is to 'grind to get eq' playing the STF's and wait for the next big thing.
It is my fervent hope that we will see more lower/mid level content(scalable mind you, like they changed the rest of the missions) to fill this gap, and to more importantly LOWER the xp awards so that a player actually stays in a grade longer then hours. I point out this later part because it has a secondary knock on. Right now, as things stand, there is ZERO incentive for me, or realistically, any player to purchase any cstore related item that has nothing to do with VA. Take the Exeter class for instance. I like the ship design, alot, but I will not purchase the ship because in all honesty, I dont get to use it. Looking at a purchase like that from a money=value standpoint, its a losing proposition.
All I can hope is that in the near future the situation will change to make it so that I can feel that its worth it making long term investments in lower level items.
DC Universe Online levels at least as fast, and only has 30 levels. They concentrate on the "end game" gear grind in that game. Not a good game for the RPG crowd.
STO's leveling is too fast, in my opinion, but I can still enjoy the leveling process.
these are games that I personally have got to endgame in less than a month.
CoH/V - roughly 3 weeks
Rift - 4 weeks (endgame before end of free sub from purchase)
Champions online - roughly a week
DCUO - 2 days.
STO - roughly a week
this is playing 4-5 hours a day on average.
its not that uncommon these days, a lot of MMO's seem to be more focused on keeping players at endgame than the journey to it, which makes sense in a way, because you feel a degree of investment in an endgame character, and existing and new players can experience new content when released if set up for endgame only (new people can get there quickly)
STO has certainly sped up in recent months, but its not the fastest out there!
Well, it's not as super fast as DC Universe, but it also features much less replay value IMHO. Now that practically any kind of officer can handle any type of ship, why reroll if you want to switch from an escort to a cruiser etc.?
As for the "endgame" - seeing as there is no higher tier of STFs or any other "big thing" on the horizon, there is very little motivation to grind the new STF gear to begin with. Most other MMOs send you to endgame dungeons, raids or whatever so you can gear up for even greater challenges, but STO is so easy and fool-proof, you can finish pretty much the whole content, except maybe the actual STFs, with green gear and zero clue what you're doing.
Think of it this way: the leveling curve is presently quite intent on you reaching level 50 before you generally get to end-game storywise. For example, during the double XP weekend I got my Kimberly from level 1 to 50 around the Devidian arc of the Klingon War... which left a lot of story content to go.
So, assuming this is as designed, then this is the following conclusion I'm drawing: the developer generally mean for you to spend most of your time playing the game at maximum level. This isn't a foreign concept in itself - the much lauded Guild Wars works like that too.
The level-progression then serves one purpose: training the player. Your time spent leveling up is time that you get used to an increasing array of powers and abilities. Since you start small, it prevents you from being overwhelmed until you're quite used to it by level 50.
In Guild Wars, you hit max level before you left the tutorial island (if you were doing the later expansions.) But this was a good thing, because character progression was not about leveling, it was about building your 'deck' of skills and abilities. The entire focus was on the endgame.
STO is somewhat similar - the endgame has a lot of ways to 'broaden' your character.
I don't think Guild Wars and STO compare very well. As the title implies, the former is about pvp more than anything. Guild Wars wants you to step into the arena as soon as possible, team up with friends and whack other players, that kind of thing. And STO... well, you know what the pvp is like.
Warcraft:
45 hours, endgame focused
(1-85): (Aside from a few species quests, there are about two optional tracks per faction, all gated by zone in linear chains now.) (And they speed it up every time they raise the level cap because they want the total time from 1 to the cap to be the same for a new player, regardless of where the cap is)
TOR:
30 hours of play, endgame and alt focused
(Lots of options when rerolling; then again, lots of playtime is just cinematics)
STO:
30 hours of play
(Only 1 complete faction and the other, in progress.)
DCUO
25 hours of play
(2 factions. Each have 2 low level tracks that merge together.)
Just a rundown of a few games I've seen. In general, nobody shoots for more than 40 hours of play in a new MMO and if they have more effort to put in, it goes into optional leveling tracks, more factions, more cinematics, or questing at the level cap. In general, there's nothing wrong with having twice as many or three times as many quests as it's needed to level... and generally nothing wrong with having weeks of required activity at the level cap... but 40 hours of leveling is pushing the limits of what the target player wants tospend leveling.
And, increasingly, levelness games like APB and Secret World are being launched that focus entirely on gear upgrades or earning money to spend or uncapped collection or active abilities that share cooldowns (so that your power level never necessarily increases by much but your situational options do, effectively making lateral multiclassing without levels the progression system).
I'm old school, taking a while to level is fine with me. The fast rate this game has is due in part to the huge amount of moaning there was about getting from 1-10. If you could see back a few years in the forums there were so many threads on not liking being in Mirandas from people that didn't understand standard mmo progression, rusty sword/tarnished sword/sword/better sword/uber sword.
They all wanted to be in the tv show ships as soon as possible. So exp gain got increased, exp bonus items were introduced, double exp weekends were added, and in a game where we all know there were limited official missions people were now outleveling whole portions of what was there and skipping it. Tons of people never did patrols, or skipped parts of the storyline, and were advised to do so by the 'how to level fastest' crowd.
Trying to appease the crying by increasing exp gain was just about the worst thing to do. Adding simple things like random distress calls, 'mission terminal' mechanics and other things of that sort could have added much more for folks to do. We have more to do now, but still have the too high exp rate, so you warp to the level cap in no time at all.
I did it in 6 days. It was a little over 70 /played hours.
I have found STO to be around 35-40 /played hours to get to level cap since Season 5.
Yes, 70 sounds more realistic. I had to write a class guide with a few coworkers about it and most of us were close to 100 hours by the time we all capped. Bearing in mind most of us had no previous experience with out classes from the beta or anything.
As for STO, my partner gave the game another try a week ago and was level 14 at that time. Hit the level cap last night. We did most episodes together for the fun of it and until somewhere around the 40s almost every episode resulted in a level-up. The whole thing felt insanely fast - much TOO fast for my liking, but then again, all of these episodes were actually a lot of fun to play and went beyond the boring "Kill 10 X, loot 20 Y" garbage you get in every other MMO, including TOR. Because, no offense, 20 minutes of dialogue before a generic "go kill something" kind of quest doesn't make the actual quest any better. I actually prefer the episode-style gameplay in STO.
... Just do 2 episode missions or a couple of patrol missions and you hear "congratulations captain"....
You're doing it wrong ;-)
Actually you gain one level per mission, provided that your duty officers are on duty most of the time, because the duty officer assignments give XP, too.
I've played WoW for about four years now (including several months of abstinance) an I still habe only one max level (85) char, one on 80, and some very low level chars. Ok, I'm not what one would call "hardcore player" ;-) But even those last five levels from 80 to 85 took me several weeks to reach, playing an average of 3 hours/day.
So yes: STO is a very very fast leveling mmo. Just started a new char on january 8th, and it hit VA about one week ago. And I'm playing STO an average of about 1-2 hours/day.
Edit: During the time from 0 to 50 I've never skipped any dialogue. ;-)
Depends on if you hit spacebar to skip all dialogues and have to pause for anything.
If you are doing that then you are not really playing the game. I have a new Admiral who has only done DOFF Missions. I logged in 3 times a day: morning, afternoon, and evening and gave him fresh DOFF Mission. I doubt the character has even 12 /played hours yet he's level 50, and I did it in less then a month. I don't consider that character played nor enjoyed; and that's what you're talking about above.
The problem with speed leveling is that you don't have any real time to enjoy your ships. This is especially true if you have C-Store ships. When each Rank is 7-8 /played hours someone can blow through a ship in only a few days: assuming only playing 2 hours a day. When you spend $15.00+ on a ship you don't want to be past it in a long weekend.
Think of it this way: the leveling curve is presently quite intent on you reaching level 50 before you generally get to end-game storywise. For example, during the double XP weekend I got my Kimberly from level 1 to 50 around the Devidian arc of the Klingon War... which left a lot of story content to go.
So, assuming this is as designed, then this is the following conclusion I'm drawing: the developer generally mean for you to spend most of your time playing the game at maximum level. This isn't a foreign concept in itself - the much lauded Guild Wars works like that too.
The level-progression then serves one purpose: training the player. Your time spent leveling up is time that you get used to an increasing array of powers and abilities. Since you start small, it prevents you from being overwhelmed until you're quite used to it by level 50.
This.
This is why I am fine with the leveling and wished it was faster. There is no need for making content much before level 50. The only sub 50 content we need it Klingon content and content for a hopeful Romulan expansion.
The problem with speed leveling is that you don't have any real time to enjoy your ships. This is especially true if you have C-Store ships. When each Rank is 7-8 /played hours someone can blow through a ship in only a few days: assuming only playing 2 hours a day. When you spend $15.00+ on a ship you don't want to be past it in a long weekend.
Feeds into the 'why can't I play a T5 Connie/Nova/whatever?' argument. You buy a skin, let people use what they want to be seen in so long as it is the same type of ship -Sci-Tac-Eng-Carrier.
If you are doing that then you are not really playing the game. I have a new Admiral who has only done DOFF Missions. I logged in 3 times a day: morning, afternoon, and evening and gave him fresh DOFF Mission. I doubt the character has even 12 /played hours yet he's level 50, and I did it in less then a month. I don't consider that character played nor enjoyed; and that's what you're talking about above.
That's not a problem for me. Sounds like Crytic found a way to give those players, whom previously only had Diplomacy misions--which weren't very many-- a viable way to get to level cap without going the non-Trek route and capping & exploding a whole bunch of ships on their way to VA. Do you really want to take that away from people whom want to see if STO is what they want in a non-combat game within the standard 30 trial time? Remember STO boxes are still being sold for 5 to 20 bucks giving people Gold tier access for 30 days.
OP: it is a lack of content that is half the problem. the other half is this new leveling system is something i never liked which is the other half.
if i gave over a week from SWTOR to STO one of these days to purely level, it would probably be done in under 5 days at most, that is enough time for small rest breaks, toilet, food and drink and sleep, nothing more then that. In comparison i have only got a single 50 level toon and its definately alot more rewarding grinding through on SWTOR then there is on STO and im still at it after just a month and a bit!
before this whole fast leveling TRIBBLE, it would of taken roughly 5 days by going through LT grade and 3 grades into LT cmdr grade to reach the next exploration sector and grind from there. thats when leveling meant a damn unlike now. its nothing but an inconveniance before you hit level 51 and then grind like crazy in STFs all your life...
As I recall... hitting max level (20?) in Guild Wars was pretty quick too...
Yes but you haven't even really hit midway through the content by 20 in Prophecies. So it's not as bad as hitting cap fast and nothing to do but dungeons aka STFs.
I know some people will want to tear me apart for this, but the reason for the flat leveling curve is pretty simple - lack of content. The episodes are just about enough to get you from 1 to 50 with a few of them left after you hit the cap. There are some small gaps which you will have to bridge with a fleet action or two, but other than that, it's absolutely no problem to reach the level cap within a week or less. For the better or worse, if it took any longer, you'd have to do a whole lot of awful, randomly-generated exploration missions and dig around the user-generated content to get your level ups.
EDIT: That said, I'm not sure there's a clever, useful way to improve the whole leveling experience. I'd love being able to play for a month or longer before hitting Vice Admiral, but imagine the insane amount of episodes it would take to provide actual content for such an amount of play time. Maybe they should take the best, most popular user-generated adventures, put them on the "official" episode list and make them part of the leveling process. I wouldn't mind if the whole thing took a lot longer. I like STO a lot, but I just can't get myself to play it much after doing all the STFs and experiencing every episode 2 or 3 times. I want more stuff to do!
And that's the "content-rich" Fed side. Wait until he sees the lack of content the KDF has.
Comments
EDIT: That said, I'm not sure there's a clever, useful way to improve the whole leveling experience. I'd love being able to play for a month or longer before hitting Vice Admiral, but imagine the insane amount of episodes it would take to provide actual content for such an amount of play time. Maybe they should take the best, most popular user-generated adventures, put them on the "official" episode list and make them part of the leveling process. I wouldn't mind if the whole thing took a lot longer. I like STO a lot, but I just can't get myself to play it much after doing all the STFs and experiencing every episode 2 or 3 times. I want more stuff to do!
now when rolling another its a few weeks....but when you speed click through dialouge that speeds it up.
also the most important thing as to how fast you level up is ..You
do you play every day? is it an hour or several hours etc
When he hit 45, he pointed this out to me, and asked what will he do when he finishes up all of the front missions, now that he is max level. While I can point out to him there are 6 weeks coming up where we get a new mission every week, thats still only 6 new things to play through. As far as goals for the future, the only real one left before him is to 'grind to get eq' playing the STF's and wait for the next big thing.
It is my fervent hope that we will see more lower/mid level content(scalable mind you, like they changed the rest of the missions) to fill this gap, and to more importantly LOWER the xp awards so that a player actually stays in a grade longer then hours. I point out this later part because it has a secondary knock on. Right now, as things stand, there is ZERO incentive for me, or realistically, any player to purchase any cstore related item that has nothing to do with VA. Take the Exeter class for instance. I like the ship design, alot, but I will not purchase the ship because in all honesty, I dont get to use it. Looking at a purchase like that from a money=value standpoint, its a losing proposition.
All I can hope is that in the near future the situation will change to make it so that I can feel that its worth it making long term investments in lower level items.
STO's leveling is too fast, in my opinion, but I can still enjoy the leveling process.
CoH/V - roughly 3 weeks
Rift - 4 weeks (endgame before end of free sub from purchase)
Champions online - roughly a week
DCUO - 2 days.
STO - roughly a week
this is playing 4-5 hours a day on average.
its not that uncommon these days, a lot of MMO's seem to be more focused on keeping players at endgame than the journey to it, which makes sense in a way, because you feel a degree of investment in an endgame character, and existing and new players can experience new content when released if set up for endgame only (new people can get there quickly)
STO has certainly sped up in recent months, but its not the fastest out there!
As for the "endgame" - seeing as there is no higher tier of STFs or any other "big thing" on the horizon, there is very little motivation to grind the new STF gear to begin with. Most other MMOs send you to endgame dungeons, raids or whatever so you can gear up for even greater challenges, but STO is so easy and fool-proof, you can finish pretty much the whole content, except maybe the actual STFs, with green gear and zero clue what you're doing.
So, assuming this is as designed, then this is the following conclusion I'm drawing: the developer generally mean for you to spend most of your time playing the game at maximum level. This isn't a foreign concept in itself - the much lauded Guild Wars works like that too.
The level-progression then serves one purpose: training the player. Your time spent leveling up is time that you get used to an increasing array of powers and abilities. Since you start small, it prevents you from being overwhelmed until you're quite used to it by level 50.
STO is somewhat similar - the endgame has a lot of ways to 'broaden' your character.
Warcraft:
45 hours, endgame focused
(1-85): (Aside from a few species quests, there are about two optional tracks per faction, all gated by zone in linear chains now.) (And they speed it up every time they raise the level cap because they want the total time from 1 to the cap to be the same for a new player, regardless of where the cap is)
TOR:
30 hours of play, endgame and alt focused
(Lots of options when rerolling; then again, lots of playtime is just cinematics)
STO:
30 hours of play
(Only 1 complete faction and the other, in progress.)
DCUO
25 hours of play
(2 factions. Each have 2 low level tracks that merge together.)
Just a rundown of a few games I've seen. In general, nobody shoots for more than 40 hours of play in a new MMO and if they have more effort to put in, it goes into optional leveling tracks, more factions, more cinematics, or questing at the level cap. In general, there's nothing wrong with having twice as many or three times as many quests as it's needed to level... and generally nothing wrong with having weeks of required activity at the level cap... but 40 hours of leveling is pushing the limits of what the target player wants tospend leveling.
And, increasingly, levelness games like APB and Secret World are being launched that focus entirely on gear upgrades or earning money to spend or uncapped collection or active abilities that share cooldowns (so that your power level never necessarily increases by much but your situational options do, effectively making lateral multiclassing without levels the progression system).
I have found STO to be around 35-40 /played hours to get to level cap since Season 5.
They all wanted to be in the tv show ships as soon as possible. So exp gain got increased, exp bonus items were introduced, double exp weekends were added, and in a game where we all know there were limited official missions people were now outleveling whole portions of what was there and skipping it. Tons of people never did patrols, or skipped parts of the storyline, and were advised to do so by the 'how to level fastest' crowd.
Trying to appease the crying by increasing exp gain was just about the worst thing to do. Adding simple things like random distress calls, 'mission terminal' mechanics and other things of that sort could have added much more for folks to do. We have more to do now, but still have the too high exp rate, so you warp to the level cap in no time at all.
Yes, 70 sounds more realistic. I had to write a class guide with a few coworkers about it and most of us were close to 100 hours by the time we all capped. Bearing in mind most of us had no previous experience with out classes from the beta or anything.
As for STO, my partner gave the game another try a week ago and was level 14 at that time. Hit the level cap last night. We did most episodes together for the fun of it and until somewhere around the 40s almost every episode resulted in a level-up. The whole thing felt insanely fast - much TOO fast for my liking, but then again, all of these episodes were actually a lot of fun to play and went beyond the boring "Kill 10 X, loot 20 Y" garbage you get in every other MMO, including TOR. Because, no offense, 20 minutes of dialogue before a generic "go kill something" kind of quest doesn't make the actual quest any better. I actually prefer the episode-style gameplay in STO.
You're doing it wrong ;-)
Actually you gain one level per mission, provided that your duty officers are on duty most of the time, because the duty officer assignments give XP, too.
I've played WoW for about four years now (including several months of abstinance) an I still habe only one max level (85) char, one on 80, and some very low level chars. Ok, I'm not what one would call "hardcore player" ;-) But even those last five levels from 80 to 85 took me several weeks to reach, playing an average of 3 hours/day.
So yes: STO is a very very fast leveling mmo. Just started a new char on january 8th, and it hit VA about one week ago. And I'm playing STO an average of about 1-2 hours/day.
Edit: During the time from 0 to 50 I've never skipped any dialogue. ;-)
That's why I can't wait for them to update PvP.
This.
This is why I am fine with the leveling and wished it was faster. There is no need for making content much before level 50. The only sub 50 content we need it Klingon content and content for a hopeful Romulan expansion.
Feeds into the 'why can't I play a T5 Connie/Nova/whatever?' argument. You buy a skin, let people use what they want to be seen in so long as it is the same type of ship -Sci-Tac-Eng-Carrier.
That's not a problem for me. Sounds like Crytic found a way to give those players, whom previously only had Diplomacy misions--which weren't very many-- a viable way to get to level cap without going the non-Trek route and capping & exploding a whole bunch of ships on their way to VA. Do you really want to take that away from people whom want to see if STO is what they want in a non-combat game within the standard 30 trial time? Remember STO boxes are still being sold for 5 to 20 bucks giving people Gold tier access for 30 days.
if i gave over a week from SWTOR to STO one of these days to purely level, it would probably be done in under 5 days at most, that is enough time for small rest breaks, toilet, food and drink and sleep, nothing more then that. In comparison i have only got a single 50 level toon and its definately alot more rewarding grinding through on SWTOR then there is on STO and im still at it after just a month and a bit!
before this whole fast leveling TRIBBLE, it would of taken roughly 5 days by going through LT grade and 3 grades into LT cmdr grade to reach the next exploration sector and grind from there. thats when leveling meant a damn unlike now. its nothing but an inconveniance before you hit level 51 and then grind like crazy in STFs all your life...
By broaden, I assume you mean coral you into the c-store and replay the same missions over, and over and over again?
Yes but you haven't even really hit midway through the content by 20 in Prophecies. So it's not as bad as hitting cap fast and nothing to do but dungeons aka STFs.
LOL. You left out one "and over".
And that's the "content-rich" Fed side. Wait until he sees the lack of content the KDF has.