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Thoughts on the grind and level advancement rates

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Been pondering this one, about why this game, with no more or less "grind" content than any othernew MMO, seems to be running into the wall so quickly after launch.

My best estimate is the relative lack of difficulty in earning skill points. I'm not talking about a death penalty, here, so save the preaching, that battle will be lost by the naysayers in due time. The difficulty to which I refer is the level of difficulty of the encounters themselves. With only thousands of points required for advancement, we're given upwards of a hundred or more in any given mission.

While the story episode missions seem to be closest to the mark in terms of risk vs reward, exploration missions and some of the patrols are absolutely bonehead simple for the rewards they hand out. Scanning five anomalies at full impulse for an exploration mission credit equal to one where I'm slogging it out against five hostile squads of ships seems a little wonky. This is equally true on the ground, where every mission involving simple visits to x number of terminals being credit equal to missions where you have an enemy squad around every corner.

I am not suggesting that these missions be scrapped, but I think the simplicity of them should be dealt with in some manner. And it doesn't have to be a combat solution, just an increase in the difficulty by making it a puzzle that has to be sorted out, terminals that have to be deactivated remotely to get to a specific reward, something to throw a log in the path of simply hauling TRIBBLE to the objective at a full clip. And if it is a combat solution, make it an "item drops to unlock" kind of scenario.

I don't want to make this sound like a quickfix, or that its even the "right" answer. All I am suggesting is that this game has no more or less PvE content than SWG had when it launched, not one iota, and that game managed to take off successfully despite numerous "gamebreaking" bugs and major stability issues. The only difference I've seen is the relative ease of advancement in this game because the missions hand out rewards for minimal effort far too generously.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    I agree that missions give out too many skill points (or we need too few to advance), but given the amount of content at the moment they shouldn't change this. We already need to grind a lot to gain levels to access more content, let alone get to max level, and adjusting things now will only make things worse and anger everyone.
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