Leveling and bind-on gear quietly killed MMOs. Permanent power turns most content into trash, collapses the economy into a gold sink, and makes other players irrelevant. If MMOs were invented today, nobody would design them like this. Defend it.
>>727767102Someone should just make a game where it's match-based, but still has leveling and (weak)loot.
>>727767232That’s just admitting the “world” doesn’t matter anymore. Once it’s match-based with weak loot, you’ve left MMO design and entered session-based progression with a chat lobby.
>>727767102Leveling works as an introduction to the game where players can familiarize themselves with the world and mechanics in a stress free environment. Permanent power aka vertical progression gives players an innate satisfaction of powering up their character which you can't really get through horizontal progression, sure it comes with its own problems like hitting stat ceilings but overall it's worth it for the joy of finding upgrades that actually make a difference. BoE gear forces players to actually play through the content instead of just buying everything with in-game gold or RMT, it helps alleviate the botting problem as the most important items in the game can't really be botted.
>>727768426Leveling as a “stress-free introduction” only works if the world after leveling still matters. In most MMOs, it doesn’t -- linear ilvl progression instantly obsoletes zones, professions, and economies.Vertical progression gives satisfaction once, but it comes at the cost of long-term world relevance. Once your stats are capped, everything below your level is meaningless. Horizontal progression, if designed around player interdependence and repair/material loops, keeps content valuable forever.BoE gear doesn’t fix botting or content engagement -- it just locks the world behind artificial walls. Players can still grind or buy the “best” items and bypass the systems that should make the world matter. Full equipment trade and material-based repairs would actually give the economy and social systems a reason to exist.
>>727767102the opposite side of the spectrum is 1000 chargeable weapons and nobody likes that shit. In fact, permanent gear upgrades keep people playing longer and is the whole point of actually playing the game besides the social aspect of it.
>>727768796Permanent gear upgrades feel good once, but the problem is what happens after. In most MMOs, vertical progression turns zones, professions, and low-tier content into dead weight. You still want progression, but if it’s tied to materials, trade, and repair loops instead of permanent power, the world keeps mattering -- and players stay engaged long after the stat chase ends. Permanent power alone isn’t the point of a game; it’s a treadmill that kills the ecosystem it’s supposed to support.
>>727768645The leveling problem is solved by giving high level players reasons to visit the older zones again, be it through quest chains or world bosses. World bosses are great as they give the new players in the zone a glimpse at what the high level players can do further motivating them to press on.What you're saying about vertical progression is true, it does make older content redundant in most cases. However that forces the devs to continuously develop new content, some of which can be put in old zones to make players return.Horizontal progression games like GW2 run into the opposite problem content bloat, where there's so much stuff you can do that you don't even know where to begin. Everyone is off doing their own niche activity instead of being funneled into the newer content making the game feel less and less alive with each patch.I'd say BoE fixes botting to a large extent, even if players run GDKP or pay someone for boost they're still required to come along with them through the content and pray for drop RNG. They can't just go on the auction house and buy everything. Locking the world down behind "artificial walls" is important to give the game a sense of progression and continuity, the alternative is a game you can beat by swiping your credit card, never seeing or plaything through anything the devs worked hard to show you.
>>727769783“Give high level players reasons to revisit old zones” is just admitting vertical progression breaks the world and needs constant band-aids. World bosses, scaling, timewalking -- all of that is artificial resuscitation for content that the system itself killed.Forcing devs to endlessly replace content isn’t a strength, it’s why MMOs feel disposable between patches. A system that keeps zones, materials, and professions valuable *by default* needs far less brute-force content churn.Horizontal progression doesn’t cause “content bloat,” it exposes bad reward routing. If rewards feed into a shared economy and repair loop, players naturally converge. Vertical ilvl funnels players only at the top -- everywhere else becomes a ghost town.BoE doesn’t stop RMT, it just reshapes it into boosts and carries. Locking power behind soulbind doesn’t create “continuity,” it just ensures last patch’s world is permanently irrelevant.
>>727767102>Leveling and bind-on gear quietly killed MMOsHe says while posting the most successful MMO ever made. Even the most successful MMO before that, Everquest, had a rudimentary version of BOE/BOP gear by having No Drop gear and a leveling system.This is what resonates with people. This is what people want out of their MMOs. It might not be your preference, and that's fine. But if leveling and BOE gear killed MMOs than MMOs never actually lived. They were a stillborn genre.
>>727767102all mmos are not the same, you're talking about WoW like it's all mmos and using made up schizo sounding concepts like 'permanent power'
>>727770335WoW being the most successful MMO doesn’t prove leveling + BoP are good long-term systems -- it proves early WoW nailed world coherence, economy, and social friction before vertical obsolescence fully took over. If people truly loved leveling that much, WoW wouldn’t have been losing subscribers for a decade straight.“And people want this” also doesn’t explain why every vertical MMO bleeds players between patches and has to rely on constant resets, catch-up gear, and borrowed power just to stay afloat. If the core progression actually sustained engagement, none of that would be necessary.
>>727770571“Permanent power” isn’t schizo jargon -- it literally just means power that never depreciates and permanently invalidates earlier content. That’s how vertical ilvl, soulbound gear, and hard level caps work by design. You don’t have to like the term for the mechanic to still exist.And I’m using WoW as the example because it set the template most themepark MMOs copied. If your MMO doesn’t rely on vertical obsolescence, great -- then it’s already closer to what I’m arguing for.
>>727770301There are problems with vertical progression, some don't see it that way however. But don't pretend horizontal progression is entirely flawless, content bloat is a very real thing. The lack of impactful rewards doesn't supply enough dopamine for many players to stay motivated. You can't gain upgrades that make you feel more powerful in a horizontal system, only alter your build to serve another purpose and unlock cosmetics. Most RPG players require that extra 'oomph' that comes from stat upgrades. The only way to achieve that is with vertical progression. Leveling further ephasise this powergap between long term players and new players making spending more time playing the game feel more rewarding.>Locking power behind soulbind doesn’t create “continuity,”It absolutely does, if you're forced to do things in a certain order then you must do it. You can't worm your way out of that one by stating a logical fallacy.
>>727767232Yeah just go play destiny nigga
>>727767102Leveling is one of the most important things in mmo. The problem with nu mmos, leveling is just a fence for the endgame.
Is this bot thread going to die when wowslop expac #294&372626273 launches I have a feeling it will
>>727770301>>727771253I'm enjoying watching this discussion btw guys
jeetGPT thread
OP link whatever 4 hour long video essay on MMOs you watched, I want to use terminology like "permanent power" too
>>727771253Horizontal progression isn’t flawless, and content bloat is real, but that doesn’t mean vertical progression is the only way to deliver satisfying “oomph". You can generate real dopamine through temporary or conditional power (charges, consumables, timed buffs), meaningful utility unlocks that expand what your character can do rather than just inflating stats, economic and social prestige tied to rarity, crafting control, titles, or market dominance, and mastery-based rewards where player skill itself becomes the power increase. All of these create strong motivation without permanently obsoleting the world. Content bloat is also a reward-routing problem, not an inherent flaw of horizontal systems -- if rewards feed into a shared economy and maintenance loop, players naturally converge instead of scattering. And forcing order through soulbinds isn’t the only way to create continuity; tech trees, reputations, territory control, and world-gated progression all create structured progression without killing trade and player interdependence. Vertical progression gives a fast, guaranteed rush -- but it does so by replacing the world. The real question is whether you want a treadmill or a living system.
>>727771293If leveling only exists as a “fence for the endgame,” that proves the system is already broken. A progression phase that becomes irrelevant the moment it ends isn’t “one of the most important things” -- it’s disposable onboarding. In a healthy MMO, the world still matters.
>>727772121Leveling is nothing but a timesink. Leveling content in WoW is irrelevant. Every new character could be a level 80 and it wouldn't make a difference.
>zoomertranny pseudo-intellectual schizobabble that's wrong about literally everything thread.Why have these been popping up lately? What does the OP think he's accomplishing?
>>727772209If every new character could be max level with no real consequence, that means progression, economy, and world relevance aren’t structurally tied to leveling at all anymore. At that point it’s not a core system -- it’s just a pacing throttle.
>>727772235it’s a bot retardbro
>I want every single piece of content to be relevant forever and ever and ever!Then MMOs are not the genre for you
>>727772526>it’s just a pacing throttle.Which is. While leveling, in wow atleast, your contribution to the economy is barely existent, if at all. The world is absolutely irrelevant, since you can pick "timelines" where you level up, and once you reach 70, you can teleport to dornogal. Leveling, has no place in modern WoW, except for time, money and resource sink. You gain absolutely nothing from leveling, at all.
>>727772235Not an argument.
>>727767232That would be roguelike. There is a multiplayer one "30 something something" where you play with an 30 people and competing/cooperating to win at the end.
>>727772681If “MMO” means deleting your own game every patch, that’s not a genre -- that’s content rot.
>>727771938I think the main problem isn't really about which is better, it's that players vastly prefer either one or the other. Vertical appeals to players that set long-term goals for themselves where they end up becoming a god among men.Horizontal is for players that like collectathons and filling their wardrobe with more clothes than they could ever need.You can only ever use one build or one cosmetic set at a time, filling up your library with countless unlockables, most of which don't really change the game in any meaningful way can end up feeling pretty pointless unless you have strong OCD.Maybe the best solution is offering a bit of both, rewards that increase player power along with adjacent items that offer different playstyles. Having to reset the stat bloat every once in a while is pretty a small tradeoff.
>>727768645Why do retards use chatgpt -- lines in their texts now?
>>727773431It's one guy, he really wants a /v/ autist name and go down in the anals of history.
>>727773297You can give players vertical “oomph” and horizontal collectathons all you want, but if the world dies as soon as stats hit cap, it’s not an MMO -- it’s a treadmill with a cosmetic layer.
>>727767102You need leveling since it's a tutorial for your class and yes half of people do need 250 hours to become semi decent. I do understand why BOP is a thing but should be used sparingly. It exists to prevent epic gear being instantly deflated in price.
>>727772121>still no hair with hatsfufufu~
>>727773589That depends, if the game is designed from the getgo with this in mind then they can tie all the health pools and damage values of enemies in the game to on universal modifier and reduce it, also known as scaling. I'm pretty sure this is what WoW is doing now.You could theoretically have the overly idealistic game you're talking about along with a superficial layer of vertical progression that doesn't make anything obsolete long-term. Would it be fun and rewarding enough for WoWfags to join however? Idk.
>>727773768Leveling can serve as a tutorial, sure -- but if the world you level through immediately becomes irrelevant, that “tutorial” doesn’t justify obsoleting content, economies, and professions. And BoP doesn’t have to lock content behind permanent gear; material-based repairs and tradeable equipment can preserve both player investment and item value without killing the world for everyone else.
>>727773431Its the same autist posting the same thread weekly, it argues with itself using chatgpt written posts
I've been saying this for a while now but Megaman solved non-linear progression in the 80s. For some reason games all wanted to subvert tropes and not have element themed areas that would easily lend to appropriate gear. Who the fuck knows why when it is far harder to name games that do this than games that avoid it.
>>727773773Meanwhile two XIV races couldn't even have most hats with their ears out, and for years. Every game got its shit parts.
>>727767102how is return of reckoning these days?
>>727773954Scaling works in theory, but in practice it rarely fixes the core problem: Vertical progression still dictates relevance. Even with universal modifiers -- zones, materials, and professions are often still trivialized once you hit the top. A superficial layer of vertical progression could exist, but if the rewards aren’t meaningful or tied into the world economy, the system just becomes cosmetic; the “WoWfag” treadmill persists, and the world still dies behind them.
>>727767102WoW was killed by a terrible dev team that released an unfinished product and instead of finishing it they started making expansions that repeat the mistakes of the previous versions.The problem with WoW is that all the content is front loaded. Leveling is the fun part and you can do it however you want. Do quests you want to do, quest in areas you like, kill enemies that you like to kill, ignore enemies that are annoying to deal with, do whatever profession you want, team up with other people or don't.Then you get to level 60. There is only one way to progress. There is only one best in slot item. Your only content is raiding and raids are done in one way. You don't like how raids work, don't like the mechanics, you don't like the overcrowding and how loot is distributed well fuck you then.End-game content should have been focused more on a variety of content. The world should be designed to make use of the leveling zones so they are not just for a few levels and then they are abandoned.They needed more involved World PvP with fighting over control. The closest they had was fighting for a few towers in one zone so the winning faction gets a 5% damage boost.They did very little get high level players in lower level areas. Like maybe some people will be in goldshire due to the faire. Booty Bay will have people because the boat is there.They needed more of that. They needed more things you can craft and expensive crafting recipes that involve a lot of materials.They could have given a reason for people to farm gold by giving them expensive things to buy, like being able to rent buildings or pay for global features or place bounties on other players. They could have had big community events like you can summon some big world boss but you need thousands of X and Y materials.The best of the best items should have been made undataminable, all server side.You get none of that. You get raidlogging and befriending losers so you get better loot.
>>727774291Losers befriending losers and learning to love themselves is the key MMO experience
>>727772235>that imageyour post isn't worth reading
>>727774279I don't understand what you have against content becoming irrelevant as you level up or gain power, you don't want to be doing the same content all the time, you want to level up or gain power so you can do new content. The horizontal game you're talking about in practice becomes going through the same few activities forever, killing the same bosses, going around the world collecting the same kind of rocks and trees. Somehow the fact that you can sell things to other players makes it all fine.I could understand it if you were talking about a game that revolves around PvP, where territorial control is the point of the game and weapons and gear is just fodder for the war effort that gets lost in battle, even then you have players and bots running around doing the shit jobs of collecting materials and forging these weapons. Or adding to some kind of collective reputation bar to build up a node, profoundly boring stuff.New content and leaving things behind isn't always a bad thing, it's necessary.
>>727775039Leaving content behind isn’t inherently bad, but vertical progression in most MMOs doesn’t leave it behind organically -- it *obliterates* it. Scaling or cosmetic changes can’t fix dead zones, trivialized professions, or collapsed economies once high-level players pass through. Horizontal systems aren’t about endlessly repeating the same content; they’re about keeping all zones, resources, and player interdependence meaningful while still offering growth. Progression can exist without invalidating the world -- that’s what actually makes an MMO feel alive, rather than a treadmill of stats that leaves 90% of the game behind.
>>727774225no clue but i have been thinking of downloading it and playing a greenskin
>>727775424If you don't leave anything behind then we're back to the content bloat problem again, long time players still crave new challenges and new unlockables in a horizontal game and the devs must give it to them. The content keeps piling on top until you're left with an unapproachable mess that new players don't want to touch and everyone is scattered instead of just doing the new stuff along with everyone else. Dead content does not make the game feel dead unless you deliberately venture outside of where the new content is located, a horizontal game where every player is doing their own thing in their own remote part of the world however does feel dead.
>>727774291>Leveling is the fun partNo, and fuck you.
>>727775039Leaving areas behind in an MMO is always bad. There should be a reason for the world existing outside of just leveling to abandon those areas. That doesn't mean you should be forced to go to the level 5 zones and kill 20 boars every day as a daily quest.A fucking game designer has to figure this shit out.Put something there for end-game players. A good example is the Darkmoon Faire. Players will go there long after they've outleveled the zone.You put end-game dungeons in places where it still requires you to go through a lower level area. Like putting a dungeon in deadwind pass so players still show up in Darkshire and walk to the dungeon.It's not all just about giving players enemies to kill. It's just where they hang out and where they exist. These zones should not be dead.There should be portals to instances in towns so people gather there.Too many people hang out in stormwind and orgrimmar, it's too overcrowded because that's where everything is. You could put auctioneers in other places. You could put high level content close to low level content. Like in Westfall you can have level 15 players leveling and put down a boat there that leads to a level 60 content island so high level players still pass through there.You could go to low level areas and do something to summon elite ??? level bosses.Figure it out.
>>727776297If there were always something to do in every zone in WoW then there simply aren't enough players to go around, we're talking dead cities and tons of players wanting to do different things making the queue times get out of control. Every MMO must add new content every once in a while to make players happy, it might not seem like a problem initially but if this content keeps piling up over decades then it becomes a massive problem.
>>727776598That's true only for current retarded blizzard retail wow. It's not true for vanilla. The world is small enough that it can be filled. On turtlewow there are so many players in stormwind you can't see the ground and the only reason it's not worse is because turtlewow has tents that you can't put in the city so there are another 100 people outside of stormwind sitting under a tent.You can spread these players around.Vanilla WoW is kind of ok at this. Most areas are populated. There are just too many players sitting in the two capital cities and too many players idling in front of instances.
>>727776893Vanilla is the same game from 2004 without any content patches beyond a few raids, it's literally the beginning when it doesn't seem like a problem.Imagine what the game would look like if they kept it like that for 20 years without adding any new landmass. They would be forced to nuke some zones to make room for the new raids and world events thus it would have dead content which is now also completely inaccessible. Getting away from content bloat is an unsolved problem.
>>727777338If they made proper content they wouldn't need to release big expansions every few years. The core game should be good.Instead of making you juggle more mechanics and forcing them in every area they could have worked on increasing the loot tables and protecting them from being datamined.They could make items rare and hide their existence, having players only spread rumors for items that may or may not exist. Hide it all serverside. Make it so that if someone manages to get the item there is a system in place that will slightly change where and how it dropped so the guy can't just tell everyone and have the entire community doing the same thing trying to get the same item. Loot shouldn't be solved.They could add content that is optional and just keeps players around, like let you play card games for fun in taverns or gamble if you want. Improve the pvp arenas. Do routine balance updates, change the rules of pvp arenas, add different professions.
>>727777814I mostly agree, a lot could have been handled better, that is the dream about Classic+. But now it seems like the Blizzard that could have done something about it is dead.The problem of content bloat is pretty much universal though, there are no long running games that have managed to avoid it. Except for EvE which the whole idea of the game is to be absolutely massive and rarely run into players.
