Quests: Now With More Grind
The supposed solution to the tedium of mob grinding was the implementation of huge numbers of quests. The best example of this, of course, is World of Warcraft. Every new zone or town has one or more “hubs” with merchants and quest givers. The quests then cause you to move about the zone doing this or that task, killing X of Y mob, gathering A of B items, and the like. The idea was to give players a story and a reason behind all of their actions, rather than just running from place to place killing every mobbie they saw.
EDIT: The discussion of this original post inspired me to rework it, add to it, and publish it as a huge article on Bright Hub. I invite you to check it out here:
New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement
Your comments inspired me to examine the issue in even more detail. I hope the new article will inspire even more analysis from the readership.
-Jyn: “Which brings us to WoW. The innovations they made to MMOs are simply too numerous to list. The result was (along with help from the popularity of Warcraft 1 & 2) the move of MMOs from relative obscurity to the mainstream. All Blizzard did with WoW is find a previously untapped niche (which turned out to be an enormously huge niche), the casual gamer.”
I’m not calling you out- but I would like to know what innovations WoW has brought to the MMO genre. The phasing thing that they have in WotLK, while sounding great on paper, I would actually consider to be a step in a backwards direction. While it makes the game closer to a single player RPG by creating an actually (somewhat) dynamic world, as far as multiplayer play is concerned it actually just takes 100 square kilometers of playing-space and puts it into 50 square kilometers of layered game world. This helps to further separate players through the quest system. Players that have not completed a certain part of the quest cannot even see players further along! This, I believe
And don’t get me wrong, I was a die-hard blizzard fanatic all the way through WarCraft 3 (That, not 1 or 2, is where the big fan craze for WoW came from by the way (I remember thinking ill of fellow WC3 players who had not played WC1/WC2
It was a far larger success than the other games of the series))
-Jyn:”What I think most Blizzard bashing stems from is serious gamers’ frustration that there is currently no good game on the market that caters to their needs. WoW is the only good, well-made game, but it’s not what gamers want, so it sucks.”
“WoW is the only good, well-made game” just makes my soul wriggle with frustration. Blizzard “polish” is famous, sure, but polish tends to be fairly superficial. Things look nice, controls are smooth, and everything is pretty bug-free. Great! But what is the game actually like? All these words: Good, Exciting, Enjoyable, Fun, Bad, Lame, Boring, Stupid, Brilliant, and Well-made are all relative expressions. What is a good and well-made game to you may look like a horrificly botched design job (case in point, some people still play SWG).
Innovative is NOT a subjective word, however, and that is why I challenge the idea that WoW is responsible for much innovation.
I googled the defenition of innovation just for kicks and I was amused by the results:
1. introducing an object as if it were new
WoW is VERY good at this! They have given us the same formula of game in a brand new package and in fun new shapes and sizes to make us like it more.
2. The act of introducing something new and significantly different (The REAL defenition)
WoW? I’m not so certain.
However I am nothing if I am not a man that holds reason in high regard. Show to me how WoW has innovated and my opinions will change as I am enlightened.
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This “casual gamer” idea is something I think you are making far too general. I agree that WoW opened the MMO doors to mainstream gamers, which are the folks that tend to just play popular games. I remember vividly when I began to play EQ that none of my buds wanted to play with me. None of them. They were far too interested in Age of Empires, Diablo, and WarCraft to be interested in the MMO thing. WoW is a popular phenomenon. It has become a part of teenage culture. It is “cool” to play WoW to a large segment of the population. DnD and early MMOs were never seen as being “cool” to a diverse enough group to be WoW-popular.
The fact that they did not play MMOs before does not make them “hardcore” or “casual”. I know plenty of harcore WoW-ers that never touches PC games until WoW. The title of “casual” gamer is exactly what it implies- someone who can only or will only play casually.
WoW does have casual-appeal to “beginner gamers” and gamers that like to play games that don’t require much thinking. I’m not saying WoW is a dumb game (although I could be ;D) but everything about it is extremely simple which makes it easy to pick up and learn.
But on the other side of that coin EverQuest had casual appeal as well. Those casual gamers who could contend with EQ’s somewhat steep learning curve found great satisfaction in the fluid grouping system (something that is non-existant in WoW-esque games) and so I knew many people that would log on for an hour or two every night, which would not hardly be considered hardcore gaming.
Just to wrap it up here, WoW didn’t tap into casual gamers I don’t believe- they’ve been around and playing every game since games began. WoW tapped into popular culture. “Gamers” are pretty niche to begin with. Guys that play lots of RTS/TBS/RPG games don’t really get along with the multitudes that love Guitar Hero and Madden. The lines are becoming more blurred, but FPS/Sports/GHero games tend to be “popular”, while Strategy/Roleplaying games tend to be “gamer.” WoW blurred those lines a lot more than any MMO ever has.
I would actually call WoW instances/raiding anything but “casual” and raiding is all there is to the game besides leveling up solo (if the game experience has changed then let me know, by all means!).
But so to say things like, “The things we’re talking about, such as linear questing, etc. are always going to appeal to the casual gamer and so, short of remarkable innovation, there is always going to be a market for it from here on.” Seems strange to me. Quest grinding is quest grinding no matter how “seriously” you play or how frequently. We all do it- any of us that play MMOs, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be something much MUCH better out there just waiting to be developed.
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Remember the whole point of discussion here is to better understand MMO’s and beat around ideas to figure out how to create the most enriching experience possible. To judge a game by anything but its pieces and their functions seems to me to be a failure to succeed in the goal here.
Well at least that’s why I am here.
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It’s really late- i’m sorry if I was not very coherant. Ask me questions if you want clarification. Wolfshead thanks for the vote of confidence- and I actually set up my blog the day before you wrote that post! I’m loathe to link to it now since I don’t have anything up yet (and my time is fairly limited so I wont be able to write often) but it’s there! Hopefully you will check in as soon as I have something good up! (Maybe an offshoot of this conversation!)
Seems as if Jyn is ripe for the stake! Infidel, “WoW” and “innovation” in the same sentence? BURN!
I usually get quite angry, too, when Blizzard gets praise for copying and expanding EverQuest. They are incredibly good at making money and improving tried & true formulas.
But I do not really see where they boldly went ahead where nobody went before.
In terms of MMO innovation, they turned back time to an age before EverQuest and Ultima Online. I often mentioned that I deeply regret that the EverQuest formula prevailed, we ended up with wallpaper worlds with no interaction, pure combat simulators.
I really like the art of Chris Metzen, but I must say I prefer Guild Wars graphics. Not too manga, not too cartoony. In fact I prefer the awesome landscapes of WoW to the character art. The shoulder fetish was already too much for me in Warcraft III…^^
Some people argue that the movie success of the Lord of the Rings stalled the evolution of the fantasy genre, thankfully not. George R.R. Martin , Joe Abercrombie and others, just to name my favorites, have their very own style.
World of Warcraft on the other hand is a curse and a blessing. The good thing is that it set a high quality standard. The bad thing is that many other less-succesful copycats try to copy an already flawed and outdated system. And usually fail miserably, with WoW being the measure for success. It is just impossible to ignore this game, but I blame it for MMORPGs degenerating into singleplayer games, piss easy lootlust grindfests without any challenge. Put in “e-sports” and WoW PvP/arenas, world PvP being as pointless as a fridge in Siberia… and forget about everything else, like group spirit, community spirit, team work, social interaction, exploration instead of item hunt and achievements.
And as Jedi said, today we play not with the old RPG geeks, but next to everyone, and this unfortunately results in the lowest common denominator for everyone, but fun for everyone, every audience, seems almost impossible to achieve in such a scenario.
I really hope for the next generation of MMOs. What we currently get is old, stale and flawed to the core.
Either the definition of innovation has changed since the last time I looked at it, or I’ve been wrongly operating under the belief (which is unusual for me with words) that it means:
Invention- the creation of something new/original
vs.
Innovation- Changes/upgrades/polish/etc. to already
existing inventions
Maybe that clears it up?
Jyn said: “The best thing about WoW is that gaming has been opened up to a whole new world of people. The world is actually starting to show an understanding of gamers, whereas before it was widely regarded as an obscure, unhealthy obsession. Some of those casual gamers may even convert to serious gamers, and our population will be on the rise, which will raise the demand for games that cater to serious gamers. We just have to be patient for now.”
I have some serious reservations about the fact that Blizzard has grown the MMO player demographic with WoW. While the upside is that we have more public acceptance of the genre, the downside is that many casual gamers are stupid and lazy. They bring with them many bad habits, poor skills and a sense of entitlement. I’m very concerned that these casual gamers have been spoiled with the “reward reward reward” philosophy of game design that is so evident in console and hand held games today. I feel that they have brought these kinds of expectations with them to a MMO like WoW which explains why WoW is such a dumbed-down virtual world. Oh and the concept of role-playing? Forget it.
The truth is: your MMO/MUD is only as good as the players that inhabit it.
Very rarely do we ever focus on the inadequacies of the player community these days. All players need to do is to pay their money, show up and be entertained. WoW fits the bill perfectly. The problem is that as we grow the MMO demographic the negative effects are the poor calibre of the people we have playing MMOs now. How bad can it get? Check out the official WoW forums for a sampling of the ever worsening mentality of the “street” out there. That street ethic has invaded the streets of our virtual worlds.
I’m worried that things will only get worse. Look at what’s happened to WoW. Except for the top tier of raiding, the sense of challenge has all been removed. Here’s a short list of what has been gimped: leveling requirements have been reduced, travel time reduced, soloing to the level cap is far too easy, the death penalty keeps getting watered down. Now even hearthstones are being changed from 60 minutes to 30. If this trend continues pretty soon WoW will be like Second Life — you just show up.
Another problem is that the players who played MMOs and MUDs 10 years ago felt a sense of ownership in the genre. We felt like pioneers. We felt that our best days were ahead of us. Back then, the potential of virtual worlds back then felt so awesome and heady. Ten years later that promise and potential has seemingly faded away.
I’m very worried about virtual worlds and the fact that the barrier to entry is now hundreds of millions of dollars. That means a lack of originality and a lack of innovation as fewer MMOs will be produced because of the 800 pound gorilla (Blizzard) in the room. Expect more WoW clones in the future.
While I may seem like a hypocrite, I don’t openly discuss ideas for advancing MMOs as I’m currently working on my own MMO design doc and I feel those ideas will be expropriated and stolen. Perhaps someday there will be a MMO dev package that is affordable and we’ll be free of the tyranny of Blizzard. Until then, what I try to do instead is to hint at the solutions for the future of our genre.
I thought this was a great answer to the question about what the difference between Invention and Innovation is:
“Both describe the creation of something new, even an invention must be materialized in some form. Innovation adds value or serves a need, whereas invention is new, but may just be novel. Invention is brand new, whereas innovation may be a different application or modification of something already existing”
If you artfully arrange a dinner platter it may look more appealing, but it’s still the same food it was before. WoW made things more appealing, but they have not presented us with anything truly new or original.
Wolfshead, what does travel time and hearthstone cooldown have to do with challenge? Just because something takes longer doesn’t mean it’s more challenging. Keeping things slow may or may not be a good thing, but the only thing a slow game challenges is your patience.
Someone taught you wrong. I blame the education system!
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/innovation?qsrc=2888
That’s our point here. WoW did not introduce new or different things. They polished up the same old stuff DIKUs and EverQuest already did, and added to that a stable, accessible game that was approachable, playable, and “winnable” by millions.
I give Blizzard credit and praise for doing a good job at that, and for expanding the genre to include millions of people. But I blame them for oversimplifying everything, teaching gamers to expect everything handed to them on a silver platter (right up until its time to raid), and introducing the most cruel, time wasting bait and switch ever (complete obsession with raiding as the only option after leveling up).
My same point, but better stated. Thanks Wolf.
Exactly. And this is largely because MMOs are not even virtual worlds any longer. The world features are being ignored and stripped away, and replaced with nothing but single minded loot gathering mechanics.
What really pisses me off is when companies that have not done that in the past, jump on the bandwagon as they move forward. DAoC was not great as far as virtual world features, but at least it had a great player housing system, guild housing, very detailed crafting, etc. Then WAR comes along and there is no housing and the biggest joke of an afterthought crafting system I’ve seen in ages.
I cannot speak for Wolf, but I imagine the point there is the way faster travel and shorter hearthstone timers add to the dilution of WoW as a world. When there is no sense of space, size, or scope, you don’t feel like you are in a world any longer. When your friend says he is on one continent, and you are on the other, there should be a sense of “wow, my buddy is really far away…. sorry dude, I can’t help you.” But when it becomes “one sec….. press button, press another button, hey buddy! lemme help you kill this boss” then you are simply killing your way through a loot dispensing monster generator.
You can also add flight.
Flying Mounts are absolutely cool, no doubt. WOTLK also introduced the Stormpeaks, a zone where you cannot go far without a flying mount.
But they also have drawbacks: They prevent any world pvp, there are no chokepoints anymore. You can bypass any mob on your way to the resource nodes. They also make sure no player interaction takes place, as you pass by at high speed. You have probably more planes colliding than WoW players stopping and talking to someone else in flight.
They did not learn this lesson. Ultima Online had virtually unrestricted travelling abilities. You could “mark” a spot with the spell of the same name, and travel there with the spells “Recall” or “Gate” if wanted to transport a whole group with you.
This caused problems in the long run. People often had often runes to all places in a dungeon. Later new facets (continents, worlds) like Ilshenar had dispersed transport nodes in the form of fixed moongates, but no longer allowed Mark, Recall and Gate.
EVE is the other extreme: It took my Amarr character more time to fly to my friend Steve who played in Gallente space than to take a walk to him at the other end of town, which takes about some 15 minutes. In EVE, even a fast frigate needed a lot of time, between 30-60 minutes…
Bottom line, I am for restricted flight (limited to certain areas), clever transport systems (the shrines/gates in Ilshenar for example) and against hearth stones.
You know where everyone has his hearthstone: In Dalaran. Before Dalaran, it was Shattrath, as these cities have portals to all other major cities.
I think there is definitely a sweet spot for travel. It should probably not take more than 15 minutes to get from a known point A to a known point B, with a few exceptions. 15 minutes might not be the exact best max, but its somewhere near that. At 30-60 minutes, that’s just extreme tedium. But at 15 minutes, someone being far away FEELS far away, and that helps the world really feel like a world.
Is 30-60 minutes even short enough? I thoroughly enjoy EverQuests system of travel. The long periods of time required to reach even another main city was significant (enter your 15 minutes) but to reach the other side of the world was a big commitment, especially if you fell off the ship in the middle of your 30 minute boat-ride (I can’t remember if i’m exaggerating with that number or not, it’s been a while- but those rides were LONG)- the ship may not seem like it’s moving fast, but it’s really truckin’ compared to a swim.
Spell casters could bind themselves anywhere- or other people in a major city (there were 10 of them)- which would let people choose where they reappear when they die, and where they return to when they cast their ‘Gate’ spell (casters only). Otherwise you had to run everywhere and it took a loooong time. SoW (Spirit of Wolf) was probably the most sought after buff in the game, even though max level buffs worked to their full effect on level 1’s, because 20-30 minutes of running swiftly meant you could shave large chunks of time off of travel.
The bottom line though was that travel separated players into different groups (more than factions did already), and high-level Wizard/Druids were highly valued for their transport spells, which could literally save you two hours of just plain running.
The long travel times brought real value to spells that MMO’s don’t value anymore. Movespeed buffs, invisibily, and teleports have all been reduced to simple convenience spells- instead of saving you 20 minutes of running they saved you hours (and your life, with SoW you could actually run away from mobs without getting nearly killed).
This may sound really bad but travelling was only required in very few cases. Every race had its own set of zones to begin leveling in, and usually each race was close enough to a few other races that seeing a few other races besides your own wasn’t uncommon.
The world felt like a world. You couldn’t spend 30 minutes of jogging (or riding) and be anywhere you wanted to be. Living in Faydwer (or Ohio) meant that it was some kind of trouble to make it over to Odus (or California) so you tended to sit around with Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes (or Residents of Ohio) because you had no reason to make that 2 hour journey to reach the Erudites (or Californians).
Now instead everyone populates a small number of cities, and when there’s more than one the cities are almost always linked as if there was a train going through each one. My sense of feeling as if i’m in a virtual world died when I moved on from EverQuest. I don’t think extreme travel times are an issue globally, I think they’re an issue locally. Getting from your level 1-10 zone to your 10-15 zone shouldn’t take very long, that would impede gameplay, but getting from the homeland of your (supposedly unique and culturally independent) people to the homeland of your allies should have some significant distance to it.
Vanguard, planned to be a hardcore MMORPG, emphasized what JediOfTheShire is talking about.
See what flight did to Outland, and also to Northrend. They could as well add dungeon teleporter portals, as people fly over the world and just pass by every kind of opposition. The only reason to stop flying is when you see someone that you could gank (this other player is fighting with NPCs, a great opportunity to surprise him from behind) or you see a resource node that you can loot.
Getting a flying mount in TBC meant that I could access much more resource nodes in a fraction of the time I needed originally.
Note that Northrend has a ferry/boat that brings you from one Kalu’ak harbor to another one. But it is so slow that people only use it once or twice… they will just fly away and forget about slower forms of transport.
Planning transportation is very important, the more the larger your world gets. There are many ways how you can make players travel in groups or on horseback. Flight and hearthstones prevent all fun and dangers of travel, plus remove “travel downtime” that people could use for socializing. Still, travel times need to kept reasonable. What is reasonable, well, this is up to the designers. But extremes are never the best solution.
I explained this in an edit to the main article, but RSS readers that only see new stuff might not realize it. So I am adding this comment as well:
I was so inspired by the great discussion of this post that I decided to work it into a huge article. I expanded on many of the original ideas and added some entirely new sections.
New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement
Check it out, and then come back here and keep on discussing!
Really good summary!
I’ve been on a bit of an action rpg kick lately, and it’s reminded me that I actually can enjoy a mob grind, if it’s done in the right way. In Diablo 2, I killed thousands of Hellcows with my javazon, and I loved doing it despite the neverending repetition of it. I think the primary reason I enjoyed it was the speed with which I did it. In the time it took my WoW rogue to kill one random mob, my javazon would have killed at least 30 Hellcows. I just love annihilating swarms of mobs. The old school “group up, pull one mob at a time” style of mmo grinding was infuriatingly slow for me, thus I switched over to quest grinding for the most part.
City of Villains recaptured that magic for me pretty well. I had a brute that would charge into any group he could find, slaughtering each mob with 1 or 2 attacks. Once he was done with that group, he’d immediately charge into the next. That was alot of fun. Unfortunately, most mmos seem to really discourage fast kills and fighting more than a couple mobs at once. If anybody can suggest another mmo that encourages you to run wild on large groups of enemies, I’d be interested in trying it out.
I’m still reading and digesting, but this just hit home because the SO and I are playing a little City of Heroes right now, with its really rather un-quest-like mission system.
“Quest heavy advancement is actually a disincentive to grouping.”
It is. And yet, oddly enough, a stripped-down up-front *mission* system has exactly the opposite effect. Is one of the things we complain about in the current quest model the fact that quests pretend to be one thing (about character and/or story development) when they really aren’t, at least not anymore?
Maybe it’s partly semantics. “Quest” has all manner of archetypal connotations. “Mission” has a much more workaday, less “epic” feel to it — and given the overuse of that word in recent years, maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Guild Wars had some rather generic >questsmissions<. Missions are visible on the map, once you explored the area, and are shown as “shields”. You can now group with NPCs or other players or a mix of both, and start the mission. You either get a short explanation what to do, a cinematic right at the start, in the middle, at the end or maybe several smaller ones while playing and triggering certain events. Many missions were rather linear, but some offered different ways how you could do this and that. Some als had hidden bonus objectives, e.g. you could blast open the door to the lair of the Ice Drake (it was only a Drake – not a Dragon
) and then you got an extra “sword” through the mission “shield” after completing it, two swords meaning that you both did the mission plus the bonus.
The good thing is, EVERYONE can join. The only prerequisite is that he is there, in the outpost where the mission starts. The only exception are some key storyline missions. E.g. the only way to the Fire Islands is to survive the siege of Thunderhead Keep.
Later, ArenaNet added some more types of mission. Factions introduced the “timed” missions. The faster you do them, the better. You get a Master, Expert and Standard rating instead of the normal and the bonus sword to the shield. This mission type was in general perceived as a step back and was not too popular. Many suspected they did not bother to add some extra bonus to the missions which were also very linear. There was also a competitive mission type (only 3 actually) with a scoreboard that you could check ingame and online on the GW webpage. It had a rather arcade style kind of feeling as it usually was surviving as long as possible while doing certain tasks against increasing odds, numbers of mobs. There were also two PvP missions, were you could go, just press enter and wait for a team to form automatically. The Kurzicks had to defend Fort Aspenwood, while the Luxons had to storm it. There was also the Jade Quarry, but for some reason people never played there. It was less popular and got totally abandoned. Things changed a bit to make it more attractive, but I believe it is still basically deserted.
The main selling point of Factions was the Faction Wars. You formed a team of 4 players, and 2 other teams were assigned to you at random. Then you fought against the Luxons/Kurzicks to hold shrines and other key positions by standing there and outnumbering or totally killing of its guards and players around. Despite some issues, this kind of gameplay is still popular. There are only 7 maps (a neutral one in the “middle”, and depending on how the battles ended, the maps become more defensive in favor of the losing faction, till they are fighting on their own soil: Kurzick Last Stand – Kurzick Homeland – Jade Sea, Kurzick – “Neutral” Map – Jade Sea, Luxon – Luxon Homeland – Luxon Last Stand), the more the Kurzicks win, the more they advance into Luxon territory and advance a line on the main map, which allows players playing in the conquered areas to gain certain extra blessings. Plus guilds could gain control of several Kurzick houses as rewards, holding the main city offered entrance to a special high level dungeon for the controlling guild.
Nightfall had a mix of both Prophecies and Factions type of missions, and the last expansion, Eye of the North, added subterran mazes and dungeons to the game, with puzzles and boss monsters and all that. Each chapter also had a special elite area with special loot. Prophecies had the Underworld and the Fissure of Woe, where one could perform several quests in random order, for a bonus when managing to complete them all, like saving all Reapers of Grenth in the Underworld. Factions had Urgoz Warren and the Deep, starring rooms with special environmental effects. Nightfall had the Domain of Anguish with different “wings”, that opened up the final area, the citadel of Mallyx the Unyielding, after completing them all. It only required one person to have unlocked the previous areas, and all could go for the big boss. The special reward were certain gemstones that could be exchanged like tokens for special weapons and rewards.
Hm… I now no longer wonder why I played GW literally for years. Despite some ugly flaws, it featured not only very pretty player char models, fee free gaming and an interesting skill system, but also a story and a world with a background. People learnt a bit about the world they were playing in, much more so than in WoW, where the story became very much unimportant. WOTLK tries to remedy that, there are many storyline quests, the great Wrathgate video/quest storyline arc is in fact a bit like the cinematics in a Guild Wars mission.
ArenaNet plans to release Guild Wars 2 in 2010/11, and judging from the snippets of info we have so far, they plan to make the game more MMO-ish and put less emphasis on PvP, more on a PvE-world. The idea of PvP as “the endgame” for everyone did not turn out to be true, as many people played PvE adamantly, or Faction Wars, but rarely the name-giving Guild Wars.
Except the first Guild Wars game, Prophecies, the game was meant to be played at max level, 20. You could become 20 and still had to find/buy tons of skills or rare elite skills to have a well rounded character. So each chapter had a very short and fast introduction, giving you some basic hints how to play and then you were quickly near max level and still had to learn how to play, some tactics and so on – otherwise you could not complete certain missions. But if you could not, not really much of a problem, very often you could just have someone travel with you to another mission outpost and do another mission. In fact I saved Fort Ranik, chronologically before the missions in the Shiverpeaks, only after I already reached the jungles of Kryta. I somehow missed the royal order to go to Fort Ranik… I was like Columbus, “there, to the west, this must be India!”
BTW, Eye of the North basically merged Quest and Mission. You now have quest/mission givers no longer in outpost, but in the open areas of an “explorable” zone. As GW2 plans to allow more parties and people in a zone, not only your party, to do away with the extreme instanced nature of the game, this seems to be the next step to merge “quests” and “missions”.
Brilliant article on BrightHub.
I think the recently released PvP-centric Action-MMORPG Darkfall sounds like they have combatted this Mob-grind/Quest-grind phenomenom seen in so many MMORPG’s today by not including a Character Level.
A character instead has a set of skills that they can improve (using a Sword etc). This means people who are new to the game can play alongside their friend who has been playing for months and experience the same content as him – raiding enemy cities, hunting players for equipment, collecting resources to help build their guild city, etc, with the only downside being the friend who has played for months can hit a bit harder with their sword.
The thing with the char levels is, not only are higher level chars stronger through more hp/mana and extra abilities, there are also inherent bonuses and minus points if you are higher / lower level than an enemy.
This is why even soloing a raid boss like the dragon Onyxia is no trouble if you are 20 levels higher. You are basically stronger than a whole raid of level 60 players…!
The point system was used in Ultima Online. You could earn up to 700 points, up to 100 in a certain skill, and could freely train/distribute them. So there was no “uber” char. But you could specialize on axe, spear, sword, magic, taming, crafting, and also, even if it hurt, totally change what you are. My warrior became a bard, for instance.