SwagVault MMO Blog

A recent posting in that pleasantly discursive blog, The Middle-Earth Adventurer, was entitled “Post 60 Slump”, and I believe it definitely touched on a sore point for many players: “I think that there’s a natural incentive to seeing the blue xp go up and up and up as you level. It hits a part of the human psyche that drives us to keep going on whatever path we’ve set out on. Once that stops… well, you lose something, even if there’s everything else in the game still pushing you forward.”

I couldn’t agree more, even though in my case it hasn’t yet stopped me carrying on with the last batch of Moria quests… but it’s true that the salt hath lost somewhat of its savour. What’s the problem? Basically, that when Turbine released Mines of Moria, they raised the level cap from 50 to 60. In other words, you could now earn experience points and level up as far as the new upper limit of sixty. This was a fine and necessary change, as far it went; unfortunately, in practice it proved all too easy to reach the new upper limit. Dedicated players went from 50 to 60 in a month or less; for the average player, I would guess a time period of around three months is probably about right. That is way too damn fast, given that it probably took an average of nine months or so to go from level 1 to level 50 in Shadows of Angmar. And as the Middle-Earth Adventurer points out, once you reach the cap level, things somehow seem a lot tamer. Particularly if the game as a whole seems to have slightly run out of steam (which is a subject I shall be getting back to very soon).

Now, normally you can’t just say, “OK, we’ll simply increase the leveling requirements – let’s double them”, because to do that, you have to build in the extra quests and activities by a similar factor. But in the case of Moria, that wasn’t a problem. How do I know? Simply, because when I hit l.60, there still remained at least 45%-50% of total new quests still uncompleted. And though I obviously can’t say how many EPs their completion would have given, it should have been substantial, given that many of them, like “Enemies of Lothlorien”, are multi-strand quests calling for the completion of several strands of very difficult quests. It would have made more sense to extend leveling from l.50 to l.60 by a factor which have ensured reaching the cap after completion of, say, 80% of the new quests. Let’s hope that when Turbine next raise the cap, as they will surely do sooner or later, they will have learned their lesson.