CardinalPiggles said:
Although I do think it kind of defeats the point of grinding for levels if they are just going to be taken away from you periodically so you can actually do stuff.
Nasrin said:
That's kind of where I was coming from.
Why on earth would you "grind" for levels? Unless you consider the act of leveling up "a grind" regardless of circumstance?
The general idea behind it is that in MMOs that use linear leveling with no scaling, the world effectively shrinks as you level. Once you're finished with a zone, there's little or no reason to ever return and play there, unless the devs create artificial reasons to pipe you back through (say, by placing a fetch quest there, or by periodically forcing you to return to a home point for training), or unless you're pittering about for the purposes of assisting a lower level friend with your godlike character. These MMOs tend to resemble pyramids...fat at the bottom, narrow at the top, with end game activity restricted to the same tiny handful of dungeons and zones, which must be farmed in perpetuity, and all the other content is now essentially abandoned and worthless. This leads to new players describing the experience as a "ghost town", as after a few months 90% of the player base is congregating in 10% of the world.
By scaling the player, the world retains some sense of challenge and interest. You can go fight in the starter zone and get level appropriate rewards and experience and a mild challenge, instead of facerolling grey mobs and getting trash. You still have access to all the skills, gear and traits of a higher level character, so you've not been completely "stripped" of your accomplishments, but you're scaled to the point where you can still be harmed and killed by the enemies in the zone, and can still profit from their defeat.
Make sense?
I've not enough experience with it to tell you if its working as intended mind you, but that's the philosophy underpinning it.
