Chapter One: OF COURSE it's the Endgame!

Agreed. I'm trying to make Boiware think about the expansion, which is a better place for sweeping design changes anyway. I'd hate for them to give us levels 51 - 60, pack all the content in there, and neglect the endgame again.

The game also needs to be a lot better at introducing new players. This one they should probably get started on yesterday.

Agreed, but I'm still not following you.

They can't give us the equivalent of the leveling content that stretches into infinity. This is like trying to lay the train tracks down in front of an already moving train. The players are always going to consume content faster than you can make it.

Gear, however, can scale forever, because it's all just numbers. It may seem silly to, say, have a million health points, but it's not very different than 10,000 when it's abstracted out to a bar. At the end of the day, you care about a percentage.

They use this trick already to put levels 1 - 49 all in the same PvP game.

Two different aspects:

* levelling: yes. Like you said, it's all just numbers. Theoretically you could have the xp required for a new level always follow some progression. If gear can continue progressing to a million because it's just numbers, then so can level. Just make some formula to calculate the new level required xp infinitely.

* story: no. You're right, they can't give infinite amounts of story content. Which is why it's self-evident to me that the character's story must end at some point and an alt must be rolled at some point. This is why I don't understand why continue with the same character when it's clear that the story content cannot progress infinitely.

Can't it? There's lots of radical ways you could keep the character story going. Remember, everyone's character's story exists in a self-contained bubble where nobody else's story matters. In that sense, it requires a big suspension of disbelief--the upside is that you could go on to be the damned emperor and it still wouldn't really impact PvP, end-game Raiding, or group play in general. I look forward to seeing what happens in the future with more content patches and expansions.

Overall, I agree with the OP though. There's some MMO (and, to a lesser extent, RPG) conventions that just need to go away for the good of all. Bioware said they wanted to keep this a relatively traditional kind of MMO, but really its not. There's a lot of ways this could splinter off into the realm of true innovation, but we'll see.

And the environment to go with it? You know, the place where all the quests and mobs you can level off of are?

Repetitive content has to come in somewhere. The alternative is infinite content, and we can't make that.

Because it's a game?

Sorry, we may just part ways on this particular point. We can't have infinite story or content. What are we here for? It must be to play something, no? If it's just to experience a story and then abandon the game once it's done, well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that. But that's really the opposite on an MMO, which is about a persistent world that just keeps going long after you and I log off. A persistent world to play in.

Your game is just gonna end. I'd like mine to last a while. That's kinda the point of this genre.

I think the ship has sailed on making this a radically different kind of MMO, and that's fine. I'm not out to reinvent the wheel... here.

I'd just like to see the bulk of design, development, art, and all that lovely voice acting, go into the endgame where most of us are going to do most of our playing.

In the beginning that was what SWG was. It was skill leveling, not character leveling. Or a great game that does have a sort of leveling is Skyrim (insert random arrow to the knee joke here)

Leveling games end up wasting a huge amount of resources and therefore money of the game designers. Once you get to 50, how much time are you going to spend on Nar Shadda, Korriban, or Drummond Kaas? It's the same thing in WoW and Rift and all the others. Once the game matures a bit, all the earkier areas are empty, yet they still need to have the computing power to have them running. Get rid of levels, make your skills grow instead and suddenly hunting anywhere at anytime is fun.

This is a problem I ran into when I was creating my own RPG awhile back. The way I dealt with it was I made the monsters level up with the player - and it worked out really good and made the game a lot more fun.

I agree 100% with everything you've said, and in addition must throw in another thing that they utterly failed at.

Many guilds use a master looting system to help ensure the gear that drops goes to the person it's the biggest upgrade for, and in turn will help the raid out the most. However the master loot system is broken for the most part due to the lack of any /roll command. While some people might have a good guild to run with where people are able to tell the difference between whats a tank piece vs whats a dps piece, many do not with the result being gear goes to people who a) don't really need it or b) goes to someone who already has it because of the game automatically designates pieces to certain players. This is a crippling aspect of the game and a glaring blemish on amount of thought they really put in to end-game raid mechanics. Why would the game automatically give the Columi/Rakata token to someone who already has it instead of allowing the guild or raid leader the opportunity to allow the people who need it to roll on it?

This is really something that needs to be addressed and I am aware there are other threads about it. Since there is already a RNG in game, you would think it wouldn't be too much effort to just add a player command to access it any time.

Just my two cents, and again, well said JustTed!

Same environment as where the grinding for infinite gear is done. If you have an environment to grind infinite gear, you have an environment for grinding infinite xp too.

I've never played an RPG, tabletop or computer, where I had the illusion that my character was going to keep going forever and ever and ever like an Energizer Bunny. From my earliest RPG experiences with tabletop D&D to this day, there has always been the assumption that eventually the character would become too godlike to be challenged anymore, and then we'd start new characters.

I really don't see what's wrong with that model.

I thought the point of this genre was to play and have fun with other players online, not to be bored at cap with other players online. While levelling, the former occurs. At cap, the latter occurs.