Ilum XP Farm

You might be able to, but honestly, without the double XP boost, if you can stomach that mind-numbing grind for that long to get to 50, you deserve it.

I think the largest majority of the power levelers were doing it this weekend, and will be returning next weekend. You might get a few groups during the week here or there, but I doubt it.

I only did that leveling thing for about an hour and a half last night and I wanted to shoot myself. Had so much more fun PVPing with my other toon and leveling up that way.

AND DON'T FORGET:

Let me just be a right rotten bastard and say that it's a PVP zone, at least on the PVP servers. If you don't like them leveling up, get on your alternate faction toons and kill them all. They can't level up very quickly when they're dead.

It is a bug and i'd be more than shocked if it was intended, however... who cares? The game has been out for almost a year and a half, and anyone who has a 50 already has one. Bioware may just be turning the blind eye to let people level up quickly before their expansion, every MMO does it. Blizz has looked the other way countless of times as botters, and exploiters get world firsts, abuse leveling, etc. Bioware just wants it's customers to have fun, and this is one of those bugs that isn't really game breaking as it doesn't overpower anyone and we all have a chance to do it. And no, I didn't get a chance to do this as I was busy all weekend but still, it isn't game breaking and it isn't a big deal. So someone hits 50 faster than we did a year ago, not a big deal IMO. Let them have fun

If it suggests to them the appeal of making level 10 ops and large-group-grindable leveling content, then that's legit. Obviously people liked it cause they did it. The challenge for Bioware is to look at it and see what it's telling them about the appeal of this activity vs. other things people could do, then figure out how to carry that appeal through to something designed into the game, without breaking everything else they have made.

What does that tell you about the sub 50 leveling process? If, as you claim, "no one", other than a select few, want to level the traditional way, what is wrong with providing people an alternative? I WANT to play the game, and this is not a problem to me. The reality is, 1-49, or leveling, is only done in MMOs, by the majority of players, because it's necessary to reach 50 (or level cap). This is why end game content needs to be heavily focused on in MMOs - players spend most of their time playing AT level cap.

At least in this case people had to actually do something in order to level up. There are games where the entire mid-range leveling process consists of dozens of players sitting on a hill /afk for days on end, while another player runs around nuking mobs in front of them. (That's right, Anarchy Online, I'm looking at you.) That's the sort of thing that turns games into graveyards.

Good reply!!! To me, it was joining up with my friends, 7 of us, in one Ops group that allowed ALL of us to contribute, despite our levels.

Agreed.

That really is one important thing missing from this game, IMHO.

In a previous game that I played, and sometimes just go tour for fun, you could either hunt, mine, or craft. Hunting mobs would net you loot comprised of resources that you could sell to get more money for more ammo to go hunt some more, etc.

But many of the mobs were very big, very tough mobs. So we would put together massive hunting parties, and just head off into the open landscape to find a pack of the mobs we wanted to hunt, and started.

I think you're onto something here, Heezdedjim. Instead of reacting like "**** IT'S AN EXPLOIT, CHANGE CHANGE BAN BAN", the obvious suggestion here is that this game needs much bigger mobs that teams of people will gather up to go hunt en masse.

And raids aren't enough. Sometimes I don't want the story, I don't want all the surrounding crap and navigating the maps and finding my way to quest hubs and what not. I just want to grab my armor and my weapon and head into the darkness to find something to pew pew pew with a group.

But is it the group mob hunting that people enjoy most, or just the quick leveling? Do they like the taste of the beer, or are they only drinking it for the alcohol content?

Some testing in various modes in the coming months with new such content would be a great way to figure that out. Make it happen, BioWare!

People have complained before about how the bizarre group XP mechanics actually punish you for grouping if you're even slightly lower level than friends. It's odd in a game that makes so much effort to make people run in groups (e.g., "social points").

There are other games that handle team bolstering much better. Star Trek Online, for instance, will let max level players and brand new toons group together to do the same content, and they somehow managed to make the bolstering and XP calcs all work out fine, without gimping the content, and without allowing /afk "power leveling." Of course, STO also has a bit more content that is "off the rails" compared to this game, but not much.

Basically the way it works is that mobs in any instance (other than endgame raids) will spawn at a level that matches your level when you enter. If a max level player is teamed with a level 1, then the level 1 is bolstered up to 51 in stats and basic item rating, and the mobs you face match the higher level. So you both have to do the work, nobody gets a free ride, and the XP is award to each person as if they were doing content on their own level.

They could make FPs work that way if they wanted; bolstering all group members to the same as the highest level in the group, and making mobs scale to that level as well. It would require some reengineering to make mobs scale dynamically, and they would also have to rework the XP code a bit to deal with each person individually. But it would ensure that everyone can contribute in any group (and has to, in order to get the instance done).

This game could do a lot more along those lines, to make it viable for people to play together no matter what their level, while still making the XP gain proportional for each member of the group, and not allowing higher level players to just drag lower levels through stuff blindly.

/Signed.

Fact: people level to cap faster in MMOs over time (when compared to when the MMO launched). It's the nature of MMOs for the most part. Some of it is player skill, some is game mechanics. Why do people care how fast someone else levels a character? Your not playing that character and getting to level cap one dimensionally does not make a character superduper in any way. Let people level the way they want to.

Heck some MMO companies even give veteran players automatic level dings as a perk to get them to come back and pay to play some more.

Note: personally I don't take advantage of the Ilum XP farm... as I enjoy taking the time to level a character via normal PvE routes... so don't even bother trying to gank me over this.

I am still failing to see the problem with this? If players want to get to 50 as fast as possible, why should they be stopped? I fail to see how people getting from level 1-50 in 20 hours or whatever affects my gameplay in the slightest... If it's someone's very first toon ever and they're doing that, then they are only cheating themselves and I don't care. If it's their 10th toon getting to 50, then they are fully capable of getting to 50 via other means and I still don't care...