@kasdeya this is something that's addressed both in Guild Wars (which is less of an MMO and more of a online RPG) and Guild Wars 2

Both have the same philosophy of horizontal progression, where the character and its gear are max level early on, and then the progression is made by learning to play, finding nice skill combinations, and stuff like that
In GW, there are skills you don't get before almost end game, but depending on your builds they can be less interesting than skills you start with
Even more, on the leveling part, GW2 made it so you get almost the same XP if you kill mobs or complete events from lower levels, as your character's level always gets scaled down to the zone's level

It's not perfect, but I think the philosophy of "make most of the content challenging regardless of your level" is pretty unique in the MMO genre

@kasdeya This is my problem with most leveling multiplayer games. If I start a game with friends, and then only some of us have time to grind throughout the week, the rest become a lot less useful on a team when they come back.

It's even worse when it's a game that's been around for a long time (ie WoW and Warframe) and someone who's played for 10 years wants to shotgun you through the main campaign. I wind up feeling lost the whole way through.

for context, I really like WoW but only as a singleplayer experience. I also like to do dungeons sometimes but the other players may as well be bots

if MMOs are designed primarily to be social experiences, then why have such strict tiers of progression? for example if I’m level 30 in WoW and I want to introduce my friend to the game, I can’t go into their level 1 zone and level with them. I’ll be massively over-leveled and we’ll both have a bad time

and even if we’re both at the level cap (which would require my friend to grind for at least a week, when they may not even like the game), we might have different tiers of raid gear - or maybe one of us doesn’t raid at all. so there will always be a power imbalance that makes things much less fun

the only thing that makes sense to me is that leveling is meant to be a solo activity, and you aren’t meant to bring your friends into the game. but instead you’re meant to reach the level cap and then join a guild, and make new friends that way. which, for me personally, is a very unappealing way to socialize

but imagine telling someone “hey do you want to try WoW with me? you just have to grind for 20 hours and then we can actually play together in-game!” like who would say yes to that

Once I saw a woman post her fursona. On her shirt, there was C64 assembly code that printed something like "hello". Helpfully, I explained her how I'd have written the same code. (I think my code was like one byte shorter, took the same amount of clock cycles and was much harder to read, defeating the purpose of having it on a shirt. I also didn't know C64 assembly, only generic 6502 assembly, so I had to look up the system call she used. Oh, and she was the founder of a large game hacking website.)

@rowan fuck yes - so glad you have it again

I went from “I don’t get this at all” to “oh it’s Empty Spaces. got it”

I thought the mech genre was just about big robots fighting. you’re telling me there are traumatized brainwashed combat dolls piloting those mechs?