Bryton's got a great point. Here's my .02 on this.
1. In the past, I've wasted months of my life grinding day in and day out and I had like 5 legend characters last wipe. My wife hated me playing for hours on end.
I had decent/limited equipment and ran most of the high-end content. After spending a week or more on skilling and nothing else (lore, mend, etc), I still wasn't legend. I started a thread and next thing skills got revamped. It was a good change for the most part. However, Bryton's right about certain skills taking way too long and the ones that are somewhat pointless otherwise. Note- I wasn't working a lot and had endless time to play, so it wasn't a big deal to grind out the exp/ranks/etc.
2. This wipe I am lucky if I get a few hours a week to play or on weekends. With the 8 man groups and just lack of time to play, I'm still level 26 and slowly gaining. I get left out of groups for other higher level chars/legends, which once you hit a certain point, soloing is not as fun and I log to play in groups with my friends and with the limited free time I get, if there is no room, I then usually log out and go do something else with my time. I notice if others are doing the same it lessens the playerbase considerably.
3. Spamming the same 4-6 zones for a cleric/mage/druid/shaman spell takes away a lot of my desire to play. I want to learn new stuff, but we're always chasing the same repops/spell hunting and frankly, I get bored as hell running dko/tot/storms/mom etc over 100x each wipe. Only to do it again when someone legends and makes a new char, which leads to my next rant.
4. Soon as people legend, due to the time it takes to get there and the fact that legend races rule over most other races (except I feel casters don't get as much love, but that's another discussion), most either retire their chars and make a new one which starts the process over or they quit. Then next thing you have is one guy with 3-4 stacked chars, since he has unlimited time on his hands and as a result, the slow guy (ie the one with less time to play) isn't geared at all. It makes playing here less fun and I'm sure others as well get bored to the point where they quit 2-3 weeks in or take a few months break.
So my suggestions to fix this:
1. Make the experience tables a tad smaller or fix some of the zones to be more balanced in ranks and exp. Example: Deep Mines vs Tantallon. Deep mines has way more ranks/exp per mob for the difficulty versus that of Tantallon. Sorinthalas is another one that needs some rank love.
2. Make ranks refresh more often or make more mobs rank. Fix the load rates on books so we don't have to run the same damn zones over and over to the point where I hate them and log at the mention of running them.
3. Keep the load rates the same but make the rent decay/decay timers less. So instead of 1000 tics make it 300 tics to decay or if the item is deep rented make it decay faster. This gives the smaller clans/players an actual chance to pop elite/limited items. Don't keep the timers on the gear the same, that way elite gear won't all decay exactly a month in and then it makes it harder for a person to only log when he knows all his gear will be decayed at the same time. Keeping it in rent and not being used in the game. Part of the allure is being able to see the gear in use and not deep rented.
4. Skills have been fixed once, but again I feel most classes need certain skills revamped anyway, yet again another topic to be discussed and I'm open for others opinions and ideas on how to improve this.
That's all I got for now. I hope I didn't ramble too much. Maybe someone else can chime in with some other reasonable suggestions.
Andy
