It took me about 4 years to hit 25.
One of my friends spent many months at level 5, trying in vain to get to 6 and finally lore the stats of the char. Since I had a high level char (10 or 12, can't remember), quality eq (2d5++ prim etc.) and decent game knowledge (I could lead toede, lost mine and all of solace sewers, not just the centipedes part), I tried to help him, but he kept dying. Not sure if he got to lev6 before the end of the wipe, probably not.
But we were exploring a lot and learned or experienced something new almost every day.
Fun times!
*oldtimer*
A true newbie who gets hooked isn't someone who get shoved from newbie to endgame in 1 day.
That's a fallacy in thinking by some people who bring friends.
Can't agree more. If I needed a program that prints on the screen now and then, "You obliterated the ancient and feared green dragon, you're a super-hero!", it takes <5 minutes of coding to make one. The fun of the game is in the process, and getting the results too fast and without effort devaluates them and reduces the fun.
If the victory (PK, PvE, a solved quest, whatever) was easy and didn't take any thinking or effort from me, what's the fun in it?
With that in mind, I'ld like to propose a mini-wipe chaos day event.
Level cap of 20, pwipe,
The idea isn't bad but I see some problems with implementation (...merging the 2 playerbase data files... *cringe*)
Perhaps an easier implementation could be something along the lines:
- Wait until the next regular wipe
- Start a new wipe as a mini-wipe with an announced fixed duration of, say, 1 week
- Announce the rules for the mini-wipe (anything from regular rules to complete chaos)
- Set the challenges (the highest rank per class, the highest level per class, the best spelled or skilled char of the class; most pkill frags; best pkills-deaths score; most different dragons killed; be the first to complete CT, etc. etc. Whatever is easy to implement or manually check in the log files)
- On day 7, run a tournament
- The winners (tournament, challenges) announce the name and the e-mail of their first char next wipe to the imms
- Wipe again
- Start a normal wipe
- The winners make the announced chars (the e-mails are used to prevent the fraud) and get their medals
- The wipe continues as any normal wipe