Both @ Dylan & Scalebeast:
I know what this sense of accomplishment is, I did level toons and have altisis back in the days also. But I must be cursed with too perfect memory and imagination. Reliving the first missions again and again and again did end up a chore (not the first few minutes, due to new toon factor). I also liked making tons of toons ideas, most of them I got tired (or had other ideas) and deleted them. My main was particularly this, I deleted him 4 or 5 times before getting him right (took Super Reflexes for Brutes to stabilize him), and that was the best 50 levels I played in my life, even after I did them already on my stone/fire Brute, which was my first 50 (but not quite the first toon either), and fully fleshed Bio too.
I don't want to cut out all progression, just to up the starting level much, much higher, and make the last progression (slotting & incarnating) extremely slow and shiftable from character to character (so that you don't have to redo it on each alt). Also, the "really hard way" can still be had, especially if it's a prerequisite to true freeform, before which, you get only a preset hero. Because the earlier levels are you starting from few powers and building them to all your repertoire.
Basically, it's like ouroboros, but up to eleven.
You can relive your Role life as often as you want, each leading to (eventually) a respec. During it, you get to grow from 2 powers to everything you choose. You can even start with it. Basically, it should last as long as it took you to get from 1 to 20, netting you either a respec or a strong reward like end-game should (just much slower because it can be done solo). RP-wise, this reward is from deeper understanding of yourself (heroes don't "loot", so it's the same when you defeat a super villain or rewatch something you did, or contemplate how you could have done it).
By removing the lvl progression, however, you would remove a lot of the interest in playing long term. The game would get boring real quick because there would be no way the DEVs could churn out new material quick enough to keep people interested.
I simply can't see it. Yes. Super Hero MMORPG's are based on comics....but they are games none the less, not the comics themselves.
I found your concepts interesting to read...but I don't see how they could be implemented in a game that wished to remain financially viable.
That's is both the weak point and turning stone of my idea. Most recent games eventually fail because they don't have enough content anyway. Once players hit the end of the planned evolution, they enter a never-ending circle of raiding and looting and gearing and raiding something else and looting something else... Is that even content ?
In 3 or 4 years of development, games get out with a tremendous amount of content, enough for 300 hours to get through. When the game gets out... every 2 or 4 months, something comes out that takes, what, 20 hours to fold up ? There is something not right here. Development is much harder than content development, and yet it doesn't hold the pace ?
That's why I wanted to see if you could just change the work flow. Those early levels ? Only make ones such as those, and offer them parallelly to the player, not vertically. Eventually, the content is going to age, just because you develop new, more powerful abilities for the player to use, and you don't want to redesign the old content. But just don't offer as much rewards. Yes you can still do this content, now much more easily, but you've got this new content you have to have the new abilities (or upgrades) to be able to do easily.
Wait, this seems familiar... Again, we are in a vertical hierarchy. So, if power levels don't change, what to change ? (<- again, one of my questions) well, type of the enemy, game mechanics involved, and offer them to the player also (partly what CoH was doing in the end, new powersets being shared between new NPCs and players, like the Dream Doctor, Pendragon...) There is nothing particularly powerful in this, this is just how Carnival is different from Knives of Artemis, or Malte. They are a new type of enemy holding the powers of illusion/devices/high-tech you need to make toons of your own, or new types of enhancements (or new combination, but nothing more powerful).
See ? Horizontality, not verticality. New content every few months, everybody playing with its type of character to unlock or strenghthen (there is still slight progression to unlock after straight unlocking) or just have fun (Maybe you can have cross-rewards at a reduced rate).
I just don't want entire stories and gameplay entirely locked to me or my character because I outleveled them. What's holding me to go and smack some skulls when I'm level 50 and an incarnate demi-god ?
Okay, time to go to sleep...
