This message is brought to you by my mad phone typing skills.
Stop giving my discussions and comments responses about being too much work. That is literally the worst excuse for anything.
All stat progression in MMOs are built around going from 0 to max. This formula has beed used as the progression basis for the ES games aswell. Although in ES games, it becomes a more of a character defining aspect because the world levels with you. So while your focused stats might be growing, any stats you dismiss start to fall behind. A new character might start out fairly strong with a sword but after 20 levels of neglect and spell slinging, their swordsmanship is sub-par and their ability to cast magic is far more powerful. It's all relative to the world leveling with you. We have to maintain that feeling of character definement; without the world leveling with you, and without you leveling past the world.
Game progression in MMOs focuses on leveling up and quest progression, while restricting you to level appropriate zones, either by directly locking you out of higher level areas, or simply clobbering you with difficult mobs. ES's game progression is built solely on quest advancement with no restriction on zones (well. . . mostly. 90% of map is open to exploration at level 1) and uses leveling as character definement. This is a huge factor for that ES leveling feel, that's why I'm mentioning it.
Anyways, onto some results of design in all mmos that I think are crummy. Starting the game as a level 1 welp and ending the game as a demi god. Ok people really like to feel as though they have gotten substantially stronger over their efforts in any game. And I don't fault anyone for that. But it's not the same as fighting a tiger in real life, and fighting your hundredth tiger (no, I have not fought any tigers). I'm not coming back after 50 levels and flattening that tiger with one fist. So I hope you know where I'm comimg from when I say that the only way to make an entire mmo world "level" with 5000+ players is to get rid of vertical progression. (Some will still exist but I'll talk about it later). The entire world would be built for a level 1 and stats on all character levels would be that of a level 1. I know being a new mmo player and seeing high level players taking on huge monsters is cool, but most ESO players are either experience MMO players that burned themselves out of that phase or they're returning ES players who were not at all expecting that when they joined the game.
In order to keep level progression but also keep a firm horizontal growth, every time you get a stat up, you also get a stat down. Every level 1's base stats would sart at 50 (out of a range of 1 to 100) before applying modifiers. 50 health (translated amount up for debate), 50 magicka, 50 stamina, 50 attack power, 50 spell power, 50 defense, ect. ect. ect. These would be influenced by armors and weapons at the start, and be boosted (vertical progression) by passives, enchantments, and buffs. When you level up, you get to allocate (lets say) 5 points from any of those stats into any others. Basically everyone starts as a very rounded character who is neither bad nor especially good in any one stat. But a higher level character would be pulling from stats they least often rely on and pushing into more important stats for their build. Tallying up their stats, they'd have just as much as a level 1 (before afforementioned boosts).
Computer is still in shipping so I'm not going after specifics with numbers and proof of concepts.
To include armor/weapon tiers, they'd still contribute to vertical progression but only boosting stats by 2 - 3 points on a tier to tier basis.
Players just starting out would be able to play in endgame content, though they wouldn't be as effective or as skilled as a veteran player. Early content can be enjoyed by high level characters. Everybody in pvp is on fairly even grounds, even before Battle Spirit. Any aquired skills beyond those first 5 slots are purely horizontal progression. Game completely opens up. NotSo stops complaining about how ESO is just skinned MMO.
Not quite the wall of text that a lot of other contributers can achieve, but if you read then I am thankful.
Edited by NotSo on July 5, 2015 2:55AM Gar'Sol the Wanderer VR14 Khajiit Sorcerer Spellblade