The speed at which you can level up in this game has gotten a bit rediculous.

Juomuuri · January 31

I've leveled up approximately 30 characters to 50, and am sitting at CP 2200+. (Yes, I've deleted at least 10 lvl 50 characters over the course of 8 years of playing, pushing 9. Also deleted a whole bunch of characters who hadn't reached 50 yet but were close.) And in my opinion, the leveling process should be as fast as it is now, since it's mindnumbingly boring at this point. It used to be even slower in the past, and my most recent characters got slamdunked to lvl 50 during 100% xp boost events with 50% scrolls on them at all times (I still have like 250 of these scrolls in my bank lol). And the way I level is quite simple: I do Stros M'kai to get to lvl 10, then I jump to Cyro tutorial to get major gallop, then go do delves and public dungeons in the base game zones until I'm lvl 47, then go do Bleakrock/Bal Foyen to get to 50. My back is borked so I had to do the leveling in multiple sessions, but it usually took about 10 hours or so to get to max. And people could do this actually fast by getting boosted in nBRP (I've seen so many people trying to sell these runs lmao).

However, my other opinion is that players who are on their first character should NEVER rush to 50, you gotta take in the game and enjoy the process. After that, it's fine to slamdunk your alts, who cares. It took me like a month to get to lvl 50 on my first character, and that one has over 2k hours played by now!

So like, as someone who has 20/20 slots used with lvl 50 characters - let people level fast if they want, and if someone wants to do it slow, they do what they wanna do. Each to our own.

Imza · February 1

what you are experiencing here is the difference in learning a game and leveling your first character and then leveling a character after learning the game for the umpteenth time.

I also have issue with this - but - there is no way (even with a naked character) I can't do anything in open world in the base game because I understand the game and how it works. I can't even intentionally do really badly - that's what happens when you invest years into a game.

Unfortunately that learning experience will only come with a new game.

DreamyLu · February 1

It's not only ESO. It's a general tendency on all games: levelling up is for many just a "grinding" and once it has been done with one toon, they don't want to repeat. So games like GW2 - a lot earlier than ESO - have implemented speedy ways to level up to max. In comparison, ESO is late to take that step.

In GW2, you can even purchase/earn a token that takes you straight from zero to max (giving you all points, bonuses and rewards of each intermediate levels).

I have no problem with that, because the way it is done, to level up slow or fast is a choice. In ESO (like in GW2), if we want to go slow, we can. We're not forced to speed it up.

Now specific to ESO, even now, I still find it too slow and would be glad to purchase the same type of token than in GW2, allowing me to boost my toon straight to 50.
I like to take it easy between 0 and about 15. But once so far, there is nothing new I get from levelling up and I would love to be able to skip to 50. The CPs after that are annoying enough on their own. Since I can't, I have stopped creating new toons.

My impression is that going fast in MMOs is a general tendency since some years. Everything has to go fast. The request to cut/speed up levelling up is just one more thing reflecting this general tendency. Most of the younger players don't want to wait. Things shall go smooth and straight to target. If it's not the case, it's grinding.

**Edited for an add**

Taril · February 1

DreamyLu wrote: »

My impression is that going fast in MMOs is a general tendency since some years. Everything has to go fast. The request to cut/speed up levelling up is just one more thing reflecting this general tendency. Most of the younger players don't want to wait. Things shall go smooth and straight to target. If it's not the case, it's grinding.

It's not a global trend.

Many Asian MMO's are very, very grindy and tedious. They have much more tolerance for that sort of thing over there.

Outside of that, the main reason for speeding things up is a lack of ability to make the journey of leveling up actually engaging.

Between things like;

- Powercreep (Such as what happened with WoW where Cataclysm rescaled all early game items and many expansions reshaped skills and talents with more early power) that renders leveling boring and uneventful so it's just not very enjoyable to play through at all.

- Focus on new end-game content, without any care to update existing content to make it also new and exciting (Cataclysm stands out as one of the few times base content got a major overhaul)

- Lack of replayability. Due to things like your first character does everything already so doing it all again but as a new character is not very interesting. Star Wars: The Old Republic alleviated this by having each class having its own unique story missions... Until they stopped and all characters ended up in the real game where everyone does the same story (Not that you can really blame them. Creating essentially 8 games worth of MSQ and content would be a ridiculously massive undertaking)

The end result is vapid and uninteresting leveling processes, whereby the journey is simply a roadblock to the actual fun rather than the fun itself. Thus, people want to simply get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

It's one of the reasons I'm so fond of Anarchy Online. Getting max level was long and grindy. But wasn't a requirement to have fun. Very few people actually ever made it to level 220 due to the absurd exp requirements for those final 20 shadow levels (Where each one required more exp than every other prior level combined). But the game was still fun because it was all about just doing fun things and gaining levels was a byproduct. The only exception was if you were twinking (I.e. Gearing up a character to be as powerful as possible at a specific level. In order to do specific things like PvP in a particular level range or do specific dungeons because they had level caps)

magnusthorek · February 1

Sometimes times I miss the times before One Tamriel

Orbital78 · February 1

This game never came across as a EverQuest style leveling game. That style died a long time ago. If you want that, check out Pantheon. I don't think I could go back to that style of mmo.

totzummrdave_ESO · February 5

tyjoie wrote: »

I feel like this game has became basically just a rush to CP160 to get to the end game content, at the expense of the early game experience. SNIP

That's all on you. You are rushing to 50/160. Stop. Stop it. Get some help. Make a character, do the tutorial for gear and just meander. It will take time again, instead of rushing. Leveling in the game hasn't changed at all. Only your approach to leveling has.

sans-culottes · February 7

Orbital78 wrote: »

This game never came across as a EverQuest style leveling game. That style died a long time ago. If you want that, check out Pantheon. I don't think I could go back to that style of mmo.

Too bad Pantheon is terrible.

nadrokal · February 7

I enjoy leveling my characters and wish I could slow it down. But I can certainly see the point of those who want to get to 50 as fast as possible. I'm usually loath to point to another game as an example, I don't think they should all be the same, but I'm certain probably everyone knows about or has heard of the World of Warcraft token things for starting a higher level character (don't really know the specifics, I don't and have never played WoW). Sure you have to pay for them, but it does give the option to begin as something other than level 1. I'll tentatively say, it might be one path for ESO to explore, though many will undoubtedly say "people already don't know how to play their classes, this will just make it worse." To that I say, there are those who _never_ bother to learn how to play their class. I've seen people only use heavy attacks with melee weapons to kill bosses rather than a more useful spammable. But it's fine; to each their own. There are those who play only for the story, as an example.

What I rather wish we had was something to disable event double experience and possibly the ESO+ bonus as well. As one more example from another game, Star Wars: The Old Republic had a similar debate in the community once upon a time, and the developers introduced a doohickey called a White Acute Module to disable the event double xp for those who wanted it. I would genuinely love something like this in ESO - it would enable me to slow down my own leveling while not affecting others. To me, that's a win-win. We may never get something like that, and that's fine; in the meantime I'll do what I've always done, just not play my lowbies until the event is over. I really don't like seeing my lowbies gain three or four levels from one random dungeon, but that's on me, as I said I don't begrudge others the ability to level as fast as they can.

SpiritofESO · February 7

While I understand the premise of this topic, I have to disagree about the whole too fast leveling speed. It really seems that people are discussing the speed at which you can reach Level 50 with Alts.

And, REAL leveling is all about Champion Points... and that is not too fast, not at all and I like it slow but steady.

However, you should consider yourself fortunate that you can level up an Alt quickly and very soon it will inherit all of your Champion Points.