Quote Originally Posted by EaglePhoenix View Post
Gee, ikr they went everywhere I did! Gosh!

Seriously though, levels 31->44, 54-62 ish and 86 onwards are the friggin hardest. Not even kidding.
You nailed it perfectly, lmao. Leveling my first char from 40-50 in R1 sofa room day after day, after day... it was hell. The highest I've legit leveled my own char from scratch in official is to 58.

The problem with the leveling is the constant rising requirement after each level. It is too too fast in the beginning, and it gets to a point where you go too long without making any actual progress after long periods of time. At first you'll gain 10-20 levels in a day. You barely even have time to actually utilize the level 20 and 40 unique weapons in the game. Soon it becomes around 10 levels in a week at around 45-60. This is good area. It takes time but you can actually gain real progress every day. It's not like level 80+ where you can grind all day for 30% and then lose it all the next day in group pvp.

Look at it this way:

Current: (These are just rough estimates).
1-20: 3 hours.
21-30: 5 hours.
31-35: 5 hours.
36-40: 7 hours.
41-45: 9 hours.
46-50: 12 hours.
51-55: 15 hours
56-60: 17 hours
61-65: 20 hours
66-70: 21 hours
71-75: 25 hours (5 hours per level)
81-85: 29 hours (5.8 hours per level)
86-90: 35 hours (7 hours per level)
91-95: 42 hours (8.4 hours per level)
96-99: 48 hours (9.5 hours per level)

This equals out to 294 hours of leveling. Let's say Jack spends 2 hours a day Monday through Friday leveling, it would take him 29 weeks to go from level 1-99. This isn't an unbearably long time when you really look at it, but it's not distributed evenly. Near the end at 8x and 9x, Jack would come home and spend 2 hours only to gain about 20-30%, meaning he'd go 3-4 days without gaining any levels at all, and being forced to avoid any pvp to avoid losing any exp he gained. This is the problem. When players go long periods of time without improving or gaining access to new content, the gameplay becomes stale and the player becomes disengaged.

Let's say the exp rate is evenly distributed though, so you don't level too fast in the beginning and too slow near the end to where it becomes unhealthy. Well, 294 split into 99 levels is 2.9 hours per level.

Spending 2.9 hours to get from level 98 to 99 is fine, but it would be ridiculous to spend 2.9 hours getting from level 1 to 2, so it must be adjusted. It is okay for leveling up to start fast and get gradually slower, but that increase in time can't be very large per level when there are 99 levels.