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Originally Posted by Kika Maslyaka
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Personally what I take from Thott thoughts is that large level spread in various zones and dungeons was bad design. Karnor should not have allowed people to go 45-60 in the same zone. Past lev 50, zones should never had more than 2 level ranges, continuously pushing people forward and making room for new comers. Rather than having everyone from 45 to 58 pile up in the same camps. So its not about grind itself, but rather distribution of grind across many different zones rather than just 2-3. People not get tired of killing mobs. They get tired of killing exact same mobs in exact same room for 5 levels straight.
And I think there is a difference between making game less grindy vs dumbing it down. Paludal was great zone design wise, but insane ZEM made it bad. There was no need what so ever to devalue old zones like that. It wasn't made to make game less grindy, it was made to sell expansion. By contrast MOST of Luclin zones were undeveloped empty and pretty much useless square boxes. Only a handful of zones were actually well made considering all the innovation Technics were already available at that time.
Also, a lot of people hated LDON for being copy-paste, theme-less & mindless auto-runs. And I agree. What I do like about LDONs that you could do a dungeon from start to finish to get to the end goal/end boss without just having to sit in 1 room for 5 hours. While LDON was simplistic it was also a foundation of future dungeon design for next gen MMOs.
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IDK- I think you could make the argument that while of course game designers always want to sell expansions, they equally valued keeping customers happy (and paying monthly subs). They didn't accidentally make PC and some of the other expansion newb zones with a high ZEM. That was done intentionally to give people a chance to quickly get through the early stages of leveling and get a new character up to the point where it'd be relevant with raids, higher level content etc. where the larger concentration of players were. No grinding needed. Hell, WoW took it to the next level with WOTLK and let you just spawn a DK at like level 50, right? No need to even bother with Levels 1-49.