So i bought COD5 the other day, purely for online play. I booted it up, browsed the server list and noted that some server names were like: "10000xp MegaServer". I joined this one to see what it was about and i was gobsmacked to find that basically for every kill your experience, rather than going up by 10, goes up by 10000 for each kill. This in turn means i was up to level 17/65 in literally 20 minutes, whereas on COD4 it would take weeks of play. I thought the idea of the levels on there was to distinguish between good and bad and more and less experience players. You also unlock the guns and perks. If this is meant to be a kind of universal skill-level system then why allow people to devalue it entirely by allowing them to progress so much quicker than nearly all other servers...?

It's kind of the same idea as Dofus' heroic server and WoW's Death Knight class. It doesn't devalue anything if you can't transfer characters or achievements from one server to another. Faster pacing appeals to a different demographic, and sometimes the original game's pace is just plain painfully slow (IMHO one should be able to finish an RPG in 2-3 months if playing as fast as possible rather than taking the time to explore everything, I tend to run out of interest if it takes longer than that.) and the developers want to test if this is the case by seeing which of two paces players respond more positively to. Also some players think the end game is the only real game, so getting to the end-game faster would definitely be a good thing from their POV.

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Original post by sunandshadow It's kind of the same idea as Dofus' heroic server and WoW's Death Knight class. It doesn't devalue anything if you can't transfer characters or achievements from one server to another. Faster pacing appeals to a different demographic, and sometimes the original game's pace is just plain painfully slow (IMHO one should be able to finish an RPG in 2-3 months if playing as fast as possible rather than taking the time to explore everything, I tend to run out of interest if it takes longer than that.) and the developers want to test if this is the case by seeing which of two paces players respond more positively to. Also some players think the end game is the only real game, so getting to the end-game faster would definitely be a good thing from their POV.

In cod5, your rank stays with you throughout all servers....

And I agree with you OP, at first I was amazed that they would do such a thing, I always liked it on xbox live where you would see the different ranks people have EARNED, and when in the lobby you could just see who were going to be the toughest players and who you want to beat, etc ,etc. But on the computer its much more impersonal i guess you could say, hardly any talking, or any interaction, the ranks mean nothing etc etc...idk if that makes sense...

Wow, that is pretty awful if it's not isolated to that server. o.O

If it were server-local rank then i'd have no problem at all.

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Original post by Dave ...i was up to level 17/65 in literally 20 minutes, on COD4 it would take weeks of play.

This was possible in COD4 as well. Servers would run maps where everyone spawned in very close proximity, facing each other. About an hour of that and you would be 3/4 through the ranks.

I personally feel it takes away from the experience but as sunandshadow pointed out, some people are not interested in the journey.

Don't pay attention to a person's skill by their level. Even in CoD4, all it states is how much time a person has invested, and not their skill level. Even without the power level servers, all a person has to do is play a small map with a large amount of players, and certain game types such as HQ and S&D give more experience.

Although, in the end, it doesn't bother me. Besides, in many ways, these servers help prevent burn out. A) People get to the level they want quickly, so they don't spend 100 hours in the first week, only to never play again. B) If the game deletes your profile (which does happen), and you were level 60, do you really want to spend another 4 weeks playing to get back what you had?

Still, I think the whole level system was not really thought out well, regardless of the fact that you can exploit it. What I would have preferred to see is a level system, where instead of getting exp for kills, etc, you ONLY receive exp through the acheivements/challenges. So a person who is level 65 would have gotten the majority of achievements, which in my mind is a better gauge at skill.

Same thing happened in Team Fortress 2 with the class-specific achievements that unlocked new weapons.

But nobody cares since the new weapons are not necessarily game-changers.

Why is giving new players disadvantages a good idea to start with? Some players want to play multiplayer for games of skill, not to fuel some school boy with far too much time on his hand's desire to dominate by having simply played more, without being any better.

So, what's the point of it? To give people a feeling of achievement at improving? That isn't destroyed by these servers, just lets those who don't want that, and want a skill based FPS, to bypass it. If it's to give people the feeling of being better than others by plunging in lots of time, then you're thinking about a considerably smaller market I suspect than they are.

If the game cost $X/hour to play, then at least the publisher could earn from having people grind. But no game does that.

It's beyond me why anyone in their right mind would put grinds in a vs multiplayer game that lead to functional unlocks. If you absolutely must have a grind, let it result in public achievements, show-off gear, etc. And do design the grinds so that they are in line with winning, so that "achievers" do not screw their team by wandering off to "achieve".