Advanced start at level 6

Started by Pandip, July 29, 2021, 05:25:47 PM

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Pandip

I suspect this will be controversial, but I'd greatly appreciate if we could have an "advanced start" implemented. Ideally this would require someone to be wanded for their IP/account to have access. Start at level 6 with 1,000 gold, 6-8 each of yellow and dirty yellow ash, a handful of light/medium healing potions. Maybe a few buff potions like PfE, bark, strength, grace, endurance - or not; in my experience, you get few to none of these anyways. Maybe there is a shop where you can spend your OOC Area gold on various trinkets or gear or potions, but that might be annoying to implement. It feels appropriate for this to be available to monster PCs as well.

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I've been meandering on a handful of PCs over the last few weeks and the grind to 6 is long. It's not difficult, but it's long. 3-4 hours long, all of which is largely spent running from soloable SQA to soloable SQA. There isn't a lot of quest activity happening prior to 6. I rarely, if ever, see people willing to do low level quests non-solo. There's no incentive to. I've even occasionally had problems finding people to do max 6 or 7 stuff depending on the timezone. It's almost comical to see PCs running through the solo content quietly before interacting with anyone. The alternative everyone resorts to seems to be hopping on the daily orcs/ghyl run as the 7th or 8th person to get your foot in the door with supplies.

Either way, the severity and importance of the "early grind" has been drastically reduced by the abundance of high-level PCs taking people on high end content and giving the gear they don't want to AFK merchants to hock to any new PCs. Nobody collects what-ifs because +1 amulets are so common. Nobody collects saltstones because coattailing onto an orcs run gets you equivalent potions. People might collect lru runes or kt runes, but even those aren't featured in most shops anymore. The need for these things is largely outweighed by access to alternatives.

I anticipate someone is going to step in and say that I'm missing the point of EFU by being averse to roleplay prior to a certain level, but I feel like the server would be better for allowing people to just leap into things rather than having to waffle for several hours before feeling comfortable participating with the world. There are only so many confused, bright-eyed PCs I can play before the trope becomes boring. This is ultimately a harsh, mechanically demanding world and the grind to 6 currently discourages people from interacting with it in a meaningful way for the first several hours of their character.