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Karrus Hakrel is a great example, it became one of my favorite places. Here's what I found: Fallen Adventurers was fun, playable, and gave you pretty good drops for the work put in. Lord Obsiderru mostly dropped junk. The raid mob's placeholder was stronger--the raid thing simply had a ton of health, but the ph hit harder. We brought down the raid mob with three toons 38-40 and it dropped junk too. That whole area is incomplete. If you played the two mini-dungeons, you'd outlevel KH. And, there are tons of powerful mobs crawling around the desert, none of which had associated content.

I think through time, xp got more generous, gear got more generous, and mobs were nerfed. Stuff that is a "big deal" to summon like in KH, Graystone, Dailuk...those could be raid strength, but at they very least they should be a lot harder than they were--much as most of the Magi Hold group mobs were, suddenly, extremely vicious to you...I remember trying the "soft touch" chick several times and her roasting a decent group many times until we folded. Those kind of defeats are much more inspiring than, "oh, that's all that was?".

As far as how fast it should go, I don't think one toon should be able to do it all unless you literally turn off xp. After making a full account, I did this and had toons stuck in the 30s and 40s permanently, otherwise I would have had 12 at 50+ that could only do the same things. Having toons primed for the "off the path" encounters was what made the game enjoyable on a daily basis. That's just me and I have the same respect for someone who has one main character and that's it--but I'm all for the tweaks that would make all areas slow/challenging/relatively equally rewarding.

I am all for challenging content and not making getting to max level too easy, many games have different takes on how this should be handled.

My start was in EQ shortly after release, well before they removed "Hell Levels" for those not familiar, every 5 levels(this was more noticeable above level 35(nto 100% sure it applied before)) was a hell level, they eventually figured out that this was because the exp required formulas had 2 multipliers and at 35/40/45 both multipliers were increased, meaning that level required a MUCH larger amount of exp than the levels between "Hell Levels' I didn't mind them as much as others did but 45 especially was a bit harsh.

The problem with reaching max level too fast, is what do you do then? This game, to my knowledge doesn't have level scalable content and that brings it's own set of problems anyways. The biggest problem I see that VGEMU will face in this regard is viability of forming groups if there are low population numbers.

Guild Wars 2 capped levels at level 80(I think) and so far have not increased that, and further content releases have used other methods than level to increase your power, however, my experience with it(recently did another stint there) was that it narrowed much further the need to have near pristine execution and timing (often not viable due to network latency) GW2 employs a system of level scaling for the character rather than content scaling, also the gear is hard capped at a certain level so at the top end of GW2 you end up doing little more than farming for appearance gear, I really enjoyed the game until I reach level cap and did the things worth doing, then it was just grindy as but with no real goal to justify it.

World of Warcraft employs daily quests and faction grinds as a timesink at max level which are "ok" options for a while to bridge the gap until the next expansion comes out, but these days you can reach max level in the latest xpac in a few days to a week or very casual playing, it is the point of saying, why bother having to level at all, and then they have put in all sorts of artificial hurdles which personally really @#$#@$#@$ off. Each expansion since WoD you can't fly in the new area until you have completed a long and involved "achievement" which requires you to completely explore all new zones, complete their "storyline"(such as it is) quests for each of the new zones grind factions to a high level across the new content, to get flying back you are forced to validate them as game designers by grinding through their content, whether or not you have a sliver of interest in any of it, given how much of the content is cookie cutter crap it is imo beyond insulting.(This kid really does not like being given a toy and then having it taken away!!!!) And to top it all off, you cant even do all that until 1/4-1/2 way through their 2 year expansion cycle.

As has been discussed elsewhere on this forum EQ was all about raiding and after Kunark, earning AA pts, so far the best end game content I have found, you could earn AA exp from any mob in any zone that you could earn exp from, so as water finds it's own level, groups would form in good exp places, you could still grind out exp solo when your friends weren't on, you had a lot of options, unlike many other games where your options for end game content were far more limited in scope.

Imo the by far superior option is to make interesting content that can't just be blazed through in a matter of days, give people a reason to want to continue to play, to want to take the time and effort to form relationships and find people of a level to form groups with.

My experience in playing MMOs pretty avidly since '99 is that you don't have to try too hard to get people to utilise content, carrot is normally more than enough, you don't really need to employ stick, after all, we are all here to have fun/relax etc giving the player something to achieve is far better than forcing them to do it in a particular way imo

Coming back from multiple segues I think having more content worth doing in leveling ranges 1-40 is worth while, when I was leveling back in the day I thought there was a lack of "things to do" you could always grind exp, which is most of what I did to get to max level but one thing I particularly like and I think could use more widespread application was Missives(will expand more on this in a different thread) but I remember spending a few levels around southwatch farming missives, for the faction and the rewards, I remember thinking there needed to be some tuning done regarding the cost of gear that could buy with them, but simple repeatable(not time gated) tasks like in SW where you could get 5 or so missives at the same time, head out with your group, complete them all before having to run back into town to refresh them was a much much much better system than spending the same amount of time killing the same amount of mobs without any definition or objective to your endeavour.

IMO Racing to max level should not be the goal for the most part, playing the game having content and goals worth striving for, and getting experience along the way rather than as the only relevant goal. The answer to the question of how to achieve that balance is not necessarily crystal clear, some people want to get to max level ASAP, leveling an alt, catching up friends, low population and no grouping opportunities until you, many reasons might apply, but one of the things I always loved about VG is there was never really a shortage of stuff to do, the dot rating system made it much more viable to have a variable group size, due/trio or above and still be able to find stuff worth killing.

As far as experiencing all the content the game has to offer, I have no problem with needing to level 6 toons to achieve that goal, the expansive nature of VG and it's content is big part of the appeal, it is not a single player RPG where the only content is relevant to your character and it's story, but rather you are part of a massive world, most of which is relevant to more than your character and it's journey, you are part of something much bigger, just like in Real Life, if you spent your entire life travelling the world, there would still, at the end, be things left undiscovered, places not visited, something else to look forward to doing/trying.