It has been 3 months since I started Eve and I have gotten into the groove of NullSec activity: avoiding roams, killing stuff on roams myself, playing the market, fighting in wars, navigating the waves caused by Drama, and so forth. Recently, some members of KiteCo (including myself) have felt burnt out on Eve and begun playing weird MMOs on the side as a diversion. Last week, it was the Korean fishing MMO; this week, it's a French strategic MMO (think World of Warcraft with Final Fantasy Tactics' mechanics). Yet playing these different MMOs after a quarter of a year on Eve has just made the things Eve does right stand out more. To me, Eve is the MMO-iest MMO out there. But why?

I'm writing these quick blog entries over the course of a few weeks to figure that out. First, we need to answer a particular question:

What is the defining trait of an MMO?

Interacting with hundreds of other players. The one advantage MMOs have over every other gametype out there is sheer numbers, with all of the drama, complexity, and conflict that ensues. Anything that hampers a player's interactions with the broiling masses is undercutting the main selling point of MMOs.

And levels, that holdover from single-player RPGs, are the prime culprit.

Levels Segregate, Levels Kill

While levels were originally used as an indication of how powerful a character was, in MMOs they have also turned into a gatekeeper for content, a sign reading "You Must Be This Powerful to Enter This Dungeon". Low-level players are only allowed to access the weak dungeons (and weak rewards), unable to get to the hard dungeons/loot until they grind their way past a particular experience level. High-level characters don't want to run low-level dungeons because their loot's bad, and low-level characters can't run high-level dungeons with their high-level friends because the game tells them they're too weak to.

If a new player wants to play with his high-level friends, he needs to put in overtime grinding up to their level. Or have his friends escort him through a few low-level dungeons out of pity. Or have them start new alts and level up alongside him. But these are workarounds for a problem that shouldn't even be there. In Eve, I was flying frigates alongside the big boys, helping them tackle and blow up enemy ships, just days after starting.

And it's not just because there's no artificial level requirement. It's because the power curve is gradual compared to the steep increases found in games with levels. A novice in Eve is 50-80% as effective as a years-old veteran. Meanwhile, a Lvl. 10 player in WoW is just a speed bump to a Lvl. 90 player; the veteran could probably kill him in one shot by sneezing. The mere existence of a numerical power gauge starting at 1 and increasing to some arbitrary number encourages the exponential increases in power that make novices worthless in comparison to veterans. Don't believe me? Then read this:

"A Lvl. 1 player is 75% as powerful as a Lvl. 40 player."

Did your mind instinctively think "that doesn't make sense" when you read that? We have been conditioned to assume high-level players can wipe the floor with enemies that would utterly crush low-level players; that causes a level system to encourage a steep power curve merely by existing. The resulting steep power curve makes novices nearly useless in a veteran group, to the point they're more hindrance than help. This encourages the developers to lock away dungeons, equipment, and even entire zones until players reach a certain level, which hinders their ability to group up with other players, which is the entire point of an MMO.

In short, level systems segregate players. Level systems actively kill MMOs by working against their defining trait, like a cancer killing its host. The sooner MMOs excise the level system and start experimenting with other methods of progression, the better.