Dear Salted: Making earlygame work is really easy

According to the forums CT, Salted has been focusing, for a while, on making earlygame Wynn have more combat challenges to show new players the depth of the combat system.

This doesn't really make sense, because you can get to level 10 just by killing mobs near Ragni.

The low XP requirements for new levels in the earlygame (1-20) meshes really poorly with the mob XP rewards. You can completely ignore the entirety of Ragni and you'll be able to powerlevel without difficulty all the way to Detlas, reaching it with levels completely outpacing your gear. No amount of shoehorned combat sequences, railroad quests, or just-barely-off-the-path boss fights will fix that - in fact, they'll make it worse, since that's even more XP.

As far as I can tell, simply raising the XP requirements (and nerfing mob XP if needed) for the earlier levels would fix all of this:

• With XP harder to come by, players will be incentivised to explore and follow the content book in order to locate new content. This will cause players to encounter more combat sequences and become more immersed in the world, as well as finding routes to high-level areas (well, Nemract, TV, and the Ravines) that they'll then become interested in and want to level up enough to reach.
• The earlygame questline currently feels really stiff and railroady to me, because it's a rigid forward progression that I very rapidly outpace. My levels will quickly overrun the quests' levels, because I'm killing monsters and they're kicking me unwillingly up the ladder. With XP much harder to get, I'll find myself wanting to do those quests, because I need the XP and they provide a convenient forward momentum that, with XP changes, would match my own progression to Detlas.
• You could easily add more boss caves, discoveries, and altars, since players will be drawn to bosses they discover because they need the XP to do whatever it is they want to do. Adding more of these would also remove the need to stick boss fights in every early quest (such as Tunnel Trouble, which did not need one), freeing up quests to have more varied content while leaving raw combat to more specialised challenges. (This effort could be improved by giving indications in Content Book nodes as to what kind of content a given node (quest, cave, altar, etc.) has - for instance, marking Tunnel Trouble as puzzle/combat, and Lost Tower as combat/boss.)

I can't come up with any arguments as to why you'd want to keep XP reqs low, other than 'let players skip earlygame', which implies either that the hypothetical arguer is bad at game design (in thinking that players should just be able to skip any part of a game which is difficult or 'boring'), or that earlygame is bad (which would need to be fixed, not by ignoring the problem, but by directly improving its content).

 

https://discord.com/channels/143852930036924417/1265513533148495882 welcome to the movement

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The CT have been pretty receptive, and are currently working on this.
(also, I heard the reasoning behind the bossfights is that new Wynn players aren't bored of combat yet, so they put that in there to get them introduced to it.)

 

Shouldn't you still have a variety in earlygame content? Someone who doesn't like the combat as much would probably be pretty interested to see more puzzle/parkour/stealth segments and those sorts of things.