Meta-levels revisited

I reworked my meta-levels concept and posted it on Grimwell.com. For archiving purposes, here is a copy:

Many things in level based games like Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft depend on the level of your character, for example what quests you can take, and what equipment you can wear. Nevertheless your class and level does not totally describe your character with all its stats. Equipment and magic items can more than double your character stats, and have a profound influence on your strength in combat. Depending on whether your equipment is better or worse than average, your “meta-level”, the level as which you effectively operate, could be several levels lower or higher than your indicated character level.

Defining “meta-level” as effective combat level means that two characters of the same meta-level, but with different character levels, would have the same ease of killing the same monster. In principle it would be possible to develop a complicated formula which calculates your meta-level, given your stats, for any given game. Unfortunately it would be very difficult to arrive at this formula, as it depends on different stats for different character classes, and even for different specializations. So most people express their meta-level in other terms, like saying they wear “full epic” to indicate that their meta-level is considerably higher than their character level indicates.

The interesting thing is that your meta-level determines how easy it is for you to kill a monster of a certain level, while the rewards for killing that monster depend mostly on your character level. If your meta-level is higher than your character level, you gain experience points faster, and you character level catches up to your meta-level. If your meta-level is lower, then you advance slower, which gives you more opportunities to improve your gear and get your meta-level up. Activities that gain you money and equipment, even if they don’t gain you experience points directly, increase your character’s meta-level and make him gain character levels faster. In effect getting lots of items from your guild, getting twinked by an alt, or buying gold on EBay, all end up power-leveling your character. Getting better gear, by whatever means, is not just for status, it is a real element of character advancement.

All level-based games have a maximum level, for example currently 60 in World of Warcraft. While you are below this level cap, you have two choices on how to increase your meta-level: You can either just increase your character level, or try to get better equipment and increase your meta-level over your character level. The problem with the latter solution is that it gets exponentially harder the bigger the difference between your meta-level and character level becomes. As soon as you reach the level cap, improving your equipment is the only way left to you to advance your character.

If you draw a graph showing character advancement over effort needed, you get some sort of curve with increasing slope. The exact shape differs depending on the game you are playing, some having a more linear increase of slope per level, others following a power law. But in all of these games the curve has a distinctive point near the end, where you reach the maximum character level, and the amount of effort needed to raise your meta-level further goes up much steeper than before. It often takes more time to get from the level cap to the highest possible meta-level than from level 1 to the cap. So some people tend to see this transition as a breaking point. For example, depending on whether they like or dislike the end-game, people claim that World of Warcraft either starts or ends at level 60. But I would argue that in many ways the players are still following the same curve, spending effort to advance their characters, just without the gaining experience point component.

Game developers have learned to smooth out the curve of character advancement over effort, following the experience of the first Everquest, where this curve had some distinctive steps, called “hell levels”, which were harder than the levels before or after them. It turned out that players absolutely hated these hell levels, and much preferred a smoother curve. So what is the interest in making further advancement after the level cap so hard? The basic problem is that you can’t produce an endless amount of content, the game has to stop somewhere. And if players reach some sort of a “game over” point, where there is no further way to advance their character, there is a risk that they quit the game, and the company loses the revenue from the monthly fee. So instead of stopping character advancement altogether at the end of the curve, the developers just slow it down enormously. A small amount of content, a few raid dungeons with a handful of boss mobs giving the best loot in the game, is designed to take thousands of hours to complete, more than all of the other content in the game together. Even a MMORPG has an end where you can’t possibly advance your character any further, but by stretching the end out so much the game developers can at least create the illusion of an endless game.