I like the idea of not out leveling content. For casual play once you finish the new expansions quests it can be a pain when you finish the story line and their is not much left to do but dungeons and raids that you have not out leveled. The way the do it is similar to a automatic use of the timeless chrono-mage to set the character's level to match the zone for low level zones. While that is the easiest way to do it, I am not sure it is the best way. What if instead of matching the character to the zone, it loads a level/gear scaled zone to match the players charter. This could mean zones mobs and item drops scale to the the player in set level increments. Say in increments of 5 levels. Apply the same to raids and raiders can choose between doing their favorite raid or the new ones. Items would have to have stats based off level they are set at. Advantages- What you do and when becomes more of a choice. (if done right it could be put in place on traditional servers instead of just a special server.) Disadvantage - city zones that share a load with quest zone may seam empty. Would defiantly require more effort and possibly memory from the server Issues I would expect, with possible ways to address them. *Quest items- finishing a quest to get a peace of gear you out leveled and is of no use to you would be a turn off. While special currency can be a negate it is not the only possibility.(not to mention some people might run out of things they want to buy with that currency after a while.) Setting the quest item to the max level would cause an issue when a new expansion opens up, and requires every one start at max level. Setting the quest item to match the level it was earned at would work. (The issues with this would be leveling your disenchanting skill.) Setting certain items from quests to level with you might work for epic quest items, but should not be done for most quests. *Getting items to level disenchanting skill-higher level characters may at times need to get lower level items to level up skills or for other reasons.-If items scale this means that farming low level items would require to be low level then a person would have to use a chrono-mage reduce their level. So the solution would already be in the game. *Level requirements for starting area zones, and expansions- Choice needs to be made as to weather old content scales down to lower level characters or if you have to reach a certain level to go do a zone.-Example the first 7 expansion zones scale down so you can do them in any order you want. Expansion 8 and beyond you have to be the level it was made for or higher. new expansion hand offs-This is kind of a big one, there is a big difference between the gear of raiders/hard core dungeon players, and the more casual player. If the new expansion is to easy for the more hard core players they could loose interest in playing. But if some one is leveling in older expansion and have to stop and run to pick up the free gear because they just hit the starting level of the next expansion would also be an issue. - The newest expansion could have normal , expert and master zones. Normal requires quest items, expert would require that you have gear from dungeons, and master for the raiders. This could be done by the player or by a gear check on zone load. Server load and system memory-having to run multiple levels of the same zone could potentially increase server load. This one I do not see a solution for.
Seems to me it'd be a lot easier to just change all mobs on the server to 90ish (HP/dmg output to match all the current scripts) and forget about the auto-mentor function entirely since that's the source of most of the servers problems (that and nothing beyond house/appearance items to buy for the achievement tokens earned). I'm not a coder or developer though, so IDK. Also, could be something they are testing to implement on a future server or live servers, so maybe the highly complicated auto-mentor thing is required. But if that's the case, they should be making adjustments to it since resist caps are completely unreasonable - there are several tiers where a merc can run through entire dungeons in a moment and others it's nearly impossible to complete with a stacked group. ^^^ heroic yellow giants in Kael takes ~8minutes of sustained dps to take down solo. ^^^ heroic yellow giants in TS takes ~5seconds of sustained dps to take down solo. That's not how it's supposed to work. We aren't talking about minor differences here. There's been no changes for months other than the complete abandonment of players. /who all rarely yields more than 10players. Attention, changes or any communication would be greatly appreciated.
I like the scaling to the zone your in. What would be interesting is to see if they could make it so that you started at L1, leveled up with xpacs coming in at an enhanced rate from the other TLEs and kept the scaling in the zones.
