I'm fairly close to quitting this rather addictive MMO I picked up on monday simply because it's taken me almost 6 hours of near constant ranking in prime territory to gain one and a half levels, and I'm fairly low-level. The first ten were cake, the next five a little slower, but now it's almost unbearable. Someone just told me "this is the easy part," and I'm still running around in rags, punching slimes, and scraping for coins. CF has seriously never looked better.

..in which xp needed for level was proportional to level^3 and xp gain while xp gain from higher level stuff increased linearly. Seriously, leveling in that game was a pain in the ass.

At level 18, I need 13k to advance. The optimal creature for me to be killing yields 8-10xp per kill. The most powerful creature I can reasonably expect to kill yields 20 or 25 xp, but I can kill 4 or 5 of the others in the time it takes me to kill one of the 25xp mobs, so it's not worth it. And these creatures will always yield the same xp no matter my level. It's redonk. And I've already completed all the quests in the area.

I'll be back to CF shortly :)

Play normally, do quests and stuff you generally enjoy in the game. That will take you up to some level. After that, go find some other quests. If you can't complete them, or do something else, quit the game since it's boring.

I've had those worthless hours in MMO's where the experience bar doesn't move, no matter how much I kill. I've also played MMO's where getting levels is so simple that it becomes completely trivial and dull. Neither of those models really holds my interest for long, and over 12+ years I've always come back to CF.

Moreover, I can't play pvp MMOs anymore because all I do is compare them to CF and point out how bad they are, and how much better they could be with a few tweaks to the pvp system (always to make them more like CF's pk system). There was nothing quite like roaming just outside the safe city, trying to beat up rats and bugs at level 8 and then getting jumped by a dozen or so level 40's who thought it'd be great fun to one-shot a bunch of noobs.

And I was paying monthly for that?

Despite the complaints that surface from time to time, CF is actually remarkably well-balanced.

And they do that pretty well, though their system has MORE balance than CF which leads to a paper-scissors-rock scenario in small scale battles, but some incredible dynamics with larger organised ones.

All the others are just pretenders, dude. Running their fingers through the clouds of blood that our Deathblows produce on a daily basis.

Actually i would say the MMO that comes closest to CF would be shadowbane. Shadowbane's leveling was very quick, maybe a week to max out and the game is of course very Pk oriented. I played that for a while and it was fun. However game lag, buggy graphics and lack of any RP whatsoever eventually took its toll. The game balance wasn't horrible but everyone would be playing two or even three characters at once. Imagine a warrior player logging on transmuter and invoker to spell himself up before going to pk.

The other thing that really made the game stale was the alliances. You guys complain about gangs in this game? Imagine 40 people defending a city and suddenly a horde of blue dots show on the mini map for the siege, no less then 300+ people. The walls fell down quickly, we tried so hard so it really hurt losing that city, it had been standing for almost a couple of RL years. God damn Zerg alliances. :(

My brother beta'd that game and then I played as soon as it was publically released. Was a lot of fun especially since my brother became one of the Ebonlore people (Huge domination out of the gate on one of the servers) They easily had a pbase of 100-250 people or so and a lot more joined a month or two into the game. I was just part of another alliance that was destroyed by them and then eventually became part of the resistance (cue eric cartman).

In the end as Ebonlore tried to dominate the entire main continent, the resistance grew into one sizeable city. I still remember being part of a defense that reflected their attack and then we counterattacked on their trainer city since we strategically placed our bane for that same time frame.

That game is around now for free, although people still box alts at the same time to give themselves con/dex/str buffs, etc. But hey.. it's free.. there's just a huge domination vs the asian alliances. It's almost scary....

EXB

ps. If you liked that (not that this is exactly like that game) check out the youtube videos for Darkfall.