This post isn’t to complain about the current experience rates, but rather to offer a suggestion to the developers in regards to the rates for the beta.
Many people will obviously have varying opinions on the current experience rate. Some think it’s rather slow; personally, I think it’s fine where it is. But, I believe we are considering the current rate under the wrong perspective: We are viewing the rates as if the game was released already.
I think the current rate is great for when the game goes live. But this is a beta for the game. We, as testers, are here to not only play the game, but to find bugs, exploits, typos, etc., and to report them so the developers can properly address the issues to help polish the live release of the game.
The reason why I bring this up, is because we only have about one month to play the beta, in a game with a rather large amount of potential class combinations available to the player. With the current experience rates, it is somewhat limiting for our ability as testers to make new characters and try out different combinations of classes. If there were something like a class-reset scroll, this wouldn’t be an issue, but they don’t exist.
Thus, I offer a suggestion that the rates be increased to help facilitate players being able to try out various class combinations, to help generate feedback on what may be unbalanced or bugged with certain classes. Also, this would allow more players to quickly access the higher level areas of the game, and play through them, potentially finding any possible bugs in those areas.
However, this does have a side effect: Since leveling speed would be increased, some lower level quests may be skipped, or whole areas may be bypassed altogether, if it means you would achieve quicker leveling by grinding in certain areas, then skipping some areas within a certain level range, and going to the next promising grind location.
Whether this would actually happen or not depends on how much the experience rate would be increased, but it’s certainly a possibility. As a result, I would suggest that the experience rate increase be applied halfway through the beta, two weeks in. This way, the level 50-and-below areas will have time to receive extensive use and testing by the player base.
After the first two weeks, the experience rate would be applied, and a larger portion of the player base would be able to easily access the later areas of the game and test those areas as well, along with being able to experiment with various class combinations to see what might require balancing.
In summary: Halfway through the beta, increase the experience rates so that more experimentation can be done with classes, and higher level areas can be more thoroughly tested.