I hope for extremely slow speed of leveling in D4

[Skelos-2150]

@Shadout-2849

What is the problem?

He already wrote you where the problem is. Instead of spamming with replies, try to think about it for some time.

I’ll try one last time.

If we endorse replayability in aRPGs, we have to extend the gameplay happening before each player reaches his MTBU threshold and stops playing.

@Skelos-2150

I’ll quote a guy from reddit touching on this topic regarding to D3:
In this game, there's a metric I like to refer to as Mean Time Between Upgrades, or MTBU. When you first hit 70, your MTBU is pretty low, every single legendary is an upgrade, but legendaries don't drop all that often. It stays pretty steady at that low rate for quite awhile: fewer legendaries you get are upgrades, but your difficulty is higher so you're getting more legendaries. Eventually, your MTBU starts to increase: you're getting even more legendaries, but you have all the peices for your build, so you're waiting on ancients or better rolls. The important part is next: each person has a different MTBU threshold where they're no longer engaged enough to continue playing in the same loop. When players meet their MTBU threshold, they will either change builds, change roles, change classes, or change games entirely.

The trick is to make the game engaging enough and tweak that stat so that players, on average, stay long enough before reaching their MTBU threshold to feel satisfied, so they leave the game with a 'ok that was fun' instead of a 'well that was a waste of time'. Because of course it was a waste of time, the whole thing is just a big slot machine feeding endorphines into your brain. And it's awesome.

When you grant end game stuff in a tutorial (basic leveling) you effectively increases the MTBU for no adequate reason.

A good aRPG is one that has slow gearing process and character development.

I have a metric I use for myself in aRPGs and I refer to it as the “Hidden Level”.

In D2, you get +5 stats for each level, but you can also get +5 stat from items. And you can also make a relation to how valuable that +5 stat is compared to other stats. So, you can ultimately convert EVERY stat in the game to what a single level-up grants you. That is how you calculate your hidden level.

An aRPG that has very high hidden level cap reachable with a proper pace/MTBU during gameplay in a non-boring way (no D3 main stat grind) is a good aRPG with solid replayability potential.

For the above to happen you have to scale the hidden level with time investment and difficulty - the more the player increases his gameplay skill and the more challenges he’s able to overcome the higher his hidden level will be from the drops/rewards he’ll get.

You can’t simply drop GG stuff in a tutorial or make the tutorial having an end game difficulty.

There’s nothing wrong to have a tutorial/campaign/basic leveling with vertical progression being done once. In fact, that’s the right design when you have a proper endgame and a working game as a whole.