Farming and Power Leveling: Why You Shouldn't Give a Shit

I've been excited about the upcoming issue 14 which will let me design my own missions... a creative outlet that I crave in these games. But a dark cloud looms on the horizon of my good time. NCsoft, in their attempts to prevent the new mission design system from being abused by farmers and power levelers, have alluded to the fact that the number of villains and their placement on mission maps will be preset to the map you choose. [pauses briefly to bang head on keyboard] One of the things that grates on me in this game is how you can memorize where villains will always be on these maps. They're always there. And they're never where you think they should be, based on the nature of the missions. Mobsters who are supposedly searching the office building for the deed to the orphanage are always milling around in the hallways and are never in the offices. This has always sapped the mission of a sense of realism for me.

So, with the upcoming ability to custom-build missions for yourself and others, I should be able to place villains logically on the map, right? RIGHT?? Ooooh, no, says NCsoft. No, we have to control how many villains are on each map to prevent those naughty players from farming til the cows come home, creating endless masses of fleshy targets to generate Experience as fast as possible. Farming is bad. Power leveling is bad.

Yes, farming and power leveling are bad. I don't think people should do it either. But for some people, that's the fun of the game, zooming up to level 50 as fast as their pudgy, Mountain Dew-fueled fingers can carry them. Whatever. To each his own. But my response to NCsoft's heavy-handed, creativity-destroying security action is "WHO CARES??" I think the point that they've all missed is that every character on CoH basically exists in a vacuum. No amount of cheating by character A is going to effect character B one little bit. At the end of the day, your toon who got himself to level 50 by farming and power leveling for a few days is going to have no advantage over my level 50 who got there over many months of normal game play. Level 50 is level 50. It may rub you rules lawyering balance-monkeys the wrong way when some yahoo takes your shiny rules and subverts them for his own ends, but it really doesn't effect game play for anyone else. I promise. The rest of the game is set up to police itself.

(As a brief aside, I'd like to point out that this argument also applies to powers. I'm sick to death of reading how power X needs to be adjusted to "bring it into balance" with power Y. No! It doesn't! Powers should be designed and balanced based solely on what the power should do. )

Please, NCsoft... I've got brilliant, rave-inspiring adventures to bring to the game. Don't ruin the fun for 90% of your loyal player base just to try to slap a leash on the 10% of players you don't really need to mess with anyway. They're not hurting us, they're just hurting your egos.