I hate levels, it's a mistake to have more

asdar

When I first started MMO's I loved levels and levelling. It was very satisfying to get that next level and I'd look forward to the skills available and I thought levels were great.

Then it turned into a treadmill where they kept adding more and more levels and while the skills were more powerful they were the same exact skills, or worse they were overpowered and made the game boring.

I thought this was just the way it was until GW. When I played Guild Wars I realized that the whole levelling thing is just for hamsters chasing the top of the wheel. They did it right and showed that the quality of the game wasn't in the number of levels, but rather in the challenge of playing whether vs players or NPC.

They made character development change from power to appearance by creating cooler armor that you have to fight to get, but not adding super powerful stats that would unbalance things. I hope they expand on this, without caving in to the crowd that want's an unfair advantage in PvP.

I hope in their quest to upgrade GW to a complete MMO they don't try to copy other MMO's and turn it into a grind, the one thing GW never was.

WellzyC

I know where you’re coming from with this. 80 levels does seem like a lot. But think about this:

 

 

 

1) All 80 levels will take relatively the same time to complete. So the levels will go fairly fast.

 

 

2) With side kicking, pvp at any level and content scaling, I think the level of your character will not be as important as other games.

 

 

3) Most of the skills come from the weaps you are wielding and not so much the abilities of your character. I think levels are just to keep the tradition of the genre.

 

 

Anywho. That’s my 2¢

 

Serelisk

I'm pretty sure they added levels just so people who've been conditioned to other MMO's won't say "OMYGOD WTF THERE'S ONLY 20 LEVELS??!?!??!?? again, and also, some people enjoy the feeling of progressing their character through stages of power. However, Guild Wars 2's game mechanics makes leveling almost irrelevant.

For one, there's no leveling curve. Or rather, it's flat, meaning at one point earlier on I suppose, no level gained will have taken more experience/effort than the previous one. Or it shouldn't anyway. Another thing is, the game's constantly scaling people down as well as giving players the ability to scale up to play with their friends. And this is automatically done when they enter certain zones, so what level you are will get really unimportant really quickly. Besides that, your fears should be put to rest by the fact that Arena Net is keeping that same core philosophy from the first Guild Wars . When you're the maximum level, there's almost no barrier to entry for the statistically strongest  gear of your profession. But players can earn much cooler looking gear by putting in a lot more effort just like the first game. They're sticking with optional grind over other game's skinner box method of presenting content.

rdash

Levels are just an illusion, and GW2 treats them as such. With sidekick system in place, their influence is almost entirely nullified (or at least their drawbacks are). 

Zeus.CM

Anyone QQing about leveling in GW2 are mistaken. As guys above me explained sidekicking makes leveling almost not important. It just gives you a sense of progression.