I understand that there are differing views and those that feel the possible nearness of terrifying enemies is both realistic and exciting raise a legitimate point.
Frankly I expect to lose on this point but when my worthless level 4 arse gets eaten by a manticore I'll have the comfort of knowing I made my point as well as I could and the devs saw and understood it. They just didn't agree. Perhaps very correctly, most people do not share my fanatical abhorance for the grim reaper.
I had two reasons to pledge now and neither was for the benefits since I expect advance warning of the next nerf in pledge rewards and a chance to lock-in the current rewards before the nerf. One was to support the game since it sounds really good. The other is to have the chance to shoot my mouth off while the game is in formative stages and opinions are more likely to influence development.
Back to the topic - plenty of MMO precedent for quest/activity/socialization hubs to support widely disparate levels of players. Maybe lower level mobs are west and higher level mobs are south. Maybe higher level mobs are on a plateau that needs to be climbed up to, or on the bottom of a lake. Yes a low level not paying attention can stumble into them and die - that's fine with me.
While I do want to see high levels mingling with lower levels, I'm not really sure if putting them into the same zones for group exping is a good idea. Enough mobs for a soloer or a duo team is great but anything more than that and we may run into people power leveling the lower levels while LFG or waiting for a group. I'd like to see other things draw the higher levels attention in low level zones...
Let's look at Qeynos Hills (Level 5 - 10 zone) in EQ1 as an example:
Fishbone Earring camp. Hadden is a high 20's 30 mob on a 6-ish hour spawn. High levels would sit and camp it and mingle with the community.
Pyzjin (and Varsoon to a lesser extent). Pyzjin was low level (15?), but high levels came back to camp her for her Glowing Black Stone. If Varsoon spawned instead (level 30), then the low levels shouted for help for someone to destroy him.
Let's look at Solusek A (Level 20 - 30 zone):
Tons of dropped loot and quest drops for items that remained useful for a very long time. Some area's of the dungeon was inaccessible for groups but contained good loot people went back for later at a higher level when they could solo it. Some examples:
Gabbie: Drops a wis/int caster cloak and a mediocre caster dagger. She's in a gnome castle in a goblin dungeon --- This castle area is a safe haven for good aligned characters. She's in a room with like 5 other gnomes and they will all come with her if you pull her or her PH. Most good-aligned characters didn't camp this due to the faction hits --- They didn't want to ruin their faction in the "Safe haven with a vendor to sell to" part of the dungeon as well as the gnome capital Akanon. So finding enough people to camp this was difficult, especially since she ONLY drops caster loot. You usually saw a higher level come back here once they could solo this.
Kindle: An imp that randomly wanders the zone. It's PH also roams. Dropped a ring most of the time, but had one of the few gloves in early EQ that had INT. As this was a rare item, most people came back later so they could camp it solo and not have to roll against others for it.
I think fewer choices for equipment combined with the rarity of mobs and drops caused a lot of the higher levels to revisit lower level sections of the game.
