Hmm, I’m not so sure that’s the case. MUD gameplay as I remember it didn’t have a particularly big elder game problem, nor was levelling up generally viewed as being as unpleasant and boring as many MMO players find it today (despite typically taking longer per level!) and the class system was certainly not one you would just divide up along tank/DPS/healer lines.

I think the problem is not the mechanics themselves but the unthinking transplantation of MUD gameplay into these larger scale games, often with tweaks made to supposedly help with the wider scope of such games but which damage the original system. eg. Reducing the penalty of death so that levelling up becomes a routine treadmill rather than an interesting obstacle, increasing the max player level and thus rarifying the number of players you can effectively group with, etc.

I said IF they do it, it must be free because it’s not an additional service they develop for you (like the iPhone app) but you’re skipping content you’ve already paid for.

And if they like to charge 20’000g for a skilled out trade skill, that’s fine. But not Euros.

Having said that, the other reason not to encourage this kind of design is that it has a knock-on effect on the in-game economy. If people usually level crafting more quickly by buying materials on the auction house in-game, then letting them buy the skill for cash kills the lower level material market. That’s also food for thought, which doesn’t affect levelling xp for characters so much.

Similarly, you could imagine a design that stimulated the in-game economy by letting crafters sell items which temporarily improved xp gain (eg. potion of learning, or somesuch). That way, people who wanted to level faster would have to farm up some gold and buy the items in game. I think that in a very real way, most of the stuff that’s sold in cash shops happens at the expense of boosting the in-game economy.

The content in a subscription based MMO is designed to be fun to play, because they want to you continue to pay your subscription. I don’t see why I should pay an additional fee to be allowed to skip content which I don’t like.

But it is a very interesting notion to wonder where consumer rights fit in, especially if policies change after you have already bought something.

Wait… why pay? We already pay for the game. We pay a monthly fee. And now we should also pay to skip content we don’t like? That’s just wrong. Either allow it or not but don’t charge money for everything.

It’s really time that consumer right start to make rules/laws about what’s allowed/disallowed in a game and what the companies have to offer for free.

I think the justification is simply that giving people max-level characters would also harm the levelling game for others. You could argue that it shouldn’t affect other people whether someone else wants to be max level instantly or not, but nothing happens in a vacuum. People skipping levelling would mean that levelling zones would be even emptier than they already are now, lots of people would run around at max level with little knowledge of their class etc. Also, if you give players a way to achieve something more efficiently, there will always be psychological pressure to do it like that all the time (see also: the dungeon finder and how many people use it even though they would actually rather group with people from their server instead).