I was just talking to somebody who used to be my friend.  A long time ago.  We fell out, over the concept of Skinner boxes.  See, I had design ideas.  He had design ideas.  I'm a programmer.  He isn't.  This gives me balance of power over who gets their ideas implemented because I don't want to code Skinner boxes.  I don't want to code little boxes of Skills or certainly not levels.  Skills suck because you can never balance the damned things.

Classes suck for all the reasons that many others have already illuminated but mostly, in my opinion, because of Level25 Despair.

Level25 Despair is what the player feels when their character reaches level25 (or any similar point between 1/3 and 1/2 way through the fixed progression).  It basically says "Christ.  It's taken me [%a stupid amount of time] doing [$something uninteresting] to get even a third of the way through Level25.  Level26 is going to be worse.  There are 70/90/[%Another Number] levels.  That means I'm going to spend an enormous amount of time being really quite bored.  Fuck that noise.  Time for some HALO."

Then you've got Level45 Despair to look forward to after that.  Are we excited yet?  Didn't think so.

Most grind-based MMOs these days try to make the process a little less boring.  Quests and such.  But once you've run 25 levels worth of quests, you're pretty sick of them.  Some of them encourage social play by making characters advance faster if grouped.  This just means you have a whole lot of really bored people doing something boring in the vain hope that achieving level 26/36/56/60/70/90 (delete as appropriate) will open up content to them which is interesting.  Which it will be.  For a day.  After that, it's just a different grind.

The thing about design -not code, design- is that really it's only possible to evangelize and motivate if you believe in what you're evangelizing.  Or if you're a natural con-artist, I suppose.  And i hate level25 despair.  I hate all the despair in all the levels.  I hate knowing that some basement-dwelling spotty little virgin can be "tougher" than me because he spends 72-hours straight grinding in a manner that I both can't and won't.  I thinking that I have to somehow earn the right to enjoy content that I've already paid for by running pointless and inappropriate quests for dispensing machines that will send the next person to do exactly what I just did. I'm a pretty talented guy; I'd quite like the opportunity to showcase that.

I want to be able to play for an hour and enjoy whatever content I feel like enjoying.  And then I want to be able stop when I choose and do something else.  If I enthuse about a game to my friend and the amazing things that are in it, I don't want to show him screenshots.  I want him to log in and me to meet him and take him there. I want him to have a chance to do what I can do, even if I've been a subscriber for four years and he's never played a computer game before.

So these are the choices that influence my designs.

My ex-friend, he's a DING junkie.  He likes code to tell him when he's achieved something and when he should be satisfied.  He likes food pellets.  He's a rat in a cage.  Not that I told him this ages ago, or at least, not until the argument stopped being about what's enjoyable and started being about who can be more personally offensive to whom.  Luckily, it's really hard work to offend me.  My ex-friend's skin isn't quite so thick, which is why he decided that it was was "ex" in the first place.

I just let him go.

Maybe I am a rat after all.  But I'm not in a cage.