 Lethal_Poison:The arcade kids win once again. Is there nothing that requires time and patience safe from this generation?
The "arcade kids"? If anything, that metaphor would seem quite flawed, since an arcade game requires a form of progression. Furthermore, arcade games tend to be things like fighting and racing games.
AoEIII, by contrast, is a strategy game. One important set of making strategies in AoEIII is making decks. With a larger range of cards comes a larger range of potential strategies. Which means that having to level up to get cards essentially limits players' ability to make new strategies. That's *not* good for a strategy game. It might be good for a newbie gradually learning the ropes, but it certainly isn't good for experienced, old school RTS players.
A more accurate metaphor than "arcade kids" would be that ES has had us playing chess without full sets of chess pieces and we've had to "level up" to earn pieces other than pawns. Hooray, level 60, now I can finally use a queen! That... wouldn't make for good chess.
Simply put, the levelling system has been more of a hindrance to enjoying the game in itself than anything else. It's added a form of metagame that might be fun to some, as is seen here, but which has no actual impact on the game in itself. It's a poor merger of different gameplay concepts -- RPGish leveling simply doesn't fit well with strategy games in the way it's been implemented by ES.
Time and patience? It takes time and patience to learn and master a game. Setting up a metagame that's about collecting game elements rather than playing the game actually distracts from properly learning a game at a high level of skill, since the game elements can change over time. A good example of this is that balance changes to be less favorable to Colonial fighting as more powerful Fortress Age cards are unlocked.
And "kids"? The entire mentality of collecting cards is pure kiddyness. It's like that Pokèmon game -- "gotta catch 'em all!"
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