Levels make it easier for the game designer to design the game: this area is designated for these levels, this area for those, and this equipment works best for someone of this level or higher. Combat is built around levels, and disparities in level cause the melee to be made trivial for one of the participants.

However, level based games have the following negative characteristics.

• Levels artifically separate friends.
• Levels act as a barrier to content.
• Levels make PK combat inherently unfair.
• Achievers view levels as gates that they must pass, reinforcing the concept of the grind.
• Levels confine the designer and developers to a particular vision.
• Levels reinforce the concept of a conclusion to the game, which is only resolved by repeating content, or adding new content and more levels.

In a game without levels, but with numeric skill values, designers, developers, and players still assign “levels” to mobs. It’s in the nature of most people who are interested in these games to deconstruct them, to assign elements to well-worn buckets, and figure out the path of increasing difficulty. (“After you’ve killed the dragon, there’s nothing tougher so you’ve won the game.”)

In a game without skill improvements, where character skill is determined by player skill, collecting abilities, and collecting equipment, players will categorize gear as trash, newbie, intermediate, elder, and uber. Levels will exist even where effort has been taken to hide them from the players.

Perhaps one possibility is the make levels essentially meaningless: a game with 1000 levels, where one level is little different from another, would help. Players would still break the levels into groups (“LFG, level 150+.”).

Another possibility is to make levels computed or synthetic: don’t grant xp, but grant levels as character skill improves through use or training. This helps with determining mob cons, but may make it difficult to compare one character to another.

A third possibility to is to make it so that a level one character can surivive encounters that are with level 20 mobs, assuming the level one is in a group. The game need not be highly lethal, and the character may be mostly ignored by the mobs as being inneffectual. Many level-based games suffer from “insta-death,” where lower level characters are struck down instantly by mobs. What if, in most cases, there was no insta-death, and a level one character would be able to effectively defend himself from a level 20, even if he could do no real harm?

A fourth possibility is to hide the levels from the players, only providing them with relative cons. This may have the effect of frustrating players, as they can only guess how strong their characters are in relation to other characters and mobs, however “realistic.”