Well… If you play by the rules, the grind is miserable and will take decades to reach lvl 50. If you are willing to break the rules and exploit other players, the grind is much more manageable but it still takes just as long to hit the next lvl. You do have to be careful because the more rules you break, the higher your wanted level goes, and the police aren’t really big on taking players to jail, if you get my meaning.
The only current “winning” strategy on this server is to be lucky and/or resourceful enough early in the game so that you have enough money to be above the law. If you hit level 10 and don’t already have a few million $ in the bank, you’re in for a long grind.
I hate both the level cap and the fact grinding gets even more painful at higher levels…
No doubt! Whoever designed this game must have been a sadist. They start you off with a lengthy tutorial that gives you the basics of survival, then set you loose in the world overstacked in physical stats with none of the knowledge or skill stats to utilize the body properly. The skills and knowledge are behind a paywall (see earlier point about economy leveling in the early years) so they are only accessible to a subset of the player base. There are “opportunities” for players who can’t get past the paywall, but that doesn’t guarantee anything more that numerous levels of a lower loot percentage. If you don’t want to pay-to-win, you can grind away experience level after level, but converting experience to better loot is a lengthy process and is never converted at the same rate as someone with a paywall badge on their account. There’s also the mid-level-cap nerf that plateaus your body stats for a while before starting to slowly decrease them level by level. By the time you do have enough experience to complete the knowledge tree, your body stats are too low to take advantage of it. It’s like this whole damn thing was designed by EA!
Beautiful graphics and environments, though! And I really do like the open-world format, though it seems like recent updates have been amping up the NPC aggression attribute. I have a feeling this is primarily due to one of the major clans (klans?) gaining too much territory while the other clans were comfortable and complacent. That’s just a theory though. I don’t think we’ll really know until the final credits roll, but there are enough clues in the story to hint at the ending.
Also, it’s not Ferris Bueller or a Marvel movie. There’s no post-credits scene or new game+. I suppose you might be able to start a new game once yours is done, but you’re starting with a completely fresh account and nothing transfers. The only hope is that you roll a good starting character with a good faction.
