What's the point of ETR?

[Bjond]

Or rather, why force folks to replay 20->30? Why not simply let them spend 6M karma to buy the feats directly? The later would provide a very strong enticement for people to play at 30. It would give them a chance to get a lot of use out of the L29 gear. It might even give folks a reason to stay long enough to acquire and use raid gear.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect dev-reasoning was something on the order of "back to 20 gives life to older content and gives new epic characters more to group with." That fails a little bit with the lack of XP penalities for Epic groups -- only helps for the low-epic reaper groups. But, reaper isn't newbie friendly.

Does it slow down karma acquisition? Probably. But if there was a 3-day lockout on a karma-buy, the maximum rate would be identical. So. Hmm.

What do you think we gain from rerunning 20->30 over a direct buy with karma without a rerun? Where "we" covers just about any subdivision of DDO you can imagine: we as players, the game itself, SSG, fresh newbie epic chars, die-hard RXP'ers, etc..

[noinfo]

Or rather, why force folks to replay 20->30? Why not simply let them spend 6M karma to buy the feats directly? The later would provide a very strong enticement for people to play at 30. It would give them a chance to get a lot of use out of the L29 gear. It might even give folks a reason to stay long enough to acquire and use raid gear.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect dev-reasoning was something on the order of "back to 20 gives life to older content and gives new epic characters more to group with." That fails a little bit with the lack of XP penalities for Epic groups -- only helps for the low-epic reaper groups. But, reaper isn't newbie friendly.

Does it slow down karma acquisition? Probably. But if there was a 3-day lockout on a karma-buy, the maximum rate would be identical. So. Hmm.

What do you think we gain from rerunning 20->30 over a direct buy with karma without a rerun? Where "we" covers just about any subdivision of DDO you can imagine: we as players, the game itself, SSG, fresh newbie epic chars, die-hard RXP'ers, etc..

I would certainly prefer not to have to regress. Those levels would still get played by people doing full TR anyway. Might be something they can consider as they continue to build end game content.