Last week, NCSoft made a fairly major announcement…their Mission Architect content for “Issue 13″ in City of Heroes/Villains wasn’t going to be there.

Cue the clouds of Forum Doom.

But wait! They’ve got a ton of things that are going to be in Issue 13 (the CoX name for a free content update), and quite a few of them weren’t originally supposed to be there. This, of course, is good news, with things like secret identities, a feature that players have asked for ever since beta, and “day jobs” (and that means yes, World of Workcraft is coming soon to a CoX install near you!) . However, the most interesting addition to me is the concept of Leveling Pacts. Let’s quote Massively on what that means:

The Leveling Pact: A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

That’s got a certain appeal, I’ll admit; I get out-leveled by my wife, for crying out loud (currently five levels ahead of me in EQII, for example), so I would love for her to grind for me.

…

Okay, that sentence not only came out wrong, but it’ll probably trip content filters all over the place. Back to the topic at hand.

On the surface, this is a pretty good idea; allowing two friends with varying amounts of play time to stay together, so that they can always play together. However, I do have a couple of questions:

• Won’t that make it take twice as long to level?
• Will this introduce an all-new level of griefing to MMOs…”Friendly Sweatshopping”?
• Will this enable PL services?

From what I’ve seen, NCSoft is addressing the first two items already, but that third one is something I haven’t seen much mention of.

Now admittedly, using the Leveling Pact feature to power-level someone for cash would take something that most PL services don’t have…at least an average amount of intelligence. If the GM staff sees a character named “asdfx” playing twenty-four hours a day, it’ll still set off an alarm bell somewhere. However, unless there’s a part of this on the back-end that I’m not seeing, then the account that is in a leveling pact with that person wouldn’t have action taken against it.

Which, of course, would mean risk-free power-leveling service for the customer; just create your character, meet up with the person you’re paying to form the leveling pact, and then log back out until it’s done.

Heck, you could still log in and play occasionally while they’re at work.

Of course, if NCSoft starts taking action against characters that are in pacts with accounts that are banned for power-leveling/gold selling, that takes care of the problem, but then you open an entirely different kettle of Hamidons, and not all of them will be nice (especially since they’ve buffed Hami).

As always, there is a better-than-even chance that I’m missing something here, but if not…I see problems coming from what looks like a really good idea. And, of course, there are even some positives in allowing farming:

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Tags: City of Heroes, City of Villains, CoX, games, gaming, leveling pact, mmo, mmorpg