Grinding Levels Isn't Fun

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And all those who find this kind of system unfun now have the session-based games. And yet all the rpgs still sell just fine, because they have their audience who likes them exactly the way they are and have been.

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Only those who have invested enough time into something can partake in the peak content of that something. Levels are just a representation of that invested time.

Like I said before, you can be a pirate w/o leveling up to max, but those who have leveled up to max (and invested way more time in the game to do that) will be much stronger than you. In other words you'll be a casual and they'll be the hardcore players. And your casual place is at the bottom of the ocean, because your ship got sunk by a stronger foe.

I'm sure that it takes a ton of time for a group of new Sea of Thieves players to start playing "perfectly" together as a proper group. And that's not counting all the years of prior shooter practice that they've most likely had. AoC will make you play in a group of 8 players, who'll have to learn all their abilities and spells perfectly, all their synergies and combos perfectly, learn all the details and intricacies of character control - then add that all together and learn how to play as an 8-man group who moves like a single unit. Once they learn that, they'll need to then find a guild who'll accept them and then learn to play with that guild.

I'd imagine that for the majority of people that would take the 45 days of 4-6h of gameplay that Intrepid are shooting for. Even if for some dumb reason Intrepid literally gave you a ready character that you don't need to build up - you'd still need to spend all that time to learn how to play the game. It's just that, instead of doing that Intrepid decided not to reinvent the wheel for the hundreds time and just stick to a good ol' well-tested leveling design.

Though again, we've heard no real info on how ship combat will work, so you literally have no clue whether you'd even need to get to max lvl in order to become a successful pirate.

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Except for obviously KingDDD. They fucking hate their guts

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Just rpgs in general. Don't think I've heard of many rpgs where you didn't have a leveling system of some kind. Genshin has several leveling systems, pretty much all based not only on tedious grind, but also on timegates. That game makes over a $billion every 6 months (or at least did on release) and is ultra popular. NW had both vertical and artisanal grind. The game had a mil players on release even after a very weak beta.

Lost Ark is probably the closest thing to what you want, but from pretty much every place I've seen discussing it, its "leveling time" was a meme due to how short it was. Oh, that also led to literal fucking hundreds of thousands of bots, exactly because you could level to max within a few hours and could then participate in top lvl content immediately. Though even that game just moved their insane grind to those max lvls, so functionally nothing changed.

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FF14 is a story-based rpg, so of course the game would require you to finish the story asap. But afaik there's a ton of stuff that you can do even w/o doing the story. When I tried the game out I got stuck on the damn Gold Saucer for several days, just because it was fun.

And if by "time to win" you mean that in order to be better than others you must have invested more time into the game, be it in the form of skill-honing or leveling (which is still skill-honing) - then yes, I want games to not fucking give everyone everything right at the first hour of the game.

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Which is exactly why the session-based games exist. You can play them casually at a moment's notice or you can go full hardcore on them. Also, as I said in my comment, you wouldn't really be able to win against hardcore players unless you had years of fps practice. And outside of pure fps skills, ya ain't sinking a ship of a well-trained group of players if you yourself have only played for a few hours. I know that because I've tried many times and failed and then when I got better I started failing way less and understood how a very good group of people could easily beat some casuals w/o breaking a sweat.

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Leveling helps you ease into the game's mechanics. Others have already said that WoW had a shitty design when it came to how the game taught you to play, so this is a bad example. I expect AoC to provide a better learning experience through leveling and will be giving as much feedback pertaining to that as I can.

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Yet the absolute majority of answers here disagree with your "I want everything and I want it now , daddy " attitude.