I am an "Advancement Driven Player," aka "addicted to the ding." Levels, skill numbers, whatever the character advancement mechanic is in the game I'm playing, I always seek to see that go UP up UP! The problem is, the scales are never linear.

When you start a new MMO, the advancement comes fast, then eventually starts to really...slow....dooown. Back when there wasn't a lot of choice, well, I just stayed with it and settled for slow advancement. Now, with 100000 choices, the problem is the thoughts start to creep in. "Well I'm only level 15 in that game, I can get some levels really fast instead of taking 3 days to gain a level here..."

I know that most MMO developers choose a number of hours they think (or hope - ha!) an "average" player should take to get to max level, and then design around that. The problem is, that number of hours is usually skewed such that the last, say, 20% of levels take as much time to achieve as the first 80% - or thereabouts. Players like myself would do better, and stay more focused, if the curve were linear. To use an overly simplistic example, let's say you want it to take 100 play hours to reach max level, and there are 50 levels. So, why not scale things so that it takes 2 hours per level? Or, if you want to give players fast levels - expand the scale. So 100 hours to max level, but there's 200 levels - so a level every 30 minutes-ish?

A lot of games have other advancement paths besides levels. "AA points" are one of course - and that helps somewhat - but a lot of times you need 5-10 or more AA points to get anything, and then usually those things have such a small effect on your character's performance that it ends up feeling not worth it. Gear is an advancement path too, and that helps - but again sometimes there's the problem of too little gain and/or too much time needed.

I don't have a good solution - I'm merely commenting on how I play and why I see myself losing focus on a game. When the advancement starts coming too slowly, I invariably end up switching games or rolling an alt. Basically, "advancement driven players" need somewhat frequent (and noticeable) gains in character performance/skills/etc, or we can tend to lose focus and switch characters (which isn't bad for the game, because we stay) or switch games (which of course, IS bad for the game).