While I (re)read.

rewards were scaled by the necessities of storytelling

Today the rewards are scaled to prevent the storytelling (oops, there’s nothing. So repeat 20 times). This says a lot.

Let’s see. The reward is the drug (our brain produces drugs, this is no news). In the past the drug was excused by a necessity. Today we have the drugs, and more elaborate (because artificial) drugs. But this is not anymore excused, just exploited. We got rewards but not reasons for the reward.

Lastly, sidekicking and mentoring, which I believe were first seen in City of Heroes — wow, what a brilliant hack! We’ll allow people to temporarily change level to get past all the barriers we just put up because we included power differentiating levels in the first place!

Ahah. Just brilliant.

The upshot is that whereas in D&D levels were used to bring people together, in MMOs today they are used to keep people apart.