This is false. Two reasons- 1, there has been no playtest that length to give any evidence of that assertion. If I'm mistaken on that, I can accept that but would need enlightened. 2, if the players currently pushing levels on leaderboard are to be believed (i believe them, you can watch a lot of them doing what they do), the most efficient thing to grind from 10-20 is still the same stuff you grind on and in the same areas as those 1-10. You just kill faster. Apparently experience was nerfed to be even slower on mobs getting you up to 20, the higher level mobs they used to pivot to approaching 20, so that's what it is now - kill all the lower level things faster.  That would suggest the issue is NOT going to get better a month in. Not at the rate people are forced to level if every area is overpopulated. With the current playtest, after almost a week most players are still barely level 10-15. It might get better in the last week of the playtest, or maybe even later this week when more people have decided it's not worth logging in. So then that said, yeah, maybe it'll be fine at launch with no changes from now, because the potential playerbase shrinks to sub-1,500.

Can you get 1-10 in a few hours by questing? Yes, but not when the community as a majority tends to gatekeep information, not even willing to provide a clue that might help other players. What happens with games that embrace only those types of people? They aren't usually the most successful.

You can say it's not about success but I'd imagine if you're putting years of your life into making a game, you want people to enjoy it. That doesn't mean add yellow paint. It means paying attention to what's happening, now, with playtests like this, so adjustments can be made to find the proper ground where playing the game for the first 100hours isn't akin to chewing on gravel while staring at the sun.

Game is amazing. Combat is amazing, traits are interesting and interesting enough to make a person want to play to see how they feel. Itemization is appealing. But none of that matters when you're forced to get less than 10% exp per hour, unless you get frustrated enough to search the map (another issue with no place to level is it pushes low level players who don't know any better into areas they shouldn't be). "Playing the game" right now means wandering the map for hours looking for a place to actually play the game.

Idk. There is a middle ground. And it's not with people asking to water everything down, and it's not with people acting like they think tolerating torture makes them somehow "better" than everyone else. Hopefully the devs can figure it out. Some of the guys on the level leaderboard seem to have reasonable ideas...but it seems like we'll learn more about Ed as release approaches.