[WhiteJoker]

Originally Posted by Keroko

The authors experience seems to be mostly based on the old type of MMO's, where leveling through grinding was the main way to level. Given that the players are doing just that: Leveling through grinding, it stands to reason that this is the same in Elder Tale.

His experience is mostly from EQ2 (Mamere is known to have played it for a long time and it seems to be his fall back example whenever he needs one) which is somewhere between the two systems. It's got a linear EXP system and is very quest heavy, but like old MMOs questing seems based primarily around party questing as opposed to solo-questing towards end game raiding like WoW style MMOs. As noted by the talk about the Magic Bag, and events in the LN not yet covered by the anime, Elder Tales does have a fairly extensive quest system, though it isn't mentioned exactly how rewarding the experience is. So if we go off of EQ2, the issue is more that killing enemies after a certain point requires partying and in an MMO, finding a party is usually the hardest part of grinding.

Really, Elder Tale as a whole seems to be more akin to the old type of MMO's. XP loss upon death, items drop on death, skill leveling requires raiding, even mobs many levels below you are a potential threat, soloing is only feasible for skilled players, all stuff that you don't really see much in modern day MMO's. Not surprising I suppose, given that this is a 20 year old game and all...

It seems to be a mixture of EQ1 and EQ2 combined with a sandbox like Skyrim (but with far more epic quests/raids)

Anyway, Touhya and Minori have been training like crazy for a full month in just this episode alone, and yet they haven't dinged to cap at all. So leveling takes a long time, even for the lower levels.

Their training seems more to be about learning the mechanics then it does grinding for levels and experience. Additionally, if Naotsugu and Akatsuki are constantly jumping in to keep Tohya from dying then they're going to wind up stealing most of the experience.

Spoiler:

But we also know from the LN that when the training camp starts Tohya is level 29 and Minori is 21. The level difference is because Tohya was forced to go farming every day when they were still in Hamelin while Minori just crafted all day long. Since the two were only in Hamelin for about two weeks, it means Tohya gained 8 levels from grinding without quests and with a crappy party that had to regularly go back to town and pick up party members who died due to incompetent Shreider shenanigans (come to think of it, he was probably sucking up a lot of exp too since he wasn't using the Mentoring system). We also know from the Goblin War that if a party spends all day fighting something around their level, at a constant rate, they can gain 3 levels in about as many days.

Spoilery stuff might provide a few more handles for how long it might take to level:

Spoiler for novel spoilers:

There is a time difference in the game compare to the real world. When it was a game, one hour in real-life was twelve hours in-game. Now that the game has become reality, this has shifted through as well. A good rule of thumb could be "time to level = time it would take in the real world X 12"

I know but even with that ratio it seems difficult to gauge travel times due to factors which wouldn't be apparent in game; things like encounters on the road seem to be more likely and apparent then it was while in game. Real world factors like uneven terrain and so forth would also be contributing factors. There just too many variables to account for that I really didn't want to get sucked into the time sink that is thinking up the thousands of things which could further increase travel time beyond the time compression factor. And then I'd have to draw up a graph, make a flow chart... and oh god, kill me now before I lose half a day again.