Game breaks

Work has sent me to the United Arab Emirates, so I am spending some weeks here working far away from any major cities. While it fairly nice and warm outside, a staying at a remote hotel gets a bit tedious after a while - but that is part of the work.

While I do have an internet connection here, the connection is too slow for any decent MMO gaming experience. Many game related webpages are also inaccessible, just showing a "network error (dns_server_failure)". Unreliable connectivity to the rest of the world, "filters" or just bad luck?

While it would be fun to play a bit, it is also nice to have some break from the gaming. That both in terms of keeping the gaming parts interesting and with a fresh view, as well as do more of other activities. At home, I probably spend 2-3 hours per day playing, sometimes more.

When I first started playing MMOGs in 2001 play time was only on weekends, since on pretty much every weekday I was in a different country due to work. That kept the interest for the game I was playing, Anarchy Online, for a bit more than a year. But it also effectively kept me out of the loop in terms of people to play with - at least back then I found it a bit difficult to keep at the same level and areas as fellow players and I gave up on that eventually.

How well do games cater for people to take breaks from a game? From a soloing perspective, one can always do that as long as the game cater to some extent for soloers. But how well does the game cater for being able to play with old in-game friends and guildies?

Many games have restrictions of the level range (in level-based games) that people can have in a group, to avoid or minimize power-leveling. If you are too low level in combat you would not be able to kill the mobs you are fighting and if you are too high level they would be too easy.

If your fellow players play many alts and they have moved ahead with some characters while you were on a break, you might still be in the right range for an alt - but just might.
In a large guild there will be easier to find a guildie to play with also. On the other hand, one might have a few friends one would prefer to play with.

So far the games I have played that at least have provided some features to make this easier in level-based games are Everquest 2 and City of Villains/Heroes.

In Everquest 2 there is the mentoring system, which allows a higher level player to be adjusted down to the level of a lower level player. All skills and weared items are adjusted accordingly. The mentored player, the "apprentice" gets a slight xp bonus. The mentor also gets xp, but at a reduced rate. Multiple mentors can mentor an apprentice.

In City of Villain there is the sidekick/exemplar (Heroes) or lackey/malefactor (Villains) system.
One higher level player can exemplar/malefactor a lower level player, effectively being reduced to the same level as the lower level player - similar to the EQ2 mentoring system. The lower level player will get xp as usual, the higher level player will not get xp, but instead more infamy/influence (the "currency" in City of...).
In addition to this, a higher level player (the "boss") can make a lower-level player his/her sidekick/lackey, effectively raising the level of the lower level player to one level below the boss player. The xp gained by the sidekick/lackey is usually slightly better than what the player would gain at the regular level, but still in the same ballpark.

I have used both systems to play with friends at different levels, both higher and lower. In both cases the game experience has definitely been enhanced. For me, features like this that allow players at very different stages to still play with each other in a meaningful way an important feature.
Not only because I might be on breaks from game due to work, but also because I usually play a lot of alts and people I play with might not level their characters in the same order or speed as I do.
As I look at new games, the ease by which the game allows people to play together at any time has become more important.