In a few months SHH's power curve will resemble TR's.
A few months? I dunno, I started with Gnosis 1, so just getting to 5 is going to take a full year. Even somebody who started at 3 due to being a full mage transfer is looking at 6 months minimum, and that's just to get to 5.
'A few months' seems to be understating it pretty heavily. This isn't a complaint, mind. I'm not 100% on the current system, but I don't really feel like 6 to 12 months is too long a wait for Gnosis 5.
Really, as a general rule, MUSHes give out too much XP, and characters advance too fast.
The first is more or less a function of the 24/7 availability of a game, combined with how many games want to reward activity. I mean, if you used the suggested XP per game and then ran your tabletop game 7 days a week, XP would inflate pretty far pretty fast as well.
The second you just have to sort of suck up and deal with, but has its roots in similar issues. In a TT game the ST can sit you down at the table and say "Okay, it's been six months since you X'd the Y of Z's plans to A the B, and you've all kept in touch." or whatever else describes lends to a sense of the passage of time and gives the advancement of abilities a sense of scope.
I don't really know that much can be done about either. People do like to see their characters advance, and at more than a snail's pace, and there's no denying that XP for activity/participation serves to motivate people to participate more. As with anything, that can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, but it's true enough even for people who aren't trying to abuse the +vote/PRP system for xp.
In games with a level system -- they get to come in one level lower than the rest of the party/players.
We did this for a good long while, but in tabletop it ultimately just seemed kind of pointless. Sorry, new guy, there are certainly people in the world as powerful as the PCs, and you're totally playing in a group with them, but despite your last character having sacrificed his life to save this very party after six years of play, we just can't let you come in as cool as the other PCs.
Instead, in every online game I've seen you're often stuck with those, and the word "custom" is treated as anathema.
This is entirely the fault of nMage presenting magic as if you're just glorified hedge wizards. 
Answer this question: why did anyone need to tinker with Cruac/Theban/Other?
Certainly sounds more interesting. People used the same arguments you are when Thaumaturgy for Tremere was essentially just a discipline with a handful of attached rituals. Expanding it into numerous paths wasn't strictly necessary, but it did make playing a Tremere way more fun/customizable.
And more powerful, sure, but that's almost always going to be the case when you give something more versatility.
Our groups have been bringing folks in after character death or retirement at the same level, in tabletop, for quite some time now. Key word: tabletop
I'm not entirely keen on the whole 100% (or 50% even) rollover to a new char. What Ark said about it not being good for anyone if someone isn't having fun but clinging because they don't want to start over, but I feel like the unlimited do-overs on TR have led to people just hopping around between characters on a whim, especially with the catchup the way it is there. Unlike some of the assholes on this board, I rather want people to get invested in their characters, and want to continue playing them for long stretches. I enjoy the sense of continuity, and when folks will drop and swap chars because they had a bad day or week of it, because there's very little reason not to just get a clean slate whenever you want it, you don't really get that.
Also, yeah, what Coin said. Video games aren't a MU*. MMOs aren't even a MU*. Using any comparison between them and how to deal with new characters on a MU* is pretty terribad.
The rate of resource growth is not at all related to the law of diminishing returns. Your statement makes no sense.
Scaled XP costs are based on the concept of diminishing returns, which reflect a measurable, RL phenomenon.
They aren't mutually exclusive ideas. I've no idea what you want to make more sense, though.
I think in Demon: The Descent it says that you can buy Primum (the game's Supernatural Tolerance trait) at chargen for 3 Merit dots. But Merit dots cost 1 experience a piece and raising Primum with experience costs 5 experiences per dot. I am not sure if this was a mistake in printing (it might have been, since in the first edition it was 3 merit dots per point of a power stat), or not. Regardless, if I am not remembering incorrectly (which I very well could be), the game we're making will be switching to 5 Merit dots per dot of Primum, to keep the costs even. If we allow it at all.
I just look at it as sort of like Chargen Only merits, things that are more powerful than the norm for their cost because you can't purchse them out of chargen, which limits how many you can take. For a Mage it could represent a particularly strong Awakening if you're brand new, or it could be that your character has been around for a whle even if you're generating it now. Either way, you're starting out with a power stat higher than 1 as a purchased-in-chargen advantage. It's an advantage that everyone (unless for whatever reason they're not allowed to >.<) has the opportunity to gain. If they choose not to, that's on then. A higher powerstat isn't necessary to take advantage of any of the shit you can buy straight out of chargen anyway.
Everyone has roughly the same access to XP. No tiered superpowers, no dinosaurs others will simply never catch up to, etc.
Boo.
Scaling XP costs were bad. Incredibly bad. Because they were both kind of dumb to begin with, and only really matter if you have a relatively finite amount of XP to play with. If your xp is at a constant upward trend, no real scarcity or diminishing return is had. I mean from a purely technical sense yes, there is a diminishing return in paying 15xp when you buy the fifth dot in a skill instead of 9xp for the third dot, but if you've got a pool of XP not only larger than what you need to buy but everything else you're likely to need to buy, AND you'll end up with enough XP to buy the next thing you want by the time you want it, more or less, diminishing returns are pretty pointless.
Scaling XP costs really only exist to slow you down, and there are ways of doing that which don't require the irrational irritation factor of a big chunk of XP doing virtually nothing for you. Going from Professional (3) to World Class (5) in a skill isn't enough to even, on average, bump your expected successes up by 1, more than likely. Meh.
Plus, we finally aren't paying for invisible fucking merit dots, which has always made me grind my teeth in the worst ways.
If my fun is RPing and you walk into scenes where I am and instead of RPing just slaughter all the things, then you're a dick
Does this work both ways? If you arrive at a scene where slaughtering all the things is about to commence, and figure out a way to resolve it all just through RPing where nothing has to die, are you a dick for pushing your preference and ruining someone else's fun?
Towards the main topic, I'd generally prefer that peoples sheets are maximized to describe the character they want to play, wherever on the scale of ability that falls. I can handle folks who want to be the best at everything, or the best at what they do, etc. What infuriates me are folks who can't be bothered to play with the system enough to be as good at the things their character does as they think they should be, and then complain, because they don't feel like they should 'have to min-max', when in truth they just don't feel like they should have to learn the system at all, just put dots where they fit their imagination and POOF it should all work out.
"Medicine 3 implies a 'Professional level of skill' but my character isn't a preofessional, so I'll only take 1 or 2, but WAH why am I reliably rolling for shit on Medicine rolls, it's so unfair!"
Shoot yourself in the foot if you want, but shut the fuck up about it for fucks sake. Yes, it's annoying that White Wolf (and other games) like to tie mundane skills to supernatural powers, such that your magical healing power that has no bearing on actual medicine at all is keyed off of your technical knowledge of actual medicine. Suck it up and buy the dots you need, or shut the fuck up.
Truthfully, I think my real contribution to this is - "twink all you want, but don't let the depths of your +sheet stop my ability to RP or you'll find we RP in very small doses." Even if your sheet is awesome, if you walk into a murder mystery, roll dice once to reverse time to see what happened, say who did it, and walk out - well, good job asshole.
...wait, isn't looking back in time like a level 2 power? How does that even require twinking? And this example is a huge peeve of mine. Murder mysteries are not generally a good idea when involving people with supernatural powers, because so, so, so many of them will sidestep the point of a murder mystery. Shit, peeking back in time isn't even restricted to Mages. Hell, there more than one M+ type that can do it. A relic can do it. If you want to run a murder mystery, only invite strictly mortal PCs.
That these are going to be considered wildly onerous system requirements by so many people:
Minimum System Requirements
Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz
AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940
Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660
AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870
RAM 6GB
OS 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)
DirectX 11
HDD Space 40 GB
How dare they build a game to require at least moderately current specs? If by 'current' we mean 'shit that came out 3 to 4 years ago'.
My only issue is the minmaxers are the 21 year old heart surgeons with Medicine 5.
Yeah, where would anybody get the idea to play something like that?
For a doze of so-called 'reality', we could note that the youngest doctor in the Guinness Book of World Records (practicing doctor who did surgery on your eyeballs) was seventeen.
I think I can give a pass to somebody playing a 21 year old heart surgeon. I might ask what took him the extra four years, but I guess hearts are more delicate than eyes. >.>
Leaving off Alzie's bullshit: I finally went to start the Wicked Eyes, Wicked Hearts quest, and goddamnit. Giant sprawling indoor maps with poorly implemented mechanics are my least favorite thing ever.
Alzie's objections read like somebody who's never played video games before. Like, I don't even know where to start. I imagine him beating super mario bros and complaining because he really wanted to run off with Bowser and HOW DARE THEY.
DA:I is full of choices you make, and the rewards, consequences, or just outcomes of those choices are presented to you as the game progresses. The shape of the world alters based on your decisions. Is that shape similar between one ending and the next? Sure. Do the details that comprise that shape 'not matter'? To you, maybe not, but people have completely restarted the game upon finding out that a particular set of choices would result in X being/doing Y in the end, becuase Not In My Game. Which means, whether you like how it's implemented or not, DA:I has pretty much entirely succeeding in delivering what it promised.
We can't really help it if your interpretation of that promise was some wildly different shit.
It was already alluded to, but I'll say it again in a more concrete fashion: This is basically Supernatural just using wod mechanics. 
Sure, me too.
But there's plenty of people who are hapier buying and bitching than they would be if they were unable to get it at all, and in only one of those two ways does the company make money off of it.
So given that doing a good job of it isn't viable with the resources at hand, I can't really call it shitty for them to choose the best worst option.
I could practically solo dragons.
Practically? You CAN solo dragons. I went and solo'd the lvl 19, 21, and 23 dragons in EDL at (my) level 19, 20, and 21 respectively. It wasn't even especially difficult. KE is wildly over the top when it comes to taking on large single targets, and even most group things.
I think a majority of DA:I players are on a older-gen console of some sort, so it's shitty when the developer decides to ignore those gamers in favor of those who own newer consoles or PCs. I mean, I understand why, but it's still shitty.
Time flies when you're having fun, but the PS3 and Xbox 360 are both heading into being nearly a decade old. I don't think it's at all shitty for game companies to dedicate fewer resources to older consoles when by 'older' we mean 'approaching a decade'.
Technology advances pretty quickly, and one of the reasons consoles have the issues they do is that they operate at a fixed point in tech progression. I admit I'd prefer if rather than poor execution they'd just not release on older hardware, but then there'd be a ton of bitching as well. Look at all the people losing their minds over games coming out with system requirements that aren't twenty years old.. So a (~)ten year old console gets a poorly optimized port because Inevitable Bitching + Money Spent is preferable to Inevitable Bitching + No Money Spent.