Soft XP Cap - Indefinite XP Gain

[Kinerd]

I happen to have a 20 fighter / 4 epic who has not yet run all of the available epic quests, and will not do so without reaching the current cap with her. This creates a situation where I do not want to run the available epic quests that I have not yet run, because I want to save the first time XP bonuses for when the cap increases. In other words, potential future cap increases encourage me not to play certain parts of the game. (Please note: I did not say absolutely forbids me from playing certain parts of the game. I said encourage.)

Suppose an alternative:
1. Reaching the current XP cap would have the same effect on repeat penalties, powerleveling, bravery bonuses, levels: putting them all on lock.
2. However, characters would continue to gain XP indefinitely. If the level cap was ever increased in the future and they had enough XP to take another level, they would immediately be able to do so, up to and including hitting the new cap.

.

This is better because it encourages players to play the game.
I can think of no reason why this would be worse.
Therefore, unless someone can provide a reason why it would be worse, it is a Good Change.

[Charononus]

I happen to have a 20 fighter / 4 epic who has not yet run all of the available epic quests, and will not do so without reaching the current cap with her. This creates a situation where I do not want to run the available epic quests that I have not yet run, because I want to save the first time XP bonuses for when the cap increases. In other words, potential future cap increases encourage me not to play certain parts of the game. (Please note: I did not say absolutely forbids me from playing certain parts of the game. I said encourage.)

Suppose an alternative:
1. Reaching the current XP cap would have the same effect on repeat penalties, powerleveling, bravery bonuses, levels: putting them all on lock.
2. However, characters would continue to gain XP indefinitely. If the level cap was ever increased in the future and they had enough XP to take another level, they would immediately be able to do so, up to and including hitting the new cap.

.

This is better because it encourages players to play the game.
I can think of no reason why this would be worse.
Therefore, unless someone can provide a reason why it would be worse, it is a Good Change.

I think it would create issues with heroic leveling, how far could I get if I could xp forever on a von3/shadowcrypt farm. Also epic levels are well fairly trivial in power increase, the real power is in ed's and the only reason to even take epic levels is to get to 25 so the rep stops so that you can level ed's.

[Kinerd]

It would not apply to heroic levels because the current cap is higher than heroic levels. Let me be clear. Nothing at all would change in the current version of the game. The thing that would change would be:
1. if you have been running a level 25 character for months and months,
2. and in doing so accumulated sufficient XP,
3. you would be able to take any new levels available due to new level cap increases.

I agree that epic levels are trivial power increases. My point is that suddenly not having epic levels represents a non-trivial playability decrease because I am (again, suddenly) once again subject to accruing repeat penalties. This change precludes that.

[CaptainSpacePony]

Encouraging players to play is... good I suppose. Players should play to have fun. Different things are fun for different players. I know many players, to whom earning xp is fun. When they cap, they start a new character, work some EDs, or TR. When a player sees the game as "work" or a burden, they should take a break.

I don't think this is nessesary at all.

The cap has worked its way up from 10 to 25 over the years. Everytime it goes up, players run their capped toons through the new content (and rerun old content) and cap again.

Let's take the logic of the proposal to the extreme: Imagine a founding player who ran the heck out of Von 7 years ago, then quit playing. He returns today and has enough XP to hit level 25! Who does that serve or help? Not him. Not the players he tries to group with.

[danotmano1998]

Suppose an alternative:
1. Reaching the current XP cap would have the same effect on repeat penalties, powerleveling, bravery bonuses, levels: putting them all on lock.
2. However, characters would continue to gain XP indefinitely. If the level cap was ever increased in the future and they had enough XP to take another level, they would immediately be able to do so, up to and including hitting the new cap.


So you don't consider having a portion of the playerbase being able to autolevel right past all the new content that was just released a bad thing? I can see where Turbine might.

[Kinerd]

Encouraging players to play is... good I suppose. Players should play to have fun. Different things are fun for different players. I know many players, to whom earning xp is fun. When they cap, they start a new character, work some EDs, or TR. When a player sees the game as "work" or a burden, they should take a break.

I don't think this is nessesary at all.

The cap has worked its way up from 10 to 25 over the years. Everytime it goes up, players run their capped toons through the new content (and rerun old content) and cap again.If I may, cap increases today are not comparable to earlier cap increases. Via the ED system a character today continues to benefit from gaining full XP. If you repeated Running with the Devils 10 times in your journey to the 16 cap, so what? Once you hit the 16 cap you were done. By comparison, if you repeat whichever quests 10 times to hit the 28 cap, you are at 9 repeats in that quest forever as you try to gain ED xp.
Let's take the logic of the proposal to the extreme: Imagine a founding player who ran the heck out of Von 7 years ago, then quit playing. He returns today and has enough XP to hit level 25! Who does that serve or help? Not him. Not the players he tries to group with.I disagree that this is an extension of the logic of my proposal, because there is no way to make it retroactive and no need to do so even if there was. I'm talking about people playing (which is to say paying) now, and how the imminent changes affect them.
So you don't consider having a portion of the playerbase being able to autolevel right past all the new content that was just released a bad thing? I can see where Turbine might.Why? People have to purchase the content for the gear anyway, and Turbine has strongly established that new gear is guaranteed to creep past the power of old gear. Running the content for XP to gain the epic levels is a very tiny power increase, and Turbine is just as well aware of that.

[blerkington]

Hi,

It's an interesting idea.

This sounds like it would be useful to people who want to be efficient about levelling. So if you had a lot of characters, or even just a few and not a huge amount of time to play, it might appeal, because there would not be any, or as much, lost xp.

One thing is, I suspect the thinking behind not allowing it is that having more levels to gain encourages people to play. It's similar to releasing new content, it gives people something else to do.

My own experience is that getting from 20 to 25 happens incredibly quickly. The amount of xp provided by epic quests is generally so great compared to heroic ones, making it very fast compared to a heroic levelling. The real work was maxxing out all of the epic destinies; for my main it was easy, for my alts it's probably not going to happen anytime soon if at all.

If the xp requirements are similar for levels 26-28 I personally won't be worrying about it, although I see that it might be harder for other people who have less time or many more characters. One caveat to this is that there is a potential trap with repetition penalties, especially if there is very little new content in that level range.

It's good of you to raise this issue though; even if we don't get a soft cap like you propose, the idea of raising the cap again so soon and its effect on the game is definitely worth a lot more discussion.

Thanks.

[Archangel666]

I'll sign this idea. I have a level 25 Monk with all Destinies fully capped and I'm dreading the level raise.

While she no longer gets repeat penalties I just know that they've been ticking away in the background and I'm suddenly going to go from "You have repeated this quest 2 times" to "You have repeated this quest 27 times, 0 xp" on the day of the cap increase.

With something like this in place I wouldn't have to worry about somehow finding a quest I haven't already run a billion times just so I can gain the last couple of new levels.