Originally Posted by
Mirage
Eventually, everyone will be, yes. While it might not be a problem that a few are capped, it kind of is if half the player base is....
The real problem is that except a very small selection of merits, all merits were made for a game where 30-40k/h was the most awesome exp anyone could ever hope to get, and most would rarely be seeing more 25-30. In this game, the current merit caps were hard to reach for almost everyone. In the current game, the merit caps, including the few that were increased, they are extremely easy to cap for almost anyone.
According to my ffxiah profile, I have spent 1646 merit points and am capped for all my currently leveled jobs and not job specific merits. It was no difficult task, as I am sure most people would agree with me on. However, if I still had 8000 merit points I could spend, on merits with increasingly diminishing returns, I might very well eventually reach the point where I do not find it worthwhile to go out of my way to keep getting merits, and simply let the last merits slowly but surely build up from doing other stuff.
This way, exp gained will never be worthless, as you would almost always have something to use it on
For example, if we got to a point where we could unlock a third and fourth base stat to merit, in addition to the two we have (probably) already maxed, but these two additional base stats started at 30 merit points for a single upgrade, that would be 720 merit points (7.2 million exp) just to boost two more attributes to +12. Do the same with combat stats, allow us to level 4 more combat skills to 8, but require 30 merits for each single upgrade, and that's another 9.6 million exp to cap out those. Do the same for two magic skills, 4.8 M EXP.
In total, this is 21.6 million exp to cap out, and I haven't even started on job specific merits. While some people would grind their tits off to max these out as fast as they could, I am pretty sure that there would be a significant amount of people who would not. These merit additions are not very hard to implement, as few (maybe even none) of them would make an big impact on how strong one job is compared to another, and would mostly let us perform better on several different jobs, not make one job even stronger.
While we were busy with these merits, the dev team would have time to plan the merits that would actually require some balancing and substantial amount of testing, and that would of course be group three (maybe even four) job specific merits, where we would see perhaps as much as 30 merit points to buy the first level, and 50 or more merits to buy the highest level. Going by an average cost of 40 merits per upgrade, and being able to max 2 merits per group, that would be 160 million exp to max out all 20 jobs.
At 300k exp per hour, that's 533 hours of nothing but merit grinding! Now that is a lot, but remember that if you are just a casual player and really just want to focus on a couple of jobs, and have the rest of your jobs stay "all right for non-hardcore purpose", you would only need 26.6 hours of meriting to max out one single job.