Quote Originally Posted by Ziyyigo-Tipyigo View Post
Nobody actually liked the level caps. Nobody.

Want to know how I know? Beastmen's Seal battles, ENM battles, ISNM battles, Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Eco-Warrior... they all still have level caps. And nobody does them any more, because they still have level caps. Hell, we wouldn't even have seal storage NPCs at all if people actually wanted to do the fights, but even back then people hated level caps enough to drop Beastmen's Seals as fast as they got 'em.
The only purpose the level caps serve now is to artificially inflate the difficulty of the battles in question. If any Joe could just run down and do Royal Jelly, Under Observation, or Up in Arms at the drop of a hat at Level 99, the few valuable items that drop from those battles would be worth next to nothing because they'd be as common as dirt. Throw this on top of the fact that, in the current economy, nobody seems to care what they wear for the first 99 levels, so the value of those rewards is deflated even further.

Blaming the level caps for the unpopularity of those events is like saying the Virtual Boy failed because it was red. People don't do those events anymore because the rewards aren't worth it for the amount of effort they require. Expeditionary Force is probably the worst offender. Let's get an alliance together, fight waves of difficult baddies, and be rewarded with... Conquest Points. To buy gear that we'll outlevel in five minutes. Nah, let's do Eco-Warrior instead and get... a Dragon Chronicles page, even though we can go to Gusgen Mines and get twice as much EXP in five minutes. Ditto for ENMs and ISNMs - they require time to assemble a team, and the rewards are either worthless or too niche to be worthwhile.

Garrison's an interesting example. Some people still do the uncapped Garrison in Vollbow. Not because the Garrison is uncapped, or because the rewards are worthwhile (they aren't), but because it can be soloed. We're about to see a whole bunch of these existing battlefields get high-level versions, but if they still require six able-bodied heroes to complete, and if their rewards can't hold a candle to the Delve and Skirmish drops, interest is going to fizzle quickly.

Saying "nobody liked the level caps" (note the past tense) is pretty easy to do now when it's virtually impossible to do anything worthwhile in the game until you have a job at 99. (It's really silly that we call that Endgame, considering it's really more like the Begingame these days, right?) Level caps means I could participate in "real" content without having to grind, grind, grind my way to the top, and it also meant that I wasn't being a leech just because I was playing with a half-dozen other people with blue job levels. If I had to kill crabs for a year before I could fight in anything that really felt like it belonged in the scope of a Final Fantasy game, I probably wouldn't have stuck around. But I could go to Promyvion from the moment it was released, and the place gave me the creeps, as it should. I could do an Eco-Warrior when I saw a shout and beat up some big, blobby newbie eater without being forced to sit and watch. I could do a Garrison (and I did... hundreds of them) and fight off waves of mobs at once; something that only otherwise happened if you had a bad puller, a band camp, and lots of bad luck. And you know what? When I finally got to 75, and I was participating the large scale battles that we take for granted these days, I had half an idea of what to expect. Compare that to today, where people get to 99 today in a matter of hours, but all they know how to do is open presents.

If leveling had always been as easy as it is now, you're right that level caps would be pretty silly. (Although leveling is pretty easy in FFXIV, and there don't seem to be many complaints about the level caps you encounter along the way, except for the usual band of "WHY CAN'T I BE AWESOME ALL THE TIME RAWR" content bingers.) Saying that they were always a bad idea may be a little lacking in perspective; they were only implemented in cases where the consequences would be beneficial in some way, either by making rewards more valuable or by allowing new players to be acceptably included. Saying everybody hated them is flat-out wrong.