Is anyone else worried SE has backed themselves into a corner?

[Dark-Saviour]

Eh... I've always thought of iLvl as an additional means of progression as rather dull (and somewhat convoluted) personally. If you need to stretch progression out further, just let items fall where they may and extend normal levels (or add alternative ways to boost stats). If you want to go with an official system of item levels, then make skills unlock via quests and get rid of the standard leveling bit entirely. I'm not a huge fan of the latter, but eh; it would keep things somewhat sensible...

ilvl has always and will always exist as long as there are stats on gear of any kind. It hasn't always been visible, but it has always been present. Even if you couldn't see it, and they added new fun and exciting stats to gear, each piece of equipment would still have an item level dictating how it is budgeted.

If you mean an intrinsically-defined (though possibly hidden) iLvl, that hasn't always been the case, nor does it need to be.
Items can have stats specifically associated with them on a one-by-one basis; you don't need to have them divied up into defined tiers which all balance to an exact standard within.

[synaesthetic]

Item level was an intrinsic part of the itemization design in this game. It's an internal statistic that determines how much of a primary attribute an item can have as well as the maximum grade of materia that can be attached to it. Materia attribute caps are also determined by item level. An item level 90 body and leg slot item cannot have more than 29 of its primary attribute, and this determines the caps for secondary attributes (accuracy, crit, etc) as well as things like weapon rating for weapons.

[Skies]

If you mean an intrinsically-defined (though possibly hidden) iLvl, that hasn't always been the case, nor does it need to be.
Items can have stats specifically associated with them on a one-by-one basis; you don't need to have them divied up into defined tiers which all balance to an exact standard within.

One item is comparable to another in some manner.
One item will be better than another. One item will be as good as another. One item will be worse than another.
There are certain guidelines the devteam has to follow to ensure where an item is in relation to another, such as "10 Crit is as good as 20 Skill Speed".

Item Level itself might have not existed mechanically at any point, but the development guidelines do. Thus Item Level exists at it's most base form, the guidelines on how to compare an item to another.
Sometimes the developers fumble, yes, and make an item horrendously overpowered or underpowered by misjudging the intricacies of their own game, so a system of hard-locked formulae that dictates how much of something an item can have has been created, and it was named Item Level

[Claire_Pendragon]

Technically, SE COULD just change the numbers from increments of 5, to increments of 1.
(Such as i55 becomes i51, i60>i52, i70>i53, i75>i54, i80>i55 etc. Even 0.5 increments work too. i55 could be i50.5 i75 could be i52.5)

This of course doesnt stop them from making numbers get too high in other stats.
Which I hope they lower the drastic changes, but by doing so, hinders their ability to lock people out of content based on numbers. (which we know they want to do.)

[Naunet]

It's more bad planning and foresight, next item tier will very likely see WARs breaking 9999 without even needing Thrill of Battle for example

I really, truly, do not see why this is a problem. It's just a number. Its significance is in proportion to other numbers, not the number on its own. Can scaling get out of hand? Probably, if the jump between the end of one expansion and the beginning of another is just waaaaay huge. Is power creep innately bad? I don't think so.

[BrandoH]

It's called vertical progression, OP. Not much of a corner, since they intended to go the vertical progression route. When they raise the cap, they keep raising gear level just as they've been doing.

[Aureliami]

We will never have iLevel 200+ because PS3 can only count to 199.

[Dark-Saviour]

One item is comparable to another in some manner.
One item will be better than another. One item will be as good as another. One item will be worse than another.
There are certain guidelines the devteam has to follow to ensure where an item is in relation to another, such as "10 Crit is as good as 20 Skill Speed".

Hence why I said intrinsically-defined. A general, "thiis item is stronger than that one" is distinctly different to everything falling into a defined 'tier' that dictates its stats.


And even then, items don't have to be universally comparable. Look at PSO:
Bringer's Rifle - Special Attack fourths HP.
Anti-Android Rifle - Special Attack paralyzes enemies.
Heaven Punisher - For half of the day (based on internet beat-time), the special attack rains giant purple death lasers on up to (IIRC) 12 enemies.
Frozen Shooter - Freezes Things.
Yasminkov 9000v - Strong raw attack, but shotgun-level range.

To compare the weapons in terms of raw stats would be folly. The item level there was essentially "SPECIAL WEAPON" vs. "Not". There were some exceptions to the rule and there were some special weapons that were clearly more useful than other, but it wasn't a clear-cut X = Y > Z or anything like that.

And it. was. good.

[Itseotle]

We will never have iLevel 200+ because PS3 can only count to 199.

255 as per memory limitations :P

[Gramul]

I'm glad to see people are brining up Power Creep. Hope this video can help explain the very heavy and very real issues surrounding it to those still fuzzy on it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxszx60ZwGw

"Incomperable" in this case would be things like horizontal progression and ELEMENTAL EFFECTS.