Lack of End Game Content

[Hawklaser]

Because the kind of break the caps are meant to encourage is the kind that discourages you from playing continuously on one sitting for a long period of time without break. You have the dailies that act as a soft cap and the weeklies that act as a hard cap.

It is not the kind of break where you decide this week or this month or this year or even this expansion you're not playing the game. You can still decide to do that, but that's up to you. If you run out of things you want to do, you can take a break from the game, but that's not the kind of break the dailies and weeklies are meant to address.

And we all know how beloved the exhaustion system of 1.0 was right? That was a system designed around encouraging shorter play sessions.

The implementation of caps and the development ideal of periodic breaks end up at odds with each other. As long as the caps serve as any kind of meaningful gate, they will create the feeling of having to meet the cap within that set period or end up feeling behind. Set the caps too loose and they may as well have not existed in the first place.

Granted, this usually impacts primarily those interested in keeping up with the current endgame, but this is a thread about endgame content. However in more predatory mobile style games, those same caps are used to not encourage breaks but to get people to spend money because if they don't meet those caps they do fall significantly behind in ways that are impossible to make up otherwise. Which leads to the game becoming more like a job. Which is also what happened with old school raids that had weekly lockouts, combined with guilds doing their own point based loot systems. The guilds really had no quick way to get a replacement up to speed for their progression teams thanks to the lockouts, which made the raiding feel more like a job than a game to a number of people over time. It was all about being there on raid night, prepared, and performing consistently, in order to get the high end progression, with one chance at loot per cap cycle. Imagine just how different things may have been if the groups could have reset their current raid instances more at will and progressed at their own rate instead.

[Misutoraru]

The implementation of caps and the development ideal of periodic breaks end up at odds with each other. As long as the caps serve as any kind of meaningful gate, they will create the feeling of having to meet the cap within that set period or end up feeling behind. Set the caps too loose and they may as well have not existed in the first place.

just want to share this
I must say I enjoy the weekly cap
most of the MMO i use to play have no weekly/daily cap, and I have to login everyday and clear content till I got the loot that day, because if I miss a day I am behind, if I miss 2 days, I am seriously behind, and the static raid group feel like a 2nd job
the weekly cap I have 7 days to get my loot, I can have a life outside MMO.
Weekly cap, some players like it, some don't. I believe it will never have a definitive solution to please everyone

[linay]

the feeling of having to meet the cap within that set period or end up feeling behind.

Since we're speaking endgame, at that point, they should know enough about the game to maximize their playtime and what they want to accomplish in the game without having to feel left behind. Another thing to consider is that having no cap means that you can be left behind even more and then having the pressure to overcompensate when catching up.