Quote Originally Posted by Kes13a View Post
actually.. no, levels have not always been a thing. used to be skill grinding. I am likely wrong, but levels were a thing mainstreamed by WoW to increase the rush by the whole level effect and sound. 100 levels isnt really that much either, Anarchy Online the level cap was 220, years ago.

power creep is what you are finding a problem with I think. regardless.. things from the games past will always become trivialized. would you prefer they take the Destiny route and whole parts of the game are "vaulted"? while there is no good answer for the issue, you have proposed no alternative, no real fix except.. "no more levels". even if they did away with that, a new expansion, because people scream for it, would likely include new jobs, and new content. those two things will cause exactly the same issue you are complaining about here. new content will trivialize old content, new regular mobs will appear to be gods compared to old npcs and the devs would have to put in extra effort to fixing old content.

see? even without levels the issue would remain.
Just to elaborate on your first paragraph. Leveling has been around since the dawn of CRPG/MMOs. There have been some variants that focus more on skill building, such as Ultima Online (I believe the first graphical MMO, I happened to beta test and play a bit.)

But these games all grew from Dungeons and Dragons, in which leveling was an integral part of the game.

If you reach back to the days before UO, you are looking at the MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), which were text based games where you did level (Gemstone III comes to mind as an example, but it was far from the first MUD.) (Excellent game btw, for people who dont mind reading instead of graphics.)

But leveing is a core part of this genre and the Final Fantasy franchise itself.