Level Cap Increase

[kyuven]

I've never been a fan of lvl cap increases, it's basically a way for devs to reset the entire game instead of building on what's already there.

Conversely I played EQ1, where they attempted to stop raising the level cap after 65 for several expansions. This created such a massive disparity between players due to the way progression was handled (vertical, basically like FFXIV except more tedious) that adding more AA points or gear was getting increasingly ludicrous, so they upped the cap.
Hell they actually had a real problem when content was too difficult for the playerbase because someone forgot to tell the encounter development team that they weren't raising the cap.
After that fiasco (and many others) it became common practice across the MMO industry to introduce level cap increases with expansions for games that warranted them.
And as for DAOC...Trials of Atlantis?

[Gralna]

And as for DAOC...Trials of Atlantis?

ToA didn't raise the lvl cap, it introduced Master Levels, which weren't really levels, they were basically just a way to measure how far along you were in doing the 10 raids they introduced, with new skills learned after each raid. You were still lvl 50 before and after all the raids, and gear from previous expansions and vanilla were still relevant for endgame.


Closest they came to adding more levels was Champion Levels which SLIGHTLY increased your max hp/mp and allowed you to learn weaker versions of skills from other classes (roughly lvl 10 equivilant).

I also understand that for this game and many others, not raising the lvl cap would be horrible idea since in order for that kind of system to work, you basically have to design the game from the ground up with that in mind. Trying to do what EQ1 did, will almost never work since there are so many of facets of the game that would require rebalancing you'd basically end up recreating the entire game.

I do however wish there would be some middle ground, where our gear doesn't become entirely irrelevant every 3-4 months.