REALLY Not liking talk of increased level cap

Hmmm, well, I think Endgame (I use the term in it's morst ironic sense) is a gigantic hamster-wheel of grinding boredom and monotony. It's as if the designers ran out of creative ideas, stuck in a few Dailies for the people happy to do the same thing day after day, the slapped a warning sign on it all which reads "Warning - Endgame! This Means We Ran Out Of Interesting Things To Do So The Game Is, Essentially, Ended... Errrrm, But To Make Up For It You Can Repeat The Same Few Missions For All Eternity."

If there are going to be more Class missions and more places to explore, bring it on!

it will give more stuff to do on your 50s instead of just grinding gear and credits from dailies.

Then you don't just have to be never on the account (50) you made because you finished everything and theres nothing else to do.

A new level cap will give people something to do rather then just leveling up other accounts, then once you get all 8 classes to 50, your basically done with the game.

So it'll be nice to have a new level cap. and with the earlier post on the first page, totally agreed, doesn't matter what other people think of you, as long as your having fun, then there shouldn't be any problems. People who cause problems, just ignore them. Simple as that.

I play the game for the story. I find the endgame grind to be a pain in the ***. Running the same content over and over is so incredibly boring.


I enjoy earning new and better gear but not that way. I'd rather play 8 alts on each story branch than run a single 50 through HM flashpoints and ops 3 dozen times for daily coms.

Level Cap increases really don't impact you unless your not level cap at the point that they are raised (which in this case is 50)

all the current 50's will have their gear "levels" reset a bit of course...but if you've been running the same end game content for months, thats far less of an issue in light of the excitement of new material.

Most end game players gladly put away their end game gear to get newly axquired stuff to fight the new, tougher, higher level opponents that you encounter. the only downside is you may lost that gear set that looked so good for new green or blue stuff that is atrocious (though i have no clue who it could get worse then the current rakata/columni design). your "effort" in obtaining that stuff isn't wasted, as you used it for months waiting for the expansion. that's far longer then most players ever have their "leveling" gear while leveling. so if you even get a week or more out of your Ops gear, you definitely got out what you put into it.

the players that will get cheated are those that haven't hit 50 yet and been able to experience the end game content. By the time they hit 50, everyone else will be running 55 or 60 content, and lvl 50 Ops will be steamroll. Thats one thing I hated about WoW's rapid progression...you would get to 60 or 70, and the cool purple gear you had waiting for you (from other toons) is obsolete the second you put them on. it will be the same with SWtoR...that alt that i was hoping to run Ops with will get to 50, get some nice gear I saved up...then immediately replace it with new gear a level higher.

Personally, I'd be happy with either. I'm a big fan of alternative advancement options (like legacy in SWtOR, or virtues and legendary weapons in LotRO), so Id be perfectly satisfied if the cap never got past 50....but if thats the case, then why even have levels? If we never get pst 50, then why even make us level to 50 in the first place?

It's a form of advancement. your skills are tagged to level, your gear is dependent on level requirements...it's a deeply immersed mechanic that would be wasted if they never raised the level cap. So while it's not required this soon or on this next xpac, it's inevitable based on their design. no matter how powerful they get our gear...our skills are still based on level, so at some poing they are going to have to raise our level if only to give us access to new class skills. Or they'll have to drop the level mechanic completely and go with something different. Which is a waste of time.

the benefit of the alternative advancement options (legacy, iLvl) is that you dont' always have to use character level as the barometer. But it's already been chosen...so it will happen...just a matter of when and how.

Same here. I would much rather have story to play than doing the same thing everyday.

I mean I'm a little surprised we are talking about a raise in level cap so early. I would have thought it would have gone at least 18-24 months before a level cap increase. But like I've said before I think we are going to see a marketing push around Christmas for a "free" expansion that will include the increased level cap to try to boost sales and subs during the Christmas season. I mean iirc when I was in FFXI it was about a 2 year window from launch to NA release with the level 50 cap and upon NA release we saw the cap raised to 60 and then about half a year later it went to 75 and stayed there for almost 7 years.

But aside from my surprise of a earlier than expected increase, it is an MMO so the level cap was never meant to be 50. It's going to go up at some point and someone will always be in your position and get screwed. Though I would imagine things will be changed so that you won't have to progress through all the current gear. BM will likely replace Recruit, WH will replace BM, and something new will be added with the difficulty for the old top gear tiers reduced.

After giving it some thought I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with OP.

There is an excellent video by "Extra Credits" on the subject of Power Creep that just came out sometime last week and it covers just this sort of thing, that is, inflation of character powers and how it affects the viability of older content.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep

I can imagine an increase in lvl cap this early in the game can certainly lead to this kind of lvl inflation phenomenon.

As the article and several others in the forum suggest; I think that BW should consider lvl'ing "horizontally" instead of "vertically". Instead of giving us new and more powerful skills at each level, give us options to modify our current skills to further customize them to our play styles - each modification having it's own set of pro's and con's to weigh

for example: The trooper's stock strike can be modified to knock down strong opponents at the cost of doing less or no damage.

- or -

A sith assassin's Dark Ward ability grants a DoT's to all enemies in a certain radius at the cost of fewer charges

These are just crazy examples off the top of my head, but the idea is the foster a sense of options and flexibility without having to increase the character's overall power.

I personally believe a level cap increase is far too soon in the thought process considering the overwhelming amount of bugs, and performance issues with the client and engine itself on most systems. (I assume everyone who still plays this game knows exactly the ones I'm referring to.)

I'd be far more concerned with having a game that ran smoothly for every user to installed it, rather than push new content out every couple of weeks, to try and satisfy an end game that was incredibly easy to reach, and incredibly uneventful once there.

I'd bet theres probably a score of mundane dailies along with it, and even further flashy extras, rather than quality of life improvements.

I realize bioware is desperately doing everything they can to try and make 'new players' want to flock to the game, and keep the ones that 'like it,' I just feel they don't know HOW to do it. Make the game smoother to play and maybe the people who try the demo will stay.. Raising a level cap (also odd that it seems to be DLC..?) Before any of these new subscribers are secured, is just ridiculous imo. (The eff would I want to play a game with under 30 FPS on an average level computer, even if brand new, all the way to lvl 60? I'd be more inclined to barely get to 20.)

Story line while leveling was awesome. I'll be the first to admit this is an awesome single player game, but why the hell do i care about a level increase single player?

I could go on and on with a tirade of more of whats wrong with the game now, and will STAY wrong with it. I myself, the only reason I'm still playing is because I made the mistake (yes, MISTAKE) of buying several months at a time on release, and yet an additional 'free' month to try and keep people playing, but I'm sure I wont be alone in leaving for good after that's done even with the 'server migration' and level cap increase.

Fact remains there are better games, that run smoother, and nothing content wise is gonna change the fact this game has serious quality of life and performance issues.

I was scratching my head at this announcement coming so soon. Does this mean that all existing content at 50 is obsolete, including the 3 OPS and countless FPs we currently have? What about all the dailies on Ilum, Belsavis and Corellia? Don't forget all the gear that is suddenly going to be deprecated(Columi, Rakata) if not outright eliminated(Tionese).

It is not as if they are churning out content at a blistering pace. Do you think they can really fill in the gaps that will create. Don't misunderstand me, I am all for more story, new FPs, OPs and WZs. However, it seems that everything announced so far is happening on Makab. Since Makab will also introduce an increase in level cap then this presents 2 troubling outcomes.

1. New planet and level cap increase comes out soon, say September and the quest for BH and Campaign gear is made pointless(basically the entire end game).
2. It is a bigger release that comes out near the end of the year and we see a 5-6 month content drought causing another mass exodus of players.

How about encouraging us to keep making more alts by adding some useful legacy bonuses. Throw us 1 - 2 more OPs, 3-4 FPS, and 3-4 WZs over the next 6 months. What about fixing Ilum and making open world PvP relevant again. Maybe add some single player story based content that requires more than 1 pet. I think there are a lot of alternatives without hitting the "reset" button.

It is way too soon to be raising level cap and way too soon for another epic fail.

If they do it right, this could be a really good thing for the state of endgame. When they announced a new level cap along with a single new planet, I assumed the level cap jump would be rather small. Maybe 5 levels max? Let's assume that.

All they would have to do is bump the difficulty of all existing end game content to the new max, which can't be too hard. It's all just mathematics for BioWare. Surely with the new content there will be a new Operation, also maybe a new Flashpoint? This could be a good opportunity for them to fix the "mistake" they made with Tionese/Columi/Rakata gear by placing the set bonuses on the shell instead of the armoring. Re-itemized end game could easily fix that.

On the other hand if they left all existing content optimized for level 50, it could easily ruin end game by leaving players at the new max with one flashpoint and one operation to do. In fact, I would say they almost HAVE to adjust the existing end game to leave enough content for everyone.

Or heck, for all we know, the new max will be level 51. If that's the case I doubt the existing end game would get dramatically easier by any means.