Why Raise the Level Cap Again?

Erm, I played FF11 for 8 years which required groups to even level up lol.

Why raise the cap? Because this is an rpg. Frankly I think we should have gotten 10 lvls last time and this one should be going to 70.

I'm not surprised that people don't want a lvl cap increase as this is a care bear mmo. They may have to grind out xp for a few weeks to get back to cap and that would be soooo hard.

rpg's are about leveling your toons and all mmo's have level cap increases to allow people to get bigger and badder. It also closes gear gap. New players will be able to hit 60 and have stats equivalent to players in NiM 81's.

The lvl cap in this game is far too low as it is. If they came out and straight up said that there would never be a level cap increase again and the game would just add a new 55 raid every six months I'd quit. That would be so boring.

And spending 5 hours leveling back to cap only to find out that those 5 levels made all the current content completely obsolete is entertaining? Give me a break. There are better things that could be spent on this game than a lazy/half-assed level increase. The level cap should of never even been raised to 55. The greatest thing about FF11 was that it scaled horizontally instead of vertically and the minute they decided to raise that cap after being at 75 for 10 years guess what happened? It killed the game. That game went from having a ridiculous amount of end game content that even the most hard core raiders barely kept up with to having absolutely zero content to do.

This information is factually incorrect. When FFXI was released in Spring of 2002 in Japan it had a level 30 level cap. This was raised to a level 40 level cap upon release of the Japanese PC version that same Winter. In Fall of 2003 for the NA PC launch the level cap was increased to level 50 and introduced the level 40-50 Artifact gear quest lines. In Spring of 2004 for the NA PS2 release of the game, our game included Rise of the Zilart which for the NA PC and JP PC/PS2 players was the first add on expansion that had to be purchased separately. This expansion in 2004 increased the level cap to level 75 and introduced end game content that would then grow horizontally through Wings of the Goddess.

The point is that even FFXI had micro level cap increases in it's first two years until they were able to push up to the 75 cap which it sat at for roughly 5 years prior to the next increase. The push to 99 was inevitable and had to be done as server populations were droping and required mass migrations or mergers.

Two things with this:

1) If BW is planning to do a 5 level increase every 1.5 years then I agree with you. That's ridiculous and is actually hurting end game content. This game needs a massive massive expansion twice to three times the size of Makeb that pushes the level cap to 80 and then stays there for a minimum of 3 years, and I don't think the one coming is going to do that.

2) You are correct, FFXI had well developed horizontal growth in end game. SWTOR has about 5% of the available end game content compared to FFXI by the point of Treasures of Aht Urgan. But the SWTOR devs are either afraid of losing casual players or simply unimaginative (The latter seems legit considering these devs have come up with nothing for PvP or WPvP in over two years and are now asking the forum for ideas this week.). This game simply cannot live for long if the "end game" is simply a new operation and a new flashpoint every six months. It needs different types of end game content. What do you do in end game in SWTOR? You raid, then raid the same op in HM, then in NM. Compare that to Dynamis, Relic Weapons, AF2, Sky, Sea, Limbus, Assaults, Besieged (HELLO?! Copy Besieged for faction v. faction even if it's PvE, duh...), ENMs, HNMs, Stronghold NM's, Salvage, Einherjar, Zeni NM's, and then of course Abbyssea.

You may think I'm disagreeing with you but I'm really not. I think there definitely needs to be a level cap increase. But I think that it needs to be done intelligently with a massive end game in mind that features more than operations and mini-operations (flashpoints). These 5 level increase are a waste of time. I completely agree with that. I think they should be shooting this thing up to a minimum of 65, and then plan a massive expansion that would take us to 80 and sit there for 3-4 years to then give them a chance to develop end game content that was more than kill trash > kill boss > kill trash > kill boss > repeat.

Hell yeah! Let`s bring back Korean MMORPG`s where max level takes you 6 months @ 14 hours per day! Oh.. top gear has only 60% success rate on recipes only! Mats drop at 5% chance from one mob only! We ain`t hardcore enough yo!

Wrong...Holy **** are you incredibly wrong.

The level cap was 50 for the JP release in 2002. It was released in NA in 2003 on the PC which included rise of zilart which raised the cap to 75 and introduced the Tu'Lia endgame area (also called sky) with god fights leading up to killing kirin. It stayed at 75 for almost 8 years. Abyssea came out and raised the cap every few months with each chapter of abyssea eventually reaching 99 which pretty much killed the game. I never bothered leveling up and immediately quit the game when I saw there was nothing to do since being level 80 equaled destroying all the content in the game and at 99 I was seeing people soloing the god fights...

The expansion in 2004 was chains of promathia which had certain chapters locked to a certain level and de leveled you to that level when you entered them. You also had to clear these chapters to enter the Al'Taieu area (also called sea) for the progression into that end game.

I played FFXI from the JP launch until about 2010 so I'm fully aware of what the actual level caps were. It seems to me you are confusing the genkai's (limit break) quests with the actual level cap. Genakai quests were introduced in RoZ which you had to complete at level 50 to be able to level past level 50(because that was the original cap) and it had to be done every 5 levels.

As for the population of FFXI. It started to drop because the game was getting old and the genre was moving away from that EQ style of game play with heavy grinding and low drop rates on end game thanks to WoW....

I played from PC game launch until 2009 and I recall things differently. We can agree to disagree on the level cap increases. But I believe we are both in tune on the fact that this game needs a much broader in depth end game.

No where did I request anything that you have posted. I've asked for a legitimate level increase with a more robust end game than just ops and HM fps. A level cap increase does not imply that it needs to be grind heavy.

What we are looking at now is a 5lvl cap increase every 1.5yrs that will then cause a year of instability while devs concentrate on balancing rather than improving end game. That's stupid. All I'm saying is that if you're going to increase the cap then do it right.

Best answer in this whole thread, thank you DarthTHC.

I'm wondering where the specific mention of a level cap increase from the devs is. i haven't seen anything specific myself, only hints about a "makeb-level" expansion with no details beyond that.