Deliberate level capping

[Mhurron]

Re: Deliberate level capping

I was thinking more along the lines of getting less exp but not needing as much to proceed to the next level. You know, like you were actually level 10. I have never seen anyone make 40-50 exp a day in the dunes.

Merits are not based on your tnl so your assertion that you would have people getting 4-5 merits a day in the dunes if they capped themselves would require the ability for a party in the dunes level to be able to do the equivalent of 40-50k exp in a day.

[Ziero]

Re: Deliberate level capping

Also your TNL doesn't change when you're capped. So it would still take 10k-20k+ past lvl 50 to lvl where in the dunes it's only a few hundred to 1k exp per lvl.

[Icemage]

Re: Deliberate level capping

Not to be rude, but I would just like to state that this comment is 100%, absolute bull. I have gotten FAR better exp at 10/20/30 then I have during any of my EXP pts in my 50s on both my jobs. Exp gain has nothing to do with a party's lvls, it's all based on two things.

1) The quality of the pt.

2) Camp location.

Agreed that party quality and correct camp location helps the XP curve a lot. However, kill speed at higher levels increases when looking at "average" parties, and with it comes better XP gains (not counting power levelling, which throws everything out the window).

The main reason for the impoved average XP/hour is recovery rates. Mages get better, more efficient spells and better ways to recover MP, and melees get access to increasingly better DPS weaponry. Yes, monsters also get stronger and beefier by level, but see my XP chain reasoning below.

Of course, you "can" get outstanding parties in most level ranges, but singular isolated cases of a 9K/hr party in Crawlers' Nest do not indicate that the average party will be able to do so. That's extremely anecdotal.

What's not anectodal is the realization that the XP chain timers get shorter as you rise in level, yet your typical decent party can still manage XP chain #5 no matter what level range you're looking at (and this is not even looking at burn parties, which skew things way off the curve past level 55). Since your average chain is completing faster, you are ergo making more XP on average as your level increases. It may seem otherwise because your TNL at lower levels is so much less, but if you plot out how much XP you're really gaining in an hour, you'd find this to be true.

Anyways, as for the original idea. It's more or less a 'meh-tastic' concept to me that would be more or less overlooked by the majority of the player base. Unless you had a good friend who was looking for a pt/member for a while at a lvl that you happen to have gear for this idea wouldn't help anyone. This would only be used to encourage static pts, which isn't exactly a bad thing, but would only hurt random pick up pts which you seem to have intended this to fix. And seeing as people who cap themselves wouldn't be able to gain any skills while they get exp, this would only *hurt* them in the long run. For statics and 'fun' missions, this would be great, but to help increase the usuable amount of people for a random pick up pt, this idea will not help.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than the status quo. There's no way to predict how the player base will react to such a change; do we really know how much of the level elitism is due to the enforced rule that you can't party with anyone not within 3 levels of you? I'm sure I don't know.

And if not this, then what? The situation in the low-mid levels is deteriorating - the more end-game activities that Square-Enix adds, the less reason there is for non-new players to level new jobs, and this trend continues to worsen daily as more players hit 75 on all the jobs they care to.


Icemage