What if the raised the linit from 50 to 60?

[doc7924]

I remember when I started 40 was the limit for a while until they made it 50.

Now for a long time after you hit 50 you really had not much to do. Incarnates aside if they decided to say make the cap 60, would you think they would have added more powers to the current sets or maybe make some new pools powers for over 50+. Plus slots of course.

Or was 50 good enough.

[Aggelakis]

Fifty was great. "I'd rather grow wide than grow up." Leaving it at 50 meant your hard work to be awesome at 50 wasn't 100% invalidated by gaining a single level.

[Eoraptor]

the problem is you can't simply "increase the cap" there has to be something for players to do or accomplish in that newly created span of ten more levels. that means creating a whole lot more content. what we had with the incarnates and other 50+ schemes was that. Plus, when you start getting that high, you're bumping up against game mechanics... you may have maxed out several of your powers (which is why incarnate grants you more) and who wants to run an extra two or three more levels just to top off the fitness pool?

[SerialBeggar]

I would have liked that level 51 was realized and just give me even 1 extra slot.  :-[

[Voltixdark]

I would have loooooved more levels. I remember when i used to make toons getting em up to 50, and just needing that 1 more slot or 2 on a few powers to maximize the passive abilities on certain enhancements. I think raising the cap would have been cool. It'd make me feel rejuvenated again instead of burned out disregarding the incarnate content which was fantastic.

[FatherXmas]

There was always going to be 50 levels but it was financially prudent to get the first 40 out and into paying customer hands than waiting another couple of months to finish Issue 1 content.

"In every project it comes a time to shoot the engineers and get it into production."

[doc7924]

There was always going to be 50 levels but it was financially prudent to get the first 40 out and into paying customer hands than waiting another couple of months to finish Issue 1 content.

"In every project it comes a time to shoot the engineers and get it into production."

I knew that. They did the same with COV when it launched.

Though for anyone that was around for the 40 cap - did you still earn xp and it was stored or once they raised the cap did you have to start getting xp again to level up. I never got to 40 before they raised it to 50. I know in COV you stopped getting xp at 40 until they raised the cap.

[FatherXmas]

I was just pointing that out because those who believe that bumping the level cap is a necessity in MMOs would use it as an example that they did it once before so why not again.

Right now that contingent is over on Guild Wars 2 asking for a level bump there as well.  WoW has really spoiled people.

[FlyingCarcass]

That's something that bothers me about WoW, there's a huge chunk of content that very few folks do nowadays at the appropriate level (well, as of when I last played 2 years ago, but I'm sure it's still the same way) because it's "obsolete" so folks just level past it. CoH built up a glut of level 50 content over the years, all of which remained relevant.

[FatherXmas]

People use to go into permadebt so they wouldn't level past content.  Then we got flashback and the ability to turn XP off so you could experience all the content without doing crazy things.

The biggest problem with level raising in WoW is "Best in Slot" items that may have taken you countless raids before you had one drop on you, would be obsolete by common items at these higher levels.  Capping out at a new set of BIS items you have to raid for a month or two to get, only to be obsolete at the next expansion that ups the level cap.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Fifty was great. "I'd rather grow wide than grow up." Leaving it at 50 meant your hard work to be awesome at 50 wasn't 100% invalidated by gaining a single level.

Agreed.  CoH actually did this better then most MMO's I feel. Even before incarnate material turning level 50 was just the start.  Especially as the game grew.  Getting the perfect build for your character.  Badges to be found and accolade powers.  Running level 50 missions in PI.  Raising money for SG bases.  Main level 50's had so much work put into them to be what they were.

[Ice Trix]

I love how CoX treated the level cap, using the 'grow wider' incarnate system that was fairly optional.

[Sailboat]

Raising a level cap, in any game, is chasing an illusion.  New content has to be created for the new cap and cannot be created faster than dedicated players will play through it; anyone who wanted the new cap will reach it and clamor for more before it can be created.  Meanwhile, that new content is both useless to all the OTHER, lower-level characters, and because it's the "hot new thing," creates incentive for them to rush past the old cap to get to the new stuff, taking the fun out of a lot of what's already been created.

And it's particularly genre-busting for superheroes -- a lot of movies and comic books imagine a bunch of mature heroes who are roughly equals, and players want to reach that plateau themselves.  To have it periodically pulled out from under them -- "Sorry, your famous big-name hero is no longer at the cap, everything just moved," -- would be frustrating and depressing.

On the other hand, to have more content created for existing levels benefits literally everybody AND is easier on the Devs.  Plus it's not slavishly copying WoW, which in itself is admirable.

[MaidMercury]

50 was fine with me...

If you wanted more, just go incarnate, play Rikti, Bloody Bay or something.

[Golden Girl]

I remember when I started 40 was the limit for a while until they made it 50.

That wasn't really a design decision - it was more of a  running-out-of-time-before-launch decision.

[Arcana]

People use to go into permadebt so they wouldn't level past content.  Then we got flashback and the ability to turn XP off so you could experience all the content without doing crazy things.

The biggest problem with level raising in WoW is "Best in Slot" items that may have taken you countless raids before you had one drop on you, would be obsolete by common items at these higher levels.  Capping out at a new set of BIS items you have to raid for a month or two to get, only to be obsolete at the next expansion that ups the level cap.

With all of the problems that increasing the level cap creates for any game like this, including WoW, WoW has an advantage over, say, City of Heroes in raising the level cap, and that's segmentation.  The more zones you create, the more levels you have, the more you spread out your playerbase across more zones and levels.  Even with things like sidekicking, that dilution of the playerbase has negative consequences.  WoW has the numbers to pull that off with less problems.  City of Heroes did not have the playerbase count at any time to warrant pushing the level cap increasingly higher.  As it was, I believe they probably had too many primary zones.

My guess is that WoW doesn't add levels out of the goodness of their heart.  WoW is a game with a greater focus on raiding than CoH, so players tend to alt less and play at the cap more to build out their characters.  So in WoW, there are probably lots of players 1-20, less 20-40, even less 40-60, but at some point the number jumps upward as players pile up against the level cap.  When enough players catch up to and pile up against the cap, they increase the level cap to allow those players to spread out a bit again and start the rat race again.  They do that because there's enough players at the cap to support spreading them out among five or ten more levels.

I don't think CoH ever had that sort of population spike at the cap.  I'm sure there was some small spike upward at the cap, but not enough to warrant adding levels to the top.

[LadyShin]

I don't think they really needed to increase the cap. If they did though, I could possibly envision it implemented through completion of an instanced storyline where you survive the Coming Storm - voila, 50 more levels to struggle through. ON TOP of your 50 levels and x number of incarnate unlocks.

'Congrats, you've saved this reality..And in doing so, you stumbled down the rabbit hole, and discover how deep the Nemesis Plot really goes. Everything you thought you knew... Is but a pale shadow in comparison to what awaits you...' ...Storyline missions at this point might handicap your character's powers, forcing you to count on your expertise as an expert gamer to improvise and solve brain-melting riddles in order to proceed.

[Sugoi]

I was happy with how things were with the 50 levels - Incarnate setup, but it would have been nice to have an option where each level you added above the 50 would give you a choice of a new power or 3 enhancement slots.

Just think, at level 100, we could all be equal to the Silver Age Superman!  :P

[Arcana]

I don't think they really needed to increase the cap. If they did though, I could possibly envision it implemented through completion of an instanced storyline where you survive the Coming Storm - voila, 50 more levels to struggle through. ON TOP of your 50 levels and x number of incarnate unlocks.

'Congrats, you've saved this reality..And in doing so, you stumbled down the rabbit hole, and discover how deep the Nemesis Plot really goes. Everything you thought you knew... Is but a pale shadow in comparison to what awaits you...' ...Storyline missions at this point might handicap your character's powers, forcing you to count on your expertise as an expert gamer to improvise and solve brain-melting riddles in order to proceed.

Security level is just a number.  Incrementing the number is intended to unlock things.  In City of Heroes, it unlocked powers and/or slots, and it unlocked content only available to players with a high enough number.  The incarnate system was really level 50 through 60, just without the counter.  The devs still gave you a way to unlock powers and slots, and they still gave you a content track to unlock and complete.  But in the Incarnate system, power unlock and content unlock were decoupled, so instead of being forced to advance linearly, you could advance in different directions simultaneously.  *And* it delivered that extra power in a way that wouldn't hose the exemplar system by negating it in lower end content, which freed the devs to give us far more power than the exemplar system would have otherwise forced them to limit to.

More power, more ways to advance, less content gating - we were leveling higher than level 50 in every important way except for the fact the level counter was broken and with more flexibility.  Even with all of its flaws and with a need for more content besides Incarnate trials (which were on the roadmap), once the Incarnate system arrived going back to normal levels would have been taking several steps backward.  We were never going to get a level cap increase because we had grown beyond the need to ever have a level cap increase.

[Eoraptor]

I don't think they really needed to increase the cap. If they did though, I could possibly envision it implemented through completion of an instanced storyline where you survive the Coming Storm - voila, 50 more levels to struggle through. ON TOP of your 50 levels and x number of incarnate unlocks.

'Congrats, you've saved this reality..And in doing so, you stumbled down the rabbit hole, and discover how deep the Nemesis Plot really goes. Everything you thought you knew... Is but a pale shadow in comparison to what awaits you...' ...Storyline missions at this point might handicap your character's powers, forcing you to count on your expertise as an expert gamer to improvise and solve brain-melting riddles in order to proceed.

That is either really great city fan fiction, or you have access to devlogs :P