No one’s asking to remove the cap nor implement any sort of unlimited progression. Wasting XP after hitting the cap usually demotivates many players (not everyone is here to either play super casually or grind like mad for BiS items) in attempting the existing contents such as quests, bounties or general grinding (it’s fun to kill mobs for something beside rng drops). You mentioned crucible, which kinda also becomes tedious when there’s no XP gain, plus if someone plays crucible for a while and gain a bunch of levels, then he/she can probably cap way before Ultimate and that might simply make the remaining contents offer fewer incentive, effectively, making it unattractive.
And regarding a previous response of another guy who mentioned that the whole idea of avoiding XP -> Loot simply because because people are already farming for gears at cap, I would like to point out that for most gamer/human, a bit of incentive works excitingly well psychologically. If essentially a whole part of grinding becomes obsolete after reaching a certain point, many people might feel demotivated to continue. I am seeing that people here are only taking into account heavy gamers but they are failing to see that the majority silent casual crowd is the one funding the game’s actual development. The game sold over a million copies but how many active members do you see on this forum/reddit who create/work/brag about heavy achievements?
My suggestions is to simply keep in mind that this is a single player game and in our current generation, majority of the PC players are casual. Catering to the needs of only heavy players might eventually hamper the financial growth of the game, so it’s best to cater everyone’s needs. It’s no MMO, so nobody’s losing anything.
I would personally LOVE to see XP come into usage again after the levelcap is hit, albeit in a non-Paragon sort of way…kinda. I’m actually a little bit OK with post-cap progression, but not in an unlimited sense and also not in such a way that it’s so easy you can get through several layers of progression in a matter of hours…like Paragon.
While I do make a lot of alts, I do have one or two characters that I enjoy playing more than the rest, and so after a long day I appreciate coming home and slaying hordes of baddies with them. Due to the illusion of progress (or time, depending on whether you’re a hipster website), it’d be neat if there were a carrot at the end of a rather long stick to work toward over the course of several days therein, even if not remotely necessary to complete.
Personally, I think it’d be neat if Devotion levels reached much much higher, albeit with current stat scaling, but with exponential XP growth requirements rather than their current quadratic growth:
I’d love to have some numbers move when I play level cap characters, I enjoy playing with those since having a good character is the end result of many hours.
So when you play for some hours with a cap character you get to experience the joy of a well oiled and maintained machine, but if you didn’t get any good items while doing that there is no sense of progression which is very important for a gamers soul.
Maybe you could very slowly accumulate reduced energy cost, it’s not gamebreaking and most builds solve it by putting as many ecto as needed (unless you play AAR), but it would be a nice convenient reward a bit like something cosmetic but more tangible.
I am probably fine with anything that changes the current system but I am more biased towards some permanent (or special) benefits since you always get loot no matter what so it’s rather redundant.
Excellent points all around.
This has always been one of my peeves with the game as well.
It was never about infinite progression but many people are eager to bring up the D3 comparison (“go play D3 if you want that,” “Paragon ruined D3 I don’t want it in GD too”).
These are just fundamentals of games: doing an activity should be rewarding to keep the player hooked, it should definitely not get less rewarding after some point (i.e. no reward for gaining XP/rep).
Another major issue in this vein is that GD doesn’t punish the player for dying in softcore at max level. You don’t lose any iron or other resources and even your portal remains standing so you can go right back in. Even in TQ your portal disappeared so you had to make the walk back, which was a reason not to die.
I haven’t been following the XP development that much besides the Misadventures (I want to surprise myself), but I really hope these issues are addressed in some way there.
The most obvious solution would be to make it harder to reach the level cap. That way XP remains relevant longer and you have a reason not to die.
But to be honest, suggestions like these are a waste of time because they will most likely never get acted on, I’ve realized that long since.
Crate clearly already has their hands full with what’s there in the XP development, the Xbox port and other things, that’s just how the state of affairs are.
And most of the regulars here prefer the status quo, with some rare exceptions like Ceno’s post above. So you’re not gonna find much help from that side either.
If you really want something like your idea to come to fruition, you have a much better chance by learning how to mod the game yourself.
