The soft cap is bad system. (Criticism)

by Claude Errera , Monday, July 23, 2018, 08:26 (2116 days ago) @ Vortech

The soft cap is ostensibly designed to keep the community leveling together. I’d argue it does the opposite of that. Miss a week, and you fall behind with literally no way to catch up. It sucks.

Why is there no way to catch up?

Two reasons - one is the one he gave (that even when you DO start playing regularly again, you're gated, so you're only improving at a slow rate past a certain point), the other is that a lot of endgame activity continues to evolve, and it can be difficult to find a group of friends that are willing to go back and play the stuff they've already moved on from.

(Say you want to play Eater of Worlds, Normal, because you've finished Leviathan but you're not leveled enough for Prestige. But all your friends are currently running either Prestige raids, or have moved to Spire of Stars - I guess you could LFG it, but a lot of those have ridiculous requirements, and finding one that fits your needs might be more trouble than it's worth.)

I missed the early days of EP, when there were groups of 9 interested players in almost every instance - I'm now fully leveled, but finding a group that wants to jump in and play EP takes planning and work; I can't just jump on when I'm free and find a game.

::shrug::

I'm actually fine with that; I figure sooner or later it'll happen organically, and in the meantime there's plenty of other stuff to do... but if I were looking for specific endgame activities, and I had gotten behind on leveling, I might be frustrated.