I think many of us older-timers might need to rethink some of our assumptions regarding the leveling process, as the broader gaming market seem less and less likely to accept the vastly longer intervals between level advancement. When CoH came out, it was considered to be rapid-leveling devoid of “grind.” Now, that word’s used regularly as the WoWer’s have invaded and seem to expect a much faster pace of advancement.

Perhaps the problem has become that we’ve made advancement to be one of the few tangible rewards, so when the “reward” slows, we lose some of the game ‘fun.’ By making diminishing-return affect the scale of the advancement (less of a boost each skill level increase) rather than increasing the time spent waiting for that ding, we might give them that much needed reward.

Sure, they might notice that the reward is nearly negligible, but to date, when they “get better” their foes ‘get tougher” to largely the same relative magnitude as before the leveling, and few seem to have really noticed THAT.

A diminishing returns curve could be used to calculate the XP awards for creatures depending upon the difference in level between character and mob. This would give a good bonus for players attacking creatures a few levels above them but would slow the award as the character became more and more out of their depth (reflecting the fact that there’s probably some jiggery-pokery going on either with twink loot or some kind of trick involving higher level characters helping that allows the character to defeat creatures so far above him) and would ramp down the XP on creatures below the characters level fairly rapidly. With that in place the XP requirement chart could be constructed to generate a proper progression over time.

The law can be applied elsewhere in the skill ceiling: like developing developing a soft skill cap.” In many games, a skill reaches a hard cap, after which you just can’t get any better. Some have a cap in the mechaincs where, even IF you can go higher than a value, you get no bonus for doing so. CoH allowed the “flight” power to take up to 6 enhancements, but after the 4th (I think) speed boost, you’d reached a cap… even as the game let you continue adding more boosts without any notice. For a while, SWG calculated defense based on a “cap” of something like 125 points, so a template stacker hoping to reach 180 points saw no benefit from the extra 55 (it’s been a while, so these are guesstimates)

In a straight percentage advancement, a person with 75 points invested in a skill would be 25% less effectie than a person with 100 points in a skill(the theoretical ‘cap’ in this example). With diminishing returns, the “curve” might make the 100 points closer to 10-15% as effective. It might take 150 points to get to the same strength as the 100-pointer in the more linear approach.

If the curve is too steep (like (to some) CoH’s effort at “enhancement diversification) then people will simply treat the arc of the curve as a lower “hard cap” but a proper grade would create a min/max’ers nightmare- a system where there’s open debate on where the best cutoff point should be!

This can be further blurred by assigning penalties in different ways:
Let’s assume a curve based on this (made up right here, not optimal)

Success Rate: Point Cost
50% : 50 points
75% : 75 points
80% : 85 points
85% : 100 points
90% : 120 points
95% : 145 points

Now, in this system, a person with 120 points and 145 points invested only have a 5% difference in success rate. If I apply a penalty of -40% accuracy for darkness, they’re equally affected and still only have a 5% difference between them. If I instead offer it as -40 points, the percentages drop to about 77.5% to a little over 85%. The bigger investment starts getting a bit of an advantage for the added investment.

Ideally, some negative modifiers affect percentages, some affect points, some affect both. The result becomes that the “ceiling” will be different depending on many factors. As a lower-skilled player, I may still be your near-equal on a clear day with optimal conditions. Add rain, add distraction from pain, and add darkness, and your mastery will allow you to perform at a much higher level than me.