[jerf]

As much as I have enjoyed Borderlands (2), it is one of the things that really triggered this thought it me. For whatever reason I encountered a high-level enemy about 5 levels above me in one of the DLCs, and I managed to trap it on the level geometry and kill it with about 80% of my ammo. And I realized just how silly this was.

The primary purpose of the leveling system in Borderlands, at least to my eyes, is to make it so you can't just pick up a gun on level one and use it the whole game, defeating the purpose of the main game loop to be forcing you to be constantly changing guns. OK, I get that purpose and in context it makes sense. But the leveling system is a really weird way to do it. I'd almost rather see guns decay instead. (Not do the whole "100% functional until they instantly and totally break"; we've got enough experiences with that to know how frustrating it is.) Decay is somewhat plausible though then you have to have the strength of will to reject repair mechanisms, which is still physically weird.

But I'm not really trying to propose all the solutions to all possible alternatives to leveling systems; I'm just saying "hey let's make the player and all the enemies 11% stronger every 30 minutes, except across a large set of dimensions impossible to ever keep scaled properly relative to each other in an exponential regime" is a silly thing.