First of all, I'm not sure that what I'm going to suggest is possible at all, so yeah.
What I think would be cool is your characters face reflect its cRPG age. No more 17 years old gandpas and vice versa + ppl would probably look closer into their opponents faces to know who they are dealing with : old with good gear = experienced, young in good gear = likely lower lvl char, who heirloomed his daddy's cool gear. Ofc there will be ppl who use low tier just coz that's the way they roll, but anyway you'll be able to tell if they're high-lvl and make your decisions around that fact.
One of the way to do this might be linking cRPG age with "age" part of face generation screen and every lvl will move it more to the right by some % :
lets say 35 lvl is max (afaik its highest among the forum users), then:
35 - 100%
1 - x%
x= 1*100\35 = 2.9 %
so every lvl could move age scale to the right by 3% to max value.
Let's discuss.