I don't think people should be punished for having exploited the flaws of retirement, they spent hours of playing because they were told they could get a bonus for it, afterall. So deleting those features seems unfair to me. I don't think it's genius-like to find a system that could both :
- satisfy grinders and arcade gamers
- protect itself from overusage in a subtle way (no cap)
- gives small advantages on the long term but hurts much on the short term
Currently it's so easy to go from 1 to 30 that the third point is clearly failed.
Retirement xp bonus goes higher and higher, and each retirement becomes faster the higher you get, so point 2 is also clearly not reached.
I don't know about the first thing.
So now, on the constructive part, what about :
- Same xp curve.
- You can retire at level 31.
- You get no xp bonus for retirement for levels under the retiring limit.
- When you are at least 31 on your gen2 character, you get a nice 32% more xp. Each gen gives (1,3 + 0,01*(gen-1)) the xp the previous gen gave. Some numbers :
Gen 1 : 1000 xp
Gen 2 : 1310 xp
Gen 3 : 1729 xp
(Don't forget it's only for levels above 31)
- The xp cost of level 31 is multiplied by (1,3 + 0,01*(gen-1)) each time you retire. Xp costs of levels above 31 doesn't change (it still takes roughly 8M xp to go from 31 to 32, but it goes significantly faster because you have the xp bonus)
So retiring is the fastest route to high levels, but reaching level 31 will be slower each time you retire.
A nice addition could be giving 1 more attribute and skill point at the character creation, because most people are going to spend ridiculous amounts of time at level 30.