If you all had the time, would you level past 10 combat or mining? What about 15's in weaps and trade?

Used to be there. No point in it now. my wrist is already hurt, and botting has become far more dull now that we don't get decent points nor can we kill the fun bots.

there is no real need to reach higher levels up to now... but time will tell.

I am dreaming of my own mothership like I saw it in sector 18 that days...

I'm slowly working on getting my trade up to 16., almost to 13 trade atm.

Not much point is there? The levels require ABSURDLY high scores, rewards for
botting and trade and mining and trading are ABSURDLY low making leveling
TERMINALLY TEDIOUS. I play about a tenth of the time I used to, and I am seriously
considering quitting the game. Content is improving however, and the game can
be fun, but only until you realise that you can't get better equipment without a
bump in levels and then the boredom sets in again....

First off it's not that bad. you don't really need to be above level 6 in any of the stats.

second it's not that difficult compared to other mmorpgs, which require DAYS of solid play in order to even compete.

My secondary char has 4/5/4/4/2 or so.

And I found it enough to do _everything_ with it.
You do not really _need_ higher levels in vendetta, so it is good that the higher levels are hard to reach.

You do not like botting? No problem.
Once you reach 4, you could

explore and
ctc and
PvP and
trade and
mine and
guild-playing and
cartograph the universe and
do prospection missions and
roleplay and
...

do everything.

I do not know another mmorpg where you can do all you want with a char that spend only marginal time with leveling. So lean back.

I felt the same way as RattMann... until I got botting fever for the first time and went to combat level 9.
Believe it or not, I'm now well on my way to combat 10. I think I might go all the way to 16 by botting for UIT and Itani standing. (The Itani standing is not for abuse during CtC, I plan to complete all 120 prospecting missions.)
-:sigma.SB

Even though there is no point to getting levels past a certain point, I do it for the challenge. And yes there is a beyond, some people believed that level 16 was the highest you could get, well you CAN get higher, just yesturday I hit level 16 in heavy weapons. The requirments for 17 is 3937045 XP.

yea, there is no actual limit to the levels, the Xp needed for each level higher is
[(current level X 1.5) + 1000]

the myth that level 16 is the highest level actually started because right after they added levels to the alpha test, one of the developers went into the database and edited his character to 16/16/16/16 (we had no mining skill then) and people assumed he had just maxed out his character.

At present the highest (known) item is the valent marauder at level 13 trade.