Well, player experience mattes a lot more than skills you can unlock.
For example, pro player with 0 skills unlocked is better at combat/surviving than new player with all 30 skills unlocked.
Sure, skills help but it’s the know-how that matters the most.
Sure, but we’re not talking about a pro player here. We’re talking about the new player who went through the game unaware of the skill cap.
Also, using your logic Aesyle, if levels don’t really matter all that much, then why cap them?
Why? Ask that from the devs.
Though, if you’d take out the entire skill tree from the game, game doesn’t break. Instead, it gets (a bit) harder. And without any skills to unlock, we wouldn’t have this topic either. 
A rather chloric response, but there is some logic to it.
But, considering the bots shoot missiles at you, have more armor than you (in general), have infinite ammo, there are more than one of them, the devs could add even more kinds and variants of bots, and the weapons you have actually do less damage than in real life, I doubt that being able to unlock all of the skills, would be game breaking. As you have said, the advantage that the skills give you is negligible. So, if removing them would not be game breaking, then conversely, since from your own mouth the abilities don’t do that much, making all of them available to one character also would not be game breaking.
Since i’ve learned the ins and outs of the game, my know-how of the game helps me a lot more than the char skills i’ve unlocked. I even happen to have one max lvl char, who doesn’t have any Combat skills unlocked what-so-ever: What is your skill build? - #9 by Aesyle
However, that is me and me doesn’t = everybody.
I don’t own rights to GZ and i can’t dictate what comes or what goes (since if i can, well… 
it would be interesting, to say the least). So, if devs have decided that we have skills and we can’t get all at one char, then so be it. I’ve just taken the hand dealt to me and i’ve made best out of it. 
There’s new Boss Man in the helm now (Zach) and perhaps, we’ll see change in feature implementations as well. For one, we have gotten several sneak-peaks thanks to Zach (which were non-existent when Paul was the Boss Man).
Maybe, one day, we’ll also get more skills and higher skill cap. We have to wait and see. 
there could be a dlc that would raise the level cap along with giving you new gameplay features, I’m thinking olong the lines of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas here because in those games there are add-ons that raise the level cap from the normal (Fallout 3) 21 to 30 and would add more gameplay.
Thats not a bad idea, actually. Because some people don’t want the level cap, but others do, so the devs could leave the decision up to the player, and maybe make a little dough at the same time.
Locking levels behind a dlc just does not wit well with me. It is quite literally putting a pay wall in front of making a more powefrul character. People who do not want more skills can just easily not use them. I am speaking purely of a level adding dlc. If it was story it would be slightly different, but would not change my opinion that much. The devs have only locked missions, collectables, himjfall, and 3 US weapons wit DLC. And I praise them for that (other than the weapons). They only lock the things that directly tie into the dlc and it’s story, not anything else.
I should probably put my opinion on level cap here as well. I think the only essential thing is a skill respec. Whether it be earned, or free at any time. A skill cap increase would be cool to have. Though I only see a need for a cap of 36-46, or maybe even 54. But that is about it.
I totally second that. This is why mi/acrotransactions have this bad reputation, some devs force you to buy them (or stop playing the game) or you’ll have a lesser playing experience.
(The other day I bought Ghost Recons Wildlands because I thought this might be a cool game. But I quickly recognized that the game provided - among others - XP boosters. I immediately refunded the game.)
I don’t like that idea either. Not because i don’t have the money to buy it (heck i would’ve payed double the current DLC prices and still think they are worth the price) but instead that makes GZ P2W. Meaning that you have to pay money to be better (more skills) and this is something i’m not okay with.
GZ devs, so far, have given us tons of free stuff, which is very nice of them. And even the upcoming Base Building feature is free for all as well. Almost any other game has paywall for additional content.
E.g Alpine Unrest DLC. With it, you’ll unlock Himfjäll island and get addition to the lore. However, devs were nice enough to include the new Apocalypse class of machines on the main island as well, so, players who didn’t buy Alpine Unrest can still benefit fighting against Apo machines and even then new KVM weapons, were made available for non-DLC buyers (since those drop only from Apo machines).
Devs could’ve very well kept Apo machines only on Himfjäll and made KVMs available only for DLC buyers, but they didn’t.
I’ll put my 2 cents.
Problem with current level cap that is current skill tree isn’t that good. For example some unskippable XP skills (heal tree, tech tree), which are getting obsolette pretty quick.
While we can have so much as 1/3 of all skills with level cap, some meta-builds like “meaty bullet-sponge vanguard” has to sarcifice even some mandatory early utility skills - that tight it is and also due to these “trash skills”.
One question- So, obviously nobody likes a pa-to-win game…at least, as far as I know. So, how would we go about razing the cap then? Because sure it would be nice if they just put it into an update, but then there are the people that would complain about how they should have kept the level cap (for some reason) so, a DLC is an option, but Aesyle is correct, we don’t want it to be p2w.
I suppose if nobody wants to pay for it, they could make it a free DLC kind of like some of the apparel packs, but that could be a lot of work for something they wont even be charging people for. So, I feel like that would kind of be up to the devs discretion, especially since they would be the ones making the changes.
How about this:
Since base building is coming to the game, devs could add 8 new skills to the game (base building/management related) but level cap increases 4 levels (to 35).
This gives all players 4 extra skill points, which players need to earn and which isn’t enough for all new skills. But it lifts level cap higher, in a meaningful way. And it’s up to every player to decide if to use those extra 4 points towards the new skills or towards old, existing skills.
That sounds like a good idea in theory, but if you think about it, it wouldn’t solve anything, no offense. Because, the whole problem is, people want to be able to use all of the skills. So, sure adding more skills isn’t a bad thing, but then to give people only a few points to use is not fair, because were already saying we don’t like the level cap. Not to mention, 4 points still wouldn’t be enough to unlock the rest of the OG skills, so if you do the math…
Let’s say there are two new threads added to the skill tree. 6-8 skills in each thread. That’s 12-16 possible skills. So then, you give us the ability to unlock not even half of that, in addition to the other skills we were unable to unlock. So we would actually be worse off because we would have actually less access, not more, because percentage-wise, we would actually lose skill accessibility, not gain it.
I dunno. PayDay 2 has 15 skill “branches”. If you have enough prestige points and choose to fill up only branches, you’ll get 3 full at max. And players didn’t whine very much. That is 120 per player, 600 to fill up.
In here we got more (around 90 total and 30 to spend).
As I said earlier - problem isn’t quantity of points or level cap. Propblem lies in skill tree that was designed for one game, that ended up something different.
How do you propose fixing it?
Depends on what ask - what to do or how to do.
At best - rewrite skill trees and start from scratch, fix and overhaul existing game mechanics. (like smoke being ignored in most cases, for example).
With laid-back development (like now) that would take a long time.
Optimum - tweak current system on how skills unlock, allowing players more flexible choices. In my opinion currently some flexibility can achieved by alloing to pick skill horizontally within same branch (“combat”, “support”, “survival”, “Tech”). Example - within “combat” you fill up Marksman branch, but also opted for “armor” skill, skipping preceding skills. Or same case - in survival you filled up to Commando and also picked “carry capacity”. Limitation would be that to pick Specialization whole collumn above it must be unlocked (as is now), so no snaking around.
At minimum - overhaul skill grid by shuffling existing, tweaking numbers, deprecating useless (XP ones for example), adding new ones (as in my recent edit at [Suggestion] Skill Tree Rebalancing - #22 by DeadWanderer)
And this is the main issue, people, not the game itself.
Thing is, there have to be limitations in the game to make game challenging and enjoyable. Limitations like: walk/run speed, sprint time, weight limit, inventory/storage capacity, skill points etc. Since if you were to remove all of those limitations, there won’t be much of a game to play.
You are forgetting the multiple char system GZ has. People are able to use all of the skills, between 4 chars, if they like. So, means to do it are there.
In my example, there would be 8 new skills and 4 extra skill points. All it takes to test out all 8 skills, is either 2x current max lvl chars (since each would get 4 points), or one, (new) char, who’s below level 27.
To get “one char with all skills”, devs have to radically change the game and remove multiple char system, since it would be obsolete after that.
I don’t know about other players, but i’m not willing to give up my 3x lvl31 chars, just to have one char with all skills. For the least, i’ll loose the extra storage my 3x additional chars give, i also loose the different looks they have and the most, i’ll loose hundreds of hours i put in, to level them all up to lvl31. And all that loss for what?
For one, there could be a logical reason to keep the multiple character thing going. For instance, if a split screen feature was added, it would only make sense that you’d want more than one character.
Also
To be honest, a game is mostly a game because people play it. And I assure you even more people might play this if you were able to unlock all of the levels. So, again, not all people want the level cap gone. That’s all good, and for multiplayer, there really would be no reason for everyone to have every single skill. But for single player, you are literally all you have. So continuing to use the “ multiplayer only requires one skill per person” argument is getting kind of old, and repetitive.
Before people ask how we would make multiplayer work, without making them all level 31 is this- Instead of relying on levels, we choose a specific skill, corresponding with our levels. So, if I’m level 5, that’s the maximum level I can use for the specialization of my choice at the beginning of the match.
That could work for multiplayer, so that people can use all of the abilities.