Prior to today, characters were given growth rates for each of the seven stats: STR, MAG, DEF, RES, END, WIS, SPD. Every level up, a character would have that percent chance of the respective stat increasing. It did create differences from character to character, which is something I wanted, but not exactly in the way I wanted. I love trade-offs; You get +STR but -DEF, so on so forth. While random levelups did accomplish this, it was possible to randomly have no trade-offs, and have a character that is better off overall. Or worse, a character that got screwed over completely by the RNG.
There are two playing fields that need to be constantly evened out: The single player story mode experience, and the balance of online battles. They are more related than one might think, for example if a player had a bad (random) experience with a character in story mode, they are that much more likely to ignore that character for online battling purposes.
So rather than risk the incredibly likely chance of a skewed perspective of the characters, I've set the growth rates in stone. End-game will produce the same characters at level 100. So what of character differences?
More on that later.
