First off, let me just say: phenomenal job with Halo 4, 343! It has been absolutely incredible, so please don't take this next part the wrong way.
In my opinion, the experience cap is a hindrance. I'm only available to game a limited amount of time every week because of school and work. I bought double xp tokens to try and account for this, so that my few games would let me keep up with my friends' ranks. This ultimately doesn't work, however. Take today for instance. Upon getting on my Xbox and seeing that I had the rest of the day to play some Halo, I figured I could make some progress towards catching up to my friends. I put in 12 or so matches worth of double xp, some of which were Spartan Ops, so I reached the xp cap in 4 hours or so. Then I quit, because there's really no point in playing if you're not being rewarded.
So hypothetically, everyone should be able to hit the xp cap every day or at least a few times a week while playing every day. Well what about us casual gamers who want to rank up, but can only rank up three or fours times a week due to our schedules? I'm not one of those guys who plays for skill and stats and what not. I just want to play, earn xp, and unlock some cool armor pieces.
So here's my opinion on the cap. I say take it off. Sure, you're going to get the rank-boosting shenanigans, but what experience-based game doesn't have rank boosters? They're all going to be eaten alive in match-making anyways. They'll just look pretty awesome doing so. The boosters will just end up punishing themselves in the long run, because they won't be practiced enough online to stand a chance against even me: a casual. What I see now with the people online is just frustration. I ran into a couple guys this morning, and one of em, after the match said, "Ah, I hit the xp cap, guys, I'm out" and he quit. This is what's going to happen.
If you have a reward system mirroring consistent reward models such as COD, where you get experience for everything no matter what, then people will get frustrated when their seemingly consistent flow of xp is cut off. And then we quit.
tl;dl -
Take off the cap, because people who have schedules that physically limit their play time won't be able to keep up by hitting the cap only two times a week, when everyone else is playing every day. And boosters are already irrelevant in multiplayer, especially when their stats show how bad they are, so that shouldn't matter.
Besides the xp cap, it's a great game.
