Hypothesis: There is a soft cap on level set at 252 as determined by the total number of perks for all skills.

Unless I'm mistaken, when you turn a level 100 skill legendary you're refunded all your perk points, meaning a level 100 character would have 99 perks to spend regardless of number of legendary skills (no perk at level 1). Since there is no level cap there is no limit to the number of perks you can get, which means infinite levels and perks...but really there's no reason to go over 251 perks, the total number of perks across all skills. This puts the soft level cap at level 252 (again, no perk at level 1).

Conclusion: Anything above level 252 is just abuse for more magicka/health/stamina...

Any objections?

The "soft cap" is true to that, but the actual hardcap is hardcoded to be 65,535.

Why 65,535? Is that when your stats start rolling over into the negative? xD

Actually, I believe you are correct.

...or close to it.

I can't recall the formulated reasoning for that.

Just something I know of from the restoration loop. Abuse it enough and your bonus actually goes so high it turns negative simply because the game isn't coded for values that high.

It has something to do with the max allowable M / H / S. Once they get to a certain limit, you can't add any more to them at the level up. IIRC.

I think it has something to do with the coding...
Lol, obviously, but specifically I mean the game treats the boost as a modifier, but the programmers probably didn't code the actual values that that modifier produces since they're higher than they intended the player to be able to produce. Thus, the game treats all values beyond a certain critical point as negative. It's the same reason why the hardcoded level cap for games like Dragon Age II is well above the maximum level the player can actually achieve through normal gameplay, so you don't wind up doing something that wasn't coded for and totally break the game somehow.
Neverwinter Nights 2 has a similar coding problem that I can't explain well in words so I'll just provide links to it.
Check the http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Appraise

That makes sense. What ever the case may be. Someone that is a lot smarter than I am came up with that number...lol

As for the max values set on M/H/S, it's probably the same basic concept. The programmers got lazy and decided to quit after 65,535 levels worth of M/H/S

Btw, that's 655,350 points worth of Magicka, Health, and Stamina, or 218,450 points of each for a grand total of 218,550 in Magicka, Health, and Stamina.

OP as hell considering you only need about 400 magicka to cast the master levels spells once. There are no such limits on Health and Stamina. More just means you can carry more, sprint longer, perform more power attacks, and take more damage.

Yea, I ran those numbers earlier to see if they triggered some dusty memory. Unfortunately, the cobwebs remain untouched.

I think I just worded things differently, but we're in agreement.

Woops actually I just placed the comma incorrectly. It's fixed now.
Also, I forgot to take into account the fact you don't get +10 at level 1 so the total 655,350 should actually be 655,340 which doesn't divide evenly between the three stats???

Ha! Yea, that comma threw me for a sec...lol

Agree with the agree. No matter the actuality of it, as interesting as it may be...I doubt anyone will get much into the latter hundreds let alone the thousands. o/

Well I never really play multiple characters so if I stick with just the one long enough I'll get there eventually xD
I think I'll exhaust every new and interesting thing the game has to offer to the point where I'm just grinding for gold long before I hit 65,535 though.

Argonian for life so I always play as a lizard, and with all the levelling restrictions removed now I don't have any reason to create a "mage" character or something different since every character now has the potential to max all skills and unlock every perk.

I'll probably make it my goal to reach level 252. I can use all that gold I'll be grinding for to abuse skill trainers every time I make a skill legendary. That should speed things up xD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65535_%28number%29 might help.

Ha! I can dig it....

I feel like a 1st grader looking at that but I can dig it.

I think you have something with that.

That does indeed shed some light on this otherwise mysterious and seemingly random number. I take back what I said before about gamesas's programmers being lazy. It looks like they actually took the time to code all the way up to "the highest number which can be represented by an unsigned 16 bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system number" which means, and I might be wrong--it has happened before--they programmed as much as they possibly could within the limitations of the game code.

Either that or they're simply being Bethesda and making weird video game references no one understands completely.
Also, I almost lol'd when I read the first line of that wikipedia article. "65,535 is a number. It comes after 65,534 and before 65,536" Herp derp.

I mean...seriously.

You have GOT to love this forum.

...seriously.