What's The Highest Level In "Pokemon Go"?

For those of you who, like me, have been transformed from Average Joe/Jane to Pokemon Trainer extraordinaire in the past two weeks, "Pokemon Go" has become a part of your daily routine. You fire it up during your commute, scanning your surroundings for Pidgeys, Weedles, and the occasional Eevee. You've reached Level 5 easily, and then Level 10 with a little more effort, and Level 15 with some dedicated Pokemon time. But what about Level 20 and beyond? What's the highest level you can reach in "Pokemon Go"?

According to some players with much better coding and programmer skills than I have, there is a level cap, and it's set at 40. While that may not seem very high, considering how many players around the world have made it to Level 25 or Level 30, it's going to take a heck of a lot of experience points to get to Level 40. No one's done it yet — at least, no one that the internet knows of. And if anybody does, especially this early on, it's going to make news. That's because the amount of XP you need to level up scales as you ascend the ranks of Pokemon Trainer. It's not hard to reach Level 5 in a day, but it is hard to go from Level 5 to Level 10 in a day, and very difficult to go from 10 to 15. A Twitter user by the name of Klik_Vox graphed the amount of time it would take to reach each level if you were to net 100,00 XP per day (which is already quite a lot).

It would basically take a year to get from Level 39 to Level 40, so while 40 seems to be the cap, good luck actually getting there.

Reddit user Riggnaros did a write-up of his post-Level 25 experiences, in which he argues that the leveling system might be a strategy by Niantic to get us to buy more Pokeballs. Here are some of his reasons:

1. Pokemon get exponentially harder to catch as you level up, breaking out of the Pokeball more often and deflecting most of what you throw at them. According to Riggnaros, this happens even with lower CP Pokemon that used to be easy.
2. You get the same amount of XP — 100 — for catching a CP 10 Pidgey and a CP 500+ Dragonite.
3. As you level up and come across more Pokemon, it's increasingly unlikely that you'll add new Pokemon to your Pokedex. Goodbye, 500 XP bonuses.
4. Difficult-to-catch Pokemon means you have less candy to evolve your pocket monsters, resulting in less 500 XP cash-ins from evolution.

Of course, Niantic may not have been prepared for the dedication of all the fans who have already reached Level 25 and above. The kind of tweaking that often happens with apps like this has been hard for Niantic, since it's likely put all its energy into keeping the servers up.

All this is to say, you likely still have a while before you even need to worry about capping out at a certain level. Keep finding those Pokemon, people.

Images: Klik_Vox; LowKeyCalamity/Twitter; Giphy