They’ve already done the stealth nerfs to the grind. Everything became grindier over night, to a system that was designed to be inherently grindy.
Think about it for a moment my guy. The WM system, and the crafting system requiring quite literally millions of materials are designed from the ground up to be straight up grinds. There’s nothing fun about hitting thousands of rocks. There’s nothing fun about grinding up an arbitrary number. There’s no gameplay mechanic there. It’s grind for the sake of grind.
Then they looked at it, at the system that was designed from the ground up to be grind for the sake of grind, and said “You know, this isn’t NEARLY as time wastey as we want it to be. Make it worse.”
At least the traditional MMO grind relies upon RNG. You grind dungeons, raids, rare mobs, et cetera for a chance at obtaining your item. You might get lucky and get it first try. You might get unlucky and need to grind it 100 times. That’s the normal grind.
This takes that, and adds an additional layer on top of it in the form of tuning orbs. Then they took their traditional RNG grind, coupled with crafting grind to even have a chance at getting the RNG grind, but also stuck a third grind on top of it, the water mark.
So now you have to grind for water mark, so you can grind for your tuning orb, so NOW you can grind for the RNG chance item. Triple the grind of a normal MMO.
That was a deliberate decision on their end. Why? Now you have a problem.
They’re going to sell you a solution. It was the plan from the get go.
The issue is that any mechanic you add to increase the rewards for newer or more casual players will also be available to high-hour veterans.
Adding the mechanics you’re describing increases the gap, it doesn’t catch people up, it makes it harder for them to catch up. Literally the opposite of what you want to do.
You may be missing the point of what a whale is. A whale is someone who actively plays as little as possible and makes up for that by spending silly amounts of money in the cash shop.
The sign of a whale would be if they could buy coin. Maxed out professions, 600 bought gear (or buying spots in dungeons). A low level weapon with high level gear would be an actual flag that its a whale.
Any solution they sell to the problems they’ve created becomes predatory.
There is nothing you need to sell in the shop that cannot be solved in game by modifying the systems.
Anyone who approves the idea of being able to swipe your CC to enhance your in game experience, provide advatages or conveniences is the type of person who actively damages the genre and promotes these games and their predatory tactics.
The most grindy thing that most people wont have time for is the poor design of the watermark system. Adjusting this system to maybe increase the rate at which your water mark increases up to a certain gear score (current cap 600 maybe increase rate up to maybe 560 thn normalize it until the GS cap is increased) would help improve this some.
Because they losing players and alot of people got burned out before even hitting 60. Makes me feels like they are already planning on adding p2w items in the shop.
Instead of that they need to improve what they currently have to make the experience more fulfilling to keep players engaged.
Also adding p2w things to shop in the games current state especially would mostlikely piss people off even more.
Specifically the words used were “at launch”. And I can’t find the source, but I distinctly remember a statement saying 2022. That’s technically another year. Though is 30 days from now.