Meursault wrote on Dec 5
th, 2015 at 6:02pm:
While I'm glad to hear the community is more supportive and understanding than they've been in the past, I've recently heard complaints, from people I know well in real life, about how frustrating and humiliating it is to be "that player" who can't kill anything and dies when nobody else does.
Even if people are kind about it and offer to let the poor gimp pike, it's still bad for the game. Most people play these games to be a hero, not a charity case, and being stuck as the latter through a long grind causes a lot of people to just give up.
I don't mean to downplay the importance of your observation, a supportive community can go a long way towards covering for the incompetence of the game designers. But I think the really powerful stuff you have to be a whale or an insane power gamer to get in less than half a year is bad for the game in the long run and it sounds like what we have here.
And maybe the "random lootgen" and Cannith Crafting passes will address this by bringing random loot and crafted loot to the 60-80% power range so the power and grind of this won't be an issue, it's still too early to call doom. However, Turdbin's past performance does leave me, ah, concerned, as to how this will play out.
I understand your concerns. I'm not a power gamer either and I agree with most of your points.
The thing I like about a GS2 type of system is that you can progress toward it as it is less random. So whether I play 40hrs or 1hr per week, I have a sense of progress.
The other option is the random loot and quest loot - which is random and means you could run a 1,000 times and not ever see it. I believe that was the old SCroll/seal/shard system, and I find that more frustrating. No sense of progress.
As for power balance, if the random loot and quest loot is "good" and the raid loot is "great", then I'd be happy with that, because I can still participate even if I don't raid a lot.
A side benefit if the random loot is indeed better, is that it will also help the AH and ASAH and kick start the game economy again. This means non power gamers can access saleable items to bolster their weaknesses.