there are many valid points coming in from all directions.
our "dev manifesto" is pretty simple. we have community segments with conflicting interests. This topic does a good job to illustrate it (or it did, before some of the drama was deleted). So naturally we have to take turns to please both because they're equally as important to us. The game needs to be exciting for our loyal playerbase that fell in love with an unforgiving game and stood with us through the years, but also welcoming so it can attract a new audience and hopefully keep some growth and new people coming in.
So, a very common complaint is how many characters can't perform well in the very endgame. We've done a lot of effort to make all builds (which btw, are so many ) be able to complete most of the content pre-130 ("midgame"). But why is there such ruthless content in the first place? let's rewind a bit. how did we get here? did everyone live happily ever after before labs, scos, sam, deim existed?
when "all characters could do all content" and leveling grind wasn't there (easy 120) there were as many complaints as there are today, just different. Most difficult charms (void) were completed in first 24h even by naked chars. Vets - who provide most realm activity - would get bored and move on, so our difficult task was to try tackle a issue that is massively shared among arpgs. To extend the duration of the "ladder cycle".
this is how we got here. We already had "all chars can do all content" but there was a problem just as big as there is today. Balancing the game has a contradicting nature as you are trying to please opposing user segments.
- if game is too easy, ladder is over in a day. if its too hard, ppl quit because no interest in "shallow endless grindfest"
- if we make new content, rules change, guides become outdated, and information inaccessible. If no new content, meta is stale.
while some people don't believe it, it's in our best interest to make this game as enjoyable as we can for as many people as we can. it's nice to see people engaging in (mostly civil...) passionate discussion about it. we are always taking notes, so thanks for the feedback.