Suggestion - Minimizing power disparity

thunderbeetle5

Hello,

As many have noticed, the power of "pay-to-win" has dominated the PWI economy. Now, players have been gearing themselves up simply by purchasing gold and making in-game coins. For example, many of them do not even know how to run or have never tried the new instances, such as MWT, specifically designed to make G17 "less pay-to-win". Additionally, said players have thousands of PvP spirit (~7,000) over the general population (~3,500), allowing them to "one shot" players in any scenario. Consequently, this makes PvP in NR (Northern Realms) less enjoyable for most players who have no chance against others. Unfortunately, this does not only apply to PvP in NR. For instance, mass PvP in general has been in a decline (people quitting) due to the wide disparity between the gears of "strong" and "weak" players. I do acknowledge that there are some players who do farm significantly and are geared up in that manner. That is beyond the scope of this suggestion. I would love to suggest a total spending limit, but it is simply unreasonable business & player-wise. Thus, I would like to suggest two possible ideas in order to create a healthier and more enjoyable PWI community:

1) Diminish the number of items that can be bought simply with coins. One idea is to make gears "farm-able" via untradeable items from various instances. For instance, the rewards given in MWT/DUP is a great start. This should be done with higher level gears such as G17, Moon Stone of Punishment, potentially Paramounts (?), and especially G18 (since no one completes Whispering Mausoleum due to its difficulty, so people are relying on Faction Trials to obtain their materials which is essentially unrealistic). By doing so, players who spend a significant amount in the game cannot merely purchase these "end-game" items WITHOUT ever running instances like TTR2, MWT, etc. Additionally, this would either require easing the difficulty of the instances or providing gears to instances (like MWT), so that each player will have approximately the same chance at gearing their characters, understanding that spending real life money will give you a SLIGHT boost.

2) Either decrease the number of materials required to make specific items (such as TTR gears) or increase the number of times we can repeat a dungeon daily. For instance, G17 (mainly s3) armor is essentially impossible for the general public to obtain. You can even see it on each server where no more than 20-30 people have G17s3 armor. The G17s3 armor is heavily dominated by pay-to-win. Moreover, the "daily" that's given to each player at the start of each instance (DUP, MWT, IBU, JDH) cannot be repeated in a single day. Given that each player is given 1 instance key, with the exception of the log in rewards, it will take them years to complete a single G17 weapon.

Still, I understand that "pay-to-win" isn't totally preventable, and I don't wish that it is since people who spend real money SHOULD get a boost, but not a very huge one where they can "one shot" anyone with a click of a button.

Thank you for reading this!