Is this the road they will continue to take with items?

[Fendred]

Regardless, it doesn't matter what people think works or doesn't work. What matters is there is a subset of players who want there to be a stable content hierarchy that can be revisited. That cannot be accomplished with such heavy handed vertical progression. The amount of extra work they'd have to go into just to give incentives to players to do all the old stuff would start to become ridiculous after some particular amount of content is reached. So to satisfy these players they'd need to approach the progression differently. The gearing concern is just a symptom of a larger issue.

[Gardes]

Regardless, it doesn't matter what people think works or doesn't work. What matters is there is a subset of players who want there to be a stable content hierarchy that can be revisited. That cannot be accomplished with such heavy handed vertical progression. The amount of extra work they'd have to go into just to give incentives to players to do all the old stuff would start to become ridiculous after some particular amount of content is reached. So to satisfy these players they'd need to approach the progression differently. The gearing concern is just a symptom of a larger issue.

I totally agree with this. Pity that there will be people who will dismiss this subset of players with the reasoning that it's okay for content to be obsolete, that they don't want to go back to older content but then proceed to defend SE when people complain about the quality and longevity of the content in the patches by saying that they come up with a patch every 3 months is already very fast. Doesn't occur to them that they have to come up with new patches at breakneck speed is exactly because every new content they make save for the weekly lock coil doesn't last long, I guess..