Protecting Our Casuals: Gear

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Because MMOs live or die based almost entirely on constant engagement.

If you quit League for a year and come back, you know that the 'only' thing other people gained over you is skill. If the game got too stressful to maintain your own skills, you just work your way back skill wise while facing challenges of equal difficulty, often with the same friends you played with before, whether they quit or not. Your friends don't have to 'catch you up' in any way other than 'ok let's play' and teaching you about the current meta or guiding your flows.

Persistent World. No Resets.

This means that you quitting Ashes for a year, or worse, your whole friend group doing so, means you come back both out of practice and 'behind the curve'. But there's no matchmaking, so the 'casual' player has no reason to come back.

Casual MMO players need to either have tons of nostalgia triggers (Ashes might provide this well) or a good reason to log in consistently.

And as much as I agree with what Steven says, I also want this game to survive for longer than 2 months. And usually, your casuals is what's keeping a game alive. I really hope Intrepid can satisfy as many people as they can w/o giving up their core design directions, but they'll know who and how to satisfy thanks to these kinds of discussions. And considering that testing phases access costs money, which most likely leads to a more hardcore testing audience - we wouldn't know too much of the casual POV just through testing. So this discussion is quite valuable imo.

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This, BUT. Gear might as well be the deciding factor in EITHER situation.

If the Combat is simplistic but balanced for 8, then gear might as well decide it, because simplistic combat is moreso about how it feels for the obvious things to happen. If it feels satisfying, it won't matter that there's not much skill involved.

If the Combat is complex but balanced for 8, then the less skilled players are going to NEED gear to be weird to have a chance at deciding it. This applies to PvE moreso than PvP, but it's still the same. High level gamers are terrifying relative to the distance in ability between them and players with less time to dedicate or who are just trying to enjoy being in a world.

At least when things are just 'ok, well this sucks, that guy wins when we start bashing each other's heads in because his sword does Fire damage every 5 hits' the answer is 'I need to get some Fire Defense gear', as opposed to the sort of things people have to go through for skill-competitive games.

Afaik Wildstar wasn't even targeted toward high-playtime gamers, it was targeted at high-skill gamers, and everyone else noped out of there REAL quick.