*BLEEP* the Casuals.

There are two types of casuals. Casual in play and Casual in time.

Casual in time people are as dedicated to the game as you are they just don't have the privilege or value things like family and non-mmo friends. These people's opinion and place in the world should definitely be thoroughly considered and made enjoyable just as much as 'people with a lot of time's place in the world' should be. You see those threads come up relative to this type of casual because a PvP game with gear progression will ultimately make life for such people (as well as people new to a server) difficult without good design to keep things enjoyable for them.

Casual in play people are the ones you are actually 'upset' about in your post, but you seem to be bunching the two types of players together. Casual in time players do not usually want the game to be made easy for them. They just want the game to still be fun even if they have 'fallen behind due to time requirements'. A game with open world PvP presents a unique challenge to that. So obviously it will be a continued topic of discussion.

They are not 'the general masses' or casual in play style players which is what you seem to really be railing on here. Yes we get it you want the game to stay hard and fun for people at the top and basically NO casual in time player will ask for the game to be easier for you so that their game can stay fun. If you want to rail on both types of casual equally, I guess whatever people's response to you will say a lot about the state of the current community.

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I am willing to say that.

If spending more time or having more skill (either works) provides some reward, then people who invest that time or skill have more of that reward than those who do not.

The question is only this: Is the reward meaningful? If it's not, it's not really a reward is it? If it is, then people who earned it (through whatever method) have something meaningful that others do not, and this will always make some of those others unhappy.

The only questions that truly matter therefore are:
1. Can you provide a reward that is only meaningful to the type of person who is both able and willing to invest in it, and not meaningful to others?
2. Do you want to reward people at all?

From there, it's just a question of "how much?", and that will always be subjective.

The simple problem is that " able to invest" is always going to be different between time-casual and time-hardcore, and between skill-casual and skill-hardcore players. You will always have "interested, willing, but unable to invest", regardless of what that investment is. And that player will always be unhappy.

What investments do you want to reward, and with what?

No matter what you choose, there will always be people who are unable to invest as much as others. If you want your game to contain rewards at all, this is something you have to accept.

What if we had a donation-like system. Time-hardcore players would obviously have excess of gear, so why not have a system that lets them exchange that excess gear for upgrades to their main gear, while sending all that excess down the power lvl pyramid.

You could tie this to social structures in the game so that players get better augments from their preferred social structures by investing their overtime into their future enemies. Make each gear piece have some arbitrary point value and set different point prices for different upgrades. Add some diminishing returns to repeatable donations, so that a player couldn't get 1k points for donating 1k t1 boots.

And on the side of the low lvl/casual players, have a tower-like solo instance where clearing floors would give them points that they need to combine with rewards for some open world quests, in order to buy the donated gear. This would give those time-casual people some constant content and a way to catch up faster. Add some reward scaling for clearing floors super fast and you'll have yourself a reward for all the hardcore-challenge casual-time players.

This system doesn't add gear into the overall market out of nowhere. It rewards everyone for doing things that they would've been doing either way and/or just like doing. It creates a soft equalization of gear on the whole server w/o creating direct systems that do so.

If you put some quantity limiters on the donation amounts per node (considering node's lvl) and add a caravan-like pvp event for transferring all the excess gear to another node - you have yourself an additional fun thing for the high lvl pvpers to do.

The instance tower thing could even go up to max lvl and give out some title/cosmetic rewards, akin to FF14's "The Necromancer" title.

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You could tie artisanal profession progress to the tower instance rewards. Make it be a catalyst that you need in order to use the tower points. This, on top of the usual "I need money so I'll just sell what I crafted on the market instead of donating it" should be enough? Though obviously testing would be required.

I think they should go with degradation. Or maybe at least decrease in power and you'll have to power them back up with stuff that you can buy with points.

I saw donations be mainly tied to nodes. I even thought about them being tied to purely religion and divine nodes, but I feel like that would be an unneeded overcomplication of the system. You'd donate the gear through your preferred social structure, but the gear itself would go towards the node bank (which would also play into node sieges). The bank would have a limit on donations, at which point it get some overflow and you'll need to transfer that overflow in smth like a caravan. This would increase gear trade between nodes, increase pvp in the area and high lvl pvpers would be interested in attacking these caravans to get themselves some free upgrade points.

As for alts, you'd still have direct trading so it's not like you couldn't just give your alt the gear itself. The main point of this system (at least as I see it) is to help casuals catch up to the higher lvl people w/o implementing super direct catchup mechanics and w/o adding gear outside of the owpvp systems. All the gear within the donation system would still be acquired through the usual "farm - craft- sell/trade/donate" means. There'd still be pvp for the resources required for that gear. Caravans would still run between nodes, in order to provide the resources required for crafting.

And through the "catalyst" part of the Instance Tower thing, you could have any kind of content that you consider super important for a newbie/lowbie to experience. It could be small low lvl party bosses, pure traveling, social structure interactions, questing, node tasks, etc etc. The Tower itself would just be a way for high skill low time players to powerboost themselves faster (because imo they deserve to do so), while also giving some quick content for any low skill low time casual player who might not be in the mood to just cut grass or trees for their artisanal profession.