broken? abused? the old retirement system required 5k gold multiplied by actual generation. to retire from 9gen to 10gen was a 50k gold fee. to retire from 19gen to 20gen was a 100k gold fee. if you still call spending 100k to retire some sort of "retirement abuse".
yes we didn't have upkeep but average gold income was 1k/hour.
And yet people had no problem retiring every week on the minute as soon as the timer ticked over up to gen 10, 20+ and such. Retirement was MUCH easier back then. It was a weekly thing on the dot.
And think about that. NO upkeep, 1k/hour (using your average).
So all you did was level/play until you owned the gear you wanted to use. This wasn't that hard. Hell, before my shit got deleted I had every 1h/2h/PA/shield/horse/bow/xbow/armor/gloves/helmet/boots/ladders/siege shields/construction shit I might ever want to use at any point ever.
So say you played casual and got in 2 hours a night during workdays. There's 10kg there with nothing to spend it on. Then you play for say 4 hours on the weekend, so there's another 8k gold (and that's being lenient with alot of the grinders play time logged). Even then you would be retiring much faster than currently where it takes almost a friggin month to get to 31.