Again you fail to get the point.
1. This is not supposed to cater towards people who love super-challenging games. It's about catching NEW players and making them STAY. This is not happening at the moment if you look at the servers.
I'm not worried they will have an "easy" time, because they won't. cRPG now is more hardcore than ever.
2. Don't compare when you and me and most vets started playing.. Sure battlefield was uneven, but skill levels were not even near what they are now. The average player at EU1 now would beat most top players back then.
Sure gear or levels won't help them much, but i.ex start at lvl 25 would make them get their first loompoint faster and they wouldn't have to experience being a useless peasant until 2nd gen. I honestly don't see the problem with this.
cRPG still has level differences, luring players in by making them think there aren't any probably isn't a good idea.
However, the level 25 thing seems ok. But that means new players will actually "learn" the game later on.
Making the game more "noob-friendly" shouldn't default to "erasing the grind aspects". People have varied opinions about grind, but I think it is important that anytime on the battlefield, there are people that have better stats and people that have worse stats (note : this is not really linked to grind, as an example in some FPS games you have a "mutant" mode where one guy is uber powerful and each other player has to kill the mutant to become the next one). The generation system was introduced so that high level players would go back to level 1 willingly, exchanging roles with players of lower levels. I think that's a very good idea, but the incentives for generation grinding were too high. It's totally possible to fix that.
Ideas :
1) No more gen xp bonus, each gen should actually be longer (or just equal in duration) than the previous one. E.g. the level requirement could increase.
2) A generation should give more diverse long term bonuses. They can be cosmetic like titles, banners or exclusive armor skins. They can also take the form of LPs or unlocking skill cappers.
3) The LP system could be so much better. If weapons could be more freely customised, there would be a real depth and variety to it. Imagine improving you weapon speed, weight and damage separatedly.
4) Skill cappers : Imagine that as a gen 1 character, you cannot invest more than X skill points in any given skill, and each generation lets you go one point further than that in one or a couple of skills you choose. That would force people that want lots of specialisation to retire. Also, switching classes when retiring wouldn't be
that easy, but still possible.
5) Improving your equipment should be enough of a motivation to retire as soon as you reach the requirements. To keep people from going high level, equipment pieces should be upgradeable much much further than just putting 3 LP in them. Of course further improving your already improved equipment would mean spending more loom points to get the same stats increments.
6) Smoother xp curve, people should be more or less equally spread among levels
As a result, even hardcore grinders would go back to peasantdom regularly, this allowing them to craft unique items with the LP they make through retiring, and unlocking more extreme builds.
