The issue is most games focus entirely on one of these things.
Keorean asian grinder? yeah there it is, you need time and skill or money, money buys it all. most mehanics are so bad even grandpa can do them if he spent enough money on the "I win market"
I am at the stage where I do have money, still spent plenty of time in gaming and still have decent, ye nto top skills.
MONEY should never be the requirement for things to achieve in a game. that counters the entire point of a game. Time, should always be a reaosnable factor, espcially in PvP games, Worst experience was Dragons prohpet where your chars strength was mostly done by stupid gems added to the equipment and youc ould farm them endlessly in a dungeon leading to people grinding those first 5minutes in the dungeon for 100's or times each day. This even as someoen with time, has nothign to do with gaming at all, ot's broken stupid nonsense.
Skill, well, yes skill should be rewarded but skill is a mix of things which includes experience, and that also comes with time spent. In PvE games rewarding skill is fine, in PvP games, it can get very problematic for the game itself, esepcially when you as a company need to run servers. Because you need to make sure everyone still has a good gaming experience otherwise people leave your game and don't pay development and servers anymore. Thats why games like CS leave running servers to their customers, this entirely removs the issues of having to care about finding proper matchups, because matchmaking is a huge issues, especially when the playerbase is not that big. Look at starcraft, it has one of the most cometitive scene and ye hardly anyone complains about it, because beign competitive is sololy about skill, yet everyone else just plays the pve part if he isn't competitive enough. But when you make people able to meet each other, and skill, or worse, skill meets time consuming equipment requirements, the top area of the game exclusively is reserved for the first kind of people of the above picture. But a running buisness relying on people without money? Thats not a good buisness model when you require steady further income.
WoW, is the prime example how it works in total, you got all the PVP and PVE content in one game, you got the high competitive No Lifers grind parts oin both PvE and PvP. BUT it has the playerbase to make each part work, even for those not having much time and skill, becauise they find plenty of fun and progression by simply playing the quest and lower dungeons. And doing this, makis covering all areas, so there is a steady income of money from all the players. And since all skills have a global cooldown of 1sec even the somewhat older lower reaction time poeple can still properly participate on it.
Ed suffers from a lot grind that hides content and competition behind said grind. And only of the grind is done can you start learning most of the skill based related things (becauase engineers really change so much about he game that it plays mich different). So ED caters a very minor part of it's playerbase when it comes to PvP. And the PvE grindy side bores people out too quickly. Either because nothing intereting or new is left to be done, or to unlock it you have to do the same like an endless amount of times. What ED needs is find a proper PvE content thats not repetitive and boring to make sure people are entertained at whatever stage of progression they are.
