I’m really not a fan of daily gating systems either, tbh. They always feel like a scummy way to drag out playtime. It’s especially frustrating in RO, where the endgame doesn’t have as much variety compared to other MMOs or mobile games, the usual suspects for these kinda mechanics.
That said, completely removing daily gating would be tough since the in-game economy revolves around items from these instances. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up for debate, but let’s be real here, if a game released in 2024 forced players to create 15 alts just to progress, it’d get bashed. The last game I played that had something similar was Lost Ark, where you needed alts to gear up your mains. And well, people weren’t happy with that grindy/gated mentality when it launched in the west. I don’t know how it’s doing now, tho, since I quit pretty early on.
In RO, gating is such a core part of the game that it’s hard to imagine it going away completely. Maybe a possible approach would be setting a cap on how many times you can run an instance per master account while still letting alts runs that go above this cap. That way, people who prefer sticking to their main can keep up without feeling left behind, and players who enjoy grinding with alts can still do their thing.
It might make progression feel a bit more fair overall, though it does raise new questions. What’s a reasonable limit for daily runs? And would it just lead to alt-runners dominating the market even more, since they could farm heavily on their main before switching to alts? Maybe there could be an option where you choose between a hard cap per master account or the option to run "infinitely" with alts.
Then again, that sounds like a headache to implement, and I’m just rambling here. But i do agree that progression caping trough daily gating is not a good overall design. So yeah, a fair and well implemented alternative would be great. 🙂
