Sakai and Kimura will no longer appear in PSO2 livestreams

[Dark Mits]

Sega has already "allowed" us to get a +1 grind with 300 class xcubes, or that PvP item. I think it's time they consider a third way, through crafting materials, even if it is an exorbitant amount (like 10000 gold materials and 10000 saphards).

Or at an even worst possibility, update Weapon Extending to allow Extending the cap on an -NT weapon, again with an appropriate material cost (for example 300x its current grind cap in Gold- and Saphards)

Well in the forums that might be the case but don't you need an active subscription to be even able to use these forums? In other words people who say that haven't left the game. Outside of the forums almost nobody complains about the game being too hard back then. Iirc correctly Total Biscuit was super pissed that when Cataclysm hit live they reduced the difficulty tremendously, Since he was covering a lot of the test server and was really liking the challenging aspect. In Jontrons Blizzard Rant Video not once had he mentioned the game becoming too hard (a video that was about Blizzard DMCA'ing Nostalrius, a vanilla server). And I could name you a few other videos where WoW content creators point fingers at the overall lackluster quality of the expansion, Cut content like the path of titans feature and raids for why so many people left since cataclysm and not the high difficulty of the content.

The official Blizzard forums? You always needed an active subscription for them. Fan forums of course didn't.

Streamers do not represent casual players. They're either hardcore or pseudo-hardcore (ie. they spend a lot of time but do not engage in difficult content). Their concerns and remarks always represent players who follow updates on a game, developer blogs, live streams etc.

Your average casual player doesn't do any of that. The average casual logs in, does whatever he thinks of first or appears as a task, and then logs out. The average casual player does not know about intended new features, cut content, or even how the storyline ends (which hardcore players knew through datamining during betas).

The subscription dip at the start of the Cataclysm, which was the worst dip for the game until then and only surpassed by WoD's dip (5th expansion), included mostly players who hit the point of what they could do before requiring them to engage in hard content (the heroic dungeons at lvl85). This was exactly the reason why Cataclysm felt like 2 different games; the latter half was re-designed to make it easy to progress even for non-invested characters. Hence why Well of Eternity (a very much requested raid) was cancelled and replaced with just a 5man dungeon, and why the last raid in the expansion was designed to be exclusively pug-friendly (seriously, Dragon Soul is even today considered the absolute worst raiding tier of WoW). And while I mentioned the worst subscription dip at the start of the 5th expansion, you know again why it happened. Because character progression in the 5th expansion was gated behind raiding. A casual player who didn't participate in progression raiding hit the point of how far he could improve his gear very quickly, and then had absolutely nothing left to do to make it even better. Nothing except go into organized raiding.