I’ve let this debate go for a while figuring it would run its course, but things seem to be getting increasingly heated and personal instead…
Respec costs have a very deliberate purpose to play on our psychology and give heft to our decisions. Time and cost invested into a character develops attachment and purpose. Whether you agree with that or not is obviously why this debate exists to begin with.
Consider the olden times of Diablo 2, where respecs were virtually nonexistent (I think you got one per playthrough or something? That might have even been added in a patch?). You played a character and you learned the hard way if your build was trash. There were external programs to edit characters, but if you played on closed b.net, that was not an option.
I think most of us agree that such an approach is rather draconian and very harsh to those with limited playtime (like many adults).
In contrast, Diablo 3 has virtually no limitation on respecs and in one of their updates they added the option to store multiple skill/gear loadouts on a character. At that point my desire to ever roll more than one character for each of my preferred classes went out the window, and it was already low to begin with cause a few minutes of swapping stuff around on one character achieved the same result.
Now to some that is the desired approach, but I guess I am more of an old school purist and like having all those different characters, like tools in my arsenal that I’ve accumulated over years of effort.
I’m not even gonna get into Path of Exile, where the thought of respeccing is best summarized like this…
Shifting now to Grim Dawn…while making decisions meaningful is important, we also don’t want to discourage new players from trying new skills and experimenting. Learning your character should not turn into a grind for resources or force you to reroll.
I personally think we’ve struck a fine balance with tuning respecs in Grim Dawn such that you are free to change your character’s loadout as you please, but excessive (excessive being another topic of personal opinion) respecs will cost you.
Even then, respeccing never becomes prohibitively expensive. You can almost completely reset any character (except for mastery choices) if you so choose regardless of what point you are in the game, but you have to commit to it.
Everybody has their own tolerance level for any sort of cost or limitation in a game, and we’re never going to please everybody. Some people are genuinely upset that you don’t have enough skill points to get every skill in your masteries. We could certainly cater to that demand, but I’m not sure we would have a better game for it?
In regards to respec costs, that is such a minor point of contrition, I’m not sure we would see a major shift in either direction should we remove them, but I think ultimately having them is better than not.
The argument that respecs are necessary as a cash sink is a bit silly. We can adjust costs all over the game if we want players to burn more iron bits. Even in that, I feel we’ve actually ended up in a really good place in the end where cash flow is plentiful, but there’s a lot of meaningful ways to spend it. Respec costs were absolutely not factored into that.
Likewise suggesting that we are scaring people away with respec costs seems a bit dramatic to me. I think I could count all the reviews complaining about respecs on Steam over 8 years on one hand, and I’ve read a LOT of reviews.
I don’t generally tell people to use external programs to solve an “issue” they perceive with the game, but seriously, if it bothers you to this degree…the tools are out there. Play the game however makes you happy. It’s Your free time.
For us though, we are going to make changes we perceive to benefit most players.