Many people desire cosmetics, new environments, and new challenges, and are willing to pay for them. But EVERY SINGLE PLAYER desires items; after all, it's impossible to play the game without them. Even if you never participate in the economy for anything else, it's nearly certain that you'll make or buy some 3* or higher gear, and when that happens, OOO is making money. That's good. It's also good for you an me, the players, because we now have gear.
Unfortunately, a huge portion of the gear available in this game just doesn't measure up to its challenge, much less many other pieces of gear. Since all gear essentially costs the same to make, this naturally means that people are going to make the "good" stuff, and might not ever see the "bad" stuff, which is a shameful waste of good design and good ideas. Even big spenders who make multiple sets and tons of weapons might have energy sitting around unused (or worse, never buy it in the first place) because they don't want to craft something they know they won't like as much as the things they already have. For instance, many players will have multiple Wolver sets before making other armor, or both a DA and an elemental Brandish before making another sword.
As the title suggests, I would argue that it would be at least a very good, if not the best move for both OOO's profits and our enjoyment if these items were fixed, so that they were all on a roughly equal field of fun and power. I have no illusions that "perfect" balance is achievable, but the closer it gets to that point, the more viable items there are... and the more viable items there are, the more people will want to buy them.
It's better than promos!
To compare to the accessory craze that's been sweeping Haven since they were added:
• The cost of creating a 5* item, taking into account energy and crowns for crafting, crowns for recipes, and time/energy for heating and gathering materials, rivals the cost of many rare accessories or prize boxes.
• Those items are also much more broadly desirable (so more people are alikely to want to get them), and even the people who buy rare accessories are likely to spend much more on their gear than on their decorations.
An excellent proof of this point is the price of CE at the time of this writing. The addition of 6 new 5* items, regardless of their mixed reception, has created a huge demand for CE, and thus a huge rise in price, that the promo has done little to counteract... probably because the people who bought it are using it to craft rather than sell, so supply is relatively the same, if not less than before.
It's better than new dungeons!
There's also a strong argument for considering weapons to be on the same level as dungeons in terms of new content priorities. Taking a different kind of weapon into the same dungeon is very much like running a completely different dungeon; the experience of running FSC with swords versus bombs, or (more subtly) an Alchemer versus an AP, is different enough that it compels people to make more weapons and gear sets to support that variety. I would hazard a guess that for any of you who have done this, you probably spent much more energy on making that new item to do dungeon X with than you did on actually running the dungeon with it.
OCH owners, consider this: Did you buy the mission for the mission's sake, or for the items? How many times have you actually run the mission? When you got the items, did you enjoy running old dungeons with them? Chances are, most people will have bought it mostly for the items, only run it enough to acquire those items, and then used them to enhance their experience of content they already enjoyed; the mission itself was just an added bonus.
Essentially, the more viable weapons there are for running a given dungeon, the more "versions" of that dungeon there are. It's like added exploration content without actual added exploration content!
It's easier than new items!
Of course, all this could be resolved by simply adding more new items that are balanced against today's "good" ones. I would consider this wasteful, however. There are all kinds of good ideas and looks that would still be wasted if not fixed, and many pieces of "bad" gear need only a little tweak of their numbers to put them in more players' arsenals. Plus, generating goodwill among players who've shelled out for suboptimal gear can't be a bad thing!
Okay, do you have any ways to balance the current equipment we have?