Currently, the games developers are the gods that determine what it takes to reach the end of this game. They have chosen grinding as the key characteristic required of players.
I find ‘grinding’ as the defining goal of a game absurd, since it is so arbitrary, and so easy to give players the option to do it to a level that they choose. For example:
Crafting
Easy difficulty - Crafting anything you want is achievable, you just need to collect the shards and find the items (I’d play this for sure, and for longer time than I ever would for a work-like grinder, such as POE and Last Epoch in their current forms)
Moderate difficulty - crafting items to Tier 3 is achievable, then RNG, gambling, grind, work for tier 5 mods
Hard difficulty - crafting in it’s current form.
Gating content
Easy difficulty - All content is accessible all the time, you can fight a level 100 mono at player level 1 if you want. Players decide when their toon/build/stats are ready to take on tougher content. If they get stomped, players decide how long to grind for better items. (Interestingly, this would almost certainly be the choice of difficulty for all those players currently arguing for the grind, as this would afford them much greater challenges. Beat a level 100 mono at player level 50? Yeah, it took me ages to get the gear on other characters, and 100 tries, but I did it. Hooray. Give me street cred!.)
Moderate difficulty - Players are forced to complete the campaign to do Mono, then, say, 4 mono runs to beat a big boss. Say 12 stages at 3 big bosses per stage, this is 50 runs to unlock the chance to beat the endgame boss.
Hard difficulty - The current form of however many hundreds of mono runs it takes to get the chance to grind out the RNG to get the glyph you want.
Multi-player difficulty - Areas and Bosses that would stomp any individual player, but can be defeated with the right mix of builds, strategies, tactics.
Effects on balance
The real benefits of the ‘give players more autonomy’ design approach would be for balancing items, keeping a wider player base happy, balancing bosses, etc.
Consider how hard the developers have to work to keep ‘balance’ in this game before it even launches, with far fewer items, skills and characters than are planned, and far fewer players than they would hope to keep happy and returning. They currently have to choose one level of damage for each boss, one level of stats for each item, one base mana regen, etc. For each choice they make, we, the players, have our opinions, and never will they all meet.
Then think about how freeing it would be for players to simply choose their own combinations of challenges.
For people like me who like listening to podcasts, listening to music, stopping the game to live life, etc. it’s simple. Choose easy. You will get a pause button for when the doorbell rings, you will get the chance to fight a boss without days of grinding. You cannot brag to your friends, but that’s fine by me.
For badasses who like climbing leaderboards, it’s simple too - Choose hard. You cannot pause the game, your items will fracture 99 times out of 100, so the one that sticks will feel really good, bosses will kill you unless you spend days min maxing your gear, and even then it will test those reflexes I remember having long ago.
For developers, it would mean that balance changes do not need to accommodate all players at all times. Did we clearly get volatile zombie numbers wrong, so that every build is now spamming them and getting thousands of ward? Sure, but no big deal. Players who are enjoying it can stay in easy. In hardcore we will change the numbers of that skill so that we see if it remains viable at 50% of it’s current value. Did changing the base mana regen create nice challenges for streamers, but alienate a lot of casual players? Sure, but no big deal, we can make easy level include a slightly higher base mana regen.
Do you see how many types of player feedback/preferences, even the ones that are polar opposites, can now be assimilated into the game?