It’s a valid question, IMO. Allow me to offer another perspective:
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… okay, it was the 1990s, I was a student in college, and the setting in question was one of the text-only MUDs of that era that were a distant progenitor of games like World of Warcraft. I was an admin for a decent length of time during that period, and my last position (and eventual downfall) included oversight on new areas and specifically equipment balance, both within the zone and on a broader overall basis.
And your question had a pretty good parallel to that setting. Because most equipment didn’t see very much use at all. There was something of a “meta” for the most advanced players who had access to everything, and a secondary “meta” for the next tier of players who couldn’t get their hands on certain pieces of equipment that were hard-coded as limited – i.e., only a certain number could spawn in their entirety and then no more would spawn until one or more copies were “lost” or destroyed – et cetera. A similar scenario would arise for certain regions, by which some areas would seldom see adventurers and other areas may as well have had an active queue of players waiting for the re-spawn so they could slaughter everything.
And trying to keep all of that in balance? Trying to thread various needles to try and encourage more diversity? It’s an impossible task to do ahead of time, and a thankless task if you try and “ret-con” stuff to bring stuff back into line after the fact. If I tried to moderate stuff before it was released, I ended up with angry arguments from a developer/builder who felt I was trying to neuter his/her new region ahead of time. If I tried to balance stuff after release when it was demonstrated how out of whack things were, I was either accused by the players of ruining things for them or accused by the developer of the region that I had a bias against how great their stuff was.
And when some of those unhappy people had friends higher up in the administration of this place? Let’s just say I ended up taking fire from all sides. And before it could ever enter my mind to maybe throw up my hands and resign the position and let somebody else try to keep stuff in balance, an awful lot of those unhappy people saw to it that I no longer had to worry about doing that job. Or any job within that admin, despite the lengthy and varied services I had provided to them.
They never did solve that problem, by the way. Just watching from a distance and keeping quiet contacts with a few friends who were left after my departure, it seems like they stopped even making cosmetic attempts to address those imbalances. Which soon led to a situation where everybody had the same stuff and most of their equipment and region database was useless because nobody except the occasional newbie would bother with it while everybody fought over a very small fraction of it. And most of that everybody leaving never to be seen again.
…
So what do I view as the “moral” to my story? You’re probably right in that there needs to be better balance. But heaven help the person who actually tries to achieve that, because the popular stuff now has advocacy groups that will scream bloody murder if you touch “their thing”.
