Prototypemind

Depends on the mats. Some I sell, some I keep in case I think I might want armor or weaps later on, some I incinerate.

They don't even need to port it to Source 2. If they'd just optimize what they have this game could survive on for quite a while as is.

It's beyond frustrating. This is one of the few games where players have been able to delve in and figure out the exact causes of optimization issues and on top of that handed it directly to the devs to look at, yet years later ZERO has been done to address it. It's sad that professionals do this, but the same thing happened with SWTOR. The original BioWare team made a mess slapping together code for the Hero Engine because of EA's push to release for Christmas, and it's so bad that despite the devs who stayed on or replaced them trying to fix it they just couldn't with the time they were allotted to focus on it. In Vindi's case it's just laziness, though.

Call me crazy but in my experience, the easier this game becomes the less players stay because they'll achieve their goals really easily and just quit.

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Generally easier gearing just means people playing more alts. I've actually picked up my Fifi again, and I'm working on building an additional set for my Sylas since this game has such a silly cosmetic system. Games that aren't so RNG heavy generally lead to even more involvement since players can actually enjoy those other characters. I used to love doing Ops multiple night a week on multiple characters on SWTOR before the devs effed it up. I'm glad that I'll have the chance to actually play more than the few mains I'd had to go down to.

Even with the reduced loss of gear, capping still isn't easy, there will be plenty to keep most players around for a long time.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Iset and Keag are in better supply than they were before, but the prices have also dropped because there's less gold floating around with the gold sellers pushed out and some money soaked up by quitting sales with players who have yet to return and may never. Depending on the rates these may go pretty high, but we have fewer players sitting on billions and billions in gold, so I'm not sure how many will be both willing and able to spend that kind of money.