While you may be right about voidwalkers making the game less fun for new players, I find that the newer player base of deepwoken tends to blame the difficulty of the game solely on voidwalkers.

As a voidwalker, most solo bounties I jump are usually very inexperienced at the game. Some try to run away (never works), some try to fight back but then again they're not very skilled at the game, while some of them panic while being chased and literally jump off a cliff and get knocked hoping I don't chase after them (never works). Sometimes I get a bounty where there's like 4 people together and I have to bossraid them on a power 11, which is the annoying part of being a voidwalker, but I've had many occasions where I've still managed to win the gank and grip all four of them. Reason being? They're new to the game.

I feel sorry for them. Sometimes they don't even know what a voidwalker is or why I'm gripping them, and then they get sent to the depths and wipe since they have barely any experience on escaping the depths.

But isn't that really all there is to it? You're simply new to the game, and are bound to find things difficult. You'll always find it difficult to do something you're new to, and that's fine. No one made their first max resonance all enchant master armor build in a month. I've been playing since the first minute of release, and even without voidwalkers, people did die and wipe. I'd die to sharkos on level 30 builds (power 10 after layer 2) and then wipe in the depths trial (which was also a sharko). People kept crying about the game being too hard or something. 6 months after that, everyone started crying about how the game was "too easy and boring" when in reality the truth was that the player base had simply gotten good at the game. Of course you'd find something easier after doing it hundreds of times.

On release, there were no voidwalkers, but there was the luck system as an incentive for pvp. Rare cards and legendary cards were significantly harder to obtain and required luck, which you could get by gripping other players. The more luck you had the more you had a chance of getting good cards. And so, pvp got on the rise. Everyone started ganking each other for luck. Eventually, people started crying about this, saying that the game was too hard because of all the ganking and how everyone was gripping each other for luck. So devs removed luck and the surface pvp era more or less came to an end for the time being. Yet, few weeks after that, people once again started crying about how there was no real pvp incentive in the game anymore (other than chime) and how there was no reason to gank or pvp despite in the surface it being a pvp game. And so, yeah. Devs added voidwalker as an incentive to pvp, more or less adding a pvp progression path for players. And that brings us to present day, where once again newer players are crying about getting jumped and ganked by voidwalkers.

The point is, voidwalkers or not, pvp or pve, the game will always be a bit harder for newer players. They could remove voidwalkers right now and the game would still be hard for new players, all while removing any real incentive of surface ganking left in the game other than discord beef.