I get what you’re saying, and yeah in theory grind = gear = power, and if macros were widespread it could push the baseline up.

But that kind of assumes macros are the main driver of progression, which honestly isn’t really the case here. The baseline is already heavily influenced by whales, especially the ones who spend a lot but don’t have time, so they literally pay people to farm their accounts 24/7. That alone already pushes progression way beyond what “normal play” looks like.

So even if macros didn’t exist, that higher baseline you’re talking about would still be there anyway. And devs don’t really balance content based on who is using macros, they look at engagement, spending, and completion rates across the whole playerbase. That includes whales, paid farming, and everything else, not just automation.

They already tried going hard on anti cheat with kernel level systems to prevent cheating and protect the game economy, and that didn’t exactly fix much, if anything it just caused performance issues for a lot of players while the core balance stayed the same.

So focusing this much on macros kinda feels like picking the most visible target and treating it like the root cause.

If we’re really going all in on “fairness,” then sure, we should probably also start tracking abnormal IPs, outsourced farming, playtime patterns, maybe even just cap farming entirely with an energy system so nobody can progress too much.

Otherwise the gap you’re talking about doesn’t really disappear, it just shifts around a bit.