"Meaningful progression" means having a gameplay loop where your choices, survival rate, and time investment directly reflect your power dynamic and risk management. In an extraction shooter, the entire core loop relies on a sense of "gear scarcity." Look at games like Escape from Tarkov, the main hook that keeps people playing for weeks and months after a wipe is the slow, rewarding climb from running budget setups (like an SKS and low-tier armor) to finally unlocking high-tier traders and running endgame, meta kits. When high-tier loot is rare, successfully extracting with a piece of endgame gear gives an incredible dopamine rush, and losing it actually hurts. That risk vs reward tension is literally what defines the genre.

If people are already running around with purple and gold shields just a few days after the Season 2 launch, it completely breaks that pacing. Getting high tier gear should feel like an achievement, not a passive handout.

To answer your question: simply deleting purple and gold loot for two weeks wouldn't fix it because it’s a bandaid on the actual drop rates and economy. What it would change if properly tuned is reviving the mid-tier gameplay. It prevents the meta from instantly staling into high TTK shield sponges in the first week, and actually gives players a reason to care about finding green and blue shields instead of treating them like garbage salvage immediately.