Sotcliff Please don't give me moral mottos about real life, about people who put in the effort, etc., etc., or about old games like the PS1 era that didn't even have teams focused on user experience.
With all due respect, I feel this doesn't really counter my points. But I do understand your complaint is aimed at having base characters behind a level up wall. So I'll see it through a lens of not the difficulty of the leveling up, but rather the fact that there are characters behind this wall.
A couple things, and It's been stated you are new to this game and its community. The capybara was not an original character. It was added in several months, possibly a year or more after the games release. So my point is, is that they just, perhaps with haste, found a spot to fit the capybara in the game. I don't think it'sas malicious as your thinking it is. Another thing to note, and I acknowledge this might contradict my first point, is that this game actually has quite a bit of exclusive base characters that you cannot get again unless they announce a re-release of these characters. It does suck to be on the other side of this but it does give players the ability and the feel of yaving unique characters and skins as a reward for their loyalty and consistency for playing the game, but these are only rewarded during special events such as christmas, or more specifically for base characters, the cats and dog event. It does Sock as I am also missing base characters that I would love to have. I know within battle passes you are able to buy your way up into progression so an alternative to my idea of proposition that I supplied you with that could also be considered.
Also, I'm a bit disheartened to see that you did not respond to my well thought out suggestions laced with empathy and realism towards you. Given my insanely busy schedule, it is a testament that it is possible and I cannot fully agree that it's too grindy. Especially because, my point being, you and I were raised on games that were just as challenging or even more so. I would like your thoughts on it. I play for maybe about an hour and a half to 2 hours for maybe three to four days a week when I'm at work and maybe a solid 5 hours at night for two of the night of which I have my week off. If you're willing, I would like to hear your schedule and consistency on playing the game. Because if it's only 2 hours a week or so, it is going to take a while and I don't think they should make it that easy.
Again, I highly encourage you to start a thread as a petition, respectfully give the development team ideas such as being able to use Nemo bucks to bypass progression, or compose another idea of instead of unlocking specific base characters, you unlock the ability at those intervals to pick a base character to unlock. I would also suggest maybe putting in there a proposal to have double XP weekends or something as well.
These are all great ideas that I think should warrant at least some sort of consideration on your behalf, instead of only engaging with the members of this forum with a arguementive tone. Perhaps I'm biased but I feel like my suggestions have been very constructive and are more promising of reaping the change in which you seek. I guess what I'm getting at is I want to hear your feedback on this.
As for the morals comment, I just strongly disagree that having things extremely easy to achieve in this game. The game modes alone are only engaging and incentivize players so much. To have a far reaching goal gives players incentive to work towards it. Ive played this game a lot, and this is the first time I've heard this complaint.