I completely disagree w/ what you said, and if you can’t put it politely it means to me you really don’t care about what other people think (which is fine, but there are consequences)…
but thank you for linking that tweet from Mahler, you’ve helped me realize something: I also disagree w/ him on how he is approaching all this… here some major points:
“..players automatically assume that a Level20 character will just naturally be stronger than a Level1..” yeah well, why would they not? this is true to virtually all games out there, RPGs or not…
“In an attribute system, your character is defined by how you spend your attribute points..” that is a legacy system, based on table-top RPGs (namely D&D), but which/what attribute matters for each build is based on the particular rule set any given game employs.. for example: in many RGP titles, even if your main weapon scales w/ STR, investment in DEX still can provide ‘utility’ effects (those that in NRftW, Mahler defines as: “..supporter attributes like health, stamina, focus or equip load..”)… every game needs to “teach” its players how their particular systems work, especially when deviating from the norm…
every innovation needs to tread the line of being similar/familiar enough while bringing novelty… particularly when you are trying to please a large number of people…
now, I’m not saying that by dropping the attribute system, in favor of a novel class system, he is wrong… in fact is his game and he should know what fits best their vision (he says so himself, “..we knew this since Early Access Launch..”
what I AM saying is, blaming the players in an umbrella statement is generally not a good idea… why? working for over a decade exclusively w/ design (and over 2 decades before that as an engineer) has taught me that if you design something most people don’t get it, either you are not conveying it clearly enough, or your design style sucks…
(note: I don’t have access to data, nor know what “..a lot of players..” means to Mahler, so I can’t really say how big this issue is/was, what I do know is playing games for over 4 decades I’ve learned that if not careful, one can in fact “brick” their chars in RPGs, but also learned playing NRftW that here, investing in stamina is not as crucial as having an attribute especially allocated for it indirectly informs players, usually called inference)