While some of this could be true, it’s also worth mentioning that you can’t say we all like the game for the same reason. The group of people you described is not the only group of people here. I’ll tell you right now, I dont play because the game is less casual and requires grinding. I play this game because of the extensive class system, art, music, and classic feel. This game isn’t “hardcore”, I’m sorry but it’s not. Nothing about this game is hard. It may have that old school mmo feel; but believing that design of this game is that the only challenge lies in which class combination you set up is a fallacy at it’s finest. Seriously? That sounds like utter bull. I say this because class experimentation and creativity is a staple feature of the game itself.
The “risk” you’re saying exists is the time waste when something doesn’t work out. Yes, that is a “risk”, but I don’t believe that that was intended to be part of the design when trying to implement some sort of difficulty. That’s just monotonous repeated grinding in the same areas; something that actively pushes players away. If you take a giant handful of games and really inspect their game mechanics; how many of those have time wasted as a legit mechanic? Can you really imagine developers sitting in a room and saying “We want to waste their time if they…” I refuse to believe that the developers are so unintuitive that they can’t even come up with a legit form of difficulty when designing a game, because wasting someones time isn’t considered difficulty in my opinion. It’s just an annoyance.
This game is that old-school nostalgia at it’s finest. This game is about experimenting with tons of classes, delivering that great old-school feel we grew up on, and socializing with friends. It’s not about “hardcore” mindless grinding. If such an item is implemented, all it’ll do is save time. It’ll make it so that you don’t have to grind another 200+ levels to see if your idea works. I don’t see people complaining about the XP buff on tokens, or the XP tomes. Those are time savers too; they make it so that you don’t have to grind as long.
Here’s another thing to consider: People like to have multiple class builds of the same base job. I have a Rogue, that I love using, but I think I want to make SchwazerReiter later on. I’m not gonna reset my rogue, im gonna make another archer. Like others have said in this thread before, people get attached to their characters, so it’s not like everyone is only going to have 4 characters. Your grind that you don’t mind will still be there.
My only real concern is that it could possibly lessen the amount of time someone plays, but that’s not the fault of the item. It’s the fault within the design of the game. Unfortunately, this game is all fluff with very few activities for a player to partake in.