Exactly. I could not agree more with this. These types of continued changes will eventually cause larger and larger portions of the community to not participate in content with the expectation that it will be blindly made easier in the future (with enough “[Insert Item here] is not worth the [Insert time or effort here] to me, so make easier.” posts). Developers will then respond with more FOMO content to forcibly drive the playerbase in that direction, which in turn will cause people to feel forced / obligated to play content they do not want to. Then, with developers wondering why people are not participating in new content, some players feeling like their time/effort is devalued, some players feeling forced to do content, some players wondering why they can’t access last season’s rewards, we will come together bang our heads on the wall and wonder why everyone hates everything.
This is the entire point of the Value Preservation post (Discussion: Skill-Based Difficulty, Time-Based Difficulty, and Value Preservation), though technically, because the content is current, they would be in the clear according that post. Maybe I can modify that later.
Either way, there needs to be a reward for Layer 8 to replace what was made easier (the assumption right now is that there is not a replacement reward, because I didn’t see anything in the patch notes).