I feel like gear progression is massively underrated. I love to dress up with my muscley rpg man, and make him look cooler and more awesome as he gets stronger. I don’t want the best cosmetics locked behind a paywall. In MMOs it also just murders any respect/cred you get from having awesome gear that needed you to clear an epic raid or similar.

I get the whole cosmetics thing for “free to pay” e-sport-esc games though, where there’s not really any gear progression