I'm going to tell you all why most people (including me and my friends) tend to stop playing this game somewhere around the mid-late game.
Let's just get one of the obvious reasons out of the way. Yes, the quality grind is shit. However, from my experience at least, I get bored of the game because of how late game combat plays out.
You have this great system as far as unarmed goes, which feels tactical and fun as fuck, and it's pretty damn useful for early/mid level PvP. That all gets thrown to the wayside though once melee weapons start to become a thing. Melee isn't tactical, it isn't fun, it's just Chop and Sting one hit kills. Look at unarmed. There's so many abilities to play with, but once melee becomes available, unarmed becomes completely secondary.
Then we get to the subject of Marksmanship. Does anybody want to tell me why, after all these years, this skill is still absolute dog shit in PvP? When an entire combat skill is made irrelevant just by some guy zig zagging towards you, it should be clearly apparent that something is wrong.
None of these things seem hard to balance, and yet they have been left in such extremely unbalanced ways for years.
Overpowered - Melee
Balanced - Unarmed
Underpowered - Ranged
Nobody is going to stick around for lategame when the next reset happens, purely because of how poor the combat gets after the initial unarmed phase is over.
Anyway, I have a few question for the devs.
Is Marksmanship ever going to be anything more than just a glorified PvE skill? Will you ever actually be able to hit a moving target?
Will melee ever not clearly overshadow the other two combat abilities in every single way?
Will there ever be a time when you can concentrate on 1 combat skill while ignoring the others and have that ONE combat skill be on equal footing with the others?
Oh and just to clarify, I usually stop playing while I have a character alive and well, so this isn't a case of "waah some nasty guy with a sword killed me and now I'm gonna quit!". More often than not, I'm running with a pure unarmed / marksmanship guy, and I'll realize just how inferior these combat types are (especially MM) to Melee. And here's the thing, it's not like making a sword or a b12 is that hard to make, certainly not to the extent that they should render melee to be far superior to the other two options.