>>1902691
>the gearing was possibly even more atrocious
This was a big sticking point for many, back in the day.
Vindi has always suffered from terrible gear progression (something they've only kinda-sorta-not-really started to rectify within the last few years), but you're absolutely right, it was ESPECIALLY bad during late Season 1 to early Season 2.

Pure ultra-low RNG as to whether you'd find the necessary boss drops to even start your gearing journey with then-current equipment. Buying them off the marketplace wasn't remotely feasible, as individual components sold for ~70-90mil each (and you'd need at least 2-3 of them in any given recipe) at a time where you'd earn around ~1-3mil per-day after a full ~4-5 hour raid loop with VVIP running.
To say little of then finding the equally as rare/expensive Enchant Scrolls for the item, actually having them succeed with ~30% rates at best (and guaranteed, non-recoverable item destruction if it failed, unless you were dropping $25 protection runes every attempt), enhancing, not having THAT fail and destroy your equipment, etc, etc, etc.

And that's assuming you could join boats for those initial endgame boss drops to begin with, as they were thoroughly closed-off to anyone but the luckiest/biggest whales anyway, locking out like 95% of the playerbase from attempting the suffering themselves. You had to have perfect endgame gear to run things which dropped materials for making that same endgame gear.
It was beyond awful, even by KMMO standards of the day. You couldn't even whale through the initial farming phase for crafting then-current equipment and scrolls, as there wasn't any way to sell Cash Shop items on the market or directly purchase Gold with NX.

It's no wonder Vindi's population cratered a few years after its release (and why hacking was so prevalent at the time). The gear grind was horrific, and there was hardly anything to do besides it.