FOMO has no place in a $40 AAA game. No one deserves rewards more than others, and "early supporters" don't exist when everyone pays for the game and funds development as much. I've used more money into the game than most people who own the Wailing Barnacle ship set, it is the thing I want the most over anything in the entire game; however it is not my target today, as much as I advocate for everything that was once time-limited-obtainable to come back.
Twitch Drops shouldn't be any kind of cosmetic or time-limited content that will become unavailable later on. This leads to FOMO and makes it completely unfair and impossible to get for people who, for many reasons, could have been unable to watch streams: be it for being unable to play SOT/watch Twitch for one single week, not owning a Twitch account, not playing SOT at the time, etc. Twitch Drops should be limited to gold, doubloons, valuable limited quests and 50-150 ancient coins as the last drop, but somehow we have none of that except quests very rarely. I can ensure you that people would still watch your partners for 4 hours if they got even the slightest amount of ancient coins from it: it might even become more efficient than putting cosmetics as rewards, as a LOT of people constantly complain and don't care about the recolours, effectively skipping the drops.
Now what's done is done for the most part, there are countless time-limited items that were only available through Twitch Drops for the past 6+ years and are now lost to time for most players. However, I came up with a fun solution that would not only fix the FOMO problem, but would also revive interest for exploration in adventure:
I have over 3500 hours of total playtime into the game, and many have much more. I crave adventure, but I know every island like the back of my pocket, the location of every single secret in the game, and I don't even need to look at the map anymore when I'm doing quests since 2000 hours at least. Here comes my idea that would encourage people to explore again and not just grind:
Make old Twitch Drops a chance drop, findable in the open world. The way I imagine it would work is by having a bunch of set locations on the map where, once a week on one of these, the skeleton of a lost pirate dead while holding a kind of delivery crate could be found. Upon interacting with the crate, you would be rewarded with one random Twitch Drop item that you don't own.
I'm sure it's not that complicated to make except for the random unowned item part, as the rest would just be reused assets, and it would certainly lead to the revival of interest for actual exploration adventures, better incentive for Twitch Drops and contribute to the end of the FOMO policy.
