I agree 100% with the OP, and have said this many times in the past myself, but it's never going to happen. Bottom line is, WGT can sell more clubs and balls the way it is rather than making equipment tier specific.
BlackBogey:You can't just play the same driver/short iron courses like St A, PGA and Kiawah OVER AND OVER AND OVER and hope to get better.
I beg to differ. Go back to the time when there was one or two courses. Some players got very good on those. When they brought out a new course it didn't take long for the better players to soon learn how to play those too. Even with the likes of quirky Olympic and Merion courses the better players were scoring in the 50's within a day or two. In the early days most of us played our favourite courses to lower our average in order to climb the tiers. I remember playing St Andrews F9 more than other courses, others did it playing Bethpage F9.
Also in the early days it wasn't easy to climb tiers quickly, nor was it easy to increase your level quickly either. Take a look at this:
This person started on 23rd July 2023. By 25th August they had moved up to Legend tier! That would have been pretty much impossible 10+ years ago. Also, on 31st August they reached level 80. 12 days later they reached level 90. Again, considering the amount of XP needed to do that, it would have been impossible. At those levels it usually took a minimum of 2-3 months to move up just 1 level, but this person has moved up 10 levels in 12 days! WGT have made tiering up and levelling up far too easy now that none of level, tier, nor average hold any value whatsoever.
This person's first 5 games as a Hack shows scores of 30, 29, 30,31, 29. And this was on Merion - one of, if not the quirkiest course on WGT! I don't know if it was front 9 or back 9, but these are not the scores of someone new to the game, this is someone who has had previous account(s). Since WGT allowed players to restart with new accounts this sort of thing has become more rampant than ever. And WGT have done this for one reason only - to be able to sell more clubs to 'new' accounts. What WGT fail to realise is that these players don't put money into the game as they can often sandbag at the lower levels to gain enough credits to pay for the equipment.
The quality of the game has diminished exponentially with each passing year, and all because of WGT's greed, allowing players to do things that would previously have been impossible, just to try fill their coffers with a few extra pennies.