That's just it though, having 300 ping was not a technical limitation last patch as it was completely possible to play on a 99% fair playing field to someone who had 10 ping bar a few outlier situations. It still is mostly fair although the balance has been shifted slightly.The only true reason I see people admiring the slow combat is because they feel empowered because the system now crutches their inability to react.
I get everyone keeps throwing out the term fair and unfair. Having 300+ ping isn't what I'd lump into a category of fair or unfair, it's more this is a technical limitation.
But, as an FYI, not myself or anyone I've seen previously who played MO1 is advocating for laggy, desynced bullshit. We're not wanting buggy, broken combat.
No one is advocating for that.
We just want it to be faster, and to allow better players to shine more and allow players who invest time to be able to show their time invested.
There is also a disconnect here when you say you aren't advocating for lagging desynced combat, you just want it to be faster.
Making the combat faster by removing the release delay or the run speed a lot faster will cause desync and lag. There are reasons it was slowed down in the first place, it wasn't just done to accommodate people with terrible reaction times, it was done to make it actually possible to react.
If you want to speed the game up enough to make a big difference in feeling and combat, that is.
As I've been saying, there are some areas that can and hopefully will be sped up such as the normal swing charge times, but some specific areas cannot be sped up dramatically without massive issues for people with even medium-high ping.
So the best course of action would be to find the things that can be sped up without compromising anything else, and collectively as a community ask to speed them up.
As far as not agreeing that high ping players should be taken into account for the game balance, that's fair enough and you're well within your right to have that opinion, but Henrik has stated several times that he wants the game to be accessible for everyone around the world, not just EU and not just NA. In order for that to be the case, compromises have to be and have been made.