is to make every interesting item profession or level based anyway.
and the camping was here ever since the eq crowd asked for static dungeons.
i am not arguing that even the semblance of balance we currently have is tremendously difficult to maintain / nurture while still catering to a diverse customer base...
but imo ao is moving away from the skill based system more and more to a class/level based system.
i would not say this trend got started with the ipr - it started with the profession dedicated patches for advs and fixers - suddenly there were class only weapons and nanos with a level req on them.
funcom has continued into this direction ever since.
there is no denying that however crude this method may be it is effective to control the spread of an item across the playerbase.
there are at least 3 classes in ao whose main function is to give and deal with damage and restricting weapons to these classes assures them somewhat of a lead in this direction.
some weapons appear that are not tied to a specific class - say the manex or the queenblade and people flock to them.
before 14.2 or so, shotguns were all the rage.
imo this is however not a problem exemplified by iprs or reroll twink chars but by a bad database were 70% or more of the usuable weapons are utter junk.
a certain amount of min maxing in a rpg cant be helped.
we have a problem because there are weapons that utterly totally destroy any other weapon of their class - yet this has nothing to do with how you spend your ip.