Stop doing it, resist the urge to clean each town of everything, stop re-loading on that boss/chest until you get OP items, accept failures in fights/stealing/dialog, maybe keep the secrets vendor a tiny bit more secret, did you really have to kill all those NPCs eventhough you successfully struck a deal, you're telling me nobody in the entire game knows you're the burglar who took EVERY SINGLE painting and sold them IN TOWN... I mean come on, I see you people.
Stop abusing the game so heavily and wondering where the challenge went. Honestly save the song and dance about how you play X build because its harder, or ways you personally justify you dumb dicking the game in several areas.
No. It's the developer's responsibility to limit and balance the game because one of the enjoyable parts of a game is to play tactically and/or strategically well so that you can beat a high challenge. And games - not just in terms of video games but games throughout history - are all about one player/team fighting against another player/team. And no true player enjoys playing with someone that is weaker than them. They want a challenge. To win against a challenge is what gives satisfaction. To handicap yourself to play someone weaker may be morally satisfying, but it does not satisfy the ultimate objective of beating a legitimate challenge.
TLDR it's the prerogative of the developer to provide a challenge, because what a gamer wants is to figure out by any means how to overcome that challenge. Otherwise, you don't have a game, you have just an interactive story. This is why finishing a game is called "beating a game."
If the challenge is not there because balance is wonky and abuses are widely possible, then why even bother spending the effort to handicap yourself, if you can spend just as much effort writing up your interactive story in Notepad?
