@bugaboo-bill That's a really interesting comparison actually.
And you know what i'm gonna tag @MikeTheMutinous and @S0nicbob too
Like weapons in real life, exploits in software and game systems are inevitable.
In real life, when people talk about banning guns. I always try to make the point, that really what you want is for people to not feel like they need them in the first place. If you have that, you don't need to ban them and if you don't, banning them wont do any good.
In SoT, the question is more like, what would it take to create a community that's invested in helping make the systems better with Rare. With both the combat exploits and economic ones, what people are saying is essentially, the game isn't fun without them. The dedicated players engaged with those systems the most, are always the ones who know all the tricks. But they have no motivation to help fix it in SoT. Why would PvP'rs want to take away their advantage against less dedicated players, when theres so little room for that already.
And on the other hand people using Alliance servers are likewise saying something about the state of the game, that could maybe be addressed in better ways. And thats a bit more complicated, but with the economics in general, one of the things i've always enjoyed most about the game was figuring out how to be as efficient as possible in making gold. Its essentially playing the same way, but adding time into the equation makes it more of a challenge, in a way that the game doesn't have enough of for me. But in a shared world sense, Alliances really made all that pointless. The answer is always just alliances now. And the entire reason they haven't changed that at all, as stated by devs on multiple different occasions, is because not enough people do it.
Well, if what other people are doing only matters if everyone is doing it. And if theres little to no long term consequences to any of these systems. Then what incentive does any one person have to raise concerns about something being over or underutilized. Especially because to the extent that there have been long term consequences its often more been to undermine past accomplishments. And anyway, It really didn't make much of a difference at all to me that they changed Emissaries and Reapers Bones after the fact. I'm more or less playing the same way. I also know people that were happy to exploit the systems first before most people could really take advantage of it. And for that matter, with alliances in the mix, and the general constant inflation, how do you have any sense of scale about what the gold levels should be.
If the dedicated players engaged the most in any given system, were motivated to report bugs, and raise concerns about issues. The whole Ships of Fortune post launch nerf never would have needed to happen. Combat bugs wouldn't remain in the game for months or years at a time.
A playful spirit and moralizing is all well and good but its not actually gonna change anything. Unless maybe they start banning people for using exploits, which would be a terrible idea. And to be honest its a bit hypocritical actually, if its just a silly game that no one is supposed to take seriously enough to use exploits, then by extension it doesn't matter much if they do. Its no big deal if you lose, or you can even just jump to the next server if someone is playing in a way you don't like.
Bill, you're telling people how they SHOULD play, and you know this kinda moralizing does work a bit within a group. For example, if you get enough PvP'ers all together the common ground they have in how they think and what they enjoy about the game works to homogenize the group some as new members wont have the experience to form opinions outside of the group, and not everyone is gonna think through every problem anyway. And ultimately the moralizing serves to remove people from the group who don't agree. But no one in those groups gives a flying F what you think. You don't have the standing with them to be making statements about how they SHOULD play. They've told you this. And you know, maybe i'm picking on you a bit here Bill. But that's because you are very representative of an ideal, that's already very strong within Rare. But for every quick soundbite about it being about fun adventure stories, there really must be deeper ideas behind the game. If there wasn't they'd have to be somewhere between delusional and sadistic, to have created the game they did. What I want is a shared world, that people are invested in. Especially one that exemplifies the positive force that gaming can be. That's not gonna be created by simply making the game less interesting for exploiters.
And if you really want change, what you should be asking, and hopefully what Rare IS asking themselves, is what would it actually take for more people to want to play that way. Exploits are inevitable, them being a systematic problem in the shared world, is not.
