[Miles]

Combat characters generally aren’t much, if at all, better at combat than non-combat characters. If you mean is it intentionally designed so that it’s impossible to completely avoid combat, though, and I think that’s what you mean, maybe?

I think two changes should shore this up, though, and maybe they’re already planned or in progress, who knows:

1) An underground tunnel travel system for bypassing the mist and getting from building to building. Bootlegging or old subway tunnels etc.
2) The driving autopilot should probably go out of its way to avoid mist when possible and to prompt for confirmation when unavoidable.

[Miles]

I agree with the stated intention of the change, but I do not agree with a lot of the characterization of events over the last week nor do I think the changes themselves actually accomplish the stated intention.

My ideal scenario would be a world in which people do what is fun and makes sense organically for their characters and then to allocate the ‘value’ obtained through those activities with intention and political forethought.

We’ve definitely seen that instead, the borough system made people feel pressured to engage in activities specifically for borough control, and more particularly in a specific sort of activity.

Some activities are worth substantially more than others, the calculus in the political contributions announcement seemed to imply that hunting was the most efficient and primary source of capital; that’s pretty far from true.

There are also functional incentives in how systems like the competition incentives, etc., work that steer people towards some really un-fun and twinky ways to maximize the system. For example, if you’re the first faction allocating resources to a borough, you’re actually punished for that, and if you’re the last, you’re kind of incentivized. It creates a dynamic where you don’t actually want to consistently invest in the same area, you want to surge into an area that’s already contested by two other groups at the eleventh hour and save all of your resources and energy for that last week.

Obfuscating the mechanics is great and all for making it harder for people to figure out how to twink the system and what weird behaviors are incentivized, but those incentives are still there. They’ll likely always be there in some form. The system needs a lot of overhauls and just obfuscating the underlying mechanics won’t prevent people who know where the weak points are from hitting them. For me, it’s a lipstick on a pig change. It’s throwing a tarp over a minefield and then telling people to go play in it. I probably won’t be engaging with the system in any serious capacity beyond what happens incidentally and organically going forward but I absolutely do not expect that to lead to any borough wins.

I also worry that the competition system actually, quite contrarily, incentivizes large and heavily social factions to aggressively cannibalize efforts made by smaller factions at every opportunity, using smaller groups to ‘prime’ boroughs for take-overs.

[Author]

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