by Lujo on Mon Jan 21, 2013 7:42 am
I hear you paplaukes!
The origin of calling overly powerful items/features "stupid" and "ridiculous" or "cheat code" comes from understanding intimately where you're coming from. Also calling vets "lunatics" or "crazy"!
There is a learning curve, and a power curve, and a kingdom progression curve in the game - and if you're trying to play the game in a "semi-casual" way, more accurately described as "sane", you come to intuitively understand some things - monsters regenerate health if you explore while you fight them, you can't fight monsters much higher than your level without a crippling investment, and so on and so forth... You try to work within the boundaries which are reinforced by many things and trying to break the sensible rules isn't something a sane/honest person is supposed to contemplate too much. The rules and boundaries are there for a reason, they are pretty strict for the most part, and the game is challenging.
But if a feature lets you break these rules too much, or too effortlessly, and then gives you overwhelming power - after the initial rush of going mad from power, you can start feeling really stupid about obeying the laws in the first place. What is keeping a sane and respectable person from discovering how crazy powerfull B2P is? The answer is "the very idea of something giving that much power for rule breaking sh**s all over every reinfrcement of the seeming law of blackspace conservation". You're not supposed to burn that much blackspace on leveling and still be able to kill the bosses, right?
But you CAN.
Mechanicaly it's easy to discover - you step up to a really high level low-hp monster, and start clicking away. If you're going spellcaster, you wouldn't need the HP potions so much, so you drink them there and then to fuel more B2P, and sure enough, that gorgon or wraith drops dead, and what you get is 2-3 DINGS! And then you scratch your head and put the 2 and 2 togather and figure out that you would have wasted MORE blackspace if you tried to play it any other way. And what you did required less effort and thinking, too!
But psychologicaly it's difficult to figure out - because it requires you to go STUPID for a moment, and forget all you learned up till then. Same thing with the Tri-Sword - sensible use doesn't reward you nearly as much as playing like a complete dope, or a Balkaneeze horse thief trying to "cheat" at every opportunity. And I personally HATE that. The question of "what if I dumped all my potions into it right off the bat" should play out much like "what if I pis***d on that electrical wire?" - get you electrocuted, not give you superpowers!
CB? What if don't I really need the shops, or all the stuff I've spent time and effort unlocking to have available in those shops? What if I just dumped all my gold into the damned ball, instead of thinking up combinations and uses for all the junk? The answer to that should be "Yeah, right, I'll pick those elven boots next time, someone spent time coding all that stuff", not "Hell yeah, screw the shops, this thing can be prepped! Eat my dust normal people!"
And as for our suggestions - no matter what tone we make them in, we AREN'T devs, the devs are the devs, they made all the features, and for all we know they had all this stuff on the radar all this time and we're (a bit overenthusiasticaly) confirming that "Yes, if we play like a bunch of complete trolls, these things reward us." The solutions might allready be on some list, and god knows what they are - the devs have proved time and again they aren't fools, and won't gimp the regular people while troll-proofing the game.
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!