I've got some deadlines today, but I'll try and spend a couple hours to put a thread together this weekend.
ok I'm no high roller but I'll feed a statistical pool for a bit.
I was sort of asking about the conversation you've refererred to in your other posts because I seriously though this was a "loot quality" perk for grinders and so wasn't that concerned, which has led me to ignore the other threads on the topic since by the time I was gone for a week they ll seem pretty cluttered with drama and "skill stealing".
Which I hope MA isn't doing. All they have to do is say the skills currently being received are or aren't taken from the hunter's points and it's done.
All this is adding up to something pretty heinous though and maybe it will be "my last straw" if that isn't cleared up soon since the signs all together is ominous, and if they were to announce the opposite it will close the door on many things, and seal the deal on a sort of system that I won't participate in.
At least, not for "entertainment".
Imagine an EU where any unexpected interaction with another avatar is taboo.
Where "Don't Heal Me" is a stickied thread in the noob section with 100 pages of posts of people's stories about how they didn't know or accidentally healed another avatar hunting near their team and got bawled out for it.
Where nobody will kill dry mobs or hunt near a sweater or a sweat circle.
Where accidentally sinking even a single round accidentally into "someone else's" mob has immediate skilling and/or directly financial repercussions.
This together with the CRM techniques being built into the loot engine is all adding up to a very personal funnel. The absolute nightmare of a "personal loot pool" that follows you around all professions and becomes "dynamic" based solely on how much that CRM algorithm says you're likely to take based on a weighted balance of your 30 days, 7 days, and one days activities and the "excitement" or "involvement" factor of your current activity.
Together with a social setting that discourages teamwork or many of the player to player interactions that lead to casual conversation or new people just randomly "meeting each other" and/or "helping out".
It's a little derailment I may post another thread with my thoughts on this matter as well. This sort of social and behavioral analysis is relatively trivial right now and being endlessly refined.
All the signs here just keep pointing to a very bad thing. This is true without the skill stealing issue. That's just the padlock on the gate, if it's announced to be actual fact.