In that case, I would modify my stance to, "I think the community may be approaching these two questions in an ill-suited order." It should first be noted that the order in which individual conclusions are drawn will, in general, affect the overall verdict. The
McKelvey–Schofield Chaos Theorem tells us this much. How then should a suitable sequence be recognized? I don't know that there is a universal algorithm, but the condition of being "only a hypothetical" doesn't seem to cut it. Applied in other contexts, such a litmus test would warrant deciding to change a school attendance policy without considering what the new policy should be ("I don't know if students should be allowed to miss a greater or fewer number of days, that's a mere hypothetical anyhow, I just want to change it"), modify an investment portfolio without considering what assets are available in the market, or perform a surgery on a patient without considering which procedure, if any, would cure them. Basic cost-benefit analysis demands upfront consideration of downstream hypotheticals. We can't really escape that fact. Isolating decisions in a methodological ignorance of future, associated decisions is a recipe for nearly assured disaster.
How might such a disaster play out in this context? You've stated that about 50% of players want loot waves gone. Presumably these players have specific reasons for their preference. Some may object to the property that certain time zones could receive preferential treatment over others. One possible solution to this would be to adjust the period of the waves so that there is no longer such asymmetry, on average, between time zones. Some may object to the property that game play during the descending half-period of a wave has a negative psychological quality, as loot keeps getting worse, on average, the longer one plays. One possible solution to this would be to remove loot waves, and insert some other periodic function, such as an ascending sawtooth which ramps up and then abruptly returns to its minimum value before reascending. Some may object to the property that loot waves are too easy to identify, and thus the advantage of discovering them gets arbitraged away too quickly. One possible solution to this would be to go beyond basic periodic functions and implement something more dynamic and interesting.
Some players may actually have a fundamental preference to reduce Entropia to an F-mashing RNG-fest, whereby an individual player's agency has little to no effect on the outcomes he or she experiences, and thus genuinely aim to remove the loot wave system without searching for a replacement. It is somewhat unclear why anyone would need
Entropia to attain this type of gameplay experience; any online random number generator is good enough, and there are plenty of games in the vein of Marbles On Stream that can paint a pretty aesthetic atop the same fundamental random number generator "game" mechanic. More realistically, some players may be missing the forest for the trees, advocating for the pure chance proposal without seeing the broader processes of strategy-space degradation unfolding.
Perhaps some who advocate for this proposal want to reduce this aspect, but not other aspects of player agency from Entropia. Unfortunately, the arguments actually given in favor of the pure chance proposal are so vague and indiscriminate that they would, if accepted, also necessitate abandoning just about every other aspect of meaningful player agency. If the arguments were of the form, "because factors A, B, C, D, and E are all present, this is actually a situation that calls for ignoring or intentionally reducing strategic-richness in the loot system," then players could reasonably debate the merits of the arguments, but at least the proposals would have some degree of
prima facie sanity. The most radical arguments here, by contrast, appear to be grounded in conditions so weak that they would, if sound, threaten to incidentally undermine very large portions of the Entropia experience. It is of little consequence that those pressing the radical arguments may not wish to also implement their far-reaching implications. By failing to explicate the necessary qualifications, they are still setting the stage for disaster.
This is not, by the way, a criticism of this thread in particular, but of our boarder angle of attacking the loot wave question as a community thus far. I think the players who don't like loot waves probably have a lot of valuable ideas for how to alter or replace them, but the least productive ideas are being foregrounded by the trajectory of the conversation. So the potential disaster is that we might cultivate a strong anti-loot-wave sentiment in the community based on surface level agreement that the system isn't great as is, but then, in our state of resolved insistence that "
something has to change," settle for the lousiest, low-hanging fruit available, the pure chance proposal.
Note that if the pure chance proposal
did get implemented, I doubt we would see much regret stated explicitly. What we
would observe is even more boredom, more complaining that Entropia is nothing but F F F F, more impatience with planet partner update turnaround times even as the pace of new content remains constant or increases. The narrative would be almost solely focused on the quantity of higher level planet partner content, but the real problem would be that content growing decreasingly effective at holding our interest, an array of houses built on sand, as we slowly excise elements of entertainment value from Entropia's foundations over time rather than strengthen them.
