No, they aren't. There's a small minority of us who probably even have proper education to understand markets, economy, cost analysis etc.
We see time and again people using very uneco weapons, not even understanding how efficiency, dpp, etc. work. We see people show their logs and don't take everything into account. We see the price of cldts rise 2 weeks INTO merry mayhem, even though the first 2 weeks are ALWAYS the most ped cycled during any maybe.
You give people a bit too much credit since the people who generally respond have some working brain cells. But there truly is not a whole lot. Which is fine, because if you didn't have dumb people and people who don't care about all that who play the game, then the game wouldn't exist in it's current form and past forms.
I actually don't take mistakes as an indicator of low intelligence. Failing to update beliefs to correct mistakes as appropriate might be, but I take the fact that someone is asking mechanical questions about Entropia's systems or logging their activities and asking for methodological help as a net positive sign. I also don't take education to be
prerequisite. Personally, I knew
nothing about economics when I started playing Entropia. It was rather the other way around; Entropia, and the brilliant folks analyzing its systems, was what sparked my fascination with markets and all things financial, and I sort of view whatever shred of economic literacy I might have obtained from outside sources as an extension of my growth as an Entropian.
Perhaps it should be noted that I am
not concluding Entropians are (essentially) smart by observing the modern behaviors of Entropians. Rather, I am drawing from some combination of a conceptual analysis of the Entropian in relation to the Entropia Universe concept and historical behaviors. If you (or Leon) said the Entropia community isn't very smart at any time during Entropia's first decade, I think the standard reaction would have been to check if it was April Fool's Day. The Entropia community has traditionally been renowned for its atypical makeup. Even back in the days of both gaming and the Internet being deemed spaces for the anti-social, immature, teenage male to waste time, the Entropia community somehow exhibited an almost surreal defiance of its reference classes, constituting a gender and age diverse, intelligent, creative, financially mature, learning hungry, and broadly capable community, welcoming and helping other Entropians, building statistical models and software tools, cultivating new ideas, and genuinely contributing to the evolution of the Entropian user experience every bit as much as the developers.
The problem we're running into now is how many years we've spent being progressively
lambasted with a kind of content and underlying development philosophy that tries to inject entertainment value and meaning through an
extreme authorial intentionalist paradigm, into an ecosystem fundamentally shaped to thrive on the decentralized emergence of these goods. This is not in
any way to suggest that
all development has been detrimental or otherwise unwelcome; there have been a lot of positive advancements over the years, and others are certainly needed. But the relentless focus on missions, tutorials, trade restrictions, streamlining, simplification, the removal of item dropping, the utilization of policy to prioritize developer intent over individual creativity in contexts as basic as flying away from mobs while hunting, and the relative lack of sandbox-aligned content, strategically rich combinatorial structure, and causal interactions between systems for Entropians to explore, combine, transform, and synthesize into their individual procedures and goals has been brutal. It has been the natural trajectory for planet partners incentivized to prioritize an endless cycle of grabbing the attention of existing Entropians, but has been an
absolute plague not only on Entropia itself, but on the Entropia community and its constructive relation to the Entropian user experience. What I don't know is how much of this hollowing out of the excellence qualities which make Entropians who they are is due to selection pressure on who becomes and remains part of the community, and how much is just preference adaptation, Entropians learning to stop putting forward their best because they've slowly adapted to a development paradigm which doesn't respect their efforts as a primary source of Entropia's value.
