2 hours ago, theFlu said:Heh, ye, the spreadsheet for the current iteration.. no matter how many rows you fill, the answer is "Go Quest".
Only for those who care about progressing quickly. If a slower more natural progression is your choice then questing is just part of the gameplay and not dominant playstyle. You call that "gimping yourself" but that is because your perspective and priority seem to be on leveling up. Since your priority is to level up then, of course, doing anything other than questing is going to be sandbagging your game.
There will always be something at the end of every row for you. If they change the balance so that questing is no longer the best path and instead mining edges out everything else as the most optimal way to level up then that will be the new complaint. For those who enjoy mining and hated questing they will be overjoyed. For those who loved questing but hate mining it will be the death of the game. All of the authors of threads complaining about forced gameplay will change but the complaint will be the same. This isn't speculation. It's history. Since Alpha 11 the optimal way to level up has changed several times and the forum complaints followed those changes in exactly the way I describe. It is inevitable that one way to level up will outshine the rest and that is always labeled as the playstyle TFP is "forcing".
So the devs should just stick to what they like since there is never a solution possible that will please everyone as long as they want to maintain open world sandbox elements in their game. For sure they could fix things by imposing restrictions that prevent players from spamming whatever activity currently reigns as the optimal path but then that is ACTUALLY forcing players to play in a certain way compared to now where it is left up to player choice but since some individuals lack the will or desire do anything but optimize, they claim they are being forced.
My solution would be to try and balance things up some more and then add options to increase the number of quests needed to graduate to the next tier and to limit the number of quests that can be taken from a trader per week. This way people can diminish the power of questing in their game if they wish but for those who love the current influence that quests have on the game they can still have it.
For those who can't resist questing and hate it but also refuse to toggle the option to limit themselves....there's just no hope for those people. They want to min/max and they want to complain about it. That's their true game of choice.