Na, I unironically think crop circles are the single most egregiously bad piece of content in the game. They're not so much horrible in the sense they don't really affect me because I just ignore them and accept I'll always have bad qualities, but in that they add absolutely nothing and are obviously irredeemably bad.
>80% of quality comes from bones/rocks/ore/cave clay/hide straps. Stuff that never really increases, so you get to like 80% of the maximum quality that's achievable within the first month or two of a world. We made a >Q400 anvil in like 4-6 or so weeks. Maybe less, I don't rly remember. (((I wish WWWs all started at Q10, and animal products/rocks were wayyyyy lower at the beginning of the world to alleviate this a bit. That's another topic tho)))
Without flax/turnips increasing qualities passively over time quality grinding bois completely run out of things to do, and there's no reason to really ever remake/upgrade industry. The crop circles get progressively harder to maintain, to the point that it's unrealistic for non-botters to do it(and it's trivial to bot, other than the initial setup). Completely stagnates the world's quality growth. Likewise weirdos who genuinely seem to enjoy farming for quality are usually somewhat casual, and aren't going to want to put the like 10+ hours a week that crop circles are going to necessitate spending to continue doing the thing they enjoy.
In longer worlds whichever groups abuse crop circles(there literally aren't even enough heartwood trees in the world for more than a few groups to use them in a ~2 year world before you even consider people intentionally monopolizing it) will by default have wayyyyyyy higher qualities than everybody else just from flax/turnips being dank.
It's kindof(?) okay because people can rely on the WWW catchup mechanic, but realistically it seems like that needs to be botted to have a good chance of getting topQ stuff. Especially considering average players aren't running around with 500, 1000, 2000 farming to passively get them very occasionally. It can only be intentionally farmed.
IMO, long term chores where you can fall behind and not really catch up are awful, and this is the worst example of that. It's such a time gated grind, but the intervals between needing to do things are short enough that you'd need to mess up your sleep schedule just to be somewhat efficient. Then, on top of that you need to abuse potentially hundreds of alts and compete with other players just to get localized resources, and you have to maintain these activities for potentially years. Then if you weren't botting your qualities will still be shit compared to the people who do, and if you stop for even a little while your progress is kinda ruined. It's literally the worst of every world.
