you’re playing a game accidentally designed to wholeheartedly reward the efforts of “meteorite monkeys”: one which gives them advanced forms of progression like theft and high tier PVE, grants them the ability to defend themselves from other like-minded players, and allows them to annihilate LARP worms utterly with, well actually a significant effort because siege of a claimed pali setup by even a semicompetent (30 mins tops of ‘research’ required) player is nigh impossible without a 20 hour+ campout.
If devs wanted theme park MMO, spoonfed, drool-keyboard, fortnite battle pass casuals to succeed they wouldn’t so vehemently lock the most efficient progression behind intentionally obtuse bs like cooking recipes, meatsmoking woodtypes, alchemy, glassworking, pvp itself, troll/whale mechanics, etc, etc, ETC, ETC, that only the most autistic of neets can decipher.
You speak of some fraction of the “good and wholesome larpers” who engage in combat for village disputes or whatever made up scenarios from your vivid sprucecap imagination, without realizing that any such player is just a “meteorite monkey” in training/being somewhat less efficient. It’s actually quite funny, the reason the big bad baboons do as they do isn’t because they’re some evil mutant chuds bent on watching the world burn, but because they’re trying to extract “fun” from a “video game”, are playing the game as it stands more efficiently than the rest and have discovered that ‘village to village politics and combat’ systems are not at all engaging to actually interface with if such gameplay interactions have been thought out or implemented at all. Destroying sprucecap settlements is the only moderately amusing option left to someone who follows the track of success the game encourages.
It’s a hilarious byproduct of the devs being bound with unbreakable chains to the idea of a pvp sandbox mmo while being sprucecap larperbabies at heart. They are unable to devise adequate game systems to make large scale pvp engaging or even tolerable (or even functional as of w13). At the same time they’ve tricked themselves into being completely unable to take feedback from competent and passionate PVPers at face value because the most committed players are also incentivized not to share it honestly for fear of losing competitive advantages.
Hafen is a pipe that leads to becoming a so-called monkey, and the developers are stubbornly opposed to changing that direction. Accept its flow (and, play a pvp game to pvp! How morally reprehensible!) or gtfo lol. Skill issue tbh