by abt79 » Thu May 23, 2024 6:10 am
you’ve misinterpreted.
The words in the store are a summary of ‘the rules’ as implemented into the code, e.g. there is no way within the game for another player to remove the hats from your possession without your… “permission” in the most literal sense. Assuming account security is ironclad, :clueless:
What you’ve added is a summary of player behaviors: a totally logical and reasonable synthesis of the gameplay and human-behavior incentives that derive from the game’s systems and constitute the game in actuality, as is nakedly obvious to anyone who plays HnH for any period of time.
For the latter (ie, what modes of gameplay their arbitrary and mostly nonsensical design decisions incentivize), the developers take no responsibility and do not consider balancing if they consider it at all. So if for example players with an amount of ingame power (in the form of stats, items, game knowledge, ping, computing power; ultimately it’s all reducible to RL money and free time) thousands of times greater than yours is able to leverage that power sway your decisions, to construct a false choice between losing something you spent money on and losing something you spent playtime on, the game’s code does not see a difference between that choice and another player’s decision to give their hat in trade or out of complete generosity.
The developers don’t either. They wish to create a space with “total freedom” without considering how their own assumptions, biases, and haphazardly borrowed sandbox mmorpg gameplay loops create complex systems of incentives which place player decisions as simple as Choosing To Play At All downhill of their own, or even how the very act of creating a videogame is itself a series of options denied (or very strongly discouraged) to those who might play it.
Meh, they also unsecretly delight in that. It’s wishing to devise an experiment which proves one’s worldview “correct,” opting to write a sign that says “My Worldview is Correct” and being pleased with such compelling proof, except they couldn’t even manage that. It’s a feudal tax collector claiming himself powerless to stop a peasant child from starving, for all he has is written-on paper; the serfs have all the farmland and choose to give him tithes.
It’s not that there’s nothing they can do; there’s nothing that they want to do. Haven is a world more competitive, more brittle and less serious than reality, the world J+L wish to see. To stick around, to begin living and continue to live in that cold and puerile world is to accept the vision.
JOIN THE OFFICIAL H&H DISCORD TODAY