"Why are people being dismissive of me, the person who instantly dismisses any counterargument with an insult like saying theyre vaping gambling addicts? Why is this community so toxic towards my valid arguments i cant figure it out"
I explained my comment, and you just keep re-quoting it over and over again, instead of actually responding to anything that I have written. Yes, grinding has always been part of SoT, but Rare themselves admitted that the race to Pirate Legend caught them entirely by surprise. For most of us, SoT is about the journey not the destination, I think that's still largely true today, and I think Rare would agree that's the ultimate goal.
The problem is post-launch, instead of adding things to the sandbox or encouraging players to interact with one another, they decided to introduce a bunch of poorly organized commendations that only the most addicted gamers will take on. You can continue to criticize my comment, but the fact of the matter is that some of the commendations that they included in this game require the sort of time commitment that only someone who is blowing off significant parts of their life would actually be able to accomplish. Their inclusion is a design decision.The whole late game in SoT is built around this stuff. Thus, Rare is actively creating goals that encourage toxic behaviors in their own community. Rare no longer cares about the accessibility that originally drew diverse groups of people to the game, instead their catering to the same old crowd of gaming sharks that are able to dump hours into multiplayer titles. I am not trying to be offensive, I'm just calling a spade a spade. It literally takes over 100 real life hours to get the top commendation (240 wins) in arena, and this isn't even including lobby time and losses. And perhaps I would see more to the argument "it's just a goal" but if Rare wanted to make this game accessible they would significantly add to the overall purchasable cosmetic count, or other non time sink ways for players to become renowned on the seas (again something they talked about constantly in the alpha).
Again, this is Rare in 2017 "We don't want it to be basic like "oh you've killed 100 skeletons, you get 100 EXP," we don't think that's Sea of Thieves."
And here we are today, "spend at least 100 hours to unlock a cosmetic."
Yes, EXP is not 1:1 with cosmetics, but again, the late-game in SoT is literally built entirely around unlocking rare/difficult cosmetics. You cannot tell me with a straight face that that isn't true. I could join any random game right now of PLs and most of them would be working towards some sort of commendation/cosmetic related goal.
And that's my problem, the game has not added anything to the sandbox. They can't even seem to add basic things like the banjo or more songs. Rare essentially let the internet focus test this game and instead of doing cool stuff like a captaincy update, they spent over a year making random things for people to grind because the internet was screaming about "lack of content" at launch.
My point is that launch and forward is where I became less invested in this game. SoT is a unique game that's quite unlike most other multiplayer titles in the Microsoft ecosystem, and instead of trying to further expand this IP to perhaps people who do not normally consider themselves gamers, or folks like me who are pretty burnt out by the grind of modern multiplayer titles, they decided to chase the lowest common denominator of feedback from core "gamers" who were never really part of what made this game unique and fun.
In the alpha and shortly after launch, I liked playing with older people, deaf people, people from other countries, mom's playing with their kids, etc. Very few of those people play anymore. In there place is just the normal multiplayer crowd who is angry, toxic, and just wants to pour hours into titles in some sort e-status symbol.
