"Fair Play" Mod

[Jabberwock]

Hi everyone, I am an experienced SCS BG1/BG2 player (~500 hours) and am thinking about creating a mod that adjusts some of the squishier areas of game difficulty. I thought I would post about it here and see if there was any interest or feedback. I'm planning on calling the mod "Fair Play", because the intent is to force the player to play fair and to not use certain types of "cheese" that exist in current high level play, particularly high level no-reload play.

I'd like to tackle one modification each time I do a run (which happens every few months) and just chip away at the list over time. 

Modifications:

1. BG2: change "on recruit" experience caps for NPCs to 500k XP, except for Imoen in Spellhold dungeon who stays the same at 1.25mm XP cap
   • Purpose: Remove cheesy solo / small party play in Chapter 2-3 that allows the player to recruit NPCs at high level and then be over-leveled for the rest of a run. 500k matches the SoD cap and allows some benefit for XP gaming, but keeps the benefit to a reasonable level.
   • Questions/Concerns: Are the experience caps actually moddable or are they hardcoded?
2. No stealing from most merchants
   • Purpose: stealing some low level items is fine, but robbing Athkatla blind is a little egregious and removes a lot of the interesting economic decision making. The intent isn't to remove all useful stealing, but to make it more reasonable and make gold management more important. In addition, reduce the prices fences purchase at, and make them "no-steal".
3. No item recharging
   • Purpose: make limited resources limited. The 1 charge cloud kill from Jon's dungeon would no longer be possible to immediately convert into a 50 charge "infinite cloud kill" wand that gives the party nearly unlimited use of one of the strongest spells in the game! Green amulet charges have to be used a little more carefully, resurrection rod heals are a limited resource, etc.
   • Questions/Concerns: not sure if anyone has figured out how to do this. Possibly making any item with charges unsellable would work, but I'm not sure if that would make them unpurchaseable, which would mess with shops like SS. I'm also not sure how easily tunable the "unsellable" status is. Another potential solution I thought about is to raise the charges cap to something gigantic, like 99999, to make them charge expensive to repurchase (not sure if this is possible either). Maybe someone else has already figured out a solution to this modification. 
4. No Project Image / Mislead spells
   • Purpose: I have never seen anyone use either of these spells for anything other than egregious cheese
   • Questions/Concerns: is it possible to remove player access only? I know some mage scripts use mislead. I think if all scrolls were removed, and NPC starting spellbooks were adjusted (Jan starts with mislead I believe), that would mostly get rid of it, although it wouldn't stop sorcerers. Not sure if the player sorcerer book is easy to modify, although presumably it is possible given that there are custom spells that I presume sorcerers can choose on level up. I'm sure there is a well established way to remove player access to a spell.
5. Reduce the power of Chain-contingency
   • Purpose: Remove the ability to use any attack spells, which are generally too strong / cheesy (e.g. the notorious 3x ADHW on spot enemy). Alternatively, remove ability to target enemies. Worst case, remove player access to spell.
   • Questions/Concerns: the contingency / sequencer spells are sui generis and I'm not sure how easy they are too modify in any way (e.g. preventing certain spells from being used). Might be easier to just remove, although that hurts the player a little more than I would like.
6. Rest restrictions
   • Purpose: Optional modification. Don't allow the player to rest in unreasonable locations, or give them limited numbers of rests. Makes spell resource management more interesting, whereas right now it generally is not. Not sure if I really like this idea, but thinking about it.
   • Questions/Concerns: I'm sure this is possible, given that Jon's dungeon and the MFs in the UD have this restriction. Might be too much work to adjust more than a few areas, however.
7. Time limits
   • Purpose: Another optional feature I'm not sure about. Similar to rest restrictions, force more player resource management. E.g. 48 hours in Bodhi's dungeon, possibly some other areas. 30 days to leave for Spellhold (perhaps a customizable time period). Needs a mechanism for the player to explicitly know how much time they have left.
   • Questions/Concerns: this feature may be too irritating to players in practice, or may not make the game more difficult in an interesting or enjoyable way. 
8. Remove or reduce the effectiveness of kiting
   • Purpose: a HUGE percentage of dangerous enemies in the game can be defeated by kiting. So many "high skill" solo games are just kiting every enemy to death, with the monsters unable to force the player into melee range. No offense to those players, but I would like to make this impossible or at least very difficult :). I think removing the player's ability to get movement speed upgrades (e.g. haste, cheetah boots), while increasing enemy movement speed and reducing weapon speed would work.
   • Questions/Concerns: I don't know if modifications along these lines have been tried before. Lots of potential problems and tradeoffs here to think through.
9. Adjust power of protection from undead scroll
   • Purpose: Some adjustments have already been made by SCS. Adjust: allow high level undead to ignore the effect with a minor thac0 penalty. Perhaps mid-level undead get a larger thac0 penalty, so it has some use against vampires without being unreasonable strong
   • Questions/Concerns: Not sure whether spell effects can depend on enemy level. May need to just check monster type, or give certain monsters immunity. This might be a lot of work for a relatively small benefit.
10. Prevent casting pfM on enemies
    • Purpose: I think the ability to cast pfM exists in either some installation or some version; would just make it consistently self-only to remove the cheesy dispel effect
11. Reduce thief xp (lock/trap) and mage xp (spell learning)
    • Purpose: Remove the ability to generate huge amounts of xp for doing nothing. Particularly egregious when combined with scroll theft, small parties, and NPC level up on recruit. Probably reduce BG2 xp by ~90%
    • Questions/Concerns: Not sure if this is adjustable via mod
12. Remove potion stacking
    • I know this has been done by other mods; I think it's a good change and would include
13. Prevent enemy spellbook draining
    • Purpose: no cheesing enemy fights by removing all their spells via area changes or summons. I think this can be solved by creating more movement barriers (like certain lich fights receive in SCS) and possibly more aggressive teleport-to-player behavior from the AI.
    • Questions/Concerns: not sure how tedious this is to deal with across a large number of encounters. This feels like something that might be too much work to do for many encounters, but perhaps some additional fights could prevent the player from area changing or hiding out of LoS and sending a stream of summons. Maybe enemy casters could check if they haven't seen a party member in a few rounds and refresh all spells if so.
14. Consider reducing the power of player thief traps
    • Purpose: reduce the power of spike traps in particular. I know some mods have already made adjustments.

 

OK! Some of those I think are not too difficult, some are probably beyond my abilities. But hopefully over time I will chip away at this list and end up with an interesting challenge mod that removes cheese from current high level play for those players that are interested to do so.

If anyone has any comments I would love to hear them!

 

[Jarno Mikkola]

1 hour ago, Jabberwock said:

Questions/Concerns: I'm sure this is possible, given that Jon's dungeon and the MFs in the UD have this restriction. Might be too much work to adjust more than a few areas, however.

It's not... is this a EE game, or a non EE game ?

Cause here's the EE code, without component start... :

COPY_EXISTING_GLOB ~.*\.are$~ ~override~	 // 
PATCH_IF (REQUIRE_PREDICATE GAME_IS ~bgee bg2ee eet~) BEGIN
PATCH_IF (SOURCE_RES != ar0602 OR SOURCE_RES != ar4000) BEGIN
	WRITE_SHORT 0x10 (THIS BOR BIT5) //EE only
BUT_ONLY
END
END

This, will make it impossible to sleep outdoors, indoors etc, except in taverns. Which I would think was the original idea. But it got slipped away from early in BG1. 

One can make an rest interruption creature to the non-EE games to be 100% reliable, of course every area that doesn't have one assigned needs to have one added... and I haven't figured the weidu function to do such, but it's there in the 12.2 index.

And, as I shared my code, I'll take any that is offered as a fair trade for the non-EE games... to my own mod.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Jarno Mikkola

[Bartimaeus]

A number of these can be solved by just...deciding to not use exploits/cheese. Not all of them, but a lot of them. You don't have to steal everything and create a never-ending loop of gold, nor do you have to engage in kiting (one of the game engine's oldest and most powerful exploits), nor do you have to use the old "talk to" exploit, or lay down a million spike traps with meta-knowledge, etc. People who would install something that would disable those...shouldn't be using them to begin with, right? So it might be a bit of a waste of effort to try to actually implement them.

The people who love those exploits (and there are a number of them) are pretty much always going to want them to still be there, so they're not going to install something that disables them - and that's perfectly fine, if that's how they want to play the game. Therefore, I would suggest working on the ones where this is not the case, ones that are material alternative design changes that open up new options for players that refuse to engage with certain things because they're too cheap (e.g. if you think the Protection from Undead scroll is too ridiculous and therefore swear it off entirely as a player, it would make sense to redesign it in such a way where it's no longer so ridiculous and you *could* use it without feeling bad doing so - same for stuff like the Mislead spell).

Edited February 28, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Magus]

No stealing is in RR and TnT.

Mislead and PI are also tackled in TnT. (Although not 100% bulletproof and not heavily tested.)

No recharging is easy to do. Might be coming in UA.

As for Protection for Undead, a better option would be to make it PnP.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, Magus said:

No stealing is in RR and TnT.

Mislead and PI are also tackled in TnT. (Although not 100% bulletproof and not heavily tested.)

No recharging is easy to do. Might be coming in UA.

As for Protection for Undead, a better option would be to make it PnP.

TnT...seems to be your mod? I see we've had a number of similar ideas, including Slayer form, True Sight, and Otiluke's. Does that Project Image tweak work for non-EE games? I would imagine not, but just making sure. I also feel like your statement about it accurately captures how I feel about many exploits: "To clarify, the purpose of this component is to give a normally working spell to the players who don't want to cheese in the first place. The purpose is not to close every possible PI exploit." Especially because I was about to ask you about your Otiluke's tweak and how you would prevent the Otiluked character from, say, casting Fireball at themselves over and over in the middle of a battle...but presumably you haven't done anything to prevent it and are simply trusting that the player won't do so since it's clearly a lame exploit.

[subtledoctor]

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

A number of these can be solved by just...deciding to not use exploits/cheese.

Nothing against you in particular, but I hate reading crap like this. Games make you act within a particular set of constraints; that is what makes them fun and/or interesting. What if Piranha Plants in Super Mario Brothers didn't hurt you, and someone said "hey wouldn't it be interesting if these could hurt you, if you had to avoid them and time your jumps very precisely? And hey, here's a set of modding tools that could accomplish it!"  I think it would be completely inappropriate to respond "how about instead of modding that game that way, you just try not to touch them? There would be no consequences if you mess up, but wouldn't that still accomplish what you want?" Because that would not accomplish anything. The entire point of playing the game is to put yourself up against a set of constraints and consequences.

I'm all for self-imposed restrictions of various sorts - party composition, role-playing vs. metagaming, etc. But if someone thinks Chain Contingency should not be able to be insta-cast in the middle of combat, and the options for addressing that concern are 1) just don't do it vs. 2) set the "non-combat" flag in the .SPL file, modding the .SPL file is very much the better solution. Nobody wants to hear "just don't do it." I mean cripes, this is a website devoted to discussion of modding the game. How does "don't bother actually modding that" ever advance the discussion in any meaningful way??

/rant

Incidentally,

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

Reduce the power of Chain-contingency

My preferred solution is to set these types of spells to be limited to out-of-combat casting.  Not a huge change, just eliminates the cheesiest bit of cheese associated with them.

As for limiting which spells you can put in them: this might be possible with a UI hack, but it seems like it would be very complex and prone to failure. You could pretty easily limit the level of the spells that can go into it, though.

As for limited the conditions/targeting: it could be possible. The easiest way to do this would be to change Chain Contingency to use the same conditions and targeting as the regular Contingency spell.  It could still cast three spells, and higher level spells, as you see fit.

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

change "on recruit" experience caps for NPCs to 500k XP, except for Imoen in Spellhold dungeon who stays the same at 1.25mm XP cap

• Purpose: Remove cheesy solo / small party play in Chapter 2-3 that allows the player to recruit NPCs at high level and then be over-leveled for the rest of a run.

This can be done by simply editing the .CRE files themselves.  Maybe something like install Tweaks Anthology's "TOB-Style NPCs" which sets their stats to the lowest version; and then manually or through new mod, set their XP values to max out at 500K.

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

No Project Image / Mislead spells

• Purpose: I have never seen anyone use either of these spells for anything other than egregious cheese

 

My mod changes this entire line of spells into variants of Simulacrum, differentiated by how much magic the clones can use.

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

I think the ability to cast pfM exists in either some installation or some version; would just make it consistently self-only

From the scroll? Sure, you can just set the target of the ability to 5 (self).

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

No stealing from most merchants

Probably just set the required value to something  extremely high?  Seems doable.

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

Rest restrictions

I remember talking about this  a while ago; I think the end  result was the Tweaks Anthology component that lets you increase the chance of being woken up by monsters. Not that the monsters are much of a threat, but the constant interruption will prevent you recovering your spells, so it makes more sense to just find the nearest inn or other safe place.

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

Adjust power of protection from undead scroll

I think this is already handled by Item Revisions and/or SCS? Something like, if you attack the undead the protection is cancelled. So it's like a species-specific Sanctuary effect. (Makes a lot more sense to me than the vanilla version.)

10 hours ago, Jabberwock said:

Time limits

This is way outside my wheelhouse, and it seems both complicated and in need of serious consideration of consequences. What happens if you take too long? Auto-game-over? Players would probably not like that.

Maybe an alternative like, apply a penalty of some sort every couple hours. Just being in a vampire lair, surrounded by all that negative energy, should be harmful. Maybe apply an irresistible level drain every time the player rests?

I'm generally in favor of making players complete a dungeon with zero or maybe one rest... but I'm not sure how best to accomplish that within this game engine...

A lot of good ideas though, and I'm always in favor of +challenge mods!

[temnix]

I will just say this, that I agree that exploits and clever use of mechanics, so long as they have representation in-character as well, are natural in any imaginary world. That's what makes it a world, that it has to be taken seriously, and if players are trying all these bypasses, it means that they are immersed. It's a hallmark of success. But it may also be a sign that other aspects of the game are underdeveloped - atmosphere, storytelling, exploration, actual role-playing. If it isn't interesting for anyone but the nerdiest theater major to try and act as a wise knight or a greedy thief in these suggested circumstances, everyone else ends up counting pluses and powergaming, then the game simply isn't doing its job of sucking the audience into an alternative reality. It's failing to transport people into another world where they would want to simply live, because without this transport, with nothing but engaging mechanics and, for example, a good fighting system, they would be better served taking up sports in this world or joining the army. In short, complaints such as the original poster is making here are perfectly valid, but they reflect not only some imbalances but shallowness of the experience. Morrowind is one of the greatest RPGs ever made, and who of those who played it really cared whether Dagoth Ur was too easy to kill for a final boss?

Improvements to gameplay should not ruin current sources of enjoyment. For instance, Mirror Image here is a lot of fun and one of the most obviously magical things the player gets to bring about (though I did like the lined images of the original even better). If you eliminate Mirror Image, you may rebalance fighting a little, but at the cost of something much more important - mystery and wonder. Then again, after 500 hours of playing these games, what kind of mystery and wonder can there be left? Perhaps the OP is simply tearing up games he should have left behind a while ago, because, try as you might, they are not going to become much sharper and better-balanced nor deeper. Certainly not BG2, it's pretty much a lost cause and a wasted opportunity for a sequel. And the technology of the engine is simply terminally primitive, it doesn't even live up to the state of the industry at the time. But it may be possible to improve balance with innovative solutions instead of slashing away organs with "forbid this, eliminate that." Add something! Take the complaint about wands and recharging them. The real problem with wands is that there are too many of them, and there is too much free money. So change the economy, hit the gold glut, empty the coffers, and the problem will go away. Or you could make these items perform only so many times a day - once, twice, thrice; will the party really carry about a stack of wands just to sort through them, equip-unequip, forgetting which one they already used, for a sake of a single daily charge, when they could sell them? Solutions should be elegant, not crude.

Why do I get the feeling, having typed all this, that no one is even going to look for such solutions but will nerf, nerf, nerf? Stealing in stores. Problematic? Possibly, but it's one of the few ways in which thieves get to be thieves. That hand button was Bioware's modest attempt at representing the class and allowing some role-playing. So eliminate it, strike it out for balance! Make stealing work only in two stores, both selling slippers +0. That's still not going to turn the games into the jewels of thoughtful engineering that you want them to be. Maybe you just have to live with a lot of these imperfections, you know? With a game series that dates from 23 years ago? Maybe you just have to enjoy it for what it is.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

rant

All well and good, but note that the second paragraph specifically gave context to the first, which was that I'd prefer to see alternative design that opens up new possibilities rather than spending significant amounts of time on technical solutions to shut down exploitative ones that no-one with any kind of good sense for balance (like the people who would be interested in these sorts of tweaks, such as literally myself) should be engaging with in the first place. For example, the idea of doggedly spending time to try to eliminate the various ways you can kite in these games (...especially when your characters can literally be slower than the enemies pursuing you and you can still easily kite them - it is not particularly difficult to kite an enemy that is literally twice as fast as yours) when you could be working on something that will actually add a new wrinkle in the gameplay feels a little silly - the latter would seem like a more worthwhile endeavour. Perhaps my first paragraph was too sweeping - I'm not concerned with effecting balance changes that only take a line or two of code to make. It was merely a suggestion to be economical in the use of time and effort when considering a big list of possible changes like this.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Endarire]

@Jabberwock
Aside from perhaps preventing potion effects from stacking, I'm against all of these specifically because a game is only as good as its exploits.  (For an example, see Pokemon generation 1.)  Compared to more modern games, games from this era were often more permissive toward players and didn't try to be entirely serious.  What you called or implied to be cheesy was likely intended by the devs!  Realism and challenge were secondary to fun.

I also realize that I'm not the primary target audience for mods like this, having bought Daggerfall commercially decades ago specifically to exploit it!

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by Endarire

[subtledoctor]

10 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

All well and good, but note that the second paragraph specifically gave context to the first

I know, sorry, your post was well thought-out. It's just a pet peeve of mine.

10 hours ago, temnix said:

exploits and clever use of mechanics, so long as they have representation in-character as well, are natural in any imaginary world. That's what makes it a world, that it has to be taken seriously, and if players are trying all these bypasses, it means that they are immersed

That is quite a different issue from good vs. crappy game design. If you want to design a spell that lets you expend a 9th-level slot to go nova and fire off three 8th level spells instantaneously in the middle of battle... that sounds cool! But for Pete's sake write lore and a spell description that is true to what that spell does. If you describe a spells that stores magical effects and allows them to trigger independently later, based on pre-defined contingent circumstances, that sounds cool too. But now design the software to actually work that way! Contrarily, if you create the first spell, and lazily slap the description for the second spell onto it, well then 20 years later we have to listen to people go "dur, my sorcerer is so awesome because I mastered teh Chain Contingency exploit!" ... That's not immersion, or good world building. What it is, is a missed opportunity to put both of those two spells in the game and let players use them creatively.

10 hours ago, temnix said:

Why do I get the feeling, having typed all this, that no one is even going to look for such solutions but will nerf, nerf, nerf?

Because all you do is talk a lot of smack without actually looking at what modders have done. Making wands less spammable is a "nerf," but one that forces players to move past lazy gameplay and engage with other abilities and systems in the game. Limiting the number of enchanted garments you can wear leads players to use their class abilities, giving weight to their choices, rather than just shrouding themselves with all the bling that the game throws at you.  Limiting resting injects a new layer of resource management into the game. Modding the Shield of Balduran can change fights against beholders from stupid to interesting challenges (well, to an extent).  Et cetera.

Edited March 1, 2021 by subtledoctor

[Lightbringer]

I think some of it comes down to play style and mindset.  As I read the list of design goals, I had a reaction similar -- I'm guessing -- to Bartimaeus. Almost all of those are things I either already choose not to do, or wouldn't hesitate to cease doing as soon as I found it cheesy. As an example, I find resting after every battle to be boring and annoying, and I just generally try to rest a little as possible. There's nothing stopping me from constantly resting -- except me, and my preferred method of play. There are plenty of us that voluntarily avoid taking advantage of every little angle or advantage available.

To Subledoctor's point, however, there are also plenty of folks who desire an ironclad rules set that they can then push to the limit. I have a friend who is like this. He doesn't want to limit himself -- he wants the game to limit him.  That said, Doc, I remember a conversation recently about curbstomping Firkraag where you (very correctly!) recommended I don't buff before big fights. That's a self limitation -- and a very good one -- for the game I had built for myself.

There's validity to both styles. Clearly, this proposed mod is for the latter style of play. Go for it!  I won't have much to add, as I'm the former type.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Lightbringer

[Lightbringer]

11 hours ago, Endarire said:

having bought Daggerfall commercially decades ago specifically to exploit it!

Ha!  You too?

I beat Daggerfall from start to finish, and I am dang proud of my liberal use of exploits.  What a beautiful pile of terrible bugs that formed itself into a game through sheer moxie

[Magus]

19 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

TnT...seems to be your mod? I see we've had a number of similar ideas, including Slayer form, True Sight, and Otiluke's. Does that Project Image tweak work for non-EE games? I would imagine not, but just making sure. I also feel like your statement about it accurately captures how I feel about many exploits: "To clarify, the purpose of this component is to give a normally working spell to the players who don't want to cheese in the first place. The purpose is not to close every possible PI exploit." Especially because I was about to ask you about your Otiluke's tweak and how you would prevent the Otiluked character from, say, casting Fireball at themselves over and over in the middle of a battle...but presumably you haven't done anything to prevent it and are simply trusting that the player won't do so since it's clearly a lame exploit.

It is mine, and it works on Classic (in fact, I only use Classic for testing).

I didn't do anything about Otiluke + Fireball, because I didn't think of it. Not sure if something can be done, and doesn't worry me much, too. Although, if a way is found, and it's not too convoluted - everything is possible. Github issues are open for suggestions.

[temnix]

@subtledoctor The reason I don't look at what others have done much is because I know what pathetic low-brow ideas I'll see there. Nerfing is all the lot of you can think about; nip and tuck. And tweak. Yes, some items are so badly designed, they should never have been in the games in the first place, like the shield of Balduran; of course, I also notice that it shouldn't have been "of Balduran," because that's just rehashing lore from the previous game. These concerns go way over the head of the likes of yourself, maybe they rumple your hat a little in passing. You will be much more worried, permanently worried and flabbergasted, that that stupid shield from bad, careless developers may be used for cheese. Well, of course! But let me guess how you propose to handle this problem: delete the shield! Great thinking! How about instead giving beholders different rays for each of the eyes, and then perhaps players could turn those back with Gaze Reflection? Or maybe the shield could protect from a couple of those rays but not the rest. But you'll cry "cheese!" here as well, I'm sure, because the players will have discovered the proper means of making a difficult challenge easy.

Victory is always a problem for you. I wonder how you would go about playing the pen-and-paper game, if someone figures out to pour a circle of holy water around a vampire or indeed use a mirror against a basilisk? Same 8000 XP. Is that cheese there, too? Are you going to cry to the DM? What variety of ingenuity isn't to be restricted, in your opinion? What is the ideal challenge situation for you - an even, solid, never-ending, mildly dangerous grind, where you just work for every monster? Is that proper balance? That doesn't sound like adventuring at all to me, nor any real kind of fighting I've ever heard of, more importantly, not like life in its essence. It sounds, in fact, like one occupation in life: work for hire. Some kind of drudgery, honest pennies for honest hours. And if someone is smarter than the average and skips past you and the rest of the drones, gets up on the career ladder, why, that's cheating in your world. You'll be dreaming about closing every opening to this kind of "undeserved" gain. And again you'll be doing some cutting away somewhere, snipping off corners the last snipper made, because really create anything to change the process itself you can't.

Edited March 1, 2021 by temnix

[subtledoctor]

Just now, temnix said:

I don't look at what others have done

...

I know what I'll see there

I absolutely love that you don't understand the fundamental logical problem with that. You write a four-paragraph screed about how mods could address the game and player engagement, I point out that a bunch of mods are doing exactly that, and then you say "I'm sure no mods here address my concern and clear evidence right in front of my eyes will not convince me otherwise!"

10 minutes ago, temnix said:

some items are so badly designed, they should never have been in the games in the first place, like the shield of Balduran; of course, I also notice that it shouldn't have been "of Balduran," because that's just rehashing lore from the previous game. These concerns go way over the head of the likes of yourself

Huh, I've expressed precisely those concerns on many occasions when discussing how to improve that part of the game. How weird and, I'm sure, completely coincidental that someone could understand and discuss an issue that you are sure is completely over their head!

You have a serious mental block about this stuff, and your solution is avowedly to stick your head in the sand... I suppose if that works for you, then you do you.