And you won’t get us to “agree” on it, just like you won’t get PVP players to “agree” on what exactly is the problem with PVP balance, because the agreement you expect doesn’t happen in random discussions on an Internet forum. The kind of agreement you want requires a bunch of meetings between a number of people chosen to represent a (hopefully fair) mix of people who need something to happen, during which they keep working towards a definition that will be good enough for everyone involved even though it doesn’t completely satisfy anyone.
In short, compromise requires lots of effort.
They don’t actually need us to explain exactly what we need, they just need to recognize certain common elements and try to improve on those.
Of course, that won’t actually satisfy people on the forums, but nothing ever does. As long as there’s constant improvement, it’s worth doing. That’s what they’ve been doing with the whole game since the beginning: improve it little by little, despite all the raging that these improvements aren’t coming fast enough, aren’t comprehensive enough, or aren’t good enough.
At some point, yes. Not at this point. Like I’ve stated before, I have personally seen questions that still need answering. And the way I personally define “need answering” in this case is:
- I don’t know the answer
- the answer seems important
- they were asked in good faith by people who don’t have a track record of asking bad-faith questions
That being said, those that I can find at this point are extremely few. Most of the so-called unresolved questions I’ve seen posted these days were unanswerable things like “exactly how many blocks is a bridge allowed to span” and many of them were posted by people who have already established a track record of asking bad-faith questions.
Oh, come on. First of all, maybe it’s the game designers who defined those rules, but it’s not them who have to enforce them. So even if we take this weird assumption that “game designers can’t communicate like social workers”, there would still be other people involved who would be capable of that kind of communication.
But even that assumption is wrong. I’ve personally had the privilege to work with several game designers who were excellent at communication. In fact, a good game designer has to be good at communication, because they have to explain their vision to the rest of the team and provide guidance and resolve questions, doubts, and conflicts.
Look, the situation is neither as horrible as some of the people here would like us to believe, nor as resolved and clear-cut as you keep implying.
Are the rules vague? Somewhat, in the sense that the spirit of the rules is more important than the letter, and the rules have been written with that in mind.
Are there open questions? Some. There have been many good questions about the rules, and a lot of them have been answered. Some are still open, and they should be answered, but even those that have been answered are not easily discoverable. The answers are buried deep inside forum discussion threads that you can find only if you: 1) know that you should look for them on the forums, and 2) are expert at digging through the forums.
Is the enforcement clear and transparent enough? Hell no. If you get banned for building something, and you ask why that happened, and you don’t get an answer that tells you what you built that broke the rules, where you built it, and why it broke the rules, then it’s not good enough. And I don’t say that out of idealism. I’m being pragmatic here: not only will some of those people will keep making the same mistakes, the newcomers will also keep making them.
I’ve said this before – and I’ve had sophistry and trolling hurled back at me back then, so I expect the same this time around – but the situation would be vastly improved if Funcom:
- made a better effort to make all newcomers aware of the rules, e.g. by showing you a message with the link to the rules the first time your account (or your local installation) logged onto an official server
- clarified the rules further, by consolidating the answers they already gave to the important questions in the same place where they’ve put existing clarifications and examples, and by answering some of the outstanding questions
- provided more detailed information about the ban when requested
EDIT: I just realized that a lot of people will probably get upset that I said that there are very few open questions, because they were banned and they didn’t get an answer to why they were banned. I feel like I should clarify that there are very few open questions about the rules in general, not about specific bans.
. Pvp meant to be this way, your death my thrive 
. I just don’t do it because I don’t need it, even in pvp 
. The greatest reason I don’t loot is because I looooooove to farm. Farming the same things over and over again is the reason I play this game years now. All I care is be happy when I make others happy 
. Farming is all I do best in this game. The funniest thing my friend 
. I may go for a black blood pick and grind hours maybe days until I get one and if I’ll go to replace the set for someone who lost it I might get the whole set in 3 visits… Go figure 
