I find it a reasonable temporary measure.
The way the purge meter works, you can fill it up really quickly if you’re in a clan with a couple of friends and you focus on doing certain stuff. It turns out True Newbs (i.e. people who are actually new to the game rather than just creating a new character) happen to do those things a lot. It also turns out that the game used to do a less-than-stellar job of letting True Newbs know that there’s a thing called the Purge, much less explaining what it is and how to prepare.
Before they introduced the new journey system, the only mentions of the purge you could find were:
- a journey step “survive the purge” (or something like along those lines), that didn’t even appear on your HUD until you were done with a whole bunch of other things
- a couple of lore documents and/or dialog lines
So basically, if you were a True Newb, unless you saw this little bar in your inventory screen and thought to ask in chat “hey, what’s this ‘purge meter’ thingy?”, you had almost no chance of preparing for a purge and had a considerable chance of losing most of your T1 base to it.
Sure, you can usually count on other people on the server helping you out if you called out immediately after getting the purge notification, and you can usually count on them helping you rebuild if you get wiped out by the purge, and most newbs don’t really quit because their first purge steamrolled them and tea-bagged their corpses, but…
…but it doesn’t change the fact that the way things were back then wasn’t really good game design.
So I believe they implemented this exemption as a stopgap. But that’s just my theory.
Now that they’re revamping the purge, maybe they’ll change that. Maybe they won’t. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m hoping the new system will end up being good, after all the teething problems are sorted out.
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