That’s the thing, it wouldn’t. To be precise, it’s either/or: either it would be high enough to give you “a direction on how much you’re allowed to build” or it would have positive effects on performance.
To make it have positive effects on performance, it would have to be set really low and you would not only get a shitstorm on the forums from PVE people crippled by it, you would actively hurt the game because those PVE people would leave in droves. Yes, I know this is speculation, but it’s based on just how low the number would have to be to be useful for performance.
If, on the other hand, you want it to be just a guideline, then that’s just another form of theater. It’s a number nobody is expected to hit, but it’s there so people will feel like they know something. You don’t need that if the rules are clear enough.
And all of that doesn’t even touch on the fact that the spirit of the rules has nothing to do with the number of building pieces, so you’re still trying to solve the wrong problem and proposing the wrong solution for that wrong problem.
Yes, they do. And you can see it in all aspects of the game. Lifeblood Spear is OP? Nerf it to uselessness without giving it any redeeming qualities. People want a way to travel from Exiled Lands to Siptah and back? Implement a clunky, bug-ridden character transfer system which also happens to be completely useless for solo online players. I’m sure everyone here can come up with examples of their own.
Here’s the thing, though. Every paid software development team has to prioritize their work. The only devs who have the luxury of doing whatever they want whenever they decide to get around it are those who do it as a side project.
If you dig through the patch notes, you’ll see that for every cheap solution Funcom has come up with, there’s a number of other things they’ve done that involve hard work and ingenuity. Some of those were highly visible things, easily noticed, but some were subtle behind-the-scenes improvements that many enjoyed but few ever praised. Instead, people focus almost exclusively on the subpar solutions and how long it takes to solve some problems, and write things like “Funcom’s lazy”.
So yeah, their current server moderation system is cheap and shoddy. It used to be even cheaper and shoddier: you had to send a private forum message to the community manager group alias and hope they saw it and took action. And before that it was nonexistent.
They’ve been making progress on it, and as usual, it has taken them a lot of time. We should keep pushing them to make more progress on it, instead of trying to ruin the game for a bunch of people.
They have addressed some of them, and I believe they will address more of them in the future, despite the fact that each time they work with us to try to address these things, a lot of people do what you’re doing here, i.e. call them names and engage in other hostile behavior.
Fortunately, I was also involved in that discussion and I know @Ulyssi was, too, so we don’t have to let people see only your version of what happened.
You started a private topic and invited other players to discuss the evidence. Then someone invited Umborls directly. The discussion went on for a while, but there was a lot of hostility and rudeness, and the topic ended up getting deleted.