What exactly is the purpose?

[Oduda]

First I would like to thank @AndersonKain and @Cauthey. As I do not go around exploiting the game, and I do not play on officials, I was honestly not aware of this issue. I truly appreciate the two of you explaining this and although I do not expect Funcom to go into as much detail as the two of you did a simple line added to the patch notes such as
“This change was made to help correct an exploit we are aware of” would have gone a HUGE was towards helping those people who do not play on these specific servers to understand that these changes actually DID HAVE A PURPOSE. Which is what this entire thread is asking for, to discover what the purpose of these seemingly random and often nonsensical changes are for. Thank you both for shedding the light onto this specific change, somthing that Fumcon should have done but at least the two of you were awesome enough to do so.

@Cauthey

@Pliskin

Command Radial

All of the radial and facing changes, as I understand them, were to help add support for and improve support for controllers. Much of this functionality, I believe, is to make the Quality of Life (QoL) better for our gaming console brethren.

I have little love for these changes as I play on a PC with a mouse and keyboard. But in order for them to be able to market this beautiful game over multiple platforms, these changes were necessary. That these changes did make things better/easier for console players and controller users… I can forgive the changes “moving” of my own, personal “cheese.”

I believe that you may in fact be correct on this. However, they could have easily improved the support for controllers (as it already existed) while NOT completely shafting the controls for keyboard and mouse users. Both things existed previously, both things could still exist now. There was no legitimate reason to make one objectively inferior in order to make one subjectively better. That, frankly, is not something that I can forgive.

@Bambere

I agree construction hammer makes it easier.
But the change removed players ability to be able to precraft, share with players who did not own.

The two things are, in my opinion, not exactly tied together. Yes they happened in the same update but so did the main culprit, again in my opinion. That being the BLB and FLS. With the introduction of the BLB they wanted to make a system where you could not simply “give” items you purchase to other people who did not purchase said items thus I believe they retroactively implemented that mentality to become applicable to the building system they were in the middle of overhauling as well. Hence it was not a change cause by the addition of the building hammer, it was a change added to the building hammer cause by the change created by the BLB (again, this is purly my opinion as we will truly never know).

@Dinner_for_wolves

Hell, I stopped playing for many months because of said crap, however, never once have I resorted to speculation, or name calling, because I have no idea what goes into these decisions. For all I know they had wildly different plans, but are constrained by technical issues. I just don’t know. So I watch, wait, and hope they can get on the right track again. Like a rational, educated adult.

Thank you for this. This is a very reasonable way of looking at things. I do not want to sit here and claim “they did this for reason X” or they did this for reason Y". I am only asking for them to give us, their fans and players some reasons behind why these changes are being made. Just some simple communication on their end is all I ask for as it will go a long way to making things far easier for everyone to understand WHY things are being done, why they are moving in the direction they are moving. Maybe all of these little changes are part of a much larger change coming down the line, and they need to impliment these changes first in order for the big change to come into fruition. Who know? Not us, but if they simply say something then we may be willing to say “OH! OK so that is why. Alright, well hopefully this new system will be amazing and worth it in the end.”

@Xevyr

I explained this in detail a number of times back when it happened, but here, I’ll run you through it quickly again.

I appreciate it @Xevyr, I clearly missed your previous explanations. So, in other words, they could have made the changes to NPC but instead made it to the “master class” that controls both NPC’s and Player Characters? That is a pretty significant oversight and one that should have been noticed via quality control…

But again, they could have restored the main file back and then worked on the correct file rather than the slap job “patch work” “fix” that they gave us since that doesn’t exactly work (and it is turned off by default so they don’t even want you to use it which makes me believe that their “bug” was intentional).

@Xevyr

So the reason was… that they replaced the UI… and they wanted this new UI to have a standardized and fixed layout that always looks the same… so… the Dye button, that only appears on armor and no other item… - which even on the old UI sometimes only appeared under “more” - became the ugly ginger child they sent to the basement…

So they wanted to change the UI, expect they told everyone that the reason was to “justify the size of the bench”. But what about the UI requires gatekeeping dyes behind a level lock that never previously existed? Or denying the ability to use the dyes you find as loot on the fly as you always had been previously? These are massive changes that heavily restrict players. And their excuse “to justify the size of the bench” is just completely insulting. If that was their reason, MAKE THE BLOODY THING SMALLER FFS! However, if it actually was due to the UI change than the reason they gave to the community was a flat out lie. So either it was just an insulting nonsensical reason or it was a lie. Either way, not cool.