Originally Posted by
kordi82
Who says anything about grinding?
In my world death/danger and real game time are NOT any excuse for not calling something abuse. Why would you consider danger as an argument even?
Generally, something is considered an exploit when there are outsized benefits compared to the risks/costs involved. Death/danger are among the risks/costs involved in doing so. It's like saying grave digging is an exploit because it gives the potential for a huge pile of great loot, and ignoring the fact that you might have to kill a lich king or an emperor lich to do it. If you don't include risk in your calculations, well, yeah, you're going to get weird results. But a lot of people seem to--and often don't considering visiting the bugs at all to be worth it.
Once player it's strong enough it's no longer an issue. It's like saying that once player is overpowered he has green light to get even more overpowered. Pile of BS.
The Bug Temple is one of the few areas in the game that you have a real chance of losing a level 50 PC. I've certainly lost more level 50 characters in the Bug Temple than I have in the Scintillating Cave, for example (I don't recall ever losing a character in SC, as a matter of fact).
Real world time as well - i.e. I am killing beggars as my first kill every freaking single game. Then I hunt for them to kill 20 to get courage, which requires quite a lot of real world time. The fact it requires real world time never stopped me from doing so.
Good for you? You're welcome to do things in a way that takes a lot of real-world time. Not everybody enjoys playing that way. I'm adamantly opposed to the idea that the player should be required to do any such thing, as you suggested above. Five minutes of herb farming is about the limit on the amount of time-wasting exercises I'm prepared to undertake in most games.
The only reasonable argument is xp loss... still this is something that can covered for in multiple ways... slow monster, cold blood corruption. Once again I see no reason to let speed increase once Wi is at 1. There should be some kind of balancing mechanism. It can be subtle, but for everything there should be a price.
There are already balancing mechanisms. Your Wi score is reduced to 1. There is risk, corruption, time and xp loss associated with clearing out the bugs. There are pretty significant diminishing returns on speed, so your time commitment increases exponentially the more you want to gain--and if, as asdf has suggested, speed has been properly fixed along with other attributes, you can't get around this by wearing boots of slow shuffle or being strained! or some other nonsense. I'm just not convinced that this is a balance issue that needs to be fixed.