I believe its spite because of vetex’s previous behavior towards it.
He intentionally made, what should have been a fairly straightforward mechanic, intentionally terrible and convoluted.
He shuts down most if not all discussion towards him about it and even other developers have said that vetex would never listen to them about changing it on multiple occasions.
He regularly insults his own community for being dissatisfied with a change he intentionally made unsatisfying and refuses to make it satisfying.
Altogether, this does not read to me as a logical decision, this reads to me as seeing how the community wants something and wanting to spite them by sending them on a wild goose chase.
(what essence hunting feels like)
Finding the epicenter was faster and easier for me than finding one essence.
But there are also other explanations for it. Making a mechanic terrible and convoluted makes it undesirable. People are less likely to do undesirable tasks so there is utility to that. This is why he says that even he himself wouldn’t like doing it.
Shutting down discussion about it is just a tendency he has to this stuff in general. Same thing happened with the name changes except the crowd was loud enough in that case.
Spite could be the common factor behind this but it could also be an obdurate nature. Being dead-set on certain changes and reactive to criticism can also lead to spite. Which can be a vicious cycle (one leads to the other) as well.
You could honestly probably make the assertion that both motivated it but given the fact he never even wanted to add it I believe that it was a genuine decision based on reasons he evaluated. The only role spite played was in not considering the predicted community reaction as valid. Because it’s not like he didn’t know this was gonna happen.
When it was first implemented it, the bad design was a mistake.
When he refused to change it, it was spite.
When he adds an overpriced gamepass to circumvent it, it becomes predatory.
Was it a mistake or an inconsiderate decision? I’d say there are no accidents here.
Was the fact he didn’t want to change it spite or the fact he didn’t want to listen spite? Could be both but that’s also an important distinction to draw because it characterizes the situation.
Predatory in its intent or it’s structure. I think we agree on the answer but that’s really important to emphasize because when you go around calling something predatory people will conflate those two notions. Predatory also makes the situation seem a lot more serious than it is, even if it’s an accurate descriptor.
Also probably an internet thing. I imagine irl you could say that this is something predatory without raising any alarm bells due to stuff like tone.
Inconsiderate, though, would that really be the right word?
He understood full well that everyone would hate the implementation, yet he did it anyways.
Then frankly has the gall to mock and insult people for not liking it when he very clearly never intended for it to be liked.
Both.
His refusal to listen to feedback, even from his own developers, shows a degree of spite towards the people this feature is targetted to.
His refusal to change, even to his own benefit, shows the same.
God I hope its structure.
If its intent then I’m done and I hope most people atleast agree with me on that.
Yeah but are we sitting here thinking Vetex is like “Wow these people are mad I guess they deserve to suffer for this” or is it more realistic to assert “wow why would I change this, people are hating for no reason and I’m not willing to listen to them [because I hate them as well]”.
I’d say the latter is much more probable and understandable.
Could be, but I am unconvinced of this. Usually spite doesn’t involve caving to demands and making compromises such as adding Hecate Essence.
Did he really refuse to listen? Do you have to do what someone says in order to listen to them? If someone asks something of you and you say “no”, is that spite?
No because his assertion is that spite motivated Hecate not being changed, not Hecate being added.
It could be spite and also just be correct. Like one of the reasons he gave was " if you make it rarer people will expect it to be really easy to find and just get mad when it isn’t."
Like that lowkey sounds spiteful but it’s literally true
wait wait does this mean essence can be seen through walls now?
even if not, what’s the render range we’re talking about now?
can it be seen through the fog?
if essence hunting isn’t ass anymore then my entire problem is solved lol.
Not through walls, no idea about the other details.
There are other plans for essence hunting as well but none of them are public. Like there’s a lot of stuff I can’t say about this topic that’s why I have to make vague gestures
Honestly one of the big things that pissed me off when essence was first added was that I watched vetex change the lore doc and remove minds for mages being able to simply learn new magics.
This gave me tons of hope that the feature was going to be reasonable and fun to interact with and that I could finally experiment with builds more freely and… then it was added.
FREE MONEY