Honest question about the dreaded sim

[Jojoya]

The point I was trying to make was less about whether it's ethical or not to use a third party website with a sim on it, and more of the implications.

What implications?

What it means to you can only be answered by you.

It doesn't mean anything about the design of the game. What is created by one set of programmers can be recreated by another set of programmers.

If the existence of the simulator is saying anything, it's saying that the general gaming population has changed over the years. There's now a preference for combat content that can be tackled in more convenient and smaller pieces than tackled as a larger progressive whole (likely because of more exposure to mobile gaming now compared to the past). It's not an issue of good/bad or better/worse. It's just a change in preference over time. What players enjoyed in the past may no longer be as enjoyable. Or perhaps they never really had the option in the past and would have preferred the smaller pieces even then.

I brought this up in several discussions last year and it seems appropriate here. If you're not enjoying the way content is designed, don't do that content. Developers generally aren't collecting information on how players feel about content. They're only checking to see if players are doing it or not, and at what point they quit doing it. If players doing it, they're going to assume players okay with the content as designed. It's when players quit participating in the content much faster than they expected that they start listening to feedback.