Quote Originally Posted by Aviatorhead View Post
I am mostly wondering as I've seen your idea expressed by others. But why would the developers design the entry system this way (where more ciphers gives you a greater chance at a spot) if 'sniping' wasn't intended? What else would this system be for? Like they are not that dumb, it would have been easier, probably, to not have to develope the cipher system and just do a normal way to queue it.
It's a good question and sadly one I don't have an answer for. I am not in the head of the development team. The people that are suggesting that sniping organised runs is the obvious design intention are also not in the heads of the development team and cannot know that they're right on that front.

Field Operations is much more socially involved as far as content goes, so I'd speculate they assumed players would be social and collaborative when it comes to the content - which is why people have naturally congregated around forming discords and planning runs after meeting in game and spreading knowledge of these runs ingame through word of mouth. The devs clearly did not account for how anti-social some of the playerbase are. That was their biggest mistake.