Quote Originally Posted by Castillan View Post
Why is it insane to determine what the (typical) worst case scenario is, and then ask oneself, "Is this what we really intend with our system"? I'm a software engineer. I write code for a living. One of the things we're always doing, ALWAYS, is to look at the worst case scenario and determine if that is fair and reasonable and tolerable by the consumers of the software we make, and if it's not, then we find a better solution.

It's a mindset that I've worked with all my working life. Basically it boils down to this. SOMEONE WILL find a way to exercise the worst possible scenario, whether intentionally or accidentally, and if they do that, what would they see, and can we prevent that, either by putting artificial limits in place, or recoding the algorithm to something more adaptable.

This is the essence of any good software design. Understand where your limits are, and address them.
To me this sounds perfectly sensible. The current system is only ideal if SE set out to create a system that would take X hours to complete on average while allowing for completion times to be as low as 0.1X and as high as 10X. Perhaps that is exactly the result they wanted, however, several players/ customers are saying that while they think X is a reasonable amount of time for this quest to take, 10X is not, especially when some players are going to get it done in 0.1X.