How is dissallowing the game from being abused, ruining the game for everyone. Its basically cheating, as it requires no skill or investment in the game or thought process. You are always given a rouge. You only need to sneak behind someone in turn based mode and you can have free items. You might as well just allow a command prompt to give you those free items. Its not apart of the game at all, its just like an easy mode feature. The fact that its in the game to begin with, urges the player to use it since you want to win and you will use what is at your disposal to do so. Games dont operate on the premise of: This game is easy and if you want to make it harder for yourself, prevent yourself from playing the game to its fullest potential, instead play with a forced handicap so that it can be more challenging. Games are meant to be challenging for a reason, if you had the choice to have a cheat command prompt, would you use it? Sounds like it... but most people wouldnt.
Well, it doesn't affect you. It's like two adults having consensual sex in the confines of their own home - if you're worried about it, then you have an unnatural focus on things that aren't any of your business. You are unaffected if people cheat - you're just grandstanding for no good reason. Mind your business; it doesn't involve you. If I mod the game to give my character all 20s and every badass item in the game - it's none of your business because it doesn't affect you in any way. If I mod a save so I am just one hit from winning the game: it still doesn't affect you though I wouldn't do that since it would ruin the game for me. If I want to savescum, then that only affects me. If I don't want to savescum, then I just don't do it. Stop trying to force your desires on other people when it doesn't affect you. If you have an issue with a game mechanic as it affects YOUR game, then that's valid, but if it's that you want something gone and you can just literally not use it then that is invalid. This sort of paternalism has plagued games for the longest time because there are people like you complaining that other people can enjoy themselves.
Yes it should be available, but some level of deterrence. Like some investment. Maybe it costs 50 gold... or maybe it starts you back off at camp. Something that puts a slight deterrence so that abusing the game is not so easily accessible and almost encouraged. Its hard as a player no to use the options availble to them such as pickpocketing for example. Do I want to reap the benefits from investing in a thief and sneak abilities? Yes. But just like in D&D you have to earn it. You arent able to steal over half the inventory of a shopkeeper, which items would have cost you 6000 gold, when you are level 2. Isnt that immersion breaking? Are you a master thief? I mean youre level 2 only.
So technically I never really need to invest in sleight of hand again or worry about adding on any special stealing skills. That part of the game is over. From start to finish I can now steal 75% of the inventory from all the shopkeepers in the game....
Thats called an exploit, not a feature.
It makes very little sense. Stealing was OP in Divinity for sure but not as bad as this currently. The shopkeepers have very value-able items, you can pickpocket them more than once, which you couldnt do in Divinity. You can also re roll stats on items to pickpocket until they hit 0, just by clicking another item then reclicking it. You can steal literally almost all of the inventory in one single try which you also couldnt do in divinity, because it was weight/price based limited by your thievery skills. So you either waited until you had a better stealing stat so you could steal more from them or you took the best items you could on your one try.
They should apply those same rules to this game and for all of you who enjoy exploits and being OP, they should just provide you with the special code that allows a command prompt to give you whatever items you want. You can always play story mode too.
If it needs to be adjusted to your skills - well that would be fine except it's using 5e rather than earlier versions that allowed you to invest such specialization. But the exploit doesn't affect you if you don't use it - if you just decide not to use it then fine. If you want to get it sensibly adjusted because you want to use it and you feel it's too easy for you without exploiting, that's fair. But having it cost you gold to try or start back at camp is just sloppy patching for a problem that isn't there and makes no logical sense, taking people out of the game.