I think I see what you mean, but I feelas though the distinction is such a fine one that in practical terms it becomes moot. I honestly think that the examples you gave of why the button is there are actually way more niche rationales than trying to keep your inventory weight low. Hell, you even used 'moving armor I don't need at the moment' as an example. I think that the difference you describe isn't something that a person just playing the game is going to think about. I think that they're going to see "oh I can send stuff to camp directly? That's convenient" and then just do it without applying any further thought to the matter.
You point out in the latter half of your post that people who never try to stealth in heavy armor would never realize it's a thing they can do (though group stealth is a thing so it's not as unlikely as you might think) but that still requires trying something that isn't immediately obvious. You might be able to stealth and not figure it out because you never bother trying to stealth in heavy armour at all. However any time you pick up an item, if you want to give it to someone other than your selected character, you'll see that send to camp option and know you can send basically any item to camp. I think that the option is so blatantly apparent that it's not bypassing a rule, it's making use of another rule. It's too clear and frictionless and requires too little thought to be cheating. If you can break a rule purely by using a pretty obvious use of a thing, then that's bad design and something needs to be changed one way or another. How is using the send to camp feature to manage carry weight any more exploiting the system than using certain dialogue choices to avoid combat is?
To me saying it's an exploit is wrong the same way that saying the Skickpit going hostile when he sees you trying to poison the duergar's ale is a bug is wrong. It's not a bug, it's the system acting as intended and that behaviour clashing with the narrative of the story. It's an example of poor design that needs to be fixed. And for an average player playing the game, they're not going to be carefully thinking about how every menu choice impacts their play. They're gonna just do the thing and pay attention to the part of the game that's actually interesting. That's the problem with saying it should be up to the player to limit themselves when it comes to supposed exploits (though again, I think this is not an exploit); it expects each player to always be aware of what is and isn't going to give them the best experience, while removing the expectation for Larian to actually create well-designed systems.
I don't ultimately care if Larian changes the rules for food or not, but in my opinion the system is just one in a pretty long list that's sloppy and careless and should be recognized as such.
(Also very aside, but I have never even heard of the Iron Flask. What's that?)
Last edited by Gray Ghost; 19/05/23 04:34 PM.
