> What would be your preferred way of me bringing this up with a hot take to his hot take? Apparently a counter isn't valid or you're being pedantic.

Well, I don't know English idioms so saying "hot take" to me is netting you a blank stare. I suppose you are simply saying "my opinion differs from yours when it comes to..."? If so, then sorry for my remark, apparently it was misguided.

> It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily.

There are people who don't play for resources as a goal or, in general, follow the path that the game creators have outlined for the players. A role-playing "outlaw" experience is basically being a good citizen in the game until you farm enough gear and resources and then turn around and start griefing other players without caring you're denied access to towns because again, you want to roleplay an outlaw. Live in the open, be in constant danger of being killed by a bounty hunter, and not being allowed in the main hubs. Some people are into that.

Time and again, game creators have tried to discourage such behaviours but the thing they keep missing is that some people do things regardless of partially punishing mechanics. Game creators optimize the game flow for people who want to gain stuff with minimum (or reasonable) resistance. And there is no small amount of people whose motivation doesn't fall within those parameters at all.

> but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around

I cannot prove it but I'd wager this was due to smaller amount of players and gaming not being as mainstream as it is today. These limiting mechanics simply don't scale after more people start pouring in due to the huge diversity of needs and priorities of the players who joined.

The punishing mechanics are meant to discourage players of a certain state of mind and/or priorities and/or needs. But I've known people who sit at their PCs for 10 hours a day looking for whom to grief (in WoW) with a huge grin on their face during ALL of it. Bored people with comfy lives who had nothing better to do and they were happy to grief all day long. What can you do. Nothing, except leave the game (which I did).

My only conclusion or a fix is: make the punishments much more severe or if even that doesn't work, simply disallow certain behaviours to begin with, e.g. like with WoW's PvP and PvE servers. If you are on the latter, nobody can attack you no matter what (although they do still allow enemy players to kill your friendly NPCs so there griefing can take the form of them denying you quest givers or vendors which is still nasty).

> Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.

Yeah, I think so too (agreed with both your points). Most companies are too scared to change anything; the normal [MMO]RPGs make certain amounts of money and they are extremely risk-averse to try anything even slightly new, lest even this revenue dries up (and I'd argue the revenue is less than they want).

It's not like games can't be made to accommodate for all kinds of human nature IMO (and where they can't you can simply use opt-in mechanics, again like PvP or PvE servers). We simply have gotten to the very logical point in time where the market is cornered by several giants and several dozen hard-working smaller studios and it doesn't make financial sense for any company to experiment and look for a better formula.