I'm rather skeptical of the idea that picking mechanical representations of narrative features is somehow a sign of better roleplay or characterization.
(As someone who was primarily a D&D 3 player till recently, the idea that you character fluff has to be directly reflected by the mechanics still bothers me. Yes, I get that WW games are designed for closer fluff/crunch integration than d20 but I still have a natural hate reaction to, say, people who insist that my character needs the Sneaky feat because he is sneaky - no he doesn't - he has enough ranks in stealth skills, and I need that feat slot for something actually useful.)
First off, no one's saying that you need to take . In fact, I'd remind you that you get several dots of specialties for free in character creation. Moreover, unlike stealthy, specialties offer actually meaningful boost to a character. To balance that, they're supposed to be somewhat limited in scope, and not at applicable as abilities, which leads into how they inform the character. If I have a dot in investigation, I can always apply that. If I have a specialty dot in Sherlock Scan or Interrogation, well, that isn't, so my character should gravitate towards the areas that he's supposedly focused in(because that's where I put more resources).
Moreover, by putting specialties as basically as expensive as ability dots, you're basically putting them in the same zone as dots in an ability, which means that they're significantly less useful. Why buy a dot that you can only sometime use, when for essentially the same amount you get a dot that's always applicable. This is similar to my issue with virtues.
Attributes cost more than abilities because attributes are (at least in theory) more broadly applicable. In theory virtues are also more broadly applicable. "inane" is putting it a bit strongly.
The fact that virtue channels are once per story(thus applicable less often), dependent on the scene, and cost resources to use make them less versatile, not to mention the downsides for having high(and thus useful) virtues. So, no, I wouldn't really say that the cost to raise a dot of virtue according to the book aren't inane.
And it should be noted that attributes are cheaper under this model as well. Yes, they're still more expensive than abilities, but without the scaling costs the degree of expense is much less.
So just handle them narratively? My impression is that this incentivises players to put all their starting background dots in more abstract stuff like Backing and Cult and Influence and Contacts, and then pester the ST to let them go treasure hunting to pick up artifact/resources. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but wasn't part of the goal of flat costs was to get rid of the preferential "you must spend starting BP on this or suck up the inflated opportunity cost" issue?
Backgrounds have never had a scaling cost(outside of character creation), and even during the game they don't necessarily have a cost(it's up to the ST). There's also the issue that there's no such thing as balance among artifacts/resources, so making them scaling wouldn't really help.
Eh, if anything, it shows that either Onyx Path lacks computer security, or that both leaks have been internal.
Not necessarily. It's possible for the leaks to be from different people. I would bet on there being some holes in their computer security. It's almost certainly not their priority, and it's essentially a proven fact that most people are utterly terrible about security.
