Fine, let's go over it one more time...
Again...
Please take what I say as constructive criticism to your comments rather than what may seem as a emotional rant. You are ascribing as others said HUMAN MODERN DAY PSYCH THEORY onto a fictional setting of a fictional narrative setting in a fictional GAME. Your complaint at first was about mechanics of a certain action (the Playground) not showing to you how much better that the outputted results (the Knights) were better than regular commandos. Both I, the QM and others have indicated multiple times there are hidden bonii that apply, perks, and potentially even plot armor that is not a pure mechanic item. You then decide to go on a whole spiel of how this entire action item is a trauma induction for the sake of trauma.
By the same token you can ascribe BUDS training to be trauma for the sake of trauma, as it has a real life washout ratio of 75%+ AND takes candidates from basic training. Yes that's right people with no training other than what they learned in Basic get to try to become Navy SEALs. Yet lets get back to the whole issue I have with your logic. As others have said, you're not entirely wrong, nor entirely right. Could certain items be worded better? Sure. Should you launch a one person crusade advocating the termination of a mechanic that has been part of this quest since early on because you feel its traumatic? To me that comes across as petulant at best and condescending to the QM who took the time to write this all up and the questers partaking in this quest.
1) Dismissing point as human modern day psych doesn't make much sense. Most sci fi utilizes the rubber forehead alien trope, where aliens are humanoid and operate on humanoid mindsets. This is present here too. By all indications, even our alien friends get traumatized, so the points made are not rednered irrelevant.
2) My first complaint was about disagreeing whether the value-cost ratio was worth it, not because I don't understand, but because I disagree. I mentioned a lot of those hidden bonusses, so assuming I didn't know about them is rather condescending.
3) Dismissing something as a spiel about something is not exactly constructive language. If you're going to claim that you're making a constructive argument, do so.
4) The actual meat of the argument : A comparison between the BUDS course and this. The BUDS training course and this are completely different, so I don't see where you get the similarity from. The BUDS training course focusses on a series of skills it attempts to impart through dedicated training sessions based on a concrate goal. The playground just mimics warfare.
5) It's an option which has been chosen 3 times sicne the quest started. It's mostly languished in obscurity, and you're grossly overestimating it's importance, and reacting with moral indignation.
Look we get it, you're hung up on issues that are not fully explained in writing. The Playground is to simulate the Terra Terminus without the very real consequences that exist there. It's to simulate a fight against the Light of Ruin-tier opponents, who CAN slaughter you instantly en masse. If that still doesn't work for you then there is always the option to make an omake to see if that will steer things in a different path. However your statements on this particular subject so far are very antagonizing with literally no constructive proposal to what it should be changed to.
My recommendation and purely a rec: Make an Omake or if the Playground its mechanic/outcomes are an absolute dealbreaker for you, then stop voting for it, stop reading the quest or take a breather.
With my two cents shared I'm going back to writing my own omakes that had been collecting dust in hopes of getting something out before the next update.
P.S. The entire setting is fully of beings/cultures/people that are "broken" from trauma. From Humanity, to EVE, to the Protheans, to Dustlings and Covenant. Hell this should be obvious from the very first page that it was going to be trauma inducing (let's not even get into literature like the WH40k verse where training for Space Marines is a 99% failure rate on deathworlds where you have to go off your own instincts and what ever training you got till you became an adolescent to survive).
1) Nope, not my point at all. I know what the Playground is, I disagree with the idea that this approach is usefull.
2) Utilizing an omake to criticize something sounds like a really rude and passive agressive way to doing it, so I won't.
3) Warhammer 40k is called grimderp for a reason. It's not supposed to be sensible.
Edit:
Gimme a moment, I forgot to include my point.
In the end, the goal of the playground is to create better soldiers. It does this currently via a straightforward replication of a horrific battlefield, turned up to 11. It's a 1 year of constant fighting without any external support, and with a managing AI which is inventing new stuff to get you.
This way of training relies on the assumption that it's stress and suffering of combat that is essential to gaining skill. Specifically, that the more horrific you make it, the better it works. That's why you get a 12 month course where 1/3 of the people are eliminated in the first few seconds.
Now, life fire simulation in something like the Playground can be usefull, but it needs to be actively used to teach. As currently described, the main interesting thing and learning opportunities of the Playground are ignored. When killing a killbot, the interesting thing is not that you killed the killbot, but how and why you killed the killbot. But the system ignores those opportunities. People who fail to kill the killbot are washed out. People who are lucky to have avoided the killbot haven't learned a thing, and the people who did kill the killbot already know how.
Now, it makes sense for EVE to have developped this. Train warfare by doing warfare is a very simple solution. It's naive in assuming that this is the best approach however, so we shouldn't defend it as such.
Edit:
This is a survival camp that effectively, emulates, enhances and gameifies the Dustling Deathworld home environment.
A system which did this is something I could support. The problem is that the current system doesn't quite do that.
If you look at all the previous examples you mention, they're all attempts to replicate real world conditions realistically without excessive risk. This is to ensure that people can actually fail and learn from it without dying.
The playground doesn't do that. It gives people 1 chance, and that's it. The people who learnt from the playground are not those who learnt not to make mistakes against, it's those who never made mistakes, and instead suffered through everything that the playground threw at people.
Edit 2: So, the playground doesn't work to teach reflexes, or coping with real battle conditions. It's like trying to teach people to function under life fire by firing at them once, and eliminating all those who didn't function. You didn't teach anyone anything, you just selected everyone who already knew.
