>Regarding preps: The vast majority cannot be maintained 24/7. They
>require a sacrifice (time, money, effort, and/or risk) to get, just
>like getting a better piece of equipment. Are you also for removing
>non-cosmetic benefits of equipment? Knowing where better equipment
>is (and being capable of getting the tougher items) also provides an
>advantage in PK. What about quest rewards? Many quests provide
>non-cosmetic advantages which can change PK.

The bad preps are the ones where your sacrifice is just time. These are the ones that reward grinding, people are given a benefit for doing something non productive and redundant. Hidden preps and things like spamming skills fall into this category. The immortal staff has come a long way in reducing these types of tradeoffs but they still exist. If an action isn't enjoyable and doesn't benefit the game you shouldn't reward it at all through game mechanics. Other tradeoffs like risk are much more acceptable. It all comes down to what you're trying to reward.

>The existence of these kinds of factors places a higher skill demand
>on the player-- it isn't just about typing the optimal commands
>during a relatively short engagement. The system accounts for
>exploration and area knowledge as well as strategic planning, rather
>than a narrow focus on tactical decisions. All of them matter, but
>the decision tree is much larger.

Exploration and area knowledge would still have benefits in the system even if you took out A/B/S preps. Players with this knowledge have more options for getting good equipment and can manuever a lot better in PK. If you took out some of the candies, less people might place an emphasis on this and the intrinsic value of doing it might go up.

The strategic planning and skill demand thing is also lessened when it's something like damage reduction that's going to be helpful regardless of who you are going to fight. Things like resist preps that are situational and won't help against everybody feel a lot more like actual strategy.

>Games exist with purely tactical conflict mechanisms (all characters
>enter combat more or less equal, and what commands you enter is the
>pure decider, beyond the RNG), but they tend to have shorter
>lifespans due to the limited decisions. Being "good" at CF takes a
>very long time, in part because it's a complex system where other
>players have a massive volume of collective experience. You can
>still learn new things here after playing for 2 or 4 or 8 years. A
>lot of games can't provide that experience.</i>

While I wouldn't advocate a purely tactical system, I'd suggest that a good return on adding fun to the game would be putting efforts into making the tactical system of CF more varied/complex and with more decision paths. People come up with very cool ideas, do as much as you can with the mechanics to allow people to bring these ideas into practice in the game.

It's much easier to eat that death when you see somebody did something more clever than you rather than they were (or even you think they were) prepped up the ass. That's because it's more fun to try and think up that stuff rather than find the obscure prep.