On 4, this just changes the question to spoofing the pedometer value rather than spoofing the location. Which makes it worse, because that’s much harder to detect.
Since this is an MMORPG, how so you prevent cheating? Since this works offline, what prevents someone from faking the steps count and reporting to the game that they totally made 50000 steps while the phone was offline for 24 hours?
I played Ark, got a random disease that apparently can only be healed with items from a high level area and didn’t go away on death. So my options were: play with the disease for the foreseeable future or restart from scratch and lose days of progress.
Yeah, my point boils down to “nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices”, but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.
I see lots of MMOs that become ran by the community on private servers after the developer stops supporting it. It’s crap when companies try to stop that, but the game being a live service isn’t a problem in itself.
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don’t remember any bullshit from the devs.
Or they don’t disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn’t happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that’s the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn’t prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it’s not an inherent property of it.
What’s wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO’s are a live service and many are good games (if MMO’s are your thing).