I still don't get the notion of how giving people MORE firepower to deal with grossly overpowered odds is the solution to the problem, and the outright dismissal of the implication that maybe, just maybe, people should focus less on 'how good can I kill stuff' in campaign designed by its nature to punish that kind of mentality in the first place, and subsequently that the mobs would thus be reduced from their overpowered status in turn, thus negating the requirement for aforementioned firepower.
This is like saying the optimal solution to a Call of Cthulhu campaign is to give everyone rocket launchers and orbital nuke remotes because players would prefer to play action hack-slash gameplay in a setting designed to be investigative-roleplay, rather than, say, just play a setting that's designed around action hack-slash and rocket launchers.
And before anyone criticizes this as accusing people of 'doing it wrong'.. yes, I am accusing certain people of 'doing it wrong'. That does not, however, mean, that they cannot be shown how to do it right, if simply by setting them aside and explaining it to them. You don't bring the Chance cards from Monopoly to a Magic the Gathering session, expecting everything to be amended and moved around just because somehow you decided it was totally relevant to the game design to play 'Get out of Jail Free' against a Phyrexian Negator, do you? No, you sit the player aside and tell them 'this is how we play Magic'. So then why do you justify bringing gaming ideals from an action-based setting like, I dunno, Warhammer, let's say, to the clearly more cerebral Ravenloft one. Why Warhammer? Well, because where else will you find a better example of a racism-and-superstition driven meatgrinder RPG setting than that?
And just 'cause I know it's gonna come up, yes, combat is a part of just about every tabletop RPG, and cRPG. Nobody denies this. However, there's such a thing as priorities and focus. See:
The Tomb of Horrors. This is something clearly not designed for the hack-and-slash focused gamer of DnD. It even friggin' says so in the campaign book. And this was a campaign designed by friggin' Gygax, whose campaigns were legendary for murdering the crap out of ill-prepared players, even when action-based.
I just don't get why everyone is fixated on getting more and more power and more and more action-oriented traits, gear, and facets in a setting designed to function without any of that stuff, then justifying it with a handwavey 'it's leveling the playing field', when it was clearly the players who borked the playing field in the first place by refusing to adhere to the setting. It'd be like someone shoving a Jedi into a LOTR campaign, and rather than booting the player, you remodel the entire campaign to make Jedi canon. And now we have Sauron as a Force ghost, Force Choking the shit out of everyone whilst wielding a One Ring-styled lightsaber. Which is what it feels like we're heading towards on a steady basis.
Heck, between the way that the server now feels like a High Magic hack-and-slash RP server (as opposed to the Ravenloft setting being Low Magic, roleplay/intelligence RP), and with people flinging spells left and right without anyone saying a thing about it, the setting is already so compromised that I might as well roll up a character who's from the 21st Century who fell through a gap in time, and then went through the mists. It's about as acceptable as everything else is thusfar.
EDIT: Bleh.. I apologize, since I'm grumping, but every time I see the justification for raising the magic rank and power on the server even more, yet again, it just grates my nerves like sandpaper. I stand by my point, regardless, grump-induced as it may be, because I do feel there are valid points in what I say.