No, it's not that my 'feelings are hurt', it's that it's a poor game mechanic because again, it completely disrespects player agency and prevents the player from having any say about whether or not an infiltration succeeds in a game that is all about outmaneuvering the aliens on a strategic and tactical level. A mechanic that is about robbing the player of agency in a game predicated on it is a bad mechanic; full stop.
No it's not. It's only your opinion that it is. An opinion I happen to disagree. Dealing in absolutes like this is good for contained, full-control, full-information games like chess, or, speaking about Gollop, Chaos Reborn. Or games that are close to it, like Starcraft. In games that fall more on the simulationist side (see Dwarf Fortress, or any Grand Strategy game), the uncertainty factor should appear. Because in such games, you cannot ignore the meta level. You wish to, but I disagree with it. And the meta level is:
1. You cannot fully investigate Earth, and by extension the alien activities as a whole. The world is to be imagined as vast and complex, not a contained chess board. The simulation simulates only some aspects, because it cannot ever simulate everything.
2. The inability of XCom to revert Infiltration should be therefore seen not as game failing, but an element of simulation which conveys a message about the game's world. The message conveyed is, it's beyond XCom's power to do so. We can interpret is as: XCom neither is able to, or mandated to, wage war on defecting Earth countries.
I don't mind RNG rolls determining outcomes for small scale stuff, like individual shots on the tactical level, since it's possible to control and manage your overall risk and still come out ahead; the loss of agency here is not meaningful unless you're a bad player and you constantly rely on making a shot or two to uphold your tactical game. I _do_ mind it however, when it comes to completely irreversible, high impact nonsense like infiltration events.
You deny feeling an emotional impact, yet you use the word "nonsense". Nonsense implies illogicality, yet you deny illogicality by your argument - by stating that both random chance to hit with a weapon and a random chance of losing a country are both mechanics of the same ilk - "the loss of player's agency". A notion I agree with, except I'd prefer to call it "simulation uncertainty". Uncertainty, if it happens, can only be illogical from the metagame point of view - and I have explained how the metagame level logically explains Infiltration. Therefore, it is logical, which doesn't, of course, automatically make it fair. I have agreed it is unfair, but acceptably unfair. It is not, in my opinion, unfair enough to make the game unplayable.
We can of course argue if the game should be more simulationist or more contained. As XCom was balanced to cater to both crowds, it seems to sit somewhere in the middle... My XCom is more simulationist than contained, but everyone has the right to their own XCom. Your sentiment is as good as mine in that regard, with the exception the original game works the way I prefer, not the way you prefer. However I cannot agree with the notion that bad
contained game mechanics = bad game mechanics, since contained games are not the only kind of games.
