That really is the most ridiculous thing Ive heard, for people in that position there is one very simple and very obvious question they should ask themselves before starting the game. Do i wish to trade the time that the saving will take in order to get shiny achievements or am i unwilling and therefore should play without the ironman auto save and not get the achievements. Answer the question and you've sorted out the problem.
If the point of the thread is to complain about the additional time added for pursuing achievements absent any true utility from the downtime added, then it is more ridiculous to ignore that point than anything I've said in this thread to this point.
These people you are talking about need to consider whether they should be playing the game in a setting that requires monthly auto saves to try and cut down on cheating the achievements.
Saying something non-sequitur to the post you're quoting is the opposite of a strong argument.
OP's complaint is that the ironman save spam requirement is useless and time-consuming. Both have merit:
1. Time consuming: Yes, this one has been shown easily enough, I gave rough math that under-represents save time lost above.
2. Useless: This is more debatable, but a strong case for monthly autosaving being useless can be made. Ostensibly, the purpose of it is to prevent "cheating" to get the achievements. However, any number of methods can be applied to get the achievements in spite of that limitation; SAM, save-edits, end-process save scumming (ironman actually makes this less tedious ironically, since normally a player doesn't save spam and have a convenient 1 month to go back.) are all available to anybody who wants to cheat the achievements, and these are trivially done even by kids that wish to cheat.
But what if you don't wish to cheat? If that's the case, the utility between monthly and yearly autosaves is virtually nil; simply blocking the console and in-game loading previous saves would accomplish the entirety of what ironman actually provides today. However, with yearly or less frequent autosaves, it would accomplish it with hours less time spent per full playthrough.
So, the OP points this out, that forcing monthly autosaves adds no significant utility from an anti-cheat or game legitimacy perspective but has a large time cost, and you're trying to call this argument out as ridiculous? The only ridiculous thing here is that the OP's assertion is somehow hard for people to grasp, and people arguing in favor of the current mechanic routinely ignore the arguments made against it and quickly resort to ad hominems.
If you're suggesting OP should just play with ironman-style settings, use self-discipline, and then SAM himself the achievements, then I and even a developer would agree with you. However, it's still valid to point out that forcing monthly saves in ironman doesn't add anything of value that I've seen anyone present and has a large time cost. Even if you set it to yearly or even every 5 years, the only way you could "cheat" would be to deliberately end process, which you can do right now at either the month cutoff or interrupting the cloud sync to go back to pre-sync status.
I'd rather the game flow more smoothly for honest players than have it be *slightly* harder, but still pathetically easy, to cheat for dishonest players.
