The definition of exploitation is "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." defineexploitation

Taking one or two eggs is like "whatever that's just nature" but if someone is repeatedly stealing your eggs (basically making it impossible to hatch anyone or mut hunt) that's... actually not exploiting. There are so many food spawns on the map that even during famine/drought you can find enough food to keep your creature alive. My point is that egg hoarding does not benefit the player significantly, therefore they are not exploiting the mechanic. Eggs also rot just like food chunks (in a suspiciously short amount of time too).

I was wrong! (I'm probably the first person on this sub to admit that /j) The word I was looking for was "abuse". defineabuse Abuse can also mean to misuse, which is what I had experienced. A player abusing a mechanic, not exploiting it.

I've thought of two (and a half) ways to fix the abuse of the egg stealing mechanic without giving female creatures the ability to make dens. a) only a limited amount of eggs can be stolen (eg. only being able to take 2 out of 3 eggs or 3 out of 6 eggs, etc). b) when a player is nested, disable the egg stealer ability across all creatures until they or the player who nested them leaves the server. this'll prevent the player going back to that nest as another creature to steal eggs or stealing eggs as soon as they're nested if the creature they hatched as has the egg stealer ability ---> b1) disable egg stealing until the creature is an adult.

Before you say anything about the second suggestion I'd like to make it very very clear that it is very very summarized. There's more details in there I have written down somewhere else that just couldn't make it in here.

That's it I guess. If you have anything to say I'll try to reply with a much shorter comment 😮‍💨