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Is this it?

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Ari Lazarus:

--- Quote from: Solar on February 19, 2010, 07:19:17 pm ---We can rig chances to mirror timeouts, we can make people gatherer 10 times more and only have a 10% success rate. Make it depend on skills so new characters are at an even worse disadvantage, or any number of things to mirror the function of the simple timeout.
--- End quote ---

Hey, you're in control of the numbers. I didn't put any hard and fast rules about how arbitrary those numbers can be so why make it sound so terribad? I'm saying: make it more active and involving. I'm not saying: screw the newbie.


--- Quote ---Basically its taking the free time afforded by a timeout and filling it with mindless extra work. People could already be out there running about doing whatever they liked, but they choose to sit and stare at a timeout.
--- End quote ---

The problem with timeouts stems from the fact that it impedes players who want to DO something, WHEN they want to do it. I'm fairly sure a ton of grief is over this fact.

Without cooldowns, a player can decide to harvest fibres, then fine tune his mining so he can make some armor. He then makes this armor and notices he has enough left over materials to make a pistol. If at any point he fails in doing any of those steps he can spend more time doing it in the hopes it turns out better, or he can stop it and do something else immediately.

With cooldowns, he has to spend extra time waiting for his gathering timeout from fibres to expire so he can over-mine and get ore he didn't intend to get. After making the armour he then spends more time waiting before he can make that pistol. During the 5 minute gathering timeouts you might say he could go for a random encounter or a nearby quest to fill the gap, but it underlines the problem: the player does NOT want to go for a random encounter, or do a quest. He wants to gather his materials and feel all crafter-like by making shit. He does not want to do a circuit of mine - random encounter - mine - quest - create armour - mine - random encounter - create pistol. And yet this is precisely what cooldowns are encouraging people to do, in order to be 'efficient'. That, or alting.

Having no cooldowns, essentially, allows the player to do what he wants, when he wants. The details involved in ensuring that the economy doesn't tank is in the difficulty of getting actual product out of the cycle, regardless of alts or available materials.


--- Quote ---Would make players have to talk to two NPC's on opposite ends of the WM for a more "active" crafting too, then we could remove timeouts altogether.
--- End quote ---

Alternatively, instead of productive conversation, we could disregard 'feedback' from our 'testers' and instead use sarcasm to enforce our own views of the game.

crunchtag:

--- Quote from: Solar on February 19, 2010, 05:35:16 pm ---As for crafting, it was never meant to be a "big" gameplay element, its just one of the easiest to do game play elements to get working.

--- End quote ---
Between how often issues like this are brought up and the frequency of dev statements along the lines of "there's too much high-end stuff in the game", I'd have to say it's broken.

BRING ON THE DIFFICULT STUFF! OH YEAH!
And if it's not a big element, how come it's one of the largest sources of XP?

Badger:

--- Quote from: Ari Lazarus on February 19, 2010, 08:27:46 pm ---Alternatively, instead of productive conversation, we could disregard 'feedback' from our 'testers' and instead use sarcasm to enforce our own views of the game.

--- End quote ---

Ooh! That one.

Solar:

--- Quote ---Alternatively, instead of productive conversation, we could disregard 'feedback' from our 'testers' and instead use sarcasm to enforce our own views of the game.
--- End quote ---

An absurd example which demonstrates why what you're suggesting would be just a dressed up version of what we have now. Economy needs to be controlled, to do this there needs to be restrictions and all these restrictions will eventually have to amount to the same speed as each other.

As I'd already said this in the thread that has been linked to I thought a stronger example would be in order.

You can leave people's time free, or you can fill it up with pointless tasks - crafting will be at the same rate regardless. I'm sure some people have realized you can actually play the game whilst timeouts are going, so I'm not too keen on inserting dressing to actively waste peoples time for these people.

shael:
I am not sure you are very in control of the economy. You are just slowing it down, to delay the bad effects.
But in the end it's the time that the players have at their disposal that control the economy.

But I don't have any magical solution either... Even putting a limit to the number of items (X armors, Yguns...) that one can craft per day, could be easily turned by using an alt...

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