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Total Members Voted: 23

[Nice_Boat]

People have been complaining about crafting timeouts, gathering cooldowns and the game being inaccessible for newbies and laborous for advanced players for ages. Here's a solution I suggested in the mutie nerf discussion (it's mostly copypasta so feel free to delete the old post, as Surf Solar and I think it probably deserves its own thread):

Imagine if you were able to farm mediocre stuff (normal miniguns, ammo, LSWs, lasers) from caravans like it was before the wipe while having the new crafting in place for starting and top-tier equipment. Wouldn't that make everyone happy?

The idea in general is to get all the people who want to PvP some basic stuff to do so (shotguns sadly won't do) without spending half of the day crafting while keeping pure powerplayers in a position of slight advantage. It worked really well before the wipe when CA was just painful to get - most people were running around with metal armor mk2 and generally good guns, there was a lot of action and fun to be had and the real hardcore ones that'd spend half a day looking for plasma rifles or CAs would be way better off but still very much inside of reach of more humble fighters. Since crafting CAs and the best weapons is almost just as painful as it used to be to hunt for them, it'd be pretty much the same but with an additional option to craft instead of treasure hunting. That'd make the 2238 society divide somewhat naturally into 4 layers:
- newbies/bluesuits - nuff said. They never really get any stuff until they learn to play. If they do, they lose it in a matter of minutes.
- beginners - pistols, jackets, shotguns... you've all seen it, you all know it. Beginner crafters and so on, with no real game knowledge and/or companions to go farming with.
- the middle ground - they have their gangs, they farm stuff, they get the "standard issue" generic BG/EW/SG from caravans, wear leather or metal armors, can PvP without risking to lose very important stuff in a matter of seconds
- top-tier players - they want best gear, they craft it. They don't die that much anyway, and even if they do they don't get eliminated for long hours after a skirmish gone wrong.

What it does, aside from giving everyone more fun and removing the GRIND FUCKING EVERYTHING phenomenon is making PvP accessible for everyone with mediocre knowledge of the game and up. Currently there's a sharp barier between people who know how to PvP and people who don't and there's no real means of breaching the gap. Now if some of the required stuff (it's just weapons and ammo anyway) is farmable, they can learn without being hurt too much. That's a good thing. They won't start wearing best stuff until they're sure they can manage without losing it.

This of course would make NPC shops easy dumping grounds. So just make farmed weapons have a visible tag and make them dirt cheap. I mean "this laser was made in the NCR, I want no trouble sir" kind of thing. Or make the shops stop buying after, say, 5 duplicates of a given weapon are in stock (weapons only, what kind of a nutjob would sell ammo anyway?) so that they don't get flooded with farmed stuff. It'd do good for having a nice selection of common guns if some crazy loner wanted to buy them too. Another problem would be the fact that miniguns, lasguns and other mid-tier weapons wouldn't be crafted anymore. A possible solution would be to make farmable caravan encounters about 2 times bigger or stronger so that they're doable only for organized groups. That way we would have both crafting and farming (and perhaps some trade or charity) going on.

A simple solution - and the problems most people have with this game are gone... voilla 2238 is awesome once again. I mean... why wouldn't you want to do that?

[blahblah]

I'm afraid devs may not like this...
The whole 'economy' thing was introduced so that items can appear at a steady pace. If you see a Sniper Rifle, then you know X time was spent on making it. With items farmable from caravans, a Sniper Rifle can appear for the same organized group once every 30 minutes, say. So in the end, a farmed Sniper is easier to get and devs wanted to stop that. That's why encounters have "money pools" and stuff appears only once every X minutes in a given area. And because many players camp on good spots, there's rarely anything worthwhile left there.

So from what I understood of changelogs, caravans are still like they were before when it comes to items, but they have been limited to 1 every X minutes, thus they are equally hard to find as it is hard to simply craft the weapon.

[Nice_Boat]

...

Yeah, I do realise that the devs may dislike it because it'd be a bit like admitting that their idea of "player-driven economy" (hey, farming is player driven too, it's just faster!) failed. And of course by "allowing to farm" I mean removing the caravan pools, for reasons stated above. And honestly, I don't even have to try hard to prove my point here. It's all evident. How many people are using autoclickers to get the stuff they need right now? The situation really is bad when you seriously start wondering if it's over a half of the playerbase or something closer to 2/3. How many people are actually playing (as in enjoying) the game when working for their ammo, armors and weapons? 1 out of a 100? Is there anyone thrilled by the need to alt-tab every 10 minutes to click the button? Is anyone really holding his or her breath waiting for some complications of the crafting procedure (cause that's what "making it more engaging" means, folks) that are going to make it even more mundane and unbearable? How many people are actually AFRAID of playing the fun parts of the game because they could lose their precious items? Something's wrong when the leader of one of the largest PvP factions admits it's a problem.

People don't want to do stuff like that. They want to interact with each other whether by hunting together, fighting against each other or roleplaying. Even crafters probably dislike the procedure of gathering and waiting for the cooldowns to stop and really enjoy only the final effect of their hard work (ie. fresh stuff on their shelves) instead.

And let's face it - farming for guns and ammo is fun. It may not be the most realistic thing in the gaming world, but it's a semi-believable way of getting your basic stuff in an efficient manner that offers some sense of progression and achievement. When you kill a caravan, you're happy cause you've won the battle as evidenced by dead bodies lying around you. When you hit that final mineral pile and go crafting those precious bullets you're just tired and amazed you've been actually doing this crap for an hour or so. Both actions are essentially repetitive and ammount to a few clicks here and there, but they are perceived in a completely different way. I really don't know why, maybe it's something having to do with people enjoying blood splattering their screens or maybe it's just the fact that fights require your attention cause even in repetitive engagements shit does indeed happen.

Either way, there are 2 ways of solving this issue - either continuing to cheat ourselves that bumping a virtual hammer against a virtual rock can somehow magically become fun, or admitting that it's bullshit and should be an occasional activity performed mostly by people who just got in and didn't tire of it yet and people who want something a bit stronger than everyone else.

[Drakonis]

Ah same old sh*t, diffrent day.

I guess I have to agree with both of you.
- Bumping virtual hammer is boring and so on
- Changes were made to increase realism and to introduce new economy as blahblah said

Main purpose of this thread is to bring PvP for medicore and up back. right?

Well making items farmable like it was before wipe is a bad idea in my oppinion(just like blahblah said- same argumentation)... so we have to find a way around.

The main problem is that people loose their crafted stuff(hours) in matter of minutes.. once again I could suggest the most hated suggestion ever, haha.


Maybe making %(+-LUCK) chance to drop your weapon(1st slot only) and armor if you did not attack anyone first in past 15 minutes?- of course items should be unrepairable after x repairs(just as it is now= but more harsh and your weapon should eventually become unuseable even if your repair is 300%). This could work- would reduce fear of loosing their precious items for medicores- but it will work only if people will still DO have to change their weapons and armors due to detoriations and damages. OH and of course RED(full drop) MAPS if this idea would kick in. This suggestion was really hated before but think about it- it could work now with the new economy...

[Nice_Boat]

Well making items farmable like it was before wipe is a bad idea in my oppinion(just like blahblah said- same argumentation)... so we have to find a way around.

What argument? That there's more variation involved in farming? Take the median than, you could get a statistically significant sample from a single day of play. Or maybe that farming's faster? That's the point, mid tier stuff should be fast to get but not really useful outside of the area of mediocricity in PvP.

You're suggesting some funny super-dangerous high-tension red full-drop zones in a thread that's all about letting more people play with less stress in the areas that would be first marked as such. Effectively, you're just trying to ninja your way in here with an idea that's going to cater only to carebears getting shot in random places with their best gear on (because it essentialy comes down to "no loot unless I allow it or I'm shit out of luck") which wouldn't affect the problem of lack of action and overemphasizing bullshit repetitive tasks in any way.

Why wouldn't it affect those problems? Let's see. You enter a red zone (ie. a PvP zone where PvP is actually happening and not some random encounter that's going to get omitted by other players 99,9% of the times) - you drop everything. Nothing changes. People still fear PvP. Actually they fear it even more because you're saying repair should become a chore with time so the value of a single working piece of equipment increases.
You can't farm ammo? Well than, you have to craft to shoot. Dang, more boring shit to do if you want to participate in anything aside from goofing around.
Can't farm basic a weapon once you're capable of PvPing as a player? Oh wait, it's crafting time again.

Since we've already established that your idea has nothing to do with mine (and in fact both could just as well coexist without interfering with each other because they're about different aspects of the game), please start your own thread and stop interfering with mine. This is too serious of an issue to have the discussion lose focus.


But hey, you did say something valid after all:

Ah same old sh*t, diffrent day.

... yeah, it's a different day and nobody's so enthusiastic about "realism", "important time sinks" and "new awesome crafter economy" anymore. It's a good day to remind all those guys how much better it all used to be and how much more time were they actually spending playing instead of waiting to play. A good day to decide to stick to what works and forget about utopian theorycrafting. I'll say it again. Spending "realistic" ammounts of time crafting is bullshit. If my gamemaster in a pen and paper game told me to take an hour to describe in detail how I make each of my grenades and then resolved the combat sequence in 5 minutes I'd simply tell him to fuck off and seek a better one. It'd be naive to think that the reception of this crafting system is any different - people are doing everything they can, including cheating, to avoid wasting their time like that. Dunno about the devs, but I can't really blame them for that.

[kusoksna]

Please don't forget that it is wasteland. Obtaining weapons should be available at least next ways:
 - killing: kill PC, or NPC and get his stuff (working fine against PC, but not against NPC)
 - stealing: just steal what you need (don't work against NPC at low levels)
 - trading: work good from my point of view.
 - crafting: very good, i think  timeouts for simple and medium items should be reduced, and for top items increased

I think most people here hates grinding, but as it was said, there are still people who like it, and they shouldn't be forget.

[avv]

Yes it is obvious that crafting is boring. But scavenging materials would be alright feature if it had more interactivity with it. I'd love to carefully sneak among ruined buildings, looking for some loot and watching out for robbers, players or npc. Right now it's just so that you go whack a stonepile and run to a workbench.

[Sius]

Since this topic pretty much covers gathering resources/crafting I will try to bring up and old idea of mine. Even tho it was suggested pre-wipe during different circumstances it still can be used. There is some feedback on it at old forums but I would like to know whats yours (anyone who is reading this) opinion on it.

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=727254&highlight=#727254

Since it is too many letters to read here is the short version:
Its no problem to find resources now, its problem to harvest them. Imho its should be vice versa and we should have truly hard times finding materials but when we do there are no restrictions in taking them and crafting from them.

[blahblah]

Sius, Solar explained many times that replacing timeouts with something else requiring player attention will never happen.
1) Dig rocks 2) Do whatever you want for 6 minutes 3) Dig rocks

For devs 2) is very important because it allows you to play while gathering. If 2) is replaced by walking around worldmap for 6 minutes, then players will be even worse off.

And honestly, I don't even have to try hard to prove my point here. It's all evident. How many people are using autoclickers to get the stuff they need right now? The situation really is bad when you seriously start wondering if it's over a half of the playerbase or something closer to 2/3.

I'd say 100%, but only of very high-level players. I never even considered using autoclicker, so for me maybe 5% of normal people cheat.

How many people are actually playing (as in enjoying) the game when working for their ammo, armors and weapons? 1 out of a 100? Is there anyone thrilled by the need to alt-tab every 10 minutes to click the button? Is anyone really holding his or her breath waiting for some complications of the crafting procedure (cause that's what "making it more engaging" means, folks) that are going to make it even more mundane and unbearable? How many people are actually AFRAID of playing the fun parts of the game because they could lose their precious items? Something's wrong when the leader of one of the largest PvP factions admits it's a problem.

Your point of view is from a big PvP faction where the only source of fun is shooting others. Here's how I see it:
I recently started playing again and have a low-level character:
Gathering materials is time-consuming, but easy. Crafting is very fun thanks to the 60 minute total cooldown.
After I can craft gunpowder, I simply make myself a shotgun and 100 shells. The whole process takes 20 minutes during which I shot some more scorpions and gained a bit of cash shovelling shit in Hub.
Then I go look for brahmin to make a tent. Six minutes pass quickly and I go dig some more minerals for ammo and make them into gunpowder. 4 minutes are left after I did that, I find brahmin, kill them, and timeout is already finished after I have 3 skins. So I get junk, go south for minerals, and can craft another 100 ammo with my newly-made metal parts.

The only time when I alt-tab is when gathering minerals to sell in NCR. Game is engaging, allows me to do whatever I want while crafting, and I get experience faster.
As for being afraid of playing, those people didn't play EvE and never learned an important lesson: "Never use items that you can't easily replace."

People don't want to do stuff like that. They want to interact with each other whether by hunting together, fighting against each other or roleplaying. Even crafters probably dislike the procedure of gathering and waiting for the cooldowns to stop and really enjoy only the final effect of their hard work (ie. fresh stuff on their shelves) instead.

Enjoying final product is shooting stuff. Not leaving it on shelves. Hunting together and roleplaying while the six minutes passes is easy.

And let's face it - farming for guns and ammo is fun. It may not be the most realistic thing in the gaming world, but it's a semi-believable way of getting your basic stuff in an efficient manner that offers some sense of progression and achievement. When you kill a caravan, you're happy cause you've won the battle as evidenced by dead bodies lying around you. When you hit that final mineral pile and go crafting those precious bullets you're just tired and amazed you've been actually doing this crap for an hour or so. Both actions are essentially repetitive and ammount to a few clicks here and there, but they are perceived in a completely different way. I really don't know why, maybe it's something having to do with people enjoying blood splattering their screens or maybe it's just the fact that fights require your attention cause even in repetitive engagements shit does indeed happen.

You are seeing things only from a PvP perspective where nothing else than best stuff counts. For an organized group killing caravans is indeed possible and probably fun. And it is still possible. It's only that the equipment they carry is limited to how much "resources" a square has. Now that I think about it, patrols and caravans are quite frequent in the south already. One out of three encounters is a patrol. One in ten a caravan.

You just need to have the correct mindset for crafting right now. It's not a boring, repetitive, one-click action but a quick, simple, one-click action after which you can continue what you were doing in two seconds.
If mineral and ore weight were halved, I'm sure more people would decide to harvest on the go, and not just stand still in one place because having fighting gear and minerals overburdens them.

Either way, there are 2 ways of solving this issue - either continuing to cheat ourselves that bumping a virtual hammer against a virtual rock can somehow magically become fun, or admitting that it's bullshit and should be an occasional activity performed mostly by people who just got in and didn't tire of it yet and people who want something a bit stronger than everyone else.

And you think factions like yours will be perfectly happy having only the mediocre stuff?
I think your other suggestion about un-nerfing everything fixes this problem better. If an SMG was capable of doing enough damage to be worrying in PvP, then people would craft those, as they require maybe 20 minutes in total, during which people can do other stuff. And if somebody is not a crafter, they can still gang-rape caravans with their 18 slaves.

[Killy]

Gathering materials is time-consuming, but easy. Crafting is very fun thanks to the 60 minute total cooldown.
After I can craft gunpowder, I simply make myself a shotgun and 100 shells. The whole process takes 20 minutes during which I shot some more scorpions and gained a bit of cash shovelling shit in Hub. !!!<- LOLZ
Then I go look for brahmin to make a tent. Six minutes pass quickly and I go dig some more minerals for ammo and make them into gunpowder. 4 minutes are left after I did that, I find brahmin, kill them, and timeout is already finished after I have 3 skins. So I get junk, go south for minerals, and can craft another 100 ammo with my newly-made metal parts.

The only time when I alt-tab is when gathering minerals to sell in NCR. Game is engaging, allows me to do whatever I want while crafting, and I get experience faster.
As for being afraid of playing, those people didn't play EvE and never learned an important lesson: "Never use items that you can't easily replace."

thank u, now i understand people playing minesweeper and freecells

[Sius]

blahblah read the entire suggestion I linked. Cooldown is something I would expect in browser game not in MMO RPG that takes place in Fallout universum. I've suggested that farming resources would be done somehow like this:
You get on world map where you would enter location but instead of tiny little map that we have now you will get into huge map (lets say 3x bigger than NCR). In such map resources would be hidden to you, revealing only when they get into your field of view. These maps could be pretty much anything from flat deserts up to abandoned gas stations/villages and so on and they would have their own "life". Meaning that you can engage geckos at one side of such map but on the other rats and spore plants would be fighting. Some NPCs like geckos could be simply crossing map from one edge to another, but rats would have nests there etc. Also there is great opportunity for quests in large maps rather then in "one screen" big encounters.

Anyway even if farming would not change from cooldowns to searching I would love to see those huge maps implemented because exploration is just hell of an excitement and hunters/scavengers would have their playground.

[Drakonis]

What argument? That there's more variation involved in farming? Take the median than, you could get a statistically significant sample from a single day of play. Or maybe that farming's faster? That's the point, mid tier stuff should be fast to get but not really useful outside of the area of mediocricity in PvP.

You're suggesting some funny super-dangerous high-tension red full-drop zones in a thread that's all about letting more people play with less stress in the areas that would be first marked as such. Effectively, you're just trying to ninja your way in here with an idea that's going to cater only to carebears getting shot in random places with their best gear on (because it essentialy comes down to "no loot unless I allow it or I'm shit out of luck") which wouldn't affect the problem of lack of action and overemphasizing bullshit repetitive tasks in any way.

Why wouldn't it affect those problems? Let's see. You enter a red zone (ie. a PvP zone where PvP is actually happening and not some random encounter that's going to get omitted by other players 99,9% of the times) - you drop everything. Nothing changes. People still fear PvP. Actually they fear it even more because you're saying repair should become a chore with time so the value of a single working piece of equipment increases.
You can't farm ammo? Well than, you have to craft to shoot. Dang, more boring shit to do if you want to participate in anything aside from goofing around.
Can't farm basic a weapon once you're capable of PvPing as a player? Oh wait, it's crafting time again.

Since we've already established that your idea has nothing to do with mine (and in fact both could just as well coexist without interfering with each other because they're about different aspects of the game), please start your own thread and stop interfering with mine. This is too serious of an issue to have the discussion lose focus.


But hey, you did say something valid after all:

... yeah, it's a different day and nobody's so enthusiastic about "realism", "important time sinks" and "new awesome crafter economy" anymore. It's a good day to remind all those guys how much better it all used to be and how much more time were they actually spending playing instead of waiting to play. A good day to decide to stick to what works and forget about utopian theorycrafting. I'll say it again. Spending "realistic" ammounts of time crafting is bullshit. If my gamemaster in a pen and paper game told me to take an hour to describe in detail how I make each of my grenades and then resolved the combat sequence in 5 minutes I'd simply tell him to fuck off and seek a better one. It'd be naive to think that the reception of this crafting system is any different - people are doing everything they can, including cheating, to avoid wasting their time like that. Dunno about the devs, but I can't really blame them for that.

Oh dear.. I didn't say "remember to make RED MAPS and make sure they are random encounters"... I was rather thinking about making it safer ptetty much everywhere, especially while roleplaying/crafting/hanging out with friends(i said safer because you still get to keep only 1 or 2 items if you are lucky, all meds, ammo, tools and other inventory items would drop. It's just what i've read from your first post is: People loose precious stuff in matter of seconds(not pro gangers etc) and only 'precious' stuff is suitable for PvP, thus No PvP for medicore players as they rightly fear of loosing the items. Your solution is to make items suitable for PvP easy replaceable, right(just as it was pre-wipe). I say that going back to what we have will lead to old problems or at least some of them but think about it- if your goal is to make medium stuff easy replaceable then PARTIAL% drop chance would do exactly the same. If lets say we have like 20%(non pk)-40%(pk) chance to loose your weapon this will encourage 'carebears' to maybe at least... try? I mean crafting takes a lot of efford, but the real problem here is loosing this efford in few seconds to organized groups that dominate whole game(you)- thats why medicore don't 'engage' into PvP(or do they).

/ok ill shut up now, not my idea thread, just thinking out loud. Keep the discussion goin- quite fun to read- lot's of interesting views :]

[avv]

blahblah read the entire suggestion I linked. Cooldown is something I would expect in browser game not in MMO RPG that takes place in Fallout universum. I've suggested that farming resources would be done somehow like this:
You get on world map where you would enter location but instead of tiny little map that we have now you will get into huge map (lets say 3x bigger than NCR). In such map resources would be hidden to you, revealing only when they get into your field of view. These maps could be pretty much anything from flat deserts up to abandoned gas stations/villages and so on and they would have their own "life". Meaning that you can engage geckos at one side of such map but on the other rats and spore plants would be fighting. Some NPCs like geckos could be simply crossing map from one edge to another, but rats would have nests there etc. Also there is great opportunity for quests in large maps rather then in "one screen" big encounters.

This would be the best method of gathering I can think of. Nothing can compare on the excitement that's provided by riches and danger.