Thoughts on exprience and some other things.

Old C&I threads.

Thoughts on exprience and some other things.

Postby Öx » Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:06 pm

I wrote this as a reply to the steelmaking dev post, but it turned into a general ideas post so I am putting it here.

I definitely agree that skills are gained too fast. I filled out the entire skill tree except archery, trespassing, theft, murder, and (I think) yeomanry in around two days of not-very-intense playing.

Lots of off-the-top-of-my-head thinking follows. No theme. These are meant to address issues I see with the game.
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Steelmaking: as it stands, people have to log in every 10 or 11 hours, not every 12 hours. This is because of (a) the time to refuel the crucibles and (b) IRL randomness in when they are able to log in. Suggest bumping the timeout to reflect this.

(I have the same complaint about on-demand movie rental. They give you 24 hours to view the movie. Well, what if I only have time to watch half the movie one evening. I want to finish the movie the same time next evening. But it just timed out. If they gave 36 or even 30 hours I would rent a lot more movies.)
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Eating up experience:

Suggest splitting skills up more just to make the skill tree deeper and use up more exp. Baking could enable just bread making; pastry chef then would enable the other baked goods.

Suggest all skills should require much more exp to buy. Possibly suggest splitting exp up into per-skill exp or per-category exp. I'm not sure of the ramifications of that.

Suggest "mastering" a skill by buying it twice or more, at increased cost. This could give better quality of resulting goods or increase quantity of resources gathered, or make higher-level recipes available, or just make jobs faster. (Larger containers, maybe. Like 25 branches for a 2x5 wicker basket at level 2; 100 branches for a 2x8 basket at level 3 or 4.)

However, suggest having ways for lowbies to make themselves useful to their community. A thought on this: work gangs. Parties are already in the game; maybe players with a skillset can share their skills with players without skills? So someone with farming could hook up with three or four people without and do some harvesting. Or an apprenticeship system that gives better exp in a skill as long as you're hooked up with a master. I think something along these lines would greatly increase "social cohesiveness" and sense of community. (I'm at the SSE bay12 outpost, yet haven't done much for it; I don't really feel like I'm part of something greater.)

Suggest ways to grind for exp without making baskets. (I do know about the 9 of 10 materials then destroy trick, but a lot of new players sure don't.) Teapots are good for this, I suppose. Dreamcatchers are good exp if you don't add the yarn.

Suggest: consider making some skills not available at all until a slider has been pushed to one side or the other. Like farm skills requiring nature or life; metalworking requiring industry. Murder requiring death, maybe.
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Suggest empty containers be destroyable. Hard to do without enabling griefing. Maybe only the maker can destroy them? Maybe anyone can but the maker can set a flag saying not destroyable?
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I know you didn't like the idea of flying everybody's name over their avatar. But we need better identification. Suggest flying the name of known players. Or kin. Memory requirements may make this not possible; naive implementation requires a (number of players)[sup]2[/sup] boolean matrix.

Definitely need a way to ID or at least flag suspected thieves or suspected griefers, who will not be kin and may not be known. The SSE bay12 outpost already has/had a griefer who steals and cuts down nearby trees. (Why do people do this? Why?)

It occurs to me that theft might be possible without real penalties by making a secondary character to do the theft, take the penalty hit, and drop the stolen items where the main character could pick them up. If so, this needs addressed.
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Again suggest click-and-hold to walk. I intend to explore making an AutoHotkey for walking; in an ideal world I would not have to. Note that macroing walking will likely consume more server resources than a decently implemented in-program solution.
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Suggest: lots more server checkpointing so that crashes & rollbacks are less costly on the players.

Suggest: attempt to save the server state on crash; attempt to restore it once. If it doesn't restore or the server crashes again within like 5 minutes, rollback to the last checkpoint. I don't know about your architecture so this may not be practical.

Suggest: keep a rolling in-memory record (like a deque) of the last minute or two of game changes; commit the changes in 15-second chunks as they fall out of the deque. Checkpointing naturally proceeds from this; start a new file for every checkpoint, like every 5 minutes. Crash recovery becomes a matter of loading the last total state save and replaying the n checkpoint files. This could also lead to off-line consistency checking by another machine, which could load an old total save, replay the checkpoint files, and compare the results with the next total save. Again, I don't know your architecture.

Öx

WTH? the horizontal rule code doesn't work? Old, old bbcode.
Öx
 
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