Game Development: Seasons Greetings

[Tamalak]

I'm glad you decided to revert it. I've been noticing a lot of unintended bad consequences from the change.

-LP gains overall would skyrocket, speeding up a game that already only lasts a month or two before endgame
-EXP drains become excessive. I would end up groping Old Man Willow 3x a day
-Need only a small fraction of the curios you needed before to keep your study full, reducing the number of things to do and making it feel like half of the game was removed
-It feels sad and unsatisfying to throw your loyal, worn-out curio on the ground instead of converting it fully to LP
-LP-per-hour became so important that a lot of decidedly un-LARPy calculations became necessary. Before it didn't matter as much if you were throwing in the best LP-per-hour curios in your study because they cleared up again quickly
-Curio variety was reduced, severely. Before I was tossing in uncommon snapdragons as filler, for example, when I had a couple slots to spare while adventuring. With curio consumption high, you're going to run out of the best curios so lesser ones get their time in the sun. With the wear system you just calculate the best lp/hour curios you could possibly get and seek them out, putting in the same ones over and over.

I have an idea for a change that will reduce curio micro without wrecking the economy viewtopic.php?f=48&t=46003

I'm really pleased with how quickly you're able to implement experiments though, didn't you just come up with this 2 weeks back?

[DDDsDD999]

I really enjoyed the change. Made character progression more of maintaining a "high quality diet" so to speak, such as is the case with current food progression where you don't eat anything of low quality and rather only eat the most expensive things you can produce for maximum gains. Now it's just scrap together cupboards upon cupboards of decent curios and run your autostudy.

System definitely needed some tweaks, but I thought the EXP cost was fine. People were just too used to chaining mirks.

[venatorvenator]

I don't have an opinion on the reversion, but instead of making curios cost XP, have you considered adding a small XP cost for every e.g. 100 LP points used? I'm assuming curio botting was one of reasons to implement the new curio system.

[nethack]

I hope the change will come back. It was a really nice change. Doubt it was necessary to reverse it... it would have been very nice to have this system in place during holidays. It could have been adjusted afterwise if time is an issue.

[Pupsi]

Big update, big update bla bla... and now we got nothing (On my opinion it was the most important part of update). At least give us Trolls instead of these reverted changes.

[strpk0]

I'm glad you decided to revert it. I've been noticing a lot of unintended bad consequences from the change.
...

I have a few opinions about your post, I've made them hidden below because I don't want to make this thread look ugly.

-LP gains overall would skyrocket, speeding up a game that already only lasts a month or two before endgame

No, they wouldn't. You would still get less lp than the people who use automatic curio studies or something similar. This update helped level the playing field for less hardcore players.

-EXP drains become excessive. I would end up groping Old Man Willow 3x a day

No, you wouldn't. While it is true that the EXP drain shouldn't be always 100% regardless of the wear state, it is still not a very significant amount. Rather, it's probably more like a tradeoff for the extra LP gain you're getting from not having to refill your study 24/7.

-Need only a small fraction of the curios you needed before to keep your study full, reducing the number of things to do and making it feel like half of the game was removed

I'm pretty certain this was the whole intention of this update, so that you don't have to spend ridiculous amounts of your time doing senseless things like massing curiosities and managing your study. Also, I personally don't see how "half of the game is removed" if you're just being given time to do things other than dumb grinding.

-It feels sad and unsatisfying to throw your loyal, worn-out curio on the ground instead of converting it fully to LP

Well, with the old system your "loyal, worn-out curio" simply becomes your "loyal, worn out nothing" after a study cycle. The concept of "wear" prolongs the lifespan of your curiosities, while reducing the LP gain over time. I don't see how curiosities simply dissapearing is a better alternative to them being slowly reduced in effectiveness.

-LP-per-hour became so important that a lot of decidedly un-LARPy calculations became necessary. Before it didn't matter as much if you were throwing in the best LP-per-hour curios in your study because they cleared up again quickly

I don't see how this update changed that in any way? I'm assuming you mean wear reducing the lp/hour of a certain curiosity. In that case, you could still micromanage your curiosities even with this system in place, the only difference is that you didn't HAVE to anymore.

-Curio variety was reduced, severely. Before I was tossing in uncommon snapdragons as filler, for example, when I had a couple slots to spare while adventuring. With curio consumption high, you're going to run out of the best curios so lesser ones get their time in the sun. With the wear system you just calculate the best lp/hour curios you could possibly get and seek them out, putting in the same ones over and over.

I fail to see how this is a problem. There are (and will always be) less-useful curiosities. Also, how is "variety" that important? I'm pretty sure the whole point of the curio system is to gain lp, not to admire your shiny variable items. This is only my opinion though, and you could see some other sort of meaning behind curiosities.

[venatorvenator]

I spawned a new character to test the quest system and there was a mountain patch right on my minimap. Congrats to devs if that was on purpose.


Notes:
- Quest font size could be bigger on the Ctrl+T window.
- "Chip a stone" task still doesn't make it clear what a "bare rock" terrain is. At the beginning of this world the greyish thing on the map looked like snow to me, and some new players might think so too. Maybe trigger a popup or experience saying "you can dig in here" when you get close to one.

But else the quests are a great addition in my opinion.

[FerrousToast]

Well, with the old system your "loyal, worn-out curio" simply becomes your "loyal, worn out nothing" after a study cycle. The concept of "wear" prolongs the lifespan of your curiosities, while reducing the LP gain over time. I don't see how curiosities simply dissapearing is a better alternative to them being slowly reduced in effectiveness.

well, just as gameplay mechanic, it is FAR more satisfying and gives much more dopamine response when a curio pops out of your study giving you the sense of completion, rather then having to take it out and despawn it which is just disheartening rather then satisfying. This is a purely emotional argument though.

[strpk0]

Well, with the old system your "loyal, worn-out curio" simply becomes your "loyal, worn out nothing" after a study cycle. The concept of "wear" prolongs the lifespan of your curiosities, while reducing the LP gain over time. I don't see how curiosities simply dissapearing is a better alternative to them being slowly reduced in effectiveness.

well, just as gameplay mechanic, it is FAR more satisfying and gives much more dopamine response when a curio pops out of your study giving you the sense of completion, rather then having to take it out and despawn it which is just disheartening rather then satisfying. This is a purely emotional argument though.

I can agree with that. I suppose something we can take away from this is that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a toggleable option in the study window to consume your curiosities when a cycle is completed, rather than slowly wearing them out. This way it would hopefully give the players that feeling of completion, while also keeping it convenient for the other players that find the study window as a hassle to maintain, and don't really care much for it.

[FerrousToast]

Well, with the old system your "loyal, worn-out curio" simply becomes your "loyal, worn out nothing" after a study cycle. The concept of "wear" prolongs the lifespan of your curiosities, while reducing the LP gain over time. I don't see how curiosities simply dissapearing is a better alternative to them being slowly reduced in effectiveness.

well, just as gameplay mechanic, it is FAR more satisfying and gives much more dopamine response when a curio pops out of your study giving you the sense of completion, rather then having to take it out and despawn it which is just disheartening rather then satisfying. This is a purely emotional argument though.

I can agree with that. I suppose something we can take away from this is that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a toggleable option in the study window to consume your curiosities when a cycle is completed, rather than slowly wearing them out. This way it would hopefully give the players that feeling of completion, while also keeping it convenient for the other players that find the study window as a hassle to maintain, and don't really care much for it.

I really like this, perhaps have a lowered exp cost for the wear, or an option to spend a larger chunk of EXP to study the curio to completion and get more LP for the cycle but destroy it when the curio finishes. More feeling of control is always a good thing.