by Shipright » Fri Dec 18, 2015 1:55 am shubla wrote:Brickwall is most easy to build. You can make around 1000 bricks a hour. With few hours of brickmaking you can get enough bricks for very nice sized place.
Its easy if you know exactly what you are supposed to do and don't care about anything but leveling up as fast as possible. Most people who care about leveling up as fast as possible instead of, say, playing and enjoying the game in the beginning and intermediate phases where most of the game material resides, did all that "noobing" worlds ago and don't care. A new player, however, might want to try having a sheep herd or a play with silk making or any number of a thousand things this game allows you do other than rushing to build a brick wall. Essentially what you are saying is that someones introduction to the game should be is to grind for several weeks just so they can have the privilege of enjoying any other part of the game. Its like being stuck at LVL1 in a final fantasy starter town fighting chickens for weeks just to participate in the outside world because monsters start at LVL1000. HOW FUN!
This is even more insidious because the game offers other walls that SHOULD make you relatively safe but do not, at least when talking about veteran players. Fences are useless. Palisades can be defeated in less than an hour now (which means the chance of you being logged in when it happens to address it are near zero). Then you have the jump to brick walls with 24 hours. Does that progression make sense from a new player's perspective? You have two defensive choices which impede the people most likely to raid you barely at all, then jump to the end game option that is probably out of your reach and really only serves to make your end game tormentors invulnerable to any conceivable retaliation you can muster. The game is designed to protect the most capable players more than anyone else. That mechanic is not necessarily bad, work should have its rewards. It breaks down because 1.) you can progress to end game too quickly if you know exactly what to do and 2.) there is no intermediate defense option, its all or nothing.
At a minimum quick easy fix to this is to make palibashing at a minimum at least half as as long as brick wall ramming no matter the raiders skill. A base value that can't be altered. At least then a noob might have half a chance to log in before his palisade falls and repair it, and the bashing takes long enough that raiders probably won't stick around after being discovered.
The point isn't to make noobs invulnerable. What makes this game fun for me as an intermediate player is the stakes. I could die at any time, and I have something worthwhile to not just die for the hell of it. The stakes evaporate, however, when there is ZERO chance of me defending myself or my base. That's not an exciting sense of danger, rather that's the crushing weight of inevitability. No matter what I do, how hard I work, I am only alive because of any number of roving assholes whims. I could log in four times a day and raiders could still break in and bash my home to dirt in between with me getting no input edgewise. HOW FUN!
This isn't a criticism of end game players, this is how the game works and thus how it should be played. That doesn't mean you are not an asshole for doing asshole things, but the game NEEDS assholes to create the stakes. The game design is simply unbalanced.
![¦]](./images/smilies/troll.gif "Trollface")
