A plea for decay

[ricky]

So fuck you

A moderator insulting a user for expressing his ideas, in the "Critique & Ideas" forum non the less. I thought I was dealing with adults interested in having a discussion about ideas.

I lol'd

If you want, i could insult you too

[whitepoint7]

A moderator insulting a user for expressing his ideas, in the "Critique & Ideas" forum non the less. I thought I was dealing with adults interested in having a discussion about ideas, I clearly was wrong since you felt the need to resort to insults to make your point.

For the sake of the topic, however, I'll quickly reply. I'm not against casual players, I'm one of them usually, but I do believe that if you can't find 1 minute to login and refill your claim in weeks, the place should fall. And thanks to study tables, you could keep a place up for months just by logging in once every few weeks, refilling it with poppy flowers or some other easy to make curios. So don't pretend this would destroy the game for casuals, because it really takes no effort in keeping it up.

Well end of the day he has a point you can just bash every abandoned bases ... You can just play the game in empty places, don't trade with anybody or don't rummage any base , you can experience new beginning easily. I doing it right now actually and it's work perfectly . Decay works good enough compared to the beginning of this world.

There is no need to set more harsh conditions for decay and let the all world suffer just because you want to experience new world feel, you can do it yourself. About cave decay maybe but ore placements has a heterogeneous distribution also finding method kind of useless(dig dig dig only reasonable one if i am remembering correctly) if supports starts to destroy over time it can be ugly and very tiresome at some point.

[Aceb]

but I do believe that if you can't find 1 minute to login and refill your claim in weeks, the place should fall. And thanks to study tables, you could keep a place up for months just by logging in once every few weeks, refilling it with poppy flowers or some other easy to make curios. So don't pretend this would destroy the game for casuals, because it really takes no effort in keeping it up.

As I said, this is somewhat part of getting into abandoned base or once-a-month checked one. If You're casual waiting for the claim to decay enough so You can rummage the place, it's your choice. Some players risk it by sieging inactive place to be the first to loot it. So the timing in my opinion is set at correct time for now. It doesn't need to be changed.

To further this statement, I've on occasion defended some people bases when they went for vacation (and had my own defended) and in time of 2-5 weeks, someone tried once or two times putting a wrecking ball, ram or cata at walls to get inside. If not for circle of friendship, some bases might fall.

You would be actually surprised how many times people pay attention how long your fields are left un-harvested or how close to starving / dying your animals are.

As for decaying, places I knew from beginning at this moment decayed in 30-80%. If those were small, there's no trace of them, maybe only few unharvested pumpkins. Claims maybe decay too slow when out of authority but they do not that much slow. Unless those old around me got bashed by someone.

[Granger]

1st. Claims (private and village) should decay much faster. If the player is inactive for a week, we don't want them to lose everything. But for a month? That means he's not playing at all, get out of here! No more study tables filled with poppyflowers to keep that claim active a couple more months.

Having a claim (be it village or through a stake) drain from full authority/presence to zero taking a RL month sounds reasonable to me. The current figures are a somewhat longer (but not by that much), reducing them to said month would IMHO be reasonable. I would further argue that replenishing of presence/authority should only happen when actually being on the claim in question, the current ability to remotely feed of them is a bad mechanic.

2nd. Once the claim decays, allowing anyone to act inside, there should be a short delay (let's say 15 days tops) before the items (including the claim stake) will start decaying too. No more places abandoned 10 months ago, still there only filled with empty cupboards and drying racks.

This already exists (without presence the claim dosn't exist for all practical purposes).

Decay dosn't work at the pace that I envisioned in the topic that 'inspired' the title of this one as with my approach it would have been more deterministic (compared to the current approach where the map section still needs to be loaded for decay to happen), but 'good enough' compared to what we had before.

I'm happy that the devs at least went the cheap route instead of ignoring the problem any further - nevertheless I still think implementing my suggestion would give better overall results (especially for repopulation of trees and getting rid of defunct banners and pavement). IMHO as long as the decay function isn't deterministic (as in: applied regardless of the map being loaded or not) it's needlessly difficult to tune its magnitude to all scenarios (from 24/7 active base to never visited wilderness).

3rd. Crops should decay, at least in dead claims and wilderness. Not sure why they won't, but again field plants shouldn't stay there forever.

I agree with this. I think crops should start to die after a RL week or two, in case you plan to go on a vacation you could store seeds.

4th. Mine supports outside claims should decay, and cause cave-in. It could take more for a stone or metal one to decay, and less for a wooden one, but all should disappear after a while. Give them a month of life, if they are not repaired, they collapse and (by chance) could cause cave-ins. Let's refresh those caves! Also, those cave-ins should be removable, and actually "spawn" cave walls, not just those boulders we are used to.

Looking into the direction of an eternal world I agree with the need for a way to refresh the underground. Simple cave-ins as we know them wouldn't IMHO really cut it (as it wouldn't fully revert to a pristine state) and having them triggered online-only (same problem as above) wouldn't cut it - especially in the case of underground highways. Also, given the dedication of certain players to optimize the guts out of the game, the mechanic needs to be resilient against abuse so one can't repeatedly collapse a known high quality area using suicide basher alts to spawn resources in unlimited quantities.

I'm quite OK with giving underground structures some upkeep need, building and maintaining bases underground isn't as difficult as it should be - so I wouldn't have an issue with activating decay for the lower levels. While this would remove the ability to build unlimited maintenance free cupboard storages, thus some will scream and yell, I find it somewhat silly that it is currently possible - building a base underground shouldn't be easier that on the surface, quite the opposit should be the case.

5th. As per point number 1, village idols and banners should decay after a while if the village is out of authority. Banners could decay within a few days, statues in maybe a week, the idol maybe a 3 weeks later. If the idol is destroyed, the process should start immediately. Again, no more ruined villages staying there forever!

Exists. Suffers from the same side effects mentioned above though (map not loaded = nothing happens).
I think that banners should be bashable as easy as a normal fire as soon as the village runs out of authority (or the idol being destroyed).

TL;DR: don't make grab-bag topics, add to existing topics instead of creating new ones (especially when ripping off their title).

[Kamekono]

Since some of you keep missing the point, and even trying to make it sound like I want no interaction between players (with no trade, etc), I'll try to explain it again, starting with a quote:

But right now it's easier to go find stuff you need than building it yourself, and this is a major flaw that need to be addressed. Scavenge and finding cool stuff should be a lucky day, not a mundane day ... even for new players.

THIS is exactly why I'm suggesting all I wrote before. It's not to screw with casual players, it's not because I want an empty world, it's not because I don't want ruins or players around me.

The game revolves heavily around crafting and slowly improving your item's quality. If you take that out, which is what I believe the ruin spam does, you remove the core of the game.

IF stuff actually does decay in abandoned (dead) claims / villages, then the process is still too slow. EVERYWHERE you go, you can find tons of places without a shield up anymore, but with still everything intact inside. You can find lots of large villages left to die, without an idol, but with all the flags still up and the stuff inside in perfect shape.

I used to enjoy scavenging a lot. It was my favourite thing to do, exploring the map hoping to find that one abandoned place where I could maybe find a nicer tanning tub or a meat grinder. But that used to require effort and luck, you couldn't just jump between 20 abandoned places right next to each other.

I've recently introduced a couple of friends to the game, and they all asked me the same question: is there anyone even playing anymore? If you spawn outside HH (which still has a very active chat), chances are you'll find yourself in a silent realm where ruins outnumber active claims 10 to 1. The lack of players would make the world feel empty, but the spam of ruins makes it feel almost dead.

The reason to increase decay is the same reason you have behind trees respawning: keep the world alive-ish, not letting it turn into a wasteland.

And then again, it's not just a matter of how long it takes for the claim to run out of authority. You can leave that as it is, count it as "active" if it still has a shield. It's more about once the authority is over, the place effectively dead, it shouldn't stay there for ages.

EDIT: To Granger, I appreciate your opinion. I'd like to point out that the similar titles are a coincidence, I hadn't read your thread before posting this one.

[sMartins]

It's just a matter to tune the timings once the palisade goes down, with priority for higher quality stuff, then we can discuss which numbers the majority of us like more.
But reducing the window timeframe for looting old bases once the pali/claim go down can only be beneficial ... mainly for 2 reasons:
1- Discussed previously, not messing up with the natural progression of the game too much, like right now it is
2- Incentivate players interaction, with small wars/fights for the resources left behind from others .... restricted time frame = more chances for encounters = more danger = more challenging = more interesting.

P.S The actual situation with caves is just a place older that devs never approached so far ... for sure that needs to be addresses too at some point.
If you ask to me, screw the bots/custom clients and all that shit, and add darkness in caves too asap, then we'll figure out in a second moment what to do with exploits, not important at this stage and would not be the only one.
Caves should be almost a black & white environment with glowing stuff, much scarier in my envision of things, also would be cool later on changing the terraformation of caves, the actual ground level, giving it a descendent slope once you enter and along the road, giving the impression to descend to hell.

[MagicManICT]

A moderator insulting a user for expressing his ideas, in the "Critique & Ideas" forum non the less. I thought I was dealing with adults interested in having a discussion about ideas, I clearly was wrong since you felt the need to resort to insults to make your point.

Like I said, I felt the need to get my point across. Sometimes pretty words are better, sometimes being crass is. If anything else about my post made you feel insulted, I'm happy to discuss such things in private, as I think I'm a pretty reasonable guy. As always, if you have an issue with moderation, feel free to contact a moderator (currently I'm the only active one), jorb or loftar, or take the issue up in the moderation discussion thread.

But to the point of "my job," I'm only a volunteer here, and haven't been asked to be "professional." If I were a professional, I'd not even be posting on the forums. (with the moderator account... though might have a personal account nobody would know about I'd post my feelings from; development teams/publishers differ on protocol here.)

TL;DR: don't make grab-bag topics, add to existing topics instead of creating new ones (especially when ripping off their title).

Yeah, I thought about merging these together, but read the first page or so of posts in yours, and the direction of the threads were different enough I felt it should probably be left alone. (Nice back-seat moderating there, sir!)