What updates do you want the most?

[Ants]

Oh, and hats on animals. I'm dying to be able to dress up my horse. We can do it to nidbanes, so why not our pets?

[pppp]

Blight and Disease (Characters, Animals, Crops, all affected by diseases that must be treated)

Animal diseases only add tedium in Salem and no fun. That's one of a number of reasons why domestic animals in Salem cause burnout to players.

[jorb]

a quality system that isn't purely a function of consecutive days played.

That is not what we have now. Increasing quality requires you to optimize your production chains.

What, however, should it be a function of?

[Potjeh]

Quality of almost everything is proportionate to crop quality. Crop quality is purely a function of consecutive days played. Where do you see optimization in that?

Anyway, I think quality of an individual item should be proportionate to effort invested in that individual item. Ie infrastucture should only cap, never raise quality of anything. Currently you just need to spiral up a single anvil and hammer and you can stamp out infinite high q swords out of the shittiest steel. Or you can make a single high investment bone clay kiln (or whatever people are using these days) and produce infinite high q bricks out of q10 clay so you can make infinite high q ovens to make inginite high q pies out of q10 flour.

[Granger]

Quality of almost everything is proportionate to crop quality. Crop quality is purely a function of consecutive days played. Where do you see optimization in that?

Anyway, I think quality of an individual item should be proportionate to effort invested in that individual item. Ie infrastucture should only cap, never raise quality of anything. Currently you just need to spiral up a single anvil and hammer and you can stamp out infinite high q swords out of the shittiest steel. Or you can make a single high investment bone clay kiln (or whatever people are using these days) and produce infinite high q bricks out of q10 clay so you can make infinite high q ovens to make inginite high q pies out of q10 flour.

This.

Reachable qualities need to be limited by quality of what can be natural found in the world, endless growth (crops, spiraling) needs to go away.

Should the endgame solely be to raise numbers: we should admit that there is a problem (as of no endgame existing) and come up with one.

[Ardennesss]

You guys are grossly out of touch with current game play. Spiraling a high quality kiln or high quality anvil is a reward for hard work invested, and your reward is the ability to create high quality byproducts much easier than you could before. Removing these mechanics gives you a net increase in Tedium in which every single thing you want to craft will require hard to acquire resources. What are hermits and casual players to do after month 1 of a world? Quit? They will have no chance of ever acquiring a high quality natural resource to raise their tools and industry values, and they will have no ability to go underground and raise their metal values via hard work. Do you want to go back to legacy where these players are forced to farm resources for people like ramones in what is essentially slavery?

Should the endgame solely be to raise numbers: we should admit that there is a problem (as of no endgame existing) and come up with one.

Yes, the issue is that the only current endgame is to raise numbers. Beaver dungeons and bat dungeons were nice for a very short amount of time but the rewards from doing them do not make them endgame content. What is wrong with molding the world and raising qualities being endgame however? A large part of the reason there are as many players still active this late into the world as there are is because there's still something to do, which is raise qualities and trade these increased quality items to other players.

[Potjeh]

LOL "current game play". It's been exact same thing since quality system has been implemented. And this is about breaking an enormous advantage factions have over solos. Because right now there's no way they can spiral one of those insane smithing sets, but a faction can do it easily. And then the faction can make infinite swords at quality that the solo player can never hope to match. They can equip all of their combat characters with such swords, and they can dominate the marketplace so a solo blacksmith can never make anything worth selling. However, if you had to spiral metal for each individual sword high q swords would be an exception rather than the norm, so the solo smith's swords would still have some value instead of being useless trash.

[jorb]

And this is about breaking an enormous advantage factions have over solos. Because right now there's no way they can spiral one of those insane smithing sets, but a faction can do it easily.

Quality of almost everything is [...] a function of consecutive days played.

Pick one.

I agree that it is suboptimal that a higher quality resource tends to devalue all lower quality resources, and I agree that it is a bit suboptimal how you construct a higher quality something once, and then never have to worry about that again. (By that I do not want to imply that I'm after maintenance tedium as a solution). I would like quality to be more multi-dimensional, but attempts at making it that have thus far not been successful.

I would love to hear suggestions as to what the much vaunted endgame should be, but I'm obviously not interested in removing the endgame there is -- pushing numbers -- in favor of nothing. PvP might be an answer, but that does nothing for those -- like myself -- who play essentially a single player game.

[Potjeh]

What do you mean pick one? There's no conflict in the statements. It's just that unlike crops which uses raw days, metal uses man-days, but it's same shit.

And yeah, I'm offering a solution right here, I don't see how it can be made any clearer: infrastructure and tools should only cap, never increase quality. High quality items should be exceptional, not mass produced. If everything is special, nothing is. Even if you're a solo just working on pushing numbers (and there's not much of those left these days, virtually all of us borequit), wouldn't it feel more impactful to make a better sword if you poured rare materials into that one specific sword, rather than upgrading your smithing infrastructure and then making an unlimited number of swords at that quality? High q items should feel special and valuable. Losing top end gear in PvP should hurt almost as much as losing stats.

[avros008]

Combat system change.