localized resource definitive fix - ~LITERALLY~ 0 downsides

[Vigilance]

if theres anyone in the world i trust to have a good opinion on localized resources its snugglesnail

[a-Simulacrum]

Your solution is pretty akin to saying "let's stop all murder by making it illegal", the intent of your solution is not going to be relevant to the people who play under the mechanics.

nah for that to be true that would be me saying "enforce no botting by making it bannable" which to be fair is still something that should happen. the law against murder is one of the primary reasons people don't murder though, because it fucking sucks to get caught murdering. but that's besides the point in this situation anyway.

Jorbtar has been trying to solve the issue of balancing PVE for 10+ years now.

they have but despite this solution having pve elements in it, it's not really a pve balance issue. hermits and noobs get brought up too often in these types of discussions when it comes to leveling out the lead that the big villages have, and hermits and noobs are never gonna be on their level anyway without allying with them. this solution i've proposed will not alienate anybody, unless you're telling me that these people can't fight a few enemies which have similar stats to a wolverine/boar (though i really would like to see them be fast as fuck in terms of run speed to avoid the majority of bullshit that comes with kiting).

Adding tediousness(getting 40, 60, 100 UA?) does not make it impossible to interact with in that way, or make it unprofitable. It simply reduces the total number of people with the autism willing to participate in such activities.

it doesn't make it impossible, i'll give you that, but it does act as a deterrent. i'll use myself as an example for this since i'm quite familiar with my nature. i've had salt alts every world. not one, not two, not three, but at minimum like 8, ever since salt has been a thing. i am lazy as shit too and yet i still had that many that i'd log in every time my salt timers would be ready. at the majority of those salt nodes there would be 3-4 other alts that logged in and waited for the salt to be ready to harvest too. while i was doing that, people in my village (which i won't name) were all doing the same thing. literally all of us.
now i'm willing to bet that 95% of people will not go through the effort of making the alts needed to deal with the changes i've proposed and if they DID go through with it, they wouldn't make as many alts. that's already enough to make a significant difference.

i'm gonna tell you what i really think and i'm genuinely just as surprised by this myself, but i think the only reason people are against this is because of two reasons, the first one which isn't surprising is it means a marked drop in the amount of salt people are used to getting, which fair enough is a reason to be pissed about (regardless of if it's the right thing or not, greed runs deep) but the second reason is the thing i'm most surprised about seeing as how its the big villages that should be welcoming this type of thing if they love pvp so much, because i'm actually convinced that people are getting cold feet with the thought of visiting certain nodes alone incase they come into contact with others and have to fight. that's just a hunch though, because with this proposed change, you could technically ambush people when you know their node is up and they'd have a good chance at losing a good character. that type of gameplay is fine by me though, i love shit like that. i hate the way you don't see people out except when they've specifically thrown together a kill group to go kill people.

Presume 5 people are alt spamming to collect salt right now(which they are not, I assure you), and this update goes live. The response will not be 0 people alt spamming, it will just be less people alt spamming, which doesn't solve the problem, it just attributes more power to the few people willing to put up with the setup tediousness.

i didn't play much of this world so i'm not going to assume anything silly (though what i did play i still had salt alts and there were always salt alts at the nodes i was at too) but i highly doubt there's so few people doing this now when they've done it every other world. what's changed? salt is always good. might not have the same value as it once had on the market but in terms of usage salt is fucking great, it's one of the primary reasons i was able to keep up with the stats with the upper 10% of people last world.
even if it does deter most people but only leaves very few doing it i'd consider that a massive success. and as i've previously mentioned even if somebody does go through the effort of trying to automize this it still leaves plenty of room for them to be punished since the time a character would need to be at said node rises, which leaves more room for counterplay. killing the alt which would take time and effort to build up another, that alone is a good incentive. there's 0 incentive to kill the salt alts right now if you're not a big village member, you'll leave scents, you'll open yourself up to further aggression, the alt will be back the next fucking day because you can get the lp needed for it from collecting a few leaves and branches, a curiosity doesn't even need to touch a salt alt currently.
i know how irritating learning moves is too, even if done via parchments, it's still a massive pain in the ass.

Likewise, if the intent is for the player to have to focus on the client thereby making alting not possible manually, then it will not be done manually.

it's a two-pronged approach. the first is requiring the character to be at a certain level stat and skill wise. this one is 0 inconvenience to anybody who is playing legit since they're just gonna naturally be getting to this level anyway. the only ones it inconveniences are the alt spammers.
the second part focuses on people manually needing to deal with the enemies, which again aren't exactly difficult since that's not their goal.

[Sprinkle]

Hostile mobs should spawn around localized resources, and the resources shouldn't be gatherable until the the mobs are killed

I can solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA. Nothing that you want spawning next to every heartwood tree is going to require a real character.

It's also pretty debatable that alts camping localized resources is even a problem, and I suspect any "solution" that stops people from doing so will drastically reduce hermits/casual's ability to access localized resources.

May I ask how you are able to "solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA." ? What's the secret?

[xdragonlord18]

even if somebody does go through the effort of trying to automize this it still leaves plenty of room for them to be punished since the time a character would need to be at said node rises, which leaves more room for counterplay. killing the alt which would take time and effort to build up another, that alone is a good incentive.

I think you don't understand the purpose of automation. It's to negate the time and effort costs of doing something. If you go through the effort of writing a bot to collect these nodes when it is just as easy to spin up 30 bots as it is to spin up 1. The solution to automation is never making it more tedious. That's like suggesting that gasoline would be a good way to put out a fire.

[tyrtix]

funny enough, you can't stop an oil rig fire with water too. The problem with alting the gathering of resources is NOT in how much autism few people will have to overcome the problem, but on the contrary, is in how many little autism is needed to gather them.

[Oddity]

Hostile mobs should spawn around localized resources, and the resources shouldn't be gatherable until the the mobs are killed

I can solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA.

how?

[Liss12]

Oh god not another "lets make sprucecaps fight a monster" idea that will bother casual more than anyone else. Just make it impossible to log in in close proximity to localized resource and make timers less precise, so people would have actually stay here logged in for about a hour and wait instead of logging in a couple of seconds before it spawns grab it and instantly log out. And make collecting time bigger so actual players could simple push bots away or attack them while they are collecting resource. All these "guardians" will eventually lead to monumental cheesing as it were suggested in this thread before.