Boredom and sane Satiation for Curiosities and Food

[Granger]

Most (if not all) games have the problem of balancing items, leading to a top-x list of stuff that is used while the rest is basically irrelevant to the domain - and any attempts from the developers to avoid this through buffing/nerfing only works very short-term as players quickly adapt and a new top-x list emerges. Here a good example showing the problem, I think that it's quite obvious that a static approach to the problem is not possible undless it's executed as removing all 'irrelevant' items.

Jorbtar have tried with satiations to work against that, but this system is expensive to maintain (as newly added food items need to be tagged), error prone (as there have been foods that didn't satiate themselves, short loops through only a handfull of items, ...), unlogical (as you can eath through a satiation to reset it) and pointless (as of the drinks). Also no mechanic exists for the Curiosities side of the problem.

To overcome this I suggest to make the game balance Curiosities and Food per character, based on individual consumtion history.

As the mechanic will work for both problem domains the curiosities and foodstuff will for brevity be refered to as items and their respective result on the character (LP or FEP gained) as their effect.

Core mechanic

• The game tracks the all consumed items in two FIFO lists, one for what went through the mentory and the other what went through the stomach
• When an item is consumed its effect is reduced according to the amount of identical items already in the respective list
• The length of the lists scales with highest base level (ability/attribute) of the character
• The length of the lists scales with the total amount of existing eligible items, this makes the system easy to maintain as new items won't reduce the maximum difficulty this mechanic imposes - though enough variety in available beginner items need to be ensured to not choke newbies
• To avoid the exploit of long-term studying without spending any LP any unspent amount is projected onto the highest ability for list length determination

Prerequisites

• Drinks are no longer reducing satiation but are also not tracked as consumed food items (as tracking sipping would be exploited to empty the list quickly) but kept in check by getting overconsumption downsides (Knocked out cold equivalents for all of them, like Kidney Stones for Tea, Diarrhea for Milk, ...) - thus they should give a big enough buff to make them worthwhile and when overconsumed a debuff stiff enough to keep them in check
• Salt eating removed and it turned into a spice, overconsumption downsides of High blood pressure for salted, Stomach burn for peppered foods
• This needs to come in concert with overdue nerfs and fixes (alt symbel wear, charisma feasting/questing, 'hunger' bar renamed 'Appetite', ...)

Implications

• Works for both Food (Satiation) and Curiosities (Boredom) in an easy understandable manner
• Ends the top-x list meaning of only these and nothing else by ending the viability to endlessly spam only these
• As of this restores interest in currently not used food and curiosities, simply as they'll be needed for variety
• Good items will continue be good while 'worse' items will get a use
• The more evolved a character gets the more variety it needs both in mental and physical sustinence to improve further
• Would turn having 100% effect into a bonus for beginners (and for new/seldom consumed items) and lower average effect being the new normal
• The current approach of force-feeding a very narrow selection of foods being *cough* reduced *cough* in effectiveness

Reasoning

• According to ringofbrodgar.com we currently have 391foods and 205 curiosities, so there's enough variety to select from
• This suggestions viewpoint is from stimulus satiation (leading to Boredom and reduced Appetite), not a nutrition perspective
• Yes, the idea is to reduce character development speed from a certain point on and to make building specialized titans unfeasible

Numbers
The effect reduction factor and the formula for list length are the two knobs to adjust this mechanic, I suggest the following settings:

• A flat 10% reduction per identical item in the list, but a minimum payout (by clamping the amount of found items using max(identical_items, 9))
• List length being highest_level*(eligible_items/100) (highest_level modified by unspent LP for abilities), resulting in the ability to consume fully unhindered (by cycling though every food/curiosity in existance to push the one item ouf of the list before you'll have to consume it again) ending at level 100

A somewhat harsher version would be to not have a minimum payout but the reduction going below zero, giving negative LP (as staring at always the same Curiosity makes stupid) and foodstuff triggering vomiting (from the character being literally sick of that stuff) resulting in a reset of the FEP bar to zero. Could be fun though, visually.

An update: It's a bit dated of an post as satiations can't be eathen through anymore (as of world 11), but the general idea should still be sound.

This is bumped because of the discussion about hunger as a long-term companion to short-term satiations having shortfalls that lead to making alts viable (or a must) for hard labor. So please take a peek at the idea so see if the suggested general mechanic could fit as a replacement for the hunger bar multiplier.

As we all like being positive the pig should be dressed up nicely by turning the labels around, making it a buff to stuff that's rare to the character.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

I would like to give my +1 to this sensible suggestion.

[dafels]

I am skeptical about this idea
-1

[Granger]

I am skeptical about this idea
-1

Why? Any particuar reasoning (besides being to old to adapt to new stuff)?

[SnuggleSnail]

Why do you want me to have to plan around every curio I study, or food I eat for the next six months? Why does it have to be that if I eat some berries in the early game my character can be literally ruined because of satiations? Should I not study this Q 10 dandelion because I'll get more from studying a Q60 one tomorrow when my survival alt is up to scratch?

Why do you want me to have to figure out 32, or 48, or however many slots worth of "best" curios there are instead of 16? In the end it'll just give even more of an advantage to botters/titans, in the exact same way satiations did.

Why do you want it to go back to the way it was, having to leave your PC on 24/7 with a bot that studies curios? If I can only study 2 more straw dolls before a fishy eyeball/bark boat become better, then I either need to bot, or log back in to change my desk in a few hours. Considering there are 16 slots, this ends up being logging in every few minutes.

If everybody hates alts so much, why give me another reason to need them? If I effectively need to evenly level my main's stats for the best LP/hour, same as attributes, I'm going to end up ignoring half of them in favor of alts. Why discourage my character from learning to sew before it learns to farm?

Why make it so even more varied industry is needed for the best curio setup? Does that help Joe Hermit, or Titan Mc. 30 Man Village?

Why make it so Joe Noob has even less market-place power? If bluebells are one of the best curios, then presumably his Q 12 bluebell isn't just sub-optimal, but having studied it is probably going to be worse than having studied nothing due to it satiating the potential Q 80 bluebell from your swamp.

There is no implementation of boredom that would be fun. There is no implementation of boredom that would benefit the little guy. If boredom basically gives a cap to stats, then the people abusing boredom will just be able to replace their chars 10 times faster than the little guys per effort spent, and be way more aggressive.

Boredom, no matter how you balance it, is bad and unfun. Satiation, no matter how you balance it, is bad and unfun.

[Zebukin]

Boredom, no matter how you balance it, is bad and unfun. Satiation, no matter how you balance it, is bad and unfun.

Agree, but unbalanced food like «eat only 4 dishes from 500 types of food» isn`t good.
And satiation system is the first one to prevent it and stimulate players to vary their food more.
At least and now it stimulated to cook all beverages.

BUT! now satiation system is very raw and needs more work and logic. So fishpie will not satiate fruits and salad will not satiate meat.

Curios are more balanced now due to quality and variety of materials and cuz you need 16 to fill all grid.

[Aceb]

Beginning of the post

I think it's okay to have irrevelant items that exist but have their place and time when they become irrevelant, like Dandelion and Cone cow is basic start phase of the game and I don't really see dandelion fitting into mid game or later. Some thing should have their place in curio ladder and that's all.

several lists

So here's my thoughts after reading it whole. If I understand it correctly:
You force players to have 2 (maybe 3) different sets of curios, they will be juggling in order to maintain the highiest best outcome possible... that is if questing gets nerfed. Giving a negative LP would be a real shame, as someone who has less time on his hand, should still be able to maintain at least His claim so I would reduce LP gain from "same curios over and over" up to 50% and no more.

I would wish for maybe (very) simplier idea, where studing the same thing over and over would just scale it down to it's Q. Example: You studied 30 dandielios, after first 10, each next dandelion will work as it would have lower Q. So the dandelion 25th of 50Q You study, will effectively work as 35Q, despite being 50Q at the end. To speed up things, we could accept rising number not by 1, but by 1+X (1+2+3... etc so curios at 650Q would faster drop their LP reward). Maximum Q drop end at 1Q LP gain. So no negative stuff.

For Food your idea is good but would it fit? I mean having same mechanic for both isn't making any of it special, just one being Mental Food and other Stomach Food. Imho I would wish to have both at least little different to each other. Instead of making drinking too much hurting You, I would rather go back to era where drinking "enough" was giving You some sort of temporary buff then, after drinking too much giving a temporary debuff.
For some time I was thinking of maybe combining numen gaining point method with drinking / eating specific food but meh. I couldn't come up with good solution, yet or never will. But You have to remember that players tend to eat rather often a lot, then eating a little but often (usually only for energy).

Also, as it is for now I like how each type of food almost have their respective meta, when it's effective to eat or not. (cheese being end-game, sausages being mid-game and meatpies somewhere between).

Agree to salt nerf, not sure if to pepper nerf but maybe, meh.

[Granger]

Beginning of the post

I think it's okay to have irrevelant items that exist but have their place and time when they become irrevelant, like Dandelion and Cone cow is basic start phase of the game and I don't really see dandelion fitting into mid game or later. Some thing should have their place in curio ladder and that's all.

That's fine as long as there is enough ladder left, which quickly isn't when you have reached the ability to create the top-x.

Given that you have the incentive to basically consume all of them (because given a high enough developed character the list would be long enough that digesting shitty foraged ones now and then would give a benefit), wouldn't that be beneficial for trade (even giving sense to buy stuff from low-end chars) and wouldn't that make lower characters less irrelevant?

So here's my thoughts after reading it whole. If I understand it correctly:
You force players to have 2 (maybe 3) different sets of curios, they will be juggling in order to maintain the highiest best outcome possible...

No, I don't want to force them - but I think it should be less effective to just repeat the same thing over and over again. Currently you're able to force-feed a character for eg. (str/agi/con) by cycling through a handfull of food items, and I honestly admit that I would like to see this ability to come to an end (feeding a normal allround character would be easier than a specialized one, as it would eat more variety so the effect reduction from identical items would be lower).

But no, not force 2-3 sets of curios to cycle. The Idea of the lists being FIFO (first-in first-out) is that you space out the good ones by adding more (and more, the more developed the character is) not-top-x ones as your list grows longer with time. And (additionally to the top curios you really want to study) you could burn through high-speed ones (in case you can stomach the XP loss), not because they would give good LP but because they would increase the speed the list cycles out what's currently in it. And yes, I admit that I aim to end the these are the best LP/h/slot curios, thus these are the only ones ever used in endgame* through this.

I think this could lead to us having less of a static meta (purely defined by the best items one can produce at a certain point, as we currently have) but each character having a sweet spot that is a constantly moving target (as character continually develops) so that the optimum solution constantly changes.

that is if questing gets nerfed.

There's a lot that currently needs to get nerfd, charisma in general and in concert with questing/festing/symbel is IMHO the main thing that needs a decisive swing with the big axe.

Giving a negative LP would be a real shame, as someone who has less time on his hand, should still be able to maintain at least His claim so I would reduce LP gain from "same curios over and over" up to 50% and no more.

50% minimum payout would be way too much, while it would half character development speed you could still simply outproduce the problem (meaning that a flat 50% nerf to learning ability would be a simpler solution with the same effect). I should have added a smirk to the last sentence (the one with the vomiting), thus let's take a minimum effect of 10% (regardless the amount of identical items tracked) for the basis of discussion. Which would be way higher than the 1Q which you would end up with in your following sentence.

I agree being able to maintain a claim, but you don't need much for this (unless you pclaimed a whole mountain). How much LP do you need to refill a reasonably sized claim at the stake? I think loading the study table for going on a hiatus would lead to filling it with long-term stuff, likely would be used way less in normal operation (so they would be not that often in the recent list).

I would wish for maybe (very) simplier idea, where studing the same thing over and over would just scale it down to it's Q. Example: You studied 30 dandielios, after first 10, each next dandelion will work as it would have lower Q. So the dandelion 25th of 50Q You study, will effectively work as 35Q, despite being 50Q at the end. To speed up things, we could accept rising number not by 1, but by 1+X (1+2+3... etc so curios at 650Q would faster drop their LP reward). Maximum Q drop end at 1Q LP gain. So no negative stuff.

You realize that your minimum payout would be way lower than my approach - and how would you want to track this without making it even more gameable than how drinks currently work?

For Food your idea is good but would it fit? I mean having same mechanic for both isn't making any of it special,

IMHO a mechanic dosn't need to be special but has to work in the first place. And as both curiosities and food currently have basically the same problem...

just one being Mental Food and other Stomach Food.

Are they any different?

Instead of making drinking too much hurting You, I would rather go back to era where drinking "enough" was giving You some sort of temporary buff then, after drinking too much giving a temporary debuff.

Drinks are ment to give buffs, followed by debuffs when overconsumed (will add that to the OP) - how that is done in detail isn't that important for the suggestion at hand, they just need to no longer reset satiations and do not count as food items so you can't use them to clear the food list. Would eg. be fine if they would give a slight increase in FEP while in the buff phase, enough to make them worthwhile and little enough to not make them overpowered (like we currently have with feasting where you can one-click a FEP event, thanks to cha alt sitting at a perfect table that dosn't get wear as the alt is idle).

But You have to remember that players tend to eat rather often a lot, then eating a little but often (usually only for energy).

The mechanic dosn't care how often you eat (or study), just how varied your diet is. And the intent is to make

harder to impossible, as IMHO the game would be way more fun when everyone would end up at ~20% of these figures.

Also, as it is for now I like how each type of food almost have their respective meta, when it's effective to eat or not. (cheese being end-game, sausages being mid-game and meatpies somewhere between).

And the problem is that people get bored when they run out of metas. IMHO better foods getting available to a character shouldn't completely change the diet, but enrich it. One of the goals the suggested mechanic would accomplish (at least for curiosities), also stuff produced by lower characters would suddenly have a value (as it would be, as an addition, better than eating only the 'good' stuff).

Agree to salt nerf, not sure if to pepper nerf but maybe, meh.

My view: Should the amount of pepper that a character can consume have a reasonable limit (so that it makes sense to apply it selectively) so a character can produce with a reasonable effort... the need to automate render distance sized pepper operations might vanish.

(* whatever endgame means in H&H, as of everyone seens to think that it's raising the numbers I suspect that 'endgame' is currently missing completely)

[dafels]

Satiations should be removed altogether, hunger bar timegate should be made relevant just like it was in world 8 and salt should have a debuff the more you use it

[Granger]

Satiations should be removed altogether, hunger bar timegate should be made relevant just like it was in world 8 and salt should have a debuff the more you use it

Wouldn't solve the problem of not starting at the beginning (or having an accident) ending your ability to compete.
This suggestion (in concert with needed nerfs to quality explosion) would make starting later in a world feasible as it would slow down characters the more they develop, so a new one could reach their levels (or at least get near enough to make the difference neglible).