The contours system is problematic.

[DoctorViper]

Before we begin, I wish to give you a bit of information on myself as a player. My total playtime on the game clocks in at a little over a week, but I've been a Hearthling for nearly a month. World 10 is my first experience with the game, but I still feel that an opinion from the perspective of a new player can provide valuable insight.

Now! If you want a TL;DR, or a more serious critique, ignore the hidden content box. It contains my process of experimenting with the image uploader, as well as my initial reaction upon reaching the conclusion that I have on the painting system.

So, pretend you're me. You decide to take on the painting skill, and want to try and figure out a design for your very first Heraldic cape. You manage to narrow it down to two images:

Vs.

One is a little under 300x300, the other is at the maximum 512x512, but you think either one can work!... Except it really doesn't.



You think to yourself, "Sure, it COULD work... but it looks rather cancerous." You remember seeing a screenshot on the wiki of someone who managed to properly capture all of the colors to make a "photo-realistic" painting of two characters, so how did they do it?

...

Wait, noise! You just add noise to trick the system! So, you open up your copy of Photoshop, and one image at a time, you add noise to them.



Perfect! 35% should be enough to do the trick, while still preserving the actual image.

And now...



A-ha! You've bested the system! You even admire how much better that looks compared to the initial upload. You're more than aware that such an image would take a lot of dye for each dot you've artificially added to make the cape with full colors, so you decide to go check the requirements.



Well, you'll certainly have to grind for a lot of linseed oil and dye material, but it shouldn't be that hard to--wait, what the hell?



I NEED 641 PSYCHE!?









This other image isn't as bad, but that's still a lot of psyche grinding to do!

... Fuck it, time to go whine about it on the forums.

Now, I'm not complaining AT ALL at the idea that I would need to juice a metric ton of flax seeds to get linseed oil. And I obviously wouldn't bash how much dye I would need to gather to make it work. Both of things are there to make the final result all that much more rewarding, compared to if you settled with the colors being off and looking like crap, or just picked an image that doesn't suffer from that problem. But the problem is the Contour system, which acts as a barrier for more complex and artistic images to be made by tying it to the hardest base attribute to level up in the game. As such, I have a couple ideas on how to make it easier for people to show off their unique interests, whether they're making banners, painting the sails of their knarrs, or just making normal paintings! The following solutions are sorted by which one will have the biggest impact on solving the current issue while still being realistic:

• Reduce the psyche-contour multiplier from x0.5

If you have a painting that has a 375 contour value or even a 1282 contour value, that may require more Butter-steamed Cavebulbs than you have the time and resources to make and eat, as those would respectively require 188 psyche and 641 psyche respectively. For a veteran player, this might not be a problem, but you also have to remember that more casual players may not have the time or determination to grind that very specific skill.

• Add a painting skill to spend LP on.

This is a close second, and my personal favorite idea, as this will not only enable people to sink in however much LP they want depending on how serious they are on making high quality paintings, but the contour system can be changed to rely on a multiplier between the painting skill and the psyche skill, much in the same fashion as exploration and perception being multiplied to determine what kind of forageables the player can detect.

• Both of the above?

Eh, just an idea. It'd be nice if it happened, but I understand if it'll have to be one or the other.

• Add more reliable psyche-boosting foods accessible for new characters.

River pearl mussels. Butter-steamed Cavebulbs. Wonderful Wilderness Wurst. Roast Troll. All of these add a decent amount of psyche FEPs, but the needed ingredients are hard to come by, either due to rarity or due to a character not being up to snuff in terms of stats in order to go out and get them. And even then, considering how the FEP system is one elaborate toss of the dice in terms of what stat get boosted, you aren't guaranteed to get what you need short of what you get out of cavebulbs.

jsut drnk ur tobbaco n smoek ur wine

That isn't going to make a flawed system go away. Besides, the psyche-boosting items can only take you so far.

[DaniAngione]

Hey, Viper
Nice to see you here

So... I don't disagree with you.
But I hardly see it changing... Because of this:



Now, now.
I'm not blaming Jorb or Loftar either.
Revenue IS important if you want to keep game development and stable, nice servers. They need to eat, they have bills to pay, etc, etc. Being a mostly cosmetic system -- no, being a completely cosmetic system -- it doesn't bother me that much. They sell sketches, people can achieve nicer pictures and be happy, etc. It's kind of a win-win situation. And if you're really, really willing to not buy a sketch, you can find someone able to craft for you (as long as you provide the mats) - this late in the world isn't so difficult for people to have stats like that, combat stats are going as high as 1, 2, 3, 5k or more... So less than 1k Psyche isn't really a 3-headed dragon

Other than that, to not say that I'm here only on a note of pessimism, I would like to leave a suggestion to Jorb/Loftar:

Perhaps add some sort of "requirement reduction" for dyes, oil and stats if the person is verified and a bit more if the person is subbed? That could encourage a bit more verifications and subs, eh?

[DoctorViper]

They made it this way on purpose so they can get more money, idiot!

The only reason I'm not going to try and delete this thread or request deletion is because, as you told me on Discord, there may be some merit that can be taken from the OP.

[Granger]

I think the sketches are reasonably priced in case you buy them in bulk. Skills and materials needed for photorealistic images are excessive, but for crest type images they seem reasonable. Subscription bonus to material costs shouldn't be excessive, if any.

Keep in mind that you can keep unused bought sketches in your fire to both prevent them from being looted and to take them to a new world, should one come.
No clue if you can put them back into the fire (as you can with gametime tokens), havn't bough some (yet).

[ricky]

There should definitely be more colors though. Probably about 8

[DDDsDD999]

Contours should probably soft-cap a bit, imo.

Would also be nice if there were more reasons to level psyche, a lot of crafters don't raise it very high. Maybe make higher psyche lower the required amount of linseed oil? Hiring crafters to make cheaper paintings could offer an interesting trade-route.

[DaniAngione]

There should definitely be more colors though. Probably about 8

We currently have access to 9 colors + transparency

[ven]

Would also be nice if there were more reasons to level psyche, a lot of crafters don't raise it very high.

Psyche-based combat moves

[ricky]

There should definitely be more colors though. Probably about 8

We currently have access to 9 colors + transparency

To be more clear, there should probably be about 8 more colors

[loftar]

But I hardly see it changing... Because of this:

That's not the main reason, though. The main purpose of the contours/fields system is to measure the complexity of paintings and make more complex paintings harder to produce, precisely because the image upload system wasn't supposed to be used just to swipe a random JPEG off Google Images and put it in the game. Judging from the OP, it's performing exactly as intended. On the other hand, I've seen numerous examples in-game of people who've managed to show pretty nice creativity within the system.