Game Development: Pickling Brine

[SnuggleSnail]

IMO, the bloat and obtuseness of the game has a worse impact than bots. If you surveyed 10+ year old accounts about how to do grind industry/characters nearly none of them would even know where to start.

[sMartins]

tl;dr custom clients and nerfs to seige, as well as various reworks to only appease lategame nolifers, ruined the beauty of the game
if we all played on a client with no nightvision or bots it would be 1000x more involving and interesting

Yeah, we can't do anything about it ....
People don't get it, they want to 'win', no matter at what price, even if they are the first to get bored.
I have suggested several times to lock the client; is it probably a losing battle? that would lead to even more disparity? I don't know.

[Antvgr]

IMO, the bloat and obtuseness of the game has a worse impact than bots. If you surveyed 10+ year old accounts about how to do grind industry/characters nearly none of them would even know where to start.

It's what you call "bloat" is what makes the game so great. It's extremely wide, it has tons of things to do, and you don't have any straight way illuminated for you. I have been playing for 5 months and only now starting to feel that i have some solid understanding of the game, and yet find new things every few days. I have not even touched alchemy! It's the beauty. Who needs another survival pvp sim with straight progression? Tons of them out there.

[Dawidio123]

IMO, the bloat and obtuseness of the game has a worse impact than bots. If you surveyed 10+ year old accounts about how to do grind industry/characters nearly none of them would even know where to start.

It's what you call "bloat" is what makes the game so great. It's extremely wide, it has tons of things to do, and you don't have any straight way illuminated for you. I have been playing for 5 months and only now starting to feel that i have some solid understanding of the game, and yet find new things every few days. I have not even touched alchemy! It's the beauty. Who needs another survival pvp sim with straight progression? Tons of them out there.

While the annoying variety of systems simulates depth for new players, for people who have already experienced it it's nothing more but an annoyance (which they are forced to do to not fall behind compared to others who do it). You cannot tailor your game to only new players bcs all of them will at some point experience all the game has to offer and then it's just the bad systems without the "sense of discovery".

Did you ever go whaling? It's basically 2-16 hours out of your life depending on your luck. First time hunting a whale might be cool, but when you go out for the 20th time same world and waste 8 hours only to find nothing it's not nearly as enjoyable.
Mining might seem cool at first ("oh boy i'm finding so much new stuff" type of deal), but then you realize you gotta mine for 8 hours a day, and pray to god while you do this, just to have a remote chance of finding a good ore/stone with good quality while 90% of what you'll find is complete garbage (ie. ores that you'd find at -2 while mining on -9)
I could go on and on about those kinds of systems bcs most of them are like this, truffles are super annoying to get (easily bottable btw) but super overpowered, questing increasing quality is autistically grindy but also good af, herding 500+ pigs makes for a whole day of work, etc.

From what i understood the devs get that if something is heavily botted then it's probably the mechanic/system that's at fault and not the bot maker and yet they fail to fix most of these systems and even introduce new super annoying things to grind out (ie. pickling, have fun manually managing hundreds of glass jars, making hundreds extra gardening pots for spices and then having a whole bunch of trees preferably by week 1 to make dozen barrels of vinegar).

[Massa]

IMO, the bloat and obtuseness of the game has a worse impact than bots. If you surveyed 10+ year old accounts about how to do grind industry/characters nearly none of them would even know where to start.

It's what you call "bloat" is what makes the game so great. It's extremely wide, it has tons of things to do, and you don't have any straight way illuminated for you. I have been playing for 5 months and only now starting to feel that i have some solid understanding of the game, and yet find new things every few days. I have not even touched alchemy! It's the beauty. Who needs another survival pvp sim with straight progression? Tons of them out there.

i love sausage variations and birds i am so enriched by new trees and oh my god is that yet another sausage

[vatas]

Imho the siege/permadeath aspect being fundamentally something you can balance, is the root issue.

Siege impossible = only people who don't read a forum guide (and/or fall to social engineering) have their bases wrecked by griefers. There is no way to punish a griefer by wrecking his shit.

Siege too easy (and/or palisade can be bashed) = people who are casual/new to the game can have all their shit wrecked.

There's probably some kind of middle ground that can be achieved, but the problem is that people tend to blame the other side for being too OP. This mostly applies to defenders (understandable as they have so much more to lose.)
*Back in w12 or so, I was quite salty that my village got sieged. The attacker had a ram guarded by an alt and if we tried to sortie out, they would send an actual fighter to defend the Ram (at the time, "time-gated-ram-bashing" was set to ON.) However with hindsight and a more cool head, I can admit that the village had a serious design flaw: we had built two stone towers next to each other, and close to the wall (so there was no gap wide enough to build Archery Towers.) By simply aiming the Ram at the gap between to Stone Towers, the main tool intended to balance the scales for defender, was nullified. This ties to "you need to read a forum guide to build a secure base" -issue/discussion.
*Allegedly, there was once a village that came under siege. Ten or so people lived there. They decided to build something like three (3) Archery Towers in total, and prioritised Discord messaging and Forum posts where they whined about the raid, begged for help, and called the situation unfair.

Permadeath follows a similar formula, but I presume is even harder to balance:

*Hard to kill anyone through PvP = nobody, who is "good" at the game dies, people go for all kinds of ways to bypass the protection measures (boat bashing, reverse pickpocket leeches) that still manage to kill the poor newbs. Newbs are the only viable target if you play to collect Skeletons. Not being able to actually kill your opponent is at least a contributing factor on why faction PvP dies. While a faction can easily have a negative impact on the game, they would be the most feasible natural predator of "that guy who keeps posting about the random people he kills just to increase his skeleton collection and meme about game being dead." Very least, these guys seem to sprung up after factionbois quit and switch to "wait for the next world" -mode.

*Anyone KO can simply be murdered = game becomes almost impossible to get into unless you join an already established village/community. Even after getting your properly built Brickwall base, going outside carries the risk of running into someone much more prepared for a PvP encounter. If you add something heavy-handed to discourage this (overtuned Nidbane, Salem'm Stocks-system) people will just use Murder Alts for the most blatant seal clubbing, and use nuisance alts who can't be killed in retaliation.

[terechgracz]

just make game ez

[SnuggleSnail]

It's what you call "bloat" is what makes the game so great.

There are billions of food recipes. With a B and 11 digits. I doubt 1% of all recipes will ever be made. Some worlds are completely ruined just because the good foods are the least fun to make. It's not a curated of good things, it's essentially AI slop from before there was AI slop.

People not understanding how a game works at even a basic level after playing it for a decade is not a good thing and it's retarded to pretend it is.

[terechgracz]

ez game is when you can sit play and have fun etc but in haven there are random numbers and its too hard for my brain
polynomials and roots is magic for me, no way ill understand that plus like Snail says, big numbers not good

[SnuggleSnail]

write a detailed industry/character development guide or shut up tbh