#fuckfate

[CaptainMidget]

At first I thought this Fate system is a nice thing because of all the bots and stuff but it's too harmful to normal gameplay. I went on a long foraging trip (2-3 hours) in one direction yesterday and I didn't find a single notable curiosity... there's almost no point of going on curio foraging trips anymore, basically.

30-40 minutes. Jorb, fix plz.

Why did you bother to pick up stalagooms?

[DPblH]

Why did you bother to pick up stalagooms?

Because why not? With this fate we have less forage curios. So, stalagooms is fine too.

Also, I was out of water.

[Grable]

30-40 minutes. Jorb, fix plz.

That's something I left out of my post, but yeah, Glimermoss being the only notable curio that you can find reliably - which seems to imply that it functions out of the fate system and much more like normal forageables.

So the bottom line is this: I would perhaps not even mind a more reliable output of those curiosities, or whatever, but what I do mind is the fact that anything as simple as a ratio of such curiosities per map units covered by mindless walking will serve to reinstitute vaccuum bots (and those might already be a thing for all I know), and that is simply not kosher.

Feel free to discuss in terms of solutions.

I definitely understand the worry about foraging bots. I can think of one idea from the top of my head - it's actually from a chinese wuxia mmo called Moonlight Blade Online, which I played for a while - there's this activity called treasure hunting.
It functions like this:
You use an item in an area and it tells you the direction and estimated distance to it (kind of like rustroot extract!). So I go to the middle of the map, use the item and it tells me the treasure is North-West, far away. I go North-West for a couple of minutes, use the item again, it says direction is still North-West, but close. I move slightly more to North-West, use it again and a small-ish circle appears on the minimap. This is the general area where the treasure can be found. You then have to use the item two more times to exactly pinpoint the location of the treasure, and then use a shovel to dig at that spot.
Sometimes when you dig a treasure up a NPC will come to attack you. The treasure nodes are shared for everyone so if someone gets to the spot before you, the treasure is theirs.
You can watch a video guide of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeyKv2C2kJM

Sure, it's still bottable, but harder. (What isn't bottable with enough effort though?) I can really imagine Haven having something like this. The main point of this is that it could be fun and ACTIVE (curio) foraging, not just mindless walking around. So passive foraging to get normal forageables (berries, string, ..) and active foraging for better curiosities.

[Avu]

For them to be worth it you need to make them much stronger. Right now I don't even care that I don't see them. After that you can make them reliable. The only way to make them reliable and not too easily altable is applying a cost to alts. The only cost seems to be money. So 7 reliable curio per week if you have more than 14 hours played that week. You get a ritual/prayer/appeal to nature/ higher power blabla kinda menu where you spend 30 seconds in prayer and after that if you have available reliable curio stacks you get 1 in first apropriate location so you load a new minimap if it's swamp you get bell if it's a mussel you cook it's pearl bla bla I know it sounds like pay to win but it really isn't since all chars that actually play the game seriously are subscribed. If people want to pay money for 1 extra reliable curio for them it's a pay to win I'm willing to accept since they still have to go out and get it. Non subscribers can still get them randomly and if you do get one of the reliable ones you don't get the random ones and vice versa so it's still somewhat fair. Balance it so the random ones follow same general distribution.

Or you know remove them.

[fablewings]

Just nerf them and make them into leather ball stats. GG.

[MagicManICT]

Just nerf them and make them into leather ball stats. GG.

Well, that was the only reason they were forage-botted in the first place. If you have something with exceptionally better stats than anything else, people will do what they can to get it. They should have just been nerfed into the ground to begin with to see if that "fixed the problem." The other option would be to give small buffs to others to make them as good so people don't feel a very strong desire to find something better than a q300 straw doll.

Then again, people whined about the curio system at first, too, but jorb is willing to tweak this vs never going to go back to the old LP system.

[Sevenless]

There's really nothing wrong with the "RNG super rare" items existing in game. They're no different than the talking whale was back in legacy.

The issue still remains that foraging got kicked in the nuts in terms of enjoyability and utility since there's not much good to find anymore. While forage bots were exceptionally powerful, foraging was also an enjoyed activity on the parts of most haveners (in my experience of talking to people at least).

But ehn whatever, jorb was talking about not wanting a "vaccuuming the landscape for sweet loot with no real investment" as an activity. I don't know how he proposes to do that and bring back foraging as being a fun activity, but maybe the concept of rituals or hearth magic might have an answer. Either way it's going to take time *shrugs*

[Sollar]

My suggestion is to look at the root of the problem - BOTS. You will ruin the enjoyment of real people if you develop your game to workaround the bot problem. Have some captcha appear at random times that kicks out bots or better yet have a captha appear when trying to pickup a valuble item (curio or something else). If it's not completed in time have that item dissapear and kick the bot out. It's just a slight disconfort for real players. Also ban at least temporary bot accounts

[jorb]

Oh lord.

Bots aren't the root of the problem.

[Procne]

Oh lord.

Bots aren't the root of the problem.

PvP is. That's why we can't have nice things