Harsh truths > Comforting lies

[Nocturnal-Rainbows]

I'm gonna go full retard here and counter (or just clarify I suppose) one of my own points. When I mentioned that vets swoop in with their inflated stats and kill one of the warring noobs, the inflated stats aren't even an issue there. Noobs do not know how to PvP, even if they think they do. Funny story, me and my bros when we were playing a few worlds ago were constantly dueling each other in our village and even having scuffles with other players who were similarly clueless about PvP and we all legit thought we had the PvP aspect down and that if anything we were just missing the stats.
How wrong we were. When everybody else in my village quit during one of those worlds, I joined a big faction (won't name which) and the first thing they wanted to do when I got there was to see how I PvP'd and it was pretty fucking embarrassing because I got blown the fuck out and they taught me how to PvP and it's night and day.
I swear, I say this with genuine honesty, most people in the game do not know how to PvP, even if they take part in PvP. It took me specifically joining a prominent village to see just how ineffective the PvP tactics I was used to using really are and what you've got to remember is our little group was warring with people around us so we were PvPing a decent amount and it WAS adequate for the players we were going against, but anybody from a big village, regardless of if their stats were higher than yours or not, would waste you.
In this game, the benefit of having somebody who knows their shit and teaching you it cannot be overstated. You can be playing for years and not have any idea how shit you are at the game. I'm dead serious too. Next world I was back to joining a regular run of the mill village and it just further highlighted the stark difference in skill level when you know what you know. Sadly most people don't know this and actually think they have a chance in combat against people who really know how the combat system works, when in reality one person who really knows how it works can easily dispose of multiple people who don't irrespective of stat/gear differences.

I'm just clearing that up so people don't get the wrong impression by thinking I'm implying that stat differences are the only reason why some noob is gonna get ruined if a vet decides to take sides with someone else against him.

[Nightdawg]

The bots used by players in this game are just to deal with the retarded tedium that is forced on them, such as spending 5 hours to harvest, gather, and replant the crops. In a recent update the devs did some changes to improve harvesting.

Many other tedious retarded things that have been bot-mandatory were changed to some extent by the devs over the years. For example, they changed terraforming, paving, mining and crop planting, by adding area selection.

Stuff like pepper farming, cheese, truffles, foraging, looking for whales, whatever, can be botted.
Pepper farming for example, which was altered a bunch of times, was so fucking retarded and mandatory. I think you used to need to pepper every single piece of food you ate, cause there was no wound to stop you from doing it, so you would want to farm so fucking much, it was obnoxiously tedious and boring.

Imagine needing to kill the same set of mobs 500000 times on a weekly basis in WoW to be able to do arenas or BGs cause otherwise your stats would be 80% lower. Is that fun? Engaging? It's not, but it's mandatory in order to have fun.

The sad part is that the devs literally want to prevent botting *by adding mechanics that incentivise botting*, crop circles being the most recent thing I can think of, which were removed after people complained for wayyyy too long. The problem is that the only people having the power to change PvP and mechanics that are being botted, don't know how combat works, how their own mechanics work and how annoyingly tedious they are, and how players get around the tedium.

I assure you that, even if there was a "perfect anticheat" that would magically prevent any kind of botting or custom client features, there will be some basement dwellers that spend obscene amounts of time playing living this game, who would do all of that tedious crap just to brag about being better than you cause they can invest into this game 8 times the amount of time you can on a daily basis.

The problem is the annoying mechanics, not the "bots".

Also if you believe there are some super advanced hive-mind ultra A.I. bots running in this game, you are very wrong.
There's no such thing as a bot that "grinds stats, tames animals, farms crops for fodder, feeds the animals, milks the animals, builds cheese racks and trays, makes curd, checks the state of the cheese and moves it for the next stage, and does all of these processes simultaneously".

Most bots just involve dealing with the annoying boring tedium. Imagine not being able to make digging surveys that moves dirt into/from stockpiles. Imagine having to press a button and click on every tile manually and having to move EVERY SINGLE PIECE of dirt away from the spot, or having to click every single piece of dirt from your inventory to the ground (no holding shift to pick up the next piece of dirt without manually clicking it), and so on. I didn't play when 2.0 was released in 2015, but I get a feeling it was like that, judging by the questionable choices those devs make when they come up with mechanics, it probably was like that "to prevent botting" too.

I've seen how big villages play and I've seen the bots being used, there's no such thing as some sci-fi bots giving me 5000 pieces of food per day for me to just eat at a table, no mining bots finding q600 metal for the anvil upgrade, no hunting bots bringing me 600 bears on a daily basis, no crop farming animal feeding cow milking cheese moving bot that grinds that gives me 1200 pieces of cheese per day.

When I first started playing 3 years ago, I joined a village of previous hermits and other new players like me. They were all warning me about those "spooky bots" every big faction has. I don't know where this "spooky bots" idea came from. Maybe in legacy the botting was different. Thing is, during that first time I played, I was a shitty brainless player that didn't know how to play this game or grind, but my stats were matching the stats of the people playing in a group near us that claimed to have some ultra hardcore bots. Bot deez nuts.

[Zentetsuken]

Harsh truth -

this game is actually really, really objectively bad. The community makes it worse still, the devs make it worse still.

Comforting lies -

There is enough content in this game that is enjoyable that it really feels like it is possible to turn it in to something good

this is the lie we all tell ourselves, every year


Harsher truth -

The toxic vets who have found ways to get enjoyment out of this game, no matter how toxic their gameplay is and how bad it is for the longevity of the playerbase and the game itself - kudos to them.

If you're nibbling at scraps of autistic grinding that are left that hook new players and hermits long enough to ride the retard train for a few years - kudos to you

Any amount of enjoyment you can get out of this absolute 13 year long trainwreck requires a special kind of mental state or a very unique situation

The harshest truth -

Every single post made of this forum, every single login to this game and every passing moment spent discussing it, good or bad, is only positive reinforcement for the devs. If somebody or something is shit for a decade it's not going to magically get better out of nowhere. There are 10s of 1000s of games out there that can scratch atleast part of the itch that keeps you in this sordid nightmare.

If you play this game you absolutely deserve to be miserable about it.

[wonder-ass]

that's the thing tho I figured out a way I can enjoy the game without thinking about it much. idgaf if jorb decides to change how stat gain works or when he completely nukes how pvp works im sure ill figure it out faster than 99% of the community and then spit in their mouth.

[AriZona]

1. Bots.
2. Vets won't mind their own fucking business
3. Endless grind
4. Too much bullshit which never gets addressed by the devs

#1. I don't see issue here.

#2. It is an open world, but you point is posed wrongly. The issue is that various PVP lovers need only excuse. Because what harm (?) they can get from hermits; right ? They make they 3-5k stats, kick ass some hermits and noobs and get cheap satisfaction of PVP (instead showing their 'greatness' in the PVP fights among themselves). The game develops parasitic relations eventually, bc leftovers of PVP-lovers end up annoying the rest. The *irony* is that devs selling this game as PVP and 90% our infamous vocal PVP'ers and realm-players usually quit in few months. De facto this game is PVE after that time and I think the game should be transformed into 100% PVE server. All issues boil down to the grand 'identity issue' when players' sense of self in the world and reasons they start playing are not matched. Simple.

#3. I like grind. If not quality grind, exploration, trade, and resource search, you have to do ... PVP

#4. How dear you !

[razfen]

Ok I'm glad we're getting on the same page now.

The devs just either don't have enough time, or they have no idea what to do with the game, and neither do the players. All we see is that there is a foundation of a good game, and we want to believe because the game has a certain feel to it. There is a sense of progression that you just never find in any other MMO in my opinion. That is a very big hook for the players.

[AriZona]

The devs just either don't have enough time, or they have no idea what to do with the game, and neither do the players .

We should be more respectful to the efforts devs put creating something. 95% ppl are just consumers in life....

[Zentetsuken]

The devs just either don't have enough time, or they have no idea what to do with the game, and neither do the players .

We should be more respectful to the efforts devs put creating something. 95% ppl are just consumers in life....

If your local grocer spent 10 years shitting in to a can, spending hours a week sealing and packing shit in to cans, labelling the shit cans and placing them nicely on a shelf and telling you that it's tomato puree would you respect him?

this is probably the most stupid thing I have read in an incredibly long time

in what backwards universe does being a developer of something earn you automatic respect

by the way I put effort in to the developed of this comment so if you don't like it then you are just being a disrespectful asshole and you should be ashamed

[Vraatjuh]

If you want to compete at top level, botting is 100% neccessary.
Bots are 100% neccessary for:
whales
anglers
pepper
truffels
mapping
instant alerts on people around claims/thingwalls

bots can be useful for:
farming
tree planting
animals
steel
terraforming

Can you do the above without bots? Most of it, sure. Will it be even close as effective? No way.
Is it the fault of the botters? Argueably. Mostly it's just a problem of complete retarded tedium of basic tasks.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I find it funny though that people say bots are not that big of a deal, when the most broken things like whales just require bots to properly abuse them and are used by every big group.

[razfen]

If you want to compete at top level, botting is 100% neccessary.
Bots are 100% neccessary for:
whales
anglers
pepper
truffels
mapping
instant alerts on people around claims/thingwalls

bots can be useful for:
farming
tree planting
animals
steel
terraforming

Can you do the above without bots? Most of it, sure. Will it be even close as effective? No way.
Is it the fault of the botters? Argueably. Mostly it's just a problem of complete retarded tedium of basic tasks.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I find it funny though that people say bots are not that big of a deal, when the most broken things like whales just require bots to properly abuse them and are used by every big group.

Whales: I can agree, but I don't think the script for it the barrier of entry for whales. You also need to have a village that can just use snekkjas as disposable tools. Whale botting is the special case that I indeed forget, but at this point in time, I wouldn't consider it botting, but a custom client feature instead.
Anglers: Nah who cares. If you mine actively you find anglers in my opinion.
Pepper: I don't think we botted it.
Truffels: Same. The few people that did truffels just just wanted to kill themselves though.
Mapping: Same. While it is true that you can use the common whale bot to get info on continent boundaries, it is once again just a single person doing most of it, and then it is a joint effort of stitching together everyone's maps into a big map file that is then redistributed.
Instant alerts: 100% agree. This bullshit is actually sanctioned in eve online if I remember correctly. Although I would like to reiterate a little on this point: Most of the time, the opposing groups already know something is fishy before these bots give off the alerts, since everyone has scents of everyone, and people constantly check eachother's scents. The most common reason people got together usually was discord pings along the lines of "FELIX OFF HF GATHER GATHER".