Sounds reasonable, though I agree more natural-feeling gates would be better. Everyone is fine with things like skins taking a while to dry and it taking a while to turn the skins into leather. You could just gate things behind material/structure X which requires a certain amount of time to make (similar to dried skins/leather), but which (directly or indirectly) require timegated material Y to be made. For example, Mineholes are currently made from hardened leather on any level and crafting hardened leather can be done instantly, but if for example you were to make the level 1 -> level 2 Minehole cost only leather (probably has other implications; this is just for example), then make turning leather into hardened leather also take two days and require hardened leather for the first time for the level 2 -> level 3 minehole, that would add a natural two-day timegate to reach level 3 after becoming capable of reaching level 2. Make it take another two days to turn hardened leather into super-awesome reinforced leather deluxe and require that for level 4, and you've got another natural timegate. You could also e.g. require a special forge that can only be built on level 4 (or requiring materials from level 4) that takes two days to turn the newly found obnoxium ore into slowtomakeium bars and require those for the level 5 minehole to get timegates that feel more fun than just passively waiting around for an arbitrary event to happen.
fairystyle wrote:Isn't it naturally just like this. Without it being forced to an artifiial time gate
You are correct, but only within the constraints of reasonable player behavior. When people nolife the game, this is no longer true. Snekkjas are a good example. The natural method of progression is to find WWWs, dry them on a frame (16 hours at q10), plant the hemp/flax you get from that, harvest it a cycle later (2-3 days), replant them, repeat harvesting and replanting until you have enough (takes a while) and then finally craft a Snekkja sail. But if you want to nolife it, you can instead go out and collect 90 wool/mohair and craft a sail from that on day 1. Same goes for various other mechanics; mineholes should take ages to build due to the slow production of wax from beehives (and it takes a while to set up beehives even), but you can just nolife candleberry foraging to get to lower layers stupidly quick. As others have pointed out, this is no unreasonable task if you simply have enough players dedicating themselves to the task.
That being said, there are some natural time gates that
do work correctly. Nobody starts building a palisade until day 3 (or very late day 2), they remain unsafe for another day, and they won't be truly safe until another two days later. I think moving black coal to level 3 now finally prevents early metal (due to accessing level 3 requiring metal)? (It's pretty close to a true timegate if there is still some loophole left.) Tree quality growth is still limited by tree growth speed. There's probably some more gates I can't think of right now that do function...but they're typically early-game only, and there's plenty of other pseudo-timegates you can break through with sheer effort.
fairystyle wrote:Pickard wrote:fairystyle wrote:Yes you can for one because it is already how it is working with a lot of things .
Examples?
Well i already mentioned as 1st time gate, you are quantity restricted from having enough hard leather by wax and you will always be until your farm wax becomes stable
You are quantity restricted by amounts of leather which you have to chose if it goes for minehole, or armor, or gilds one side will have to wait and get quantity filled
You are restricted by hard metal because you need to build supports, smelters, levels, tools, weapons and in the same time make armor, need to balance between these things too
Your steel is also automatically time framed because it needs wrough iron to be build and same to start running steel
You are somewhat quantity restricted by Str attribute so food x time x salt amounts in the mines, what is the meaning of time gating levels if you can not mine them?
Game is sinking in time/quantity restrictions
I don't even know if i should bring up realms which are soaked with them
Quantity gates are effort gates, not time gates. It takes 2-3 days to get 4 pieces of leather. How long does it take to get 1000 pieces of leather? The answer, given enough effort, is the exact same: 2-3 days. If something costs 2 leather to craft, it can be crafted on day 3. If you make it cost 500 leather to craft, it can (and will!) still be crafted on day 3. Quantity gates are not timegates, they are purely effort gates.
fairystyle wrote:Pickard wrote:fairystyle wrote:If someone is annoyed that snekkjas are accessible too early, make more clothes required for the sail.
You cnnot make time gate with resources quantity because causal hermits and factions has 100x+ productivity difference, making something resource wise difficult for factions makes it impossible for non factions.
Yes you can for one because it is already how it is working with a lot of things .
And on the subject of practical impact of effort gates: as others in this thread have already hinted at, effort gates lock small groups and solo players out of content, scaling directly with the amount of effort required (and depending on the amount of effort the group or player is willing to invest). Mineholes are a good example. I have mined gold in the past when there were only 5 cave levels, and gold started on level 3. With the number of cave levels doubled, ores also moved further down, greatly increasing the effort gate (mine holes being stupid expensive are the main problem for a hermit, but the rock hardness is also an issue, requiring both far more strength and a far better pickaxe). I'm not 100% sure what level gold now starts on (wiki still says 3, but it's definitely wrong; I think it's level 5 or something?), but I haven't mined a single gold ore since because the amount of effort required for a hermit to get to that point is ridiculous now. (I don't necessarily mind this much as gold is not essential, but still, the effort gate has locked me out.) Meanwhile, factions get to levels lower than that in no time flat through combined effort.
For me, level 2 has nonetheless grown more exciting due to the natural caverns you can find there (which differ noticeably from level 1's), but level 3 has become underwhelming and it's hard to find the motivation to go deeper consider how little changes per level now, compared to the amount of effort you have to put in to get there.
Nightdawg wrote:The point of specific time gates is so that if someone starts playing the game from scratch 2 weeks later they're not 6 mineholes behind.
If you add long ass drying times, they're still 2 weeks behind, no matter how you look at it.
The idea was proposed as a way to extend gameplay progression time-wise and reduce the amount of effort required for factions to stay reasonably competitive, not as a catch-up mechanism (for which it wouldn't be nearly sufficient anyways; if it helps in that aspect then that's just a nice bonus). That said, long-ass minehole drying sounds like a very unfun mechanic. Moving the timegate to e.g. the materials required to build the minehole would feel much more fun. (As an added bonus, it would also help in catching up, as once the material has been made it can be traded for instead of going through the timegated process to make it yourself.
fairystyle wrote:Any kind of cap or artificial slowing down sounds like another gamekiller. Words like "game could be more enjoyable" are not matching to a fact that good players can get stuck for someone else's sake. In any narration, not adressed to author of this post, but in general: to limit good players progress for sake of those who can't keep up has nothing in common with fair catch up mechanics. Everyone got excited with fresh time gate idea forgetting how just recently entire server was crying out loud about winter BAD completely paralyzing their activities. Lets make it clear: anything what will paralyze your activity for any amount of time will be always annoying and you will hate it.
Counterpoint: The new smelting system (requiring hard metal before you can smelt iron) was very well-received even though the practical impact was that it locked people out of iron for quite some time, because it made the build-up to iron feel more worthwhile instead of going from 0 to nearly all metal stuff overnight. (The only complaints were about regional ore distribution, which has been a pain in the past, but Thingwalls have made it a lot more bearable now; I imagine there will be less complaints about this next reset as people are used to using Thingwalls to travel now.)
Pickard wrote:Zentetsuken wrote:[b]"A quake is felt during the night, as if the fathoms of the underworld have hollowed and a mystical force is calling for you to explore them. You sense that you can now explore deeper in to the rocky abyss of the hearthlands."
New level every 2 weeks, infinite. World duration is limited by server memory.
You say it like a joke, but unlocking additional content over time could genuinely work to keep players engaged, especially if there's a competitive element. In other games, even simple things like 'daily challenges' can greatly extend a game's lifespan (the Daily Challenge is the only reason I still play Spelunky 2; even though it's just a set of randomly generated levels each day (read: near-zero effort from the devs to host it) the daily leaderboards make it feel fun to play). I imagine that some people would actually try to keep getting to the lowest level.
maze wrote:For boats, there is groups of players who's whole full gameplay for the first 48hours is to get the fk off the main area and hide away from the rest/factions of the world.
You don't need a snekkja for that though, you can just enter a vortex.