Discussion - The Quality System

[KwonChiMin]

for the same reason they want carrots Hi Kwon

Hi, borka.
Even with top q crops new player (or someone who missed some time) will be far behind of everyone who played for a long time. By the time he gets farming to the q of a crop the one who sold it will have q ++.

Borka strolled over time
And in time he saw time
Time put time in the time
Time time time time

[Patchouli_Knowledge]

Crop quality is mostly timing with crop's growth rather than work of multiple people within a faction. The only thing you need mostly is a character that has adequate farming skills to not reduce quality of the crop on harvest so that is not the best example. Other things like trees, herbalist tables, and metal factory still applies though.

Not sure if we should take into account of factions that has longer play time to develop such qualities since that element is prevalent in many MMORPGs in general.

[LadyV]

For the most part I think the quality system works fine. Only thing I think would be nice is more items showing it or its affects. ie. table, chairs, meat grinder, cauldron...

[krikke93]

For the most part I think the quality system works fine. Only thing I think would be nice is more items showing it or its affects. ie. table, chairs, meat grinder, cauldron...

Yes. This please.

+1

[Danno]

I think the quality system brings about a certain sense of futility as it is. You'd surely have to be actively playing for a year (or longer) to get q500 cows. I'm not going to do that and I have no intentions of even trying. It'd just be depressing when some village 10 times better decides to come along and destroy all my hard work.

I think the paranoia all players have in this game is hilarious and charming. I like that we can die at any given moment, but there's no way I'd be able to laugh it off if I just lost a year of tedious work because some overpowered character decided to kill me and ruin my village on a whim. There's too much focus on quality, too much investment - it prevents players from putting themselves at any risk. Your friendly neighbourhood "rangers" go around finding summonable scents to murder players because they're too cowardly to fight face to face. Then they hide behind their brickwall where nobody can get them. I saw a Congress thread that said a ranger even smashed a palisade just to murder someone who was offline and innocent of any real crime. I think it's a pity, really. I think this game would be more fun if people actually fought each other and if it could be on fairly even grounds, not predetermined by quality. Stats should have a role, and I think the square root stuff definitely helps, but it's evidently not enough to prevent ridiculous imbalance.

Why are we wasting our time raising numbers? I could do that on a calculator by pressing [ + ] [ 1 ] and then repeatedly hitting the [ = ] button. We should be interacting with other players more (and not just to raise our stats further).


My village has houses. We have an oven, a farm, a kiln, a mine, stuff to deal with ores, a wall around our land. We're self-sufficient and we've beaten the wilderness. I can't beat the top villages in their quality wars. What is my next goal supposed to be? I'd like to have wars with similar quality villages (while they're online), but the quality system prevents this.

[slipper]

The quality system is genius, don't touch it.

[_Gunnar]

there is absolutely nothing stopping new players from using whatever combination of diplomacy and banditry they feel comfortable with in order to get higher quality stuff. More importantly, because of the diminishing returns, even if you don't have stuff that is "world class" you can still compete pretty effectively if you organize well enough.

It is true that some people just love the challenge of trying to get the highest quality in the world - joining late will be tough for those people, but its still possible to catch up, it will just require a lot of talking or a lot of fighting :p

Also it makes perfect sense that hermits and smaller villages should have lower quality items than large factions.

I used to kindof dislike the quality system as well since it is essentially just grind, but then I realised that some people enjoy it, and you aren't forced into taking part, really. I just buy the stuff that I don't like producing, with the stuff that I do like producing. Also, its about 100x better than the Salem purity system (or than it was when I last played salem... and it seems like it has got worse since then?)

[Danno]

Well, of course nobody's gonna agree that the quality system is bad. Everyone's happy with it because they've put a lot of effort into reaching the levels they have and they'd feel ripped off if they were to lose that, or to even lose their ability to gain such an incredible edge against all the other players. Nobody wants to rock the boat. People were all pissed off when you could no longer walk through the wild and easily 1 shot a bear with a q200 sling you traded for, but they got used to it. People also got pissed off at the curiosity system, but they got used to that, too. I'm sure they'd also get used to if it the game had something more akin to a level cap than the current system.

No, nothing's stopping me and my 6 friends from rising up and challenging, say, AD. But, obviously, it would only take 1 or 2 of their soldiers to slaughter us all in one hit each. Why would we even bother? You can argue that we should be able to take down one of them if they were isolated, but by the time we'd deplete their defense bar, we'd likely be down to one or two men left alive. It'd be incredibly difficult (or impossible) for us to maintain the combat advantage since Death or Glory (and many other combat options) would be useless for us, and the opponent would have shorter cooldowns. My friends and I are not as hardcore as a lot of you may be. We've been playing close to a month this time around and my attributes are all around 50. My friends regard me as having high stats all around.
I sparred someone with high marksmanship and most likely a good sling. He needed maybe 3-5 seconds of time to get good aim on me while I was moving. He did around 200 damage on me in one hit, being able to beat me in 2 hits. I'm sorry, but we can't get 200 agility each to counter that.

The way I see it, the game is designed in a way that it is intended to be more reasonable. It's like if a fairly scrawny street thug (or perhaps 2) were to try and kill some body builder. The body builder would have a clear advantage in strength, but they wouldn't be invincible - they're still human and they still bleed. The thug could win the fight with weapons, superior tactics, abusing human weaknesses, etc. The current reality is that the body builder is an advanced cyborg from the year 4389 with laser eyes and chainsaw breath facing off against unarmed office workers. The quality system is good to some degree, but the square root stuff involved kinda loses its purpose when people get their stats several hundreds higher than the average less devoted player.
Extreme organization is also difficult when we have real lives to live. We play the game for fun, not religiously. We could organize occasions where 3 or 4 of us go to attack 1 super player, but I have a hard time believing we'd give them a run for their money, really.

[TeckXKnight]

The value of the quality system is on a square root function. Getting from q10 to q40 has the same growth gains as going from q640 to q810. The bulk of your strength is from early on. The reason that you get raided has nothing to do with the quality system and everything to do with the fact that there are factions out there that want to raid players. The quality system neither adds to nor detracts from this unless you were a large faction of players fighting another large faction of players.

[Patchouli_Knowledge]

It is actually entirely possible to have high quality items and not be in a major faction as well. If you know the right people and use the right words and actions, you might be able to obtain something quality that may be close to the highest quality they have. While not -the- highest, the diminishing reward will make the difference of little consequences. Once you have the right resources from them, you can be able to produce some good quality items yourself.

-Take for instance, a player name Suika only plays for about 2 months. Within those two months she is able to figure out the game and is able to create a secure home with a brick-wall, village idol, and (if she is savvy enough) located on an island. With a secure front, she can focus on obtaining better items. The first option she has is to get some basic seeds, tools and such. However this means that she will be starting off with low quality items to work with. Alternatively, she can send out a foraging alt and hunt for mussels for their pearls, a valuable trade commodity. Using those pearls, she can trade with a well-respected trader(s) that has decent quality items. With enough pearls, she can cover most of her lack of quality tools and structures just from trading.

- Now one thing that Suika cannot easily buy are high quality nodes which would probably cost a large amount if someone is actually willing to sell them. The only thing she can really do is trade for next-to-highest of the trader(s) resources of the same time.

My only problem with the quality system is that it probably does not feel dynamic enough. If two factions were to quality race, the only thing that will vary is due to quality nodes, and a bit of luck with mining but that difference is going to remain the same unless something change such as a discovery of a node or an outside event occurs such as being raided or a mutual exchange of top quality items between two groups.