jorb wrote:I like the event quests. True, they are hard to pursue teleologically, but you can reroll, and you can accept completing them when you happen to complete them. Also, completing them is not a simple function of time.
Not convinced that "time gates" is a universal concept, that it is universally bad, or really any of those things you said. I mean, crops in Haven are "time gated". Shouldn't they be?
I have completed Mystic.
Time gates make sense in certain aspects, for instance, farming, sure, it makes sense for things to take time to grow etc, but thats why these are all side-jobs to an extent, you plant your stuff, then do everything else and come back when its ready to harvest. You can see exactly what you need to do here, but the very real difference is that you can actually see quite clearly as day and night exactly what it takes to grow a crop, first you need the seed, then you need to plant it, then you know roughly how long it takes to grow to harvest it and the payoff is having the resources you recieved from farming and the increased Q if you increased your stats. This is gated progression, which is acceptable when done right.
Mystic's "experience events" are just solid time gates with zero difficulty around them, for instance "Experience ancient windthrow" requires you to arbitrarily walk to a windthrow every single day until the event triggers and thats it. There is nothing interesting about that, there is nothing difficult about that, its just boring, inconvenient and as you can see others complaining about this every single world, hated by literally everybody. Everybody has the same reaction either "i hate it" or "just abandon it", please listen to this. By the time most people get to doing mystic, if they are going to do it at all, they are already a couple of months into the world, a time where player engagement is the most important thing of keeping them playing for longer and not just getting bored, quests like this can play a huge role in players just giving up on the game. Every world the same complaints are made about these quests by a lot of players.
Its a fake difficulty, you can pick every other credo quest possible and describe exactly what its very real difficulty is, whether its finding a specific foregable, slaughtering a specific animal, visiting a tree on the other side of the world, felling a specific tree, growing a specific crop, mining a specific ore, even quests like "get a pearl". All of these the player knows exactly what they need to do and have a rough idea how long its going to take, they all have very real difficulties to them, solid time gating where you just have to complete the exact same boring task of walking to the exact same natural resource every single day until an event triggers is an artificial difficulty and does nothing but make the player resent the game.
Further reading as a few examples:
tv tropes fake difficulties document how waiting is a bad mechanic.keep the player engaged, no-one likes waiting aroundthis reddit post that makes a solid point about 5 entire demographic groups of players you are forcing away from the game with solid time gatesTrial and error level designHonestly, credos have issues sure where some quests are just impossible at certain times and it would be nice to see those addressed in the future, but "experience event" quests are actually the biggest problem with credos in that everyones response to them, including your own, seems to be "reroll it".