Are devs happy/okay/satisfied with the player numbers?

[VDZ]

if for example you sell them powerful sword or treeplanting pots, but it is only one detail with impact on a few other details and not whole gameplay

High-quality Treeplanter's Pots lead to high-quality trees. High-quality trees lead to high-quality boards, blocks and branches. High-quality blocks and branches lead to high-quality tools, high-quality boards and blocks lead to high-quality crafting stations/production structures. High-quality tools and crafting stations/production structures lead to high-quality just about everything. The effect diminishes with each step, but most things cascade to affect tons and tons of other things. (Even the high-quality sword - even just the quality gains from skinning/butchering with it lead to a significant quality increase to many things, not even considering your increased combat capabilities.)

[Halbertz]

it doesn't really matter if someone on the other side of the world has 10 times your stats if you never ever meet them

Until you meet them. Or they meet you, intentionally you know.

you will already be massively behind if you're not an asslicker of top factions or a botter

Goodness gracious. I've already told you, you sperg, that factions success in stat race (and being good in general) mostly from division of labor and having leadership that experienced in game mechanics. Bots are thing too, won't argue, but not even close to main factor. Your projections about rimjobs are far from reality, mate. If you want to have good stats, there is the one and the only way in this game -- eat a lot of good food on good table. Period.

so it is a better idea to play to achieve own goals rather than to compete in this rat race of top stats

Whatever. But you don't actually need DE TOP STATS to enjoy things like pvp. But who asked? I'm on my way to punch 100 bats xDDDD.

[MadNomad]

if for example you sell them powerful sword or treeplanting pots, but it is only one detail with impact on a few other details and not whole gameplay

High-quality Treeplanter's Pots lead to high-quality trees. High-quality trees lead to high-quality boards, blocks and branches. High-quality blocks and branches lead to high-quality tools, high-quality boards and blocks lead to high-quality crafting stations/production structures. High-quality tools and crafting stations/production structures lead to high-quality just about everything. The effect diminishes with each step, but most things cascade to affect tons and tons of other things. (Even the high-quality sword - even just the quality gains from skinning/butchering with it lead to a significant quality increase to many things, not even considering your increased combat capabilities.)

yes, this is true, but for those high quality trees you also need good quality soil, so treeplanter's pot is not everything!

despite treeplanter's pot having a lot of impact on other things you can't achieve much with just those pots, you need a lot of other things! (high q ore, crops, stone, clay, feldspar etc.) and those pots or weapons will not replace them!

that factions success in stat race (and being good in general) mostly from division of labor and having leadership that experienced in game mechanics.

well, did I say that they do not or anything that makes an opposite conclussion?no! I just said a few things on why it doesn't have to make much difference for a single player if you do not wipe someone else's progress

you don't actually need DE TOP STATS to enjoy things like pvp.

of course, because you can still bash most of sprucecaps with as low as 200 UA, but I did not say otherwise

If you want to have good stats, there is the one and the only way in this game -- eat a lot of good food on good table. Period.

of course this is the best mean of getting good FEP stats, but I did not say otherwise

[VDZ]

but for those high quality trees you also need good quality soil

It's not a hardcap so no you don't. It's a simple average (not even a root or anything like that), so extremes pull up the average by quite a bit even if the other variables are crap tier. (Furthermore after one generation you can compost leaves and seeds in your no-longer-softcapping Compost Bin for higher-quality soil. There are also other compostable things you can get more indirectly at higher qualities due to having planted better trees.)

high q ore

Pot -> Tree -> Pickaxe or Stone Axe -> Ore (softcap; you're practically certain to be softcapping your highest quality nodes by tool at low STR)
Pot -> Tree -> Saw + Boards -> Bricks -> Smelter
Pot -> Tree -> Saw + Boards -> Coal

It affects literally every aspect of the metal quality formula.

crops

Pot -> Tree -> Herbalist Table -> Seeds (from WWWs)

stone

feldspar

Pot -> Tree -> Pickaxe or Stone Axe (see above on softcapping)

clay

This is one of the few things not significantly affected (still slightly due to Bone Ash being affected for Bone Clay), but it's a base resource. Further into the crafting chain there's highly likely to be something else that does get affected significantly.

Everything influences everything. And at the start of the world, that's really cool, because it allows you to progress in countless ways and they all feel meaningful to some extent. But it also means that if one thing has absurd values, it ruins the balance by cascading into everything else. Early-game this is cool because trading (at significant price!) for an upgrade to one of your tools feels like a massive upgrade and the impact is still somewhat limited. But much later into the world when things that should be out of your reach for who knows how long are discarded like trash, it gives you massive upgrades at extremely low cost, which gives far, far better value for your time and effort than trying to progress in any other way. There's no longer any point to upgrading anything yourself; your time is far better spent scavenging and trading.

And let's be real: Nobody gets just a Treeplanter's Pot late-game. It's especially ridiculous that you mention crops, because there are tons of abandoned claims that will give you at least weeks of farming progress through simple and quick scavenging. If you ever get the opportunity to trade, you will be able to get ridiculously high quality crops at bargain prices. But you'll run into plenty of high-quality resources of all kinds, both in scavenging and in trading, that will simply eclipse whatever you get 'genuinely'. There's hardly any point to playing the game until you've finished speed-upgrading everything to relatively high qualities, at which point you're already in the end-game, having skipped all the most fun parts of the game.

[MadNomad]

what if you find stone much below quality of your pickaxe/stone axe? then your pot was useless for improving quality in this case as you still have to find the spot with high quality stone!

what if you have a pot but you need clay for something else than pot? then your pot is useless for anything that is not treeplanting, because you can not build a kiln with it!

how does a smelter increase quality of raw ore? it doesn't, quality of your ore will stay the same as it is despite you having high quality smelter, so if you only use high quality smelter and coal but ignore the quality of ore you will get medium quality of bars and not high quality of bars! because quality of ore is still important in formula that calculates quality of metal bars, and it means whole 50% of your metal bar quality!

Pot -> Tree -> Herbalist Table -> Seeds (from WWWs)

becomes useless very soon because it is very difficult to find q50 WWW, and this is level of quality that is achieved quickly from just farming

and because of all those reasons above, I think that one or two high quality items are not whole gameplay!

but for those high quality trees you also need good quality soil

It's not a hardcap so no you don't. It's a simple average

well yes, if you only need medium quality instead of high quality, but I think a lot of players would rather prefer to use higher quality ingredients rather than lower quality ingredients

[CorwinOfAmber]

alright, time to close the thread before VDZ and madgonad write a book together

[MadNomad]

alright, time to close the thread before VDZ and madnomad write a book together

true, thanks for reminding me not to waste too much time on forum, I'm like 90% sure(but not 100%) that I will go on a break until I don't know when now

not sure whether VDZ will figure out if it's time to stop but I suggest to him/her to have a break and, Idk, go outside and see some sun, but whether or not they will do it is their own business

[Kuriak]

I played quite a bit in some of the earlier worlds, probably circa 2011/2012. I adored the game. I mainly played the pre-graphical update haven. What really stopped me from coming back was the botters, and the incentive to play more than one character at a time if you were going to hermit in order to have a reasonable shot at some semblance of progression. Why not join a village you ask? I could never find one that weren't a bunch of botters or Russians with a considerable language/culture barrier.

[Delamore]

I think the current user numbers are a pretty damning indictment of our development and/or management, or perhaps of the game itself, tbqh, but -- while I can certainly speculate -- I don't know with any perfect certainty what the big problem(tm) is. I am concerned that recurring resets is an addiction that we're feeding which prevents any longer term commitments to the game.

Continued development is the best I've got.

I don't think this style of game can properly exist without resets, I instead think that the key to getting it to work is to properly incorporate the resets into the game rather than as a side effect of the development process.

If the game was to have an infinite world run length, any early content is eventually going to be no longer experienced by existing players and ends up as almost dead or wasted content. Either you're adding content that improves the experience for new players or you're adding content for the current game stage players which will always be a moving target getting further and further from early game content.

Even if the game was entirely complete and nothing was going to be added or changed, eventually people feel they've experienced enough of a game and move on. In other games some of those players might instead choose to replay the game but that is a bit hard to achieve in an MMO where other players are such an important part of the experience. Also like before with the moving target for content, the game would have to be balanced so that the new player experience is still fun regardless of what stage the rest of the player base is at.

If the game is instead resetting in a structured way, players are experiencing every stage of the game and all the content you've built. It's also easier to balance you're dealing with a much better defined range of game stages instead of an infinitely scaling range.

[SavageFox]

I think the current user numbers are a pretty damning indictment of our development and/or management, or perhaps of the game itself, tbqh, but -- while I can certainly speculate -- I don't know with any perfect certainty what the big problem(tm) is. I am concerned that recurring resets is an addiction that we're feeding which prevents any longer term commitments to the game.

Continued development is the best I've got.

the truth is a lot of players burn through the contents pretty fast and they get bored quickly and there's also a group of people are addicted game being reset the reason why cuz they think they could do better next time but they never do and they get upset and they want the game reset cuz they think they'll do better next time they don't stick around if they're not winning it's more of they feel like they're losers and they don't want to play a game as a loser so they quit I burn through everything in the first 3 months a playing I ran out of things to do after that then I wind up quitting

so the three problems
number 1 are really skilled players get through the contents super fast then they run out of things to do

number 2 players
get upset they fall behind so they quit and hope for a world reset so they can have a second chance

number 3 they got murdered by someone in game don't feel like playing anymore not everybody can't handle permadeath

number 3 is a problem but it doesn't need to be fixed

regardless I think there should be one reset every year

the most important issue is content stuff to do