Bonds/Claims in Character Sheet

[bumfrog]

I'm not saying the mechanic is perfect, but using alts to circumvent it isn't exactly "no-cost" either, as demonstrated by the fact that you're complaining about it.

And permanently losing one of your hard-limit 16 curio slots is a massive incentive in the other direction, far more extreme a cost than giving an alt a few straw dolls and dragonflies for yeo and a decent size claim

[loftar]

this is a milestone of declination I really didn't expect

What do you mean?

And permanently losing one of your hard-limit 16 curio slots is a massive incentive in the other direction, far more extreme a cost than giving an alt a few straw dolls and dragonflies for yeo and a decent size claim

I didn't say anything that disagreed with that, I'm just saying that there's still a cost associated with it.

[DDDsDD999]

Why do you guys just make mechanics to specifically promote alts, why.

I'm not saying the mechanic is perfect, but using alts to circumvent it isn't exactly "no-cost" either, as demonstrated by the fact that you're complaining about it.

Putting a mass-produced curio on a study desk once a month is effectively nothing. I'm not even the one person in my village who does this, I have no personal stake in this.

I'm complaining about it because the mechanic just screws new players that don't know that you can avoid the problem by using alts. Making alts for everything is ugly and just shows poor game development, and is one of the things that turns away new players.

Your Q&A says "We try to take botting as a sign of a broken game mechanic, rather than as a sign of broken players." This applies pretty well to alts too, and then you guys have dumb mechanics like this that just yell at the player "hey make an alt to get rid of this." The solution to this dumb mechanic is pretty simple: remove the dumb mechanic.

[Zentetsuken]

Why do you guys just make mechanics to specifically promote alts, why.

I'm not saying the mechanic is perfect, but using alts to circumvent it isn't exactly "no-cost" either, as demonstrated by the fact that you're complaining about it.

Putting a mass-produced curio on a study desk once a month is effectively nothing. I'm not even the one person in my village who does this, I have no personal stake in this.

I'm complaining about it because the mechanic just screws new players that don't know that you can avoid the problem by using alts. Making alts for everything is ugly and just shows poor game development, and is one of the things that turns away new players.

Your Q&A says "We try to take botting as a sign of a broken game mechanic, rather than as a sign of broken players." This applies pretty well to alts too, and then you guys have dumb mechanics like this that just yell at the player "hey make an alt to get rid of this." The solution to this dumb mechanic is pretty simple: remove the dumb mechanic.

The more you time you are wiling to put in to making posts and complaining about it, the higher the cost associated with making a claim is and the less broken the mechanic is.

[loftar]

Putting a mass-produced curio on a study desk once a month is effectively nothing. I'm not even the one person in my village who does this, I have no personal stake in this.

I don't think that having to spawn an alt, take it to the location of the claim (or use a wilderness beacon for it), and then having to remember to log in and replenish it with curiosities every now and then counts as "nothing". I mean, again, I don't want to give the impression that I think that leaning on alt tedium is good and desirable, and if possible it should be avoided. All I'm saying is that, lacking any better options (the position I sometimes find myself in), I think there's at least a case to be made that it's better than literally nothing, at least depending on the context. Tedium may not be a nice lever to pull, but at least it's a lever that we can pull (or at least avoid retracting for existing mechanics), lacking others.

[DDDsDD999]

Putting a mass-produced curio on a study desk once a month is effectively nothing. I'm not even the one person in my village who does this, I have no personal stake in this.

I don't think that having to spawn an alt, take it to the location of the claim (or use a wilderness beacon for it), and then having to remember to log in and replenish it with curiosities every now and then counts as "nothing". I mean, again, I don't want to give the impression that I think that leaning on alt tedium is good and desirable, and if possible it should be avoided. All I'm saying is that, lacking any better options (the position I sometimes find myself in), I think there's at least a case to be made that it's better than literally nothing, at least depending on the context. Tedium may not be a nice lever to pull, but at least it's a lever that we can pull (or at least avoid retracting for existing mechanics), lacking others.

[loftar]

Part of the problem is also that the alt problem is entirely intrinsic to everything about the game. I hardly see a future where we can make it so that it's not strictly speaking better to have two or three alts just to be able to do multiple tasks at once, so trying to entirely eliminate it feels somewhat futile. That doesn't mean I like it, or that I wouldn't prefer being able to do something about it, but it's kind of hard to see what kind of game it would even be that entirely eliminated it. (Other than needing personal identification to register an account, I guess.)

[Zentetsuken]

I hardly see a future where we can make it so that it's not strictly speaking better

This is pretty much the general consensus. It was a good run, though.

[loftar]

This is pretty much the general consensus. It was a good run, though.

What do you mean?

[DDDsDD999]

Part of the problem is also that the alt problem is entirely intrinsic to everything about the game. I hardly see a future where we can make it so that it's not strictly speaking better to have two or three alts just to be able to do multiple tasks at once, so trying to entirely eliminate it feels somewhat futile. That doesn't mean I like it, or that I wouldn't prefer being able to do something about it, but it's kind of hard to see what kind of game that would even be. Other than needing personal identification to register an account, I guess.

I agree that there will always be an advantage in having the ability to have characters in multiple place at once. But I think just adjusting mechanics to not so favorably encourage alts is enough to reduce the mandatory alt usage, and make the game better. I would personally love to use less alts and have less logins, but the game actively handicaps me if I want to use one character to both craft things and fight other people (the latter requiring the former). If I want to make claims, I have to shove them onto alts because having a claim would handicap my LP gain.

Make it so the LP system doesn't favor splitting combat and crafting skills between 2+ characters, since they're competing for the same learning points. Then do the same for FEPs so I can raise fighting and crafting stats on one character without them both competing for the same hunger bar. Then let me own a few claims on my main without eating up my mentory (this thread). I'm sure 4-16 claims per character is enough maintenance-tedium to prevent whatever abuses you imagine, without needing to handicap the character's stat growth.