Top 10 things that annoy you about Cantr II

[Arlequin]

7. Every character is 'good'

It isn't easy to be evil. Even the most simpleton peasant carries a quality weapon and a shield.

[SekoETC]

It isn't easy to be evil. Even the most simpleton peasant carries a quality weapon and a shield.

Not on all regions. Even the old English world is going through regression. But if people can't even afford iron shields, what's the chance of them holding resources worth raiding? Kidnapping and enslaving people would be one way of benefiting from victims, but a lot of people tend to quit when their characters are imprisoned, at least if there seems to be no hope of freedom. Suicide is painless in Cantr. One gotta figure out what the prisoner holds in value and use that to keep them alive and working for your benefit. But a lot of players only value going where ever they want, talking to who ever they want, getting the resources they want and manufacturing what ever they want. If you take away all that, with no chance of getting it back, what's left that would be worth living for?

I've played some good evil characters but it's emotionally taxing. Not many people can appreciate even a well-played villain, especially if their own character is the victim. Also people don't generally see themselves as evil, or if they do, they would believe that their victims are equally wretched and in need of punishment. Why someone acts evil? They may feel like they were betrayed by the world (or by some group of people within) and takes vengeance upon it, or they are trying to get themselves killed. Or they may perceive their own needs as more important than those of others. Hmm... I should write an article about this, looks like there would be enough material.

[ilumino]

* Poor interface
* Lag
* Unmotivated staff
* Bad combat system
* Dying and not knowing why
* Crappy setting (would rather be in a fantasy world)
* No family system
* No motivation to be bad or have wars.

[rklenseth]

* Poor interface
* Lag
* Unmotivated staff
* Bad combat system
* Dying and not knowing why
* Crappy setting (would rather be in a fantasy world)
* No family system
* No motivation to be bad or have wars.

And you're still here...why?

And by the way, there is lots of motivation to be bad and have wars. It's called get the weapons and the loyalties of people and find someone to war with for whatever your characters want to.

[BarbaricAvatar]

* Poor interface
* Lag
* Unmotivated staff
* Bad combat system
* Dying and not knowing why
* Crappy setting (would rather be in a fantasy world)
* No family system
* No motivation to be bad or have wars.

And you're still here...why?

Yes i was wondering that too.

And who says it's not a fantasy world? There's castles and swords and knights and horses.... It only isn't if you don't imagine it to be that way.

[SekoETC]

No elves and magic. But I think in Cantr people do have motivation to be bad. It's when some individuals have more than you do and refuse to share or tell you how you could realistically earn your share. The problem is you need technology to win. Either a locked building or a locked boat, a good enough weapon and an iron shield if you're going to spend time exposed to them. A group of people might be able to drag a well-equipped person but unless you got a lock, you can't restrain them, and unless you got a good enough weapon, you can't get through their shield. And most people are carrying a crowbar and healing food anyway, and have friends that would come after them.

[ilumino]

* Poor interface
* Lag
* Unmotivated staff
* Bad combat system
* Dying and not knowing why
* Crappy setting (would rather be in a fantasy world)
* No family system
* No motivation to be bad or have wars.

And you're still here...why?

Because the good still out-weighs the bad by a huge margin. I listed some things that annoy me about the game, like the OP asked for.

There's currently no other game out there like it. Of my favorite all-time games, Cantr ranks second (just below Dwarf Fortress). I think the the RP experience in Cantr is much better than any other I've seen before (yes, even better than P&P RP), because it gives you a much better suspension of disbelief and hands you the tools to RP much more effectively.

It has flaws: yes, of course. I point those out because I love Cantr and would love to see it become even better. The fundamental "idea" behind Cantr, I think, is much greater than it's outward presentation.

You have a point with the wars thing. I may have added that pre-maturely without giving it very much thought. In my own experience I haven't seen motivations to fight wars, but I know they do exist (according to some of the webzine articles).

Yes, there are many fantasy elements. I guess what I meant was a more traditional D&D setting (aka no bicycles and automobiles, with magic, not-so technology-based, etc). I just stereotyped it there. This is my own opinion. Some may think magic would ruin it.

[DylPickle]

My cousin, brother, and I were experimenting with a spin-off called "Fantr", Fantasy Cantr. Never happened though.

[Cdls]

1: LAG
2: Forcing a character to the sidelines because another one of yours is involved in the same situation (tied with LAG for #1)
3: Character creation lacks depth for this type of game
4: Stability of server as of late
5: The combat system

Those are just issues with the game itself, the rest of the list is more along the lines of what personally gets me...


6: Seeing someone your character does not like traveling by foot on a road, and you cannot run them over while inside your vehicle.

7: The feeling you get when a character you have really grown attached to has been killed....

8: Knowing OOC that one of your characters is going to die, and then watching helplessly as the killers arrive but not able to act on that knowledge, and then watch as he dies

9: Finally breaking that lock...only to discover nothing inside the building....

10: No cures for sicknesses.



These are just my own personal opinions, and even in spite of them, I enjoy playing...most of the time.

[Helmaroc]

1. Lag.
2. Poor RP. This pisses me off to the extreme, how some people have perfectly good characters, but they simply refuse to use proper capitalization and punctuation. Or, the opposite. Or they have RP habits that not only give away who the player is, but become repetitive and annoying. I won't mention any names, but I know a few people...
3. Lack of active characters. And great characters that simply die because of player's lack of interest or loss of free time.
4. Interface. It's alright, but it could certainly be better.
5. Few active/helpful staff members. Thank you to those who still help out!
...
That's about it.

[psymann]

1. Interface

Yes, this is bad enough it's shunted LAG into second place. (Lag for me has been a little better over summer, though game's been down a lot again this week). At least the LAG is hard to deal with.

The interface is dreadful. Granted, this is a free game that's written by people in their spare time, so I'll rephrase that and say it's fairly dreadful.

I've mentioned a great long list of the problems at least twice before so won't again, but as an example, the most simple and annoying one is probably this: when you leave an area, you have first to cancel the project you're working on. Why can't the game just cancel it for you? An extra click for absolutely no reason other than poor design.

I could probably split this one into ten different sub-categories of poor design, and each one on its own would make my top ten. So to give a chance for other things to make an entrance, I've lumped them all as number 1.

2. Lag

Difficult to play when you can't access the pages. All the more annoying when you get halfway through something and then it freezes - which puts you off doing anything in case you get stuck halfway through it. Twinned with the interface design causing you to need twice as many clicks as should be necessary, this is still a major problem - both when it occurs, and when you are put off playing in case it does.

---Those two are by far the worst. Here are the rest in rough order of most annoying down to least annoying:---

3. Lack of physical description.

I have a character who is fat, sweaty, relatively ugly and has a coarse voice. But I can't keep putting that info in emotes every time someone new comes into town. So it's frustrating to roleplay when someone comes in and says she's looking beautiful and starts flirting with her. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I don't think that's the issue here, it's that their idea of my character's appearance is very different from mine.

4. People/businesses who do everything themselves

I can understand some characters having a sort of DIY personality. They want to do everything themselves. But this seems to cover most people. It's remarkably hard to run any business of any sort in Cantr because there's almost always someone else who will do the same thing.

Take manufaturing tools as an example. Most popular tools can be manufactured by anyone (stone hammer, bone knife, bone needle, stone axe) and in the case of all but the stone axe, provide every benefit of their iron counterparts other than a bit more inventory space taken up. Many more popularish tools (axe, pickaxe, shovel) can be made by pretty much anyone with only a few tools/machines. There are very few tools which require specialist machining/tooling, and none which require specialist skills.

My characters have come across so many businesses that will make anything from bed linen to ships, from steel battleaxes to dirt bikes, from diamond rings to apple pies. So instead of having a diversity of trades operating in the town, you get one rich company that makes everything and employs everyone. And that rich company then never needs to trade with others, they just make everything in-house.

My tailor could, with relative ease, build a smelting furnace, an anvil and start manufacturing weapons. Which is silly, because she's a tailor, so she doesn't. But elsewhere in the same town, other people are members of large companies that can do all their own tailoring. And my character who wants to make a sail for his ship can make his own far more quickly and easily than by using the town's ship supplies shop, because he can make it almost as quickly, and cuts out all the discussion over payment and requirements and so on that can take days.

I'd love to see it that you could gain mastery in a skill in some way, that would allow you to make items that you couldn't otherwise make. So only an expert/master tailor can make diamond jewelry. Only an expert toolsmith can make a steel flatter. Only an master shipbuilder can make a galleon. Then you can choose - make all your own average stuff, or trade with/employ people who have specialist skills that they can actually charge for and be needed for, and get good stuff.

5. The anonymity.

Other online games I've played, I've made friends IRL from. From Cantr, I've been playing for a couple of years and I know pretty much no-one. This is due to the fact that you never know who you're playing with, you only know the characters. I do think that's a shame, even though I realise the reasons it's done. I play another game which is roleplaying and you can look up the players of the characters and give them occasional medals to say that you think they roleplay well, or make the game fun, or you can trust them to play well within the game. I think that's much nicer than in Cantr when you only know people from the forum, if you choose to come to it. And people are often different on a forum to how they act in-game, I find.

6. Knowing that if I don't log in for a while, I'm letting other players down.

Not much I can do about that. But it annoys me that, for example, in the last week I've hardly been able to log in due to either lag or apathy, yet I know that other players are having a crapper time because I'm not there to communicate with their characters.

7. Towns where the first rules drawn up are "No hurting people, no stealing, no going in and out of buildings".

Fair enough if they've come from another town where they're used to those rules, but as often as not it just seems hat people put up those rules more due to OOC beliefs than IC beliefs. I'm sure sometimes the "no stealing" rule is written by town leaders who've never even seen anything stolen and probably have little idea what theft even means. And the "no hurting people" rule written by people who've never seen violence, let along violence that's done them any harm.

8. When you spawn five people in a row in the same area of the same continent.

I spawned 5 characters in a row in and around Olipfirovash. Given that the first was one who trades around those towns, I had to kill/emigrate all the others to avoid CRBs, and anyway, I created more characters to see more bits of Cantr, not the same bit from many angles.

9. People who don't think when they roleplay.

That can be anything from people who talk in txt msg speak, to people who see you talk about "Cathy" and say "No, it's Kathy" as if they somehow knew which letter you spoke, or any one of numerous other times people just write something daft that's difficult to roleplay to in return as a result.

Fortunately this is actually not anywhere near as common as I would have expected

10. People who kill your character with absolutely no roleplay to explain why they're doing it.

I logged in a while ago to find one of my characters dead. He'd travelled along a road, and as soon as he got there, was battered to death. No explanation IC or OOC as to why. Which is a bit rubbish really.

[*Wiro]

1. Narcissists, in-game or at the forums.

Oh oh. Time to run!

Anyway..

1)

Time left: 0

2) People that simply ignore someone dying because he/she never talked or barely talked.

3) When people deny something you did. (Basically blocking roleplaying possibilities.)

4) The fact you CAN'T store notes inside of spoons! I mean, think of the possiblities!

5) Hearing someone break locker number ___ of __.
It's stupid. Your character should find out what lock is broken.
In real life you don't hear someone opening the neighbour's door either. You just hear a door being opened from over there.

Not much I can think of right now.. Or.. Wait

6) L - - - a - - - g.

[Uma]

hmm

1. lag
2. the minute limit
3. the lack of ability to write a description (or better yet to modify it in game some how)

I'm sure i could think of some more things. I wish i could develop enough to help with the game some how

[MikeH]

My number 1 is pirates and bullies. I have become so discouraged by these groups who come into a town, stir things up, do what they want, and drag people off or kill them.

I've spent so much time developing a character, RP'ing them, and then BOOM, the character is dead because someone is having "fun" being a pirate.

It just makes the entire game so pointless, and I've now gone through this three times, and I just want to give up on Cantr completely, I'm so discouraged.

2. Lag
3. Nothing's going on when I'm able to play
4. People who don't understand that not everyone is online at the same time.
5. How long it takes to move stuff around. Cleaning up notes, or moving things in an out of buildings, can take forever, and is very repetitive
6. Radios don't work if you don't have someone inside listening to them, but no one wants to be stuck inside just to listen to radios.
7. Players who insist you are RPing your character wrong just because you don't agree with them.
8. Not being able to drag a fraction of an amount on the ground.
9. The lack of more defense options. Locked doors and shields are it.
10. Same as number 1. People who delight in roleplaying characters who do nothing except mess everyone else up. Incredibly discouraging.

[CantrFreak]

My number 1 is pirates and bullies. I have become so discouraged by these groups who come into a town, stir things up, do what they want, and drag people off or kill them.

I've spent so much time developing a character, RP'ing them, and then BOOM, the character is dead because someone is having "fun" being a pirate.

It just makes the entire game so pointless, and I've now gone through this three times, and I just want to give up on Cantr completely, I'm so discouraged.

Why would you hate pirates and bullies? As long as they RP decently, you should be happy. That's why you have 15 characters.