Alternitive to Vehicle Decay

[Lumin]

no one is suggesting that vehicle deterioration should be implemented without due care. but some people are arguing that it should never be implemented at all. are you saying that vehicle deterioration should never be just because of the risk of an imperfect system in the short run?

The point is, we don't have to have an imperfect system. We don't have to be going through all this crap with tiredness and the tools and weapons, either. Believe it or not, there no actual need for the programmers to randomly experiment on the game world and use our characters as guinea pigs until they finally get around to a system that isn't completely broken. It's called thinking about obvious consequences before making major changes, and it's really not that difficult.

No, it won't solve every single problem, because of course you can't foresee everything, but it would prevent the major things like 'everyone's too tired and sick to work, but there's no way to rest' and 'everyone's items are falling apart, but no repairs'. I'd say things like the ability to sleep when you're tired or fix things that are broken are closer to common sense than rocket science, and I honestly can't believe that anyone in programming (let alone everyone in programming) thought it was a good idea to inflict this stuff on players without providing a solution at the same time.

[formerly known as hf]

Any new idea has to be tested in a 'real' environment. I know the testers have test areas they can try out new ideas - and I'm sure they do it extensively - but anyone with any experience, not just with programming, but introducing any changes in anything - businesses, games, anything, knows that no test environment will be able to produce correct enough results to be able to know how it will work in reality - less so what the reaction will be...

Any new addition will go through a lot of changes, both before and after its implementation. The past few months seem to have brought some major changes to Cantr - the new stats system, 'skills' (or genetics, or whatevber you want to call it), tiredness and sleeping, item deterioration. There's no way all of these can be expected to start working perfectly after introduced.

Has it not occured to you, that maybe, the priogrammers don't have the time or resources to extensively test everything? Maybe they need to throw it into Cantr for real in order to work out how best to approach and start the solution?

I somehow doubt that they decided to introduce tiredness without thinking about the need for resting. But things have to be done one step at a time - I'm just glad we have enough dedicated programmers that resting was introduced so quickly...

[Nixit]

You do know that the programmers are volunteers, right, Lumin?

[Lumin]

*sigh*

Okay, I'm going to try one more time and then I'm going to stop, because either I'm not making the things I'm saying very clear, or I just have a drastically different view of things than everybody else. Either way, there's no point in continuing to argue about it since nobody's going to change their minds.

All I'm going to say, in fact what I've been trying to say all along, is that volunteers or not, it's not good for the game when they're in such a hurry to show off all the shiny new things they just programmed that they completely ignore the fact that those things are completely, obviously broken.

I somehow doubt that they decided to introduce tiredness without thinking about the need for resting

Yes! Exactly! Tiredness and resting go hand in hand, just like hunger and eating, injuries and healing, breaking and repairing. Go back to my example of implementing hunger before farming or hunting; it's the exact same thing. So of course they knew we'd need it, it doesn't take any huge leaps in logic to figure out that tired people need to rest.

And right there is what I've been protesting about in every post I've made in this thread. They knew there would be a need for resting, they know we need repairs, but they didn't bother to wait until they actually programmed those things.

As far as I know, volunteers don't have deadlines. It's not like a regular game company where you have to rush your product out the door even though you know it doesn't work and just hope you have time to put in a patch later.

So is it really so awful for me to wish that they would finish what they started? You know the old saying, "If you're going to do something, do it right."

Or if they knew they were only going to implement half the changes and then get around to the others at some undetermined point in the future, why not put in repairs and resting first? That way would have been easier on everybody; our characters wouldn't have to suffer, and they'd be able to add tiredness and item decay at their leisure without having to rush out temporary patches while listening to complaints on the forums...

And yes, I know Cantr is free and none of the programmers owe us anything, but since they're intelligent people who obviously care about the game enough to spend their so much of their free time working on it, I just have to wonder why they chose to do something like this in the first place, let alone persist in doing it even when it's seems to be harming the game and making players miserable. I've yet to see any explanation, though if I'm completely off base here and there really is some master plan, I'd love to hear about it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. The thing that's the most frustrating is just being in the lurch without having any idea why, when, or if the situation will be resolved.

[Nixit]

*sigh*

All I'm going to say, in fact what I've been trying to say all along, is that volunteers or not, it's not good for the game when they're in such a hurry to show off all the shiny new things they just programmed that they completely ignore the fact that those things are completely, obviously broken.

Alright, they haven't been rushing to show off the new shiny things that they programmed. Yes, they should've put in resting and repairing before or at least the same time, but please don't say rushing and showing off. Second, I don't think they knew it was completely, obviously broken, they do now, but not before. So, don't exaggerate these things and assume that is was obvious even before it was programmed.

So is it really so awful for me to wish that they would finish what they started? You know the old saying, "If you're going to do something, do it right."

Well, they're going to finish what they started, the problem is that it will be very, very late.

And yes, I know Cantr is free and none of the programmers owe us anything, but since they're intelligent people who obviously care about the game enough to spend their so much of their free time working on it, I just have to wonder why they chose to do something like this in the first place, let alone persist in doing it even when it's seems to be harming the game and making players miserable.

Errr... persist? You mean realizing that they made a bad mistake, but not having the time to change it in the near future?

[Lumin]

Well, I think Jos had the right idea about resetting tiredness, even if it was only a temporary fix. I don't think anyone would be overly upset to see the same thing happen to item decay; if not reset then at least paused until repairs are available. If it's messing up the game, then don't let it continue.

And I don't think I'm exaggerating that much, because if you only put in half of a system it can't be that much of a surprise when it turns out to be broken. (Okay, the 'rushing to show off the shiny new things' might not have been the nicest way to phrase it, but I still don't get why they couldn't have waited until they had everything programmed...)

Like I said, mostly I'm just frustrated by the lack of information. When I came back to Cantr after my hiatus, even then there were threads about how the changes were making things impossible. I went ahead and made new characters anyway because I assumed the bugs in the system would be ironed out fairly quickly, but here we are over a month later with nothing changed except a (temporary? permanent?) patch to make tiredness a little more bearable. Still not a word about repairs, or if the way tiredness works now is how it's going to stay, and that's not even getting into the natural healing issue.