Page 1 of 3

cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:05 am
by catpurr
Yes, this is not in the suggestions, as I wouldn't know how to fix it. Just to discuss it. IMHO there are far too few people in most place to create really interesting societies. Most places are little tribes, one ultimate leader, maybe another two active persons a whole set of starving death-births. Its just too many places, and since (almost) everyone wants to a leader (of people who rather powerplay than RP) everybody staying longer in this game seeks his placy to rule. Or just wait until the current leaders of his/her place die of boredom. I suppose, if there would be aprox 20 *active* players per location, actually really interesting social societies could start to evolve instead of this boring small tribes everywhere, where a small tribe is actually the highest you can get, most are anchorets or maybe a pair who rule with an iron fist.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:08 am
by catpurr
Second issue about the "society simulation" aspect which is written on the frontpage. The game has not a representive sample. It attracts some people more than others. Ingame I've seen so many well/nicely played characters gone, mostly due to hearth-attack, most by losing friends and being disgusted about the game due to death of people eh characters they cared for. While the bad apples just stay.

Edit: Oh and I also just hit the big 'X' symbol. Last character I cared was imprisoned for nothing, and no sitting in a prision is not an interesting gaming experience I log dayly into a game for. This is my last post to.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:26 am
by AlchemicRaker
goodbye

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 2:19 am
by Snake_byte
Good Luck.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 3:27 am
by YugoStrikesBack
Go to hell

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 6:33 am
by MartialAngel
returner wrote:
YugoStrikesBack wrote:Go to hell


Not needed.


Yeah, but it's Yugo...we're used to that. :-D
Love you, Yugo!

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 6:41 am
by mikki
MartialAngel wrote:
Yeah, but it's Yugo...we're used to that. :-D
Love you, Yugo!



You should watch what you say to Yugo.. Returner might think that you are also the same person as yugo... wouldn't want that now would we. :wink:

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 7:04 am
by YugoStrikesBack
Whose to say I'm not returner?

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:33 pm
by Genie
YugoStrikesBack wrote:Go to hell

*grins*

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:35 pm
by returner
YugoStrikesBack wrote:Whose to say I'm not returner?


Who's to say this new Yugo account is Yugo? It could be me just using his character to impersonate him.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 2:26 pm
by Piscator
The real Yugo is in your freezer. Rest in pieces, old chum.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 2:32 pm
by SekoETC
The world is too big for the player base, alright, but it's the people themselves who choose to have their characters go exploring. Maybe they're hoping to find more interesting places, or interesting resources that would make them rich. But there's quite a little items you can make with all those resources, and there are quite a little interesting places too. A lot of places are just a group of friends, or a town where people say hello to each other and cook food but nobody seems to have any sort of goals in life.

The thing is, after you get to a certain point, you no longer need anything. You can stockpile resources you think others might need in the future but there's nothing left for you to build. Or the few things you'd like to build seem too difficult or involve resources that are hard to get. You get newspawns and either you spend a lot of time organizing work for them so that they can earn what they'd like to have, or you help them build stuff for free, which means soon they'll run out of goals as well. A lot of people don't have any clear plans, they just want someone else to give them work so that they could earn their iron shield or battle axe or vehicle. It takes time in real life to arrange all those projects. So as a town grows, it takes an increasing amount of time to keep things running. And there are rarely enough trusty characters to delegate the work of managing all the ones who can't manage themselves. Who can't grasp the concept of earning enough credit to buy resources and processing those resources to things you sell to get more credits to repeat the process in a larger scale. That's how business works. You can make profit with that, especially if you do things in which you're an expert, and with the profit you can buy your battle axe, iron shield and vehicles. You buy your own resources so that you can set up your own projects and won't have to wait for someone else to give you work. If more people realized that then we could have towns that can grow beyond what a single leader can manage.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 3:20 pm
by returner
Expert needs to become synonymous with Specialisation. Right now in Cantr, they are different things. The difference between awkward and expert needs to be exaggerated to the point where 'awkward' literally means 'almost impossibly poor at the task' and 'expert' means 'unusually high and extremely good yield from given task'.

Right now there's not an effective enough difference between awkward and expert. Specialisation of roles is what founded society. Think Blacksmiths, Clothier, Food gatherers, etc etc. Small towns/villages usually only had one or two working within that role, usually father/son or mother/daughter.

A combined implementation of more formal family systems and drastically obvious differences between skill level will give Cantr a nudge forward. Right now it seems to be streamlining at it's peak.

However, the epic war between the Roleplayers, Realism evaluators and Simulation enthusiasts on these forums wages on, and if the war isn't lost somewhere between those groups, it's lost in the bureaucracy high above. In other words, radical changes won't ever happen in Cantr.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 3:33 pm
by SekoETC
I think it would only work if item quality came to play. If everyone produces the same result given enough time, people are going to keep doing it no matter how inefficient it is. But if it was possible to produce beautiful hide moccasins instead of simple hide moccasins if you were skillful or expert, I would sure do that. They would still be made of hide but at least they wouldn't look that primitive. Or thinking further, if people could weave hemp cloth that's not coarse and it would show up as smooth hemp cloth in clothing descriptions, that would be awesome. Or people could make a beautiful bone knife if they were good at tools, and a crude one if they were awkward.

Repairing bone tools is an example of people doing what they can just because it's possible. The call of the wrench is just too powerful to resist, no matter if you had a whole bunch of bones in storage and it took less time to make a new one than fix the old one, people will still be starting repairs for some stupid reason. And complaining about the repair times. Likewise people are going to explore the world even if the distances were too long. They do it because it's possible.

Re: cantr lands is too big for its playerbase.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 6:11 pm
by MikeH
Well, I don't know if you think it's a stupid reason, but in terms of repairing, I see that as part of roleplay. For several of my characters, the idea of letting a perfectly good-but-used tool go to waste is against their personality. So they prefer to repair rather than build new.

One or two of my characters see it as a clutter issue... having many old bone knives rotting around, and then making more new bone knives, would drive them crazy, because there is too much "stuff" littering the town already.

But if we are just talking about game mechanics without consideration of the roleplaying, then yes, clearly (right now, anyway) building new often makes more sense than repairing.


SekoETC wrote:I think it would only work if item quality came to play. If everyone produces the same result given enough time, people are going to keep doing it no matter how inefficient it is. But if it was possible to produce beautiful hide moccasins instead of simple hide moccasins if you were skillful or expert, I would sure do that. They would still be made of hide but at least they wouldn't look that primitive. Or thinking further, if people could weave hemp cloth that's not coarse and it would show up as smooth hemp cloth in clothing descriptions, that would be awesome. Or people could make a beautiful bone knife if they were good at tools, and a crude one if they were awkward.

Repairing bone tools is an example of people doing what they can just because it's possible. The call of the wrench is just too powerful to resist, no matter if you had a whole bunch of bones in storage and it took less time to make a new one than fix the old one, people will still be starting repairs for some stupid reason. And complaining about the repair times. Likewise people are going to explore the world even if the distances were too long. They do it because it's possible.