Animal Violence Polls Commentary

[Snickie]

For people who want to publicly elaborate why they voted the way they did on the latest poll.

On average, how often should an agressive pack of animals attack a character in a location?
• No more than twice a day
• No more than once a day
• No more than once every two days
• No more than once every three days
• Other [____________________]

What did you think about the level of animal agression before the latest animal fix?
• I liked it
• Too agressive
• Not agressive enough

What did you think of the level of animal agression after the latest animal fix?
• I liked it
• Too agressive
• Not agressive enough

I'll start.

I haven't voted. Since my characters are, in general, well-armed, I have very little reason to pay attention to animal attacks, and thus for the most part I haven't. However, for my weakest hunter and my most frequent hunter, I haven't been noticing very many attacks at all. So few that I've noticed. And I'm talking about characters on Aki and Burgeo.

That's all for now.

[curious]

It seems I had to vote to clear the message, so I did, but having not really paid attention to the changes made, this made it pretty much guesswork.
I liked the older system where animals could attack within an allotted time, either every day or twice a day.
I think animals should be a risk in-game, and this took out the chances of just stepping indoors for a few minutes to avoid them.

Perhaps I should have selected 'other' and posted 'random'.

[SumBum]

I am in favor of having aggressive animals. What I'm not in favor of is having to eradicate an entire species in order to control the attacks.

Having animals attack provides another challenge. I've said it over and over that I absolutely loved Burgeo when it was difficult to survive there. Yes, I lost more than one char to animal attacks but didn't care because it added an element of uncertainty and forced people to work together. Those chars had very interesting lives, even if they were short.

I'm really not sure how to balance things. It used to be that if you got an aggressive animal population down to around 5 or 6, the attacks were rare enough to live with easily, yet still (in theory) have the species around to reproduce. I know that's been broken for some time, though. Also needing a few of the species for reproduction may not be necessary if migration is re-introduced. I'm not sure what changes are being made.

I am grateful that Doug has been manually adding animals where needed, but I do not think that "hand of god" method is good for Cantr. I'd rather there were in-game ways to manage the animals.

[SekoETC]

How about having active fires burning in town would scare away most animals? I think most animals are afraid of fire. But it would have to be an advancing project or people could just leave a grilling meat project untended and get the same effect.

[Doug R.]

Methods to attract and repel animals are planned.

[gejyspa]

Please tell me it involves covering a prisoner with honey....

[Doug R.]

Surprisingly, there is a solid majority that replied that they liked the level of violence after the latest fix.

I've also found that using the old reproduction values, it's pretty much impossible to make a dent in animal populations in a location. They'll need to be lowered.

Code: Select all

Question: On average, how often should an agressive pack of animals attack a character in a location?
ans.    % ans.    Answer text
92    23.35    No more than twice a day
138    35.03    No more than once a day
79    20.05    No more than once every two days
63    15.99    No more than once every three days
22    5.58            Other

Code: Select all

Question: What did you think about the level of animal agression before the latest animal fix?
ans.    % ans.    Answer text
177    44.92    I liked it
146    37.06    Too agressive
71    18.02    Not agressive enough

Code: Select all

Question: What did you think of the level of animal agression after the latest animal fix?
ans.    % ans.    Answer text
234    59.39    I liked it
91    23.10    Too agressive
69    17.51    Not agressive enough

Actually, these numbers don't make much sense. More people thought attacks before the change were too aggressive, compared to after, which was more aggressive.

[Snickie]

Maybe they mean after the latest influx of aggressive animal attacks that was lowered somewhat when forum people demanded it.

Or maybe it's from those people who had characters attacked every other hour by something, and often more-than-one thing.

I dunno.

That's why I started this thread, to get people elaborating on why they voted a certain way. People can say yes and people can just say no, but then the reasons behind those yes's and no's would remain unheard/unseen and therefore can't be acted upon because if we can't hear/see them, then we don't know what they are.

[Bowser]

I would be a shame if a poor, weak hunter with an iron shield and full strength would be almost killed in one or two days considering this is a slow paced game.

[Ronja Rotschopf]

In my opinion it depends on the number of aggressive animal packs. When there is just one aggressive and dangerous pack of animals I wouldn't mind if they could attack twice a day. That's of course different when there are five packs of agressive and dangerous animals (I would prefer no more than once every two days in this case). On the other hand most average characters (with iron shield) don't get hurt at all by most animal types, so for them it doesn't matter.

Very few of my characters live in areas where there is more than one dangerous pack of animals.
Regarding the few exceptions: If they were weak and awkward hunters I didn't let them sleep outside and when they got hurt faster than they could collect healing food they left the location for looking for a safer place to live (including more people who can help collecting healing food).
And in my opinion one (or even two) weak awkward hunters shouldn't be able to live in dangerous locations without constantly being busy with collecting healing food and still risking death.

Regarding the second and the third question of the poll there was missing the possibility "Others" (for saying "I don't know, because I don't remember", "Doesn't matter for me, because my characters are all strong enough or don't live in dangerous locations", etc.)

[RedQueen.exe]

They make plenty of sense. Placebo effect.

[Fingersmith]

Sometimes its difficult to compare between the two agressive systems. I had chars in places where the animals where wiped out before so no animal attacks all, alltogether. After the recent changes the place had a couple of agressive animal packs who happened to attack the same character around the clock. So this would make it more agressive than before naturaly.
Another char on the other hand used to live in a place with more than 40 lions before whith daily attacks on him. After the change only 7 elephants and 6 lions or a similar number . Attack on random times now but definitely less often than before.
So this can explain why the polls seem to contradict each other. I dont mind animal being agressive and people getting hurt and eventually die if they are not able to fight them or find some sort of refuge . But I am against losing one char from animal attacks within a single day . This is supposed to be a slow paced game and enough time should be given to a player to move the char out of the danger zone. So Thats why I voted for animals to attack only once per day. So if you have a newspawn char without even a bone shield in a place with elephants, You will not loose your char before the end of your first day.

[Auryn]

I really liked what the animal reset did to the game. There have been plenty of cries for a "reset," but this is one that made sense. Suddenly, complacent large towns are fighting populations of animals that had disappeared hundreds of years ago. And the worst places for animals actually experienced a severe drop in populations that had become unmanageable.

As for the aggression, I prefer the twice a day. The new system also stopped the crazy number of animals of the same species from attacking during each attack tick. It seems like a fair trade off.

This reset created a much-needed challenge in the game. People in danger can just wait it out inside and come out daily to attack, just like the early pioneers of every island had to.

[Mr. Bones]

One thing to note too, is that an island like Burgeo had an unmanageable number of animals in uninhabited locations. Packs of animals were in the 60s and 70s in some places, and those were dangerous animals. For a character who was an awkward hunter during those times visiting some places for resources was like a death sentence and could drain large quantity of healing food supplies in just a matter of a few days. When the reduction of the packs took place it made Burgeo and places like it much safer. So I would have to think that had a role in the poll answers for many players. For those players with characters on more tame islands, they might not even have been able to notice any real difference anyway since the animal populations are usually under control, and attacks infrequent.