Cantr II Discussion Forum

There's been so much negativity recently that it makes me wonder if anyone still actually enjoys playing, or how many of us are only playing out of a sense of obligation. Outside of Treefeather, the world feels post-apocalyptic with just a handful of survivors scattered her and there. Hoards of zombies everywhere with just a few uninfected.

Why am I still playing? I like exploring and mapping Fu. I like custom describing items even though I'm starting to run out of ideas. I like gathering gems even if I didn't know what to do with them.

There are only a few characters left that I like interacting with. There are many more that I don't care about and when they talk, I wish they would've whispered instead so it wouldn't have lit up my character. I used to play several central characters in their locations like Seko and Jaina Valjean, now most of my characters seem irrelevant, except Coventina, whom everyone seems to rely on, and I'm pretty certain that the coin system would crash if she died.

I have a character who used to be a renowned bad guy. Now he just makes pretty items and doesn't want to take risks.

I have another character who is so stressed that it's causing him to lose his hair.

Another character almost died decades back, but the struggle for survival kept him interesting. Now he has recovered and there are no more goals left.

Another one just gathers opals even though he doesn't have the skills to make jewelry. He doesn't need anything except food and petrol, so why would he sell them?

Another one makes pretty items and is sort of quirky. But probably only one character would care if she died.

One lives in a boring community. Everybody is friendly, so there is no conflict. He wants to travel but can't do it alone due to a limitation, so he is reliant on other people.

One is about to travel far away, and this makes her moderately interesting. I might lose interest once she loses her destination but until then, I have some time.

One has been planning to die for a long time and is just making preparations.

One is a worker drone. He's never wanted much for himself.

One spawned in the wrong environment. The only person who seems to care about her wants her to change completely. The way she was spawned was flawed and there's nobody to take advantage of it.

My latest newspawn I expected to be controversial, but she was accepted completely as herself, unlike my previous newspawn, and now there is no conflict. She was supposed to be shunned because she's not a nice person, but by chance she just happened to fit in the community perfectly.

As for my two Finnish characters, they're both mapping. The main mapmaking character has a tandem bike, and I only recently realized how slow they are on paths. It's not even double walking speed. I've always considered it normal to take days to travel between locations. The other one who only recently started mapping has a zebra. It's so fast that sometimes I have to plan ahead when I start traveling, because I know if I don't check within an hour, I won't be able to match the map pieces in Photoshop. A telescope would make things easier but would involve traveling all over the place to get the resources. He's traveled further in 25 days than my other character has gone in a lifetime.

I enjoy playing ^_^ I wouldn't have come back otherwise. I relatively recently spotted a memorial to one of my old characters, one I wouldn't have expected anyone to expend that effort for but in hindsight can see why perhaps he was noteworthy, and it's given me drive to create the kinds of characters whose passing people would make note of and think significant for more than the half day it takes to move the corpse outside and bury it.

I'm playing a character who has a great drive for adventure and has managed to hold onto a band of buddies to bring along, a character with unusual challenges in a lovely community, a character who is a twisted reflection of one of my old characters and is seeing lots of interesting people and places from a new perspective (this especially has been a lot of fun), a character who isn't very bright and is looking for a goal in a community whose goal is of no interest to him, and a hard worker in a language that I have to think about. It's fun to do all of these things, and I've learned a lot from my first round about how to keep a positive outlook and make my characters enjoyable to play.

I think often the positives are in the little details, and those are things we can't share without outing our characters. Whereas the annoyances are repetitive things which by their nature are fairly general and less likely to out us, so fewer people hesitate to share them.

Describing custom items is fun. I only really do it for clothes so I've not done it too often but it's always for something that will end up as a first-glance picture of the character, and it's interesting to do that with words in a character limit.

I enjoy the post-apoc vibe, especially trying to survive and thrive in hostile and abandoned places. That, and exploration, is really the only draw of Cantr for me. The social and crafting aspects are done much better on many MUDs and other format games, the code is relatively simplistic... But few games can beat Cantr concerning the exploration side of things.

I enjoy playing too even though these zombie towns makes you feel a bit sad.. So much potential wasted. I love interactions with some of my chars and specially with some chars and still so much still to do I find the social interactions to be best part of the game.. Kinda not point to explore or sail alone since that gets really boring in long run and everything is more interesting with people

I am alone usually as the towns I see are just people rooting or over the top role playing.

I still have fun playing CantrII, even though the game has some serious flaws and could be 100 times better if it would be redesigned and rebuilt from scratch.

It's a hard question to answer because I love all of my characters immensely, and just getting inside their heads to RP is so much fun and escapism on such a pure level. Custom objects, too, I can't get enough of. But on the other hand, the community I'm feeling more and more like I could do completely without. So much of what seems like actual, RL anger and misery over IC events both here and IG, and in recent months especially I've lost a lot of faith and trust in the behind the scenes aspects.

If anything discourages me when actually playing it's how small the player base is. Everyone insists on spreading so thin in such a massive world, and even in populated areas, there will never be any major organizations or anything to shake up the status quo because only a tiny handful of reliably active, competent people are interested in such things, so I'm constantly having to scale back most of my chars' hopes and ambitions. Even a town that functions realistically/reliably as a town is hard to come by. And you really need that as the backdrop for building anything lasting, as well as a certain amount of reliability for any kind of meaningful, long term interactions IMO. While meanwhile it feels like so much of this game revolves around relationship or sexual RP now, or the fabricated medical drama stuff which I just have no interest in, so that my RP opportunities are pushed off into an even tinier corner by not taking part in it.

My friend who I was getting into the game unsubbed today, because her first char (first several) all spawned in wilderness areas and everytime she logged in her chars were hungry/attacked by animals. It was starting to feel like more of a chore to her, because she couldn't get past that to learn or experience any real RP, so she chucked it.

She kept trying to walk down roads to find proper towns, but they were either abandoned or hopelessly long roads, so.
For what it's worth, I still really enjoy the game.

Yeah, that sucks too.. To spawn on wilderness with few people as a newbie

Marian wrote:
If anything discourages me when actually playing it's how small the player base is. Everyone insists on spreading so thin in such a massive world, and even in populated areas, there will never be any major organizations or anything to shake up the status quo because only a tiny handful of reliably active, competent people are interested in such things, so I'm constantly having to scale back most of my chars' hopes and ambitions. Even a town that functions realistically/reliably as a town is hard to come by. And you really need that as the backdrop for building anything lasting, as well as a certain amount of reliability for any kind of meaningful, long term interactions IMO.

Yeah that's true. But I suppose that's the problem with player base that everyone wants their own thingie (yeah I am guilty too here) and partly due capital rule . And not to mention the fact that all aren't interested to play things like that due various reasons so in the end there's really small amount of chars to do such things... even less if such chars for example spawn on Fu or so.

In bigger towns there's problem that it easily gets to that 2-3 talk and even if you would be awake you feel like not wanting to join them. And sometimes you don't get the chance to join.

I am still enjoying pretty much even though some of my chars wouldn't agree with that.

Honestly, it might help to shrink the map, although, TBH, I've no idea how that'd be managed or if it even could.

I will always stand by my plan to sink Treefeather and most of Fu

I still enjoy the game, but I admit that not as much as I used to. I have had some characters where I felt stuck with them, but after culling a few and starting new stories, that has revived some excitement. Also - while I understand wilderness characters can suck, I've enjoyed some of mine - that small, tight-knit group striving to build something in the middle of harsh, remote environments.. it can be fun!

Shrinking the map or insisting that people not spread out their chars so much would be a serious, serious problem, however. Because you're not supposed to have your chars too close and interfering with one another's business so much, but there isn't a lot of room or active towns for them to live in.

I do not really enjoy the game anymore, and it has nothing to do with the game itself, but with the attitudes of some of the people involved with it. A few things have completely ruined the game for me, not the least of which is OOC disruptions.

I enjoy the game but only with a few select characters. The rest I keel out of a sense of obligation and I honestly make the bare minimum attempt at a few of them.