resource depletion

[Marian]

It would piss me off for sure. I like my wide uninhabited wastes...

Where your character is all alone for years at a time with nobody to interact with? Seems like that would get a little boring in a roleplaying game but everybody plays different I guess...the point of this thread however is to think of ways to bring characters together...no offense but lone wolves are one of the things that are killing the game

Anyway, I agree with you, it WOULD be nice if there was some way to encourage people to gather together and cooperate, but surely you've been around long enough to know how that always works out? Established characters and towns are disrupted and punished while everything becomes even more impossible for the developing ones (they've never heard of the carrot here, only the stick) all in the hopes of forcing everyone to behave a certain way, so then of course there's a huge backlash and weeks of bitching and moaning on the forums until everything that's changed gets nerfed (even though the framework still hangs around to be annoying and make things more confusing for newbies) and in the end nothing's changed at all.

My thought was that this way there's no harm to people's characters or the way the actual 'rules' of the world works, there's just been some geographic upheaval much as I'm sure happened plenty of times on Earth. (except this one miraculously doesn't happen anywhere anyone can see it or bve effected by it)

It's less disruptive than making all those locations still there but completely unhabitable, anyway, which is the other way I saw this discussion going.

[SekoETC]

Why did people settle in real life, why aren't they all nomads? Because they noticed that by staying in one place you can produce food safely. There should be no quick farming projects. The duration should be fixed but the amount of people working on it would affect the amount of outcome.

There could also be foraging where the project duration could be set between 1 to 8 hours, but the results would be greatly randomized and generally smaller than with long-term projects. This might save someone's life if they arrive in town 90% starved and need to get something quickly, but it would not be a reliable method of sustaining yourself. If people had to dedicate 5 to 20 days to farming in order to get good results, this would encourage some people to become professional farmers while others would start buying food from them.

[Talapus]

I don't see resource depletion pulling towns together.

I do agree that making the world smaller (or seem smaller) would help the game. Actually, I would advocate very drastic means. Draw a new, smaller map. Then place the towns (and everything in them) on the new map, merging them as needed. Maps and RP would take a severe blow, but I think Cantr would recover into a better game if it were done properly. I fear however that it would be bungled and only serve to hasten Cantr's decline.

[Piscator]

If we were to do that we could as well start Cantr III.

I like Seko's idea but I think we should discuss it in a separate thread.

[Marian]

Why did people settle in real life, why aren't they all nomads? Because they noticed that by staying in one place you can produce food safely. There should be no quick farming projects. The duration should be fixed but the amount of people working on it would affect the amount of outcome.

There could also be foraging where the project duration could be set between 1 to 8 hours, but the results would be greatly randomized and generally smaller than with long-term projects. This might save someone's life if they arrive in town 90% starved and need to get something quickly, but it would not be a reliable method of sustaining yourself. If people had to dedicate 5 to 20 days to farming in order to get good results, this would encourage some people to become professional farmers while others would start buying food from them.

Wow. A very simple idea that would help the problem (without making it impossible for newspawns) and makes a lot of sense. I like it.

[Marian]

If we were to do that we could as well start Cantr III.

Hell, I like this even better.

(One of the things I did while I wasn't playing Cantr was play A Tale in the Desert...I really liked the willingness of everyone to just let everything go and start all over every few years, it kept things from stagnating while making the game more accessible to new players.)

[Piscator]

Basically we could decrease the manually gatherable amount of food by 50% or more percent and introduce fields as a new type of machine. They would be slightly more effective than manual gathering as it is at the moment but would have an minimal output of let's say 20kg.

I'm not sure how tools would fit into this scenario though.

[SekoETC]

One way of making the world smaller would be speeding up traveling.

[DylPickle]

I think by making the world smaller, they mean condensing the population levels to increase urbanization in central areas. Increasing walking speed would likely only make it easier for people to wander in general, making new characters even more restless, and spreading people out even thinner.

[tiddy ogg]

I hope we're all enjoying rearranging the deckchairs on the Cantr Titanic. But none of this takes notice of the iceberg - the lag.
That's what's killing the game. I'm getting less and less patient with it, and give up more and more often.
Add to this a lot more changes, then the game is doomed. It is a pity that some of the previous changes weren't watered down, to prove whether the full implementation would have indeed caused players to give up.
But the point is, to many, any change is bad.
e

[Pilot]

Surprise! Surprise!

Common sense is not extinct in Cantr.

Thanks tiddy

[Marian]

Oh thank God I'm not the only one having trouble there, I didn't notice any recent threads about it so I wasn't sure but ever since I started playing again the lag is driving me insane. I dread doing even simple things like saying something, picking something up, going into a building and dropping it now because I know I'll get kicked to the 'CAntr is not available' page at least six times in the process...no idea how I'll manage if some event comes up where timeing matters. (and damn but it causes me physical pain to watch those sloooow page loads burn my minutes...I've gone through 70 today just with two barely active characters ...how did I ever manage a dozen? )

I can sneak peeks at my events throughout the day but as for roleplaying goes it's only possible for an hour or so during my break and when I get home at night, it's unbelievably frustrating to not even be able to log on during those times...and I can't even get my Cantr fix by browsing
the forum because that's down too.

So yeah, what tiddy said - if the lag is a going to be a constant problem then pleasemake it a priority to fix that before adding other stuff that might just make it worse.

[Tiamo]

Lag is, or will be, the main concern of the ProgD, once it will be afloat again. We have our own type of lag problems...

[Andu]

Make at least vehicles and buildings declay... Or option to demolite them.

[Marian]

Make at least vehicles and buildings declay... Or option to demolite them.

Was it Doug or someone that suggested that buildings and vehicles should be automatically upkept by people actually using them? Because I like that idea...no one want to constantly be repairing MORE stuff and this would avoid that, but at the same time it's silly seeing all these towns with like eight people and thirty buildings and twice as many vehicles just sitting there unused, eventually they'd start to rust and fall apart from neglect. (though repairing should still be possible for when that happens, if someone wants to go through the trouble)

Demolishing should be possible too, basically causing like an accelerated decay process, but not easy so that newspawns thieves can't take out the town jail. New machine: wrecking ball.