Satai wrote:This will be a post which could be construed as criticism of the PD. It is not - I'd like to criticize the gameplay choices the PD currently favours. I think there's a bit of a crisis of identity going on at present in Cantr, but only a few of those who are in the heat of the programming action seem to really recognize it.
I assume you mean ProgD, as Players' Department is solely concerned with the CR and dealing with players.
Using my overactive Cantr player's imagination, I can easily see how things currently happen with the PD:
A few regulars meet in the private PD IRC channel and start talking. What could we do to make Cantr more realistic, more exciting, more like a real simulator of real societies?
And then our volunteers start going at it: "Let's cap the resource collection, that ought to promote trade!", "Let's make tools and weapons degrade, that'll make them more valuable game items since they'll naturally become scarcer!", "Let's add tiredness so you can't possibly do all the things you want to do in one go!"
And so on. I don't know about you folks, but I see a definite pattern of "how can we make the player's life more difficult" here. This is just my vision, but how far from everyday PD actuality is it, really? And what does any of this have to do with promoting realistic societies to form?
This has everyting to do with making Cantr a pointless double-ended resource funnel, a neverending game of resource collection and consumption, and currently,it seems to me, the PD is trying very hard to find a good balance where things are always scarce and therefore people have better things to do than for instance roleplaying or effecting radical structural changes in their societies.
When gameplay changes are suggested that could truly change the way player interactions in game unfold, they are met with quite a bit of bitterness and derision: "what are you guys talking about? You want to make the game easier to play? No way, not over My Dead Body!", etc. etc. Although I do fully recognize that it's much easier to slap an IF statement in the code which will randomly limit resources than to implement even a handful of the suggestions that have come from actual players, since the latter tend to challenge the coder in a non-trivial way, they are quite a job and a handful.
How much experience do the PD's volunteer members have with game design in the context of muds or even more complex types of games? I would wager not a whole lot; yet they still don't seem at all willing to listen when their active players straight up tell them that their ideas do not work as intended, and in extreme cases are even seen as outright bugs by unsuspecting Cantrians!
Again, ProgD and RD, not PD. I actually agree with you on most things; I have definitely had my reservations about many of the changes (deterioration especially); there's a difference between what programmers guess will change the game for the better and what actually starts happening when 3000 players actually start having to deal with it. What I've noticed is a reluctance (from some, not all, ProgD and RD members) to go in and MODIFY existing values or changes once they've actually been demonstrated to be imbalanced by the bulk of players.
That being said, there's not a lot of overlap between departments. Really the only thing they have in common is that they are understaffed, and consist of volunteers--people who are giving their time and energy to try to maintain a game that means a lot to a great deal of people.
Maybe your town has a suicidal note thief (something I personally think should be dealt with in-game, no matter how annoying it is), is frustrated with the gathering limits, and is dealing with animal attacks. Yes, these are all bad news. But they're not part of a grand conspiracy. suicidal newspawns are (ostensibly) a PD issue (mostly because I think people would rather have us do it than actually deal with the problem themselves, by having a guard or keeping copies of the important notes), resource limits are ProgD, and the on-again-off-again deadliness of the animals is RD.
One thing these departments have in common, as I've said, is that they're understaffed and usually pretty complicated. If you have beef with how one of them is handling something, yeah, whine about it on the forums--I know I have--but better yet, offer your services.
Cantr doesn't work without staff, and because it can't afford to pay for them, it has to rely on volunteers. YOU can volunteer for something, and give back to cantr. And who knows, maybe you'll even make it a better place.
I'm not dead; I'm dormant.
