Jur Schagen wrote:Nick is wrong in the fact that the changes are implemented because of "realism" issues... most were introduced for game-balancing reasons
Thank Jos for that, as we say IG.
Jur Schagen wrote:- hematite change: adjust for the fact that iron production was too easy and too important;
- tiredness: discourage single-person strike-type battles against populated towns;
- deterioration: a first effort to do something about the immense stockpiles of existing goods, and the fact that nothing ever got destroyed;
- land scarcity: an effort to get rid of numb newspawns doing nothing but stand around and gather.
- tiredness: A really good idea, in that context,.It did what it was meant to do, alright, but why, oh why, did it have to affect every other activity too? What’s more , it was buggy to the point that it drove numerous players to despair, and the bugs were never actually fixed, were they? Eventually, a quick bit of jury rigging couterbalanced the worst of the adverse effects , and now we’re left with this odd phenomenon which does nothing at all (on a day –to-day basis. Combat situations excepted) except make a nonsense of the given figures for project times, and ensure that (unless you’re skilled ) all short projects will now take an extra hour to complete (and long projects some extremely -hard-to -calculate multiple of that).This also has a knock-on effect on trading, which is made more complex bv the fact that “day rates” are now bear a strictly mythical relationship to Cantrian reality. That’s an awful lot of undersirable effects for the sake of one desired affect.
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- deterioration: a t least the bugs, as such, seem to be fixed, but the unrealistic deterioration rates and repair times still haven’t been fixed. And this is having a vast, and highly salient, impact on Cantrian societyy in all kinds of ways which bear no relation to the problem in question. If people think that repairs were meant to “make life more difficult “ , that’s only natural, because that’s what they most obviously do. (and actually. I still don’t believe that the reason you gave was the only reason)
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- land scarcity: an effort to get rid of numb newspawns doing nothing but stand around and gather.
- Huh? If that’s ALL it’s meant to do, I really have to say to say that the cure is worse than the disease yet again. But, then, I’ve had the impression that there’s no real consensus in the ProgD as to what the indnded objective is. Seems to me like you each have your own individual agenda with this one and that one man’s screw-up is another man’s blessing. This is reflected (and magnified) in player’s reactions.
Jur Schagen wrote:Now, what exactly is "balancing the game"? There seems to be some discussion... In my opinion, it means tweaking the game engine and database (the RD job) so that unwanted effects, or unwanted behaviour of players, becomes harder or impossible, and to improve the gaming experience for the players within the main framework of the general game design. The design team is not entirely happy with the game as it is being played. In particular, we want a minimum of characters that have little or no interaction with their fellow chars. We want to encourage cooperation as well as conflict. We want the chars to become "living" creatures as much as they possibly can in a web game where they are, in the end, nothing but pixels on a screen and records in a database. We want to discourage sole drifters, doing nothing but stand around and gather potatoes.
Julie, balancing the game is indeed about "not screwing up the good stuff" as well. We don't feel like we're doing that - we are attempting to "improve on the bad stuff" that we consider the above paragraph. And, no matter what you say, it is working in that respect. The amount of towns that are actively discussing what to do with their limited resource slots is numerous. Not all are dealing with it *well*, and not all take on an approach that we had envisioned - but in Cantr, that's up to the players, not the designers. There is no preprogrammed way to deal with it. It's Cantr.
I'm not saying that all the changes have been implemented in a perfect way, especially the first-time implementation. Julie made some points about the time the slot fell free an the time that the chars woke that were perfectly valid criticism and that we, indeed, hadn't tought about when implementing it. We were looking to alleviate that (Keves' suggestion), and now we are flamed for trying that - but that's not the point. The point is that, while we can make predictions about how the game mechanics will work, it is impossible to fathom the way the chars (or actually their players) react to a "crisis" like this. As a matter of fact, we were expecting a general reaction that we have actually only seen in a few places. But that's the beauty of it. Noone can concieve how a crisis will be solved, maybe especially us, the design team. That's up to the players.
I’d like to put in a telling quote from West, here:
west wrote: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.
[edit: bold hilighting added by me, julie2]
To my mind, this illustrates exactly the kind of facile assumtions that the Prog D is also apt to make.
(that we could, if it weren’t much easier to bug the PD, deal with the note-thief problem by posting a guard) I’ve thought and thought about to how to post an effective guard , given that thieves can grab and run virtually instantaneously, and the average Cantrian only wakes up once–a-day. I ‘ve come up with two possible answers
A) develop the Town to the the point where it has a sizeable population and arrange things in such a way that the majority of those people can functoion as guards(even then, their chances of apprehending the thief before he gets onto the road are almost zero). Or
B) make it possible for a guard to function automatically.
The point is: this really is the ProgD’s problem . not the player’s, because the game design makes it somewhere between difficult and impossible for charries to guard things effectively, when you actually think about how to achieve that in practice, so it’s really up to the game designers to come up with an effective solution (such as B).
But , again and again, I hear it said that it’s up to the players to solve this sort of problem- even in cases where the ProgD has just created a brand-new problem of this ilk (such as that of efficiently managing resource limitations). I’m not saying that programmed-in solutions would be easy to achieve. I think we just have to accept that there are some things we can’t do effectively in Cantr, not with the best will in the world, nor the best social organisation in the world. If the ProgD said as much, fine. But they don’t say that. They create new problems. They passs the buck to the players instead and try to force better social organisation, in the spurious belief that these problems are fixable by players. You just confirnmed my worst fear, Jur- that the ProgD hadn’t even thought this thing through , from a grass-roots level, before implementing the new limitations ,nor realised how far the existing intrinsic game limitations impact on our ability to organise ourselves effectively. I don’t think the ProgD can afford to ever allow themselves to forget about those intrinsic limitations. Those should be central to your thinking whenever a new idea comes under discussion.
Anyways, sometimes these implementations don’t work as expected because your up against sheer human irrationality and bloody-mindedness (Any you claim that’s unpredictable? It’s a whole lot more predicatabvle than the ProgD’s next move ever is). Sometimes they don’t work, because you’re up against Cantrian’s well-known intrinsic limitations, but the difference between those two facrtors just doesn’t seem to register. Either way, there’s no use in trying to force humans not to be human, nor Cantrians not to be Cantrians. It’s the Prog D’s job to facilitate social development, not to force it’s development along pre-defined lines, by closing off other possibilities, ( which seems to be the objective at the moment, I’m sad to say)
Itall reminds me of our Wonderful British Government, who forever seem to believe they can force motorists off the roads by making motoring ever-more difficult and expensive . Never a thought to developing Public Transport to the point where it becomes a feasible alternative for your average real-life motorist. (not that I drive, myself, but I do rub shoulders with motorists sometimes. I can see how they’re fixed. I'm ideally placed to realise the problems they'd face if they alterered their habits, in fact) Heh. So why should I expect anything better of you lot *shrugs *. Must be an optimist , I guess.
PS. I Do appreciate that the ProgD is manned by volunteers and I am grateful, just frustrated, too. Also, I keep getting this idea that you people have some use for honest player feedback, and actually want it. Yes? So I'm kinda perplexed when some posters take offence of your behalf, when we offer some honest feedback.)
