Smaller world

[Kreed]

I'm pleased to see that doing nothing is an option with you Jos. The problem isn't as clear cut as some seem to suggest so 'fixing' it isn't as clear cut either.
All my charries spawned and live on he two islands in question and although I can see the benifits it might bring me I still dont like it because I dont think it'll work. It seems that the question is , "how do we promote more interaction between characters?" and I think the answer lies in a hundred other possible solutions. Closing the distance between people will reduce the time factor and nothing else it seems to me.

[Jos Elkink]

Why not just let the players play and let nature take it’s course?

Yes, as I suggest in my previous post, I am gradually getting more and more convinced by this point of view in the discussion. Although I do think more 'natural disasters' - and they don't need to be so dramatic as to wipe out towns! - might influence the game positively, it is true that these differences between islands are actually interesting and should not simply be compensated that quickly.

There is one issue, though, that is a bit of a concern, and that is an OOC question: it might be very exciting to see the English areas die out because it's boring to play, and the Polish island flourish, but it's also a signal of bad game design if all players walk away . So from a society simulator perspective something can be interesting, but if it really chases away large numbers of players, it's a bit of a dead-end street. So this is all related, I think, to the difficult issue of keeping a balance between challenge and playability/fun in this game.

This discussion is quite interesting, though, even if nothing will be changed .

[wichita]

Sounds like you have enough motivation to finally get back to work on the weather system, Jos.

[Doug R.]

Have the older islands -always- been like this? I mean, in a population sense. Has this problem always existed, or is it recent (the symptoms, not the size, I know that they've always been the same size)?

[Phalynx]

There is one issue, though, that is a bit of a concern, and that is an OOC question: it might be very exciting to see the English areas die out because it's boring to play, and the Polish island flourish, but it's also a signal of bad game design if all players walk away . So from a society simulator perspective something can be interesting, but if it really chases away large numbers of players, it's a bit of a dead-end street. So this is all related, I think, to the difficult issue of keeping a balance between challenge and playability/fun in this game.
.

I think that's the whole point. The premise of the original thread was that there is a problem with cantr, because a number of players have left, and the implication being, in the 'english area' they are not being replaced.

Some people here don't see that as a problem - if 50 'decent role players' played the game they would be happy. Therefore their opinions on how to deal with 'the problem' become entirely irrelevant. They should be posting on the thread: The problem with cantr is, there isn't a problem!

But of course they all have their own problems/issues that they want resolved in relation to their own concerns. Their concerns however do not seem to relate to the greater good of the whole game!

[wichita]

As far as I have been able to deduce, the old islands have always been kind of as they are now. All of the great empires of old that I have ever heard the oldbies reference seem to be rather localized to regions. These areas had a diverse range of resources in a limited area so that a central town developed fairly quickly. This drove road improvement that shortened the travel gaps to the "suburbs". Beyond that, there was little gain in increasing cooperation.

These localized empires where then connected by sparse areas such as a fairly vast and barren desert and the "corn hills" separated by 20 days walk from each other. I have always referred to the hill towns on the old islands as simlating Kansas, a sparse collection of quiet farmers that were willing to brave starvation to cross.


Look at Treefeather Island. Walking between Krif and Drojf Hills (and Seatown for that matter) is relatively speedy (only a few days between towns), especially when factoring in boats and sea access. What developed? The KDS conglomerate as well as the Olipiofirovash region empire, seperated (isolated) by a wicked huge desert, a wicked huge mountain range, and a lot of foothills that were terrorized by MacGregors.

In contrast to that, what I think is seen on the polish lands is that the terrain is much more homogenize, and therefore the society is spread more evenly. This fluidity rather than separation gives the appearance of "more activity".

Granted, these separated English regions have suffered from activity loss in and of themselves for whatever reason. As i have been saying over and over again the past couple of weeks, I think it is more to do with the dilution effect associated with more locations being inhabited by roughly the same number of players. In the old days, eberyone had 15 characters on three islands. Now it seems like most people have their 15 spread across four or five islands. If the number of players is not increasing to match the expansion, sure it is going to appear less active because you run into fewer characters.

[Jos Elkink]

As far as I have been able to deduce, the old islands have always been kind of as they are now. All of the great empires of old that I have ever heard the oldbies reference seem to be rather localized to regions.

Yes, and I think two things should be taken into consideration here: 1) most (but certainly not all!) really interesting developments were due to CRBs - i.e. the PD has become better and better, stiffling the game in some sense ... 2) We of course used to have a different spawning system, encouraging big cities. The new spread is a very gradual effect of the revision in the spawning system.

And should I conclude now that you would approve of disasters, like HF, that would stimulate more concentration? ... 'disasters' can be interpreted as a very strong term for just making some areas somewhat less inhabitable.

[Marian]

Well, for what it's worth I've got several of my characters trying to make 'interesting' things happen right now, but progress is slow, because RL has finally caught up with me, and because yes, manpower is a real problem.

Partially this is my fault, because by choice I've set up in out of the way places, and another big part of it is never being able to trust anybody. Seems like the majority of chars I get stuck dealing with are either too sleepy or too butterfly-minded to even trust with starting a project on their own, let alone going on a trading trip, and don't even mention a war. And of course you can't go on a trip yourself and leave these people in charge. (I would like to point out that none of this has anything to do with travel distances. Give me five reliable, active people who are willing to check the hippy lovefest at the door and I could have them on tandem bikes with battleaxes and iron shields and crowbars and carrying all the boiled eggs they need to conquer the limestone, hematite and coal six towns away. Once that's done, give me another year to set up and maybe two more good people and I'd be ready to start some serious empire building from there. (Of course that's just a pipe dream...finding seven reliable people? Yeah right.)

Anyway, I'm getting a little off topic here. I can say though that concentrating a population is something I've been thinking about a lot even before I saw this thread, and I think it would be pretty easy to do IC, at least to a small degree.

One thing I rarely see is a town that actively promotes itself and tries to get new citizens. A lot of times newspawns just get ignored, and a lot of times I see a company spreading around flyers to try and attract people to a town, something that passive probably doesn't have much effect. (For one thing, I'm constantly seeing notes that don't even have dates...the company could have gone out of business 60 years ago for all I know, and my char's not going to travel six towns away to find out if a job's still available...)

Once thing I think would work, and that I'm fixing to try, is to simply hop in a big boat and start visiting some of those tiny, zombiefied towns on the coast...I figure anyone around who's actually active would jump at the chance to get away, and offering them free transportation and maybe some equipment would only sweeten the deal.

And of course, for a really dedicated town, with cabins now there's also a more efficent way to...y'know, "relocate" the people in smaller towns whether they like it or now. At best you might find a few people willing to adapt and roleplay it out, and at worst you'd wind up with a bunch of sleeping prisoners, but even that would encourage more newspawns to pop up. Actually I've given this a lot of thought, and a couple of my leaders have the resources to do it, but sadly none of them would be ruthless enough to go through with it...might be hard convincing the rest of the townspeople to go along with it to.

Sigh. My dream of running a Lawful Evil town may never come to pass.

Switching topics now, I would love to see weather added, but I don't think the effects of it should always be bad. Why not give an area lots of rain for a few years, maybe resulting in a little flood damage, possibly damaging a building or causing a few of the things inside it to rot or rust, but they get a really nice crop of corn and rice at the same time? All the new repair works combined with a drought in a neighboring area causing to leave and severely cutting down gathering slots could encourage people to migrate.

Mountains could have avalanches, forests could have fires, coastal towns get hurricanes, and I'm sure people could think up specific things for other places. Maybe in the desert you could get heatstroke if you're working outside 24/7 for an entire year.

All of these things could result in changes both good and bad to gathering rates, miner and rarely moderate damage to buildings, and every once in awhile miner damage to people. ("Encouraging" people to move to safer areas should be what we're going for here, not "forcing".) And I don't think people should be completely at the mercies of the elements either. After getting schooled by tornadoes for a few years, someone's eventually going to come along and invent a more durable type of building, maye with steel reinforcements or something like that.

And not all weather has to effect things! A simple message like, "A light rain begins to fall," or "A heavy fog rolls in," or 'A chill northerly breeze blows in' even if it did absolutely nothing could give people something to roleplay off of. I know it seems like a small thing, but considering how much attention some people pay to animals, fish, passing ships, etc. just because there's absolutely nothing going on and they're desperate to make conversation, talking about how it's so chilly out and maybe the lady who owns the restuarant should make some nice hot stew could be the height of excitement! It would probably give people an excuse to wear more than one outfit, too.

Anyway, I'm actually finding myself interested in this kind of thing for the first time in months. (Jos, you must stick around, you have a great effect on the forums. No social life for you, ever! )

I do still get tired and frustrated with all the negativity though...it would be nice if now and then instead of complaints about repairs and combat and the staff and the size of the world and every single thing a few vocal people think is wrong with Cantr we could get a thread about what's right with Cantr instead. I could write pages about that one too.

(And if we're really trying to attract new players, the usual long list of threads full of whining and arguing and complaining probably isn't the best first impression...)

[The Sociologist]

I'm afraid I'm not even playing the game right now...not even checking my characters much, really. But I must just add something here:

The existing English islands were exactly as they are now in terms of travel times since the beginning. In fact they were worse in a way, given that a few more improved roads have been built since then. And they were exactly like that all through the exciting times when people used to wake up in the middle of the night to check on their characters.

So making distances less or times faster has absolutely nothing whatever to do with anything! Nothing whatsoever!

What is happening currently is that there is too high a turnover of players' characters and this turnover is either not being replaced or else is being filtered away to those really half-baked small islands where there is nothing bar 40 wolves, 60 gorillas and 200 elephants. Where you die in 3 days. And where you cannot then replace your character for another 40 days, so in time yet still more people get bored and leave.

Recommendations:

1. Fix the skills/strength system and tiredness in relation to combat/dragging. Then conflict might become possible again. So just possibly a few more people might not be so bloody bored!

2. Fix the skills system in relation to repairs also, and the time involved in repairs. (Currently I'd say repairs as designed were probably meant to apply to what are now "expert" repairers only). Either way, the skills system currently has pernicious effects across the board, and nothing positive or really motivating to show for it.

3. Then stop all spawning on the new islands! And especially keep it that way until the old islands have repopulated themselves, and the animal system has been fixed so you don't get those huge uncapped predator numbers.

4. Furthermore, you should drop that horrible system of penalizing players for losing young charries. It is entirely ludicrous to let newcomers to the game spawn in places like Burgeo and then penalize them for dying fast. Stupid! I must also point out that suicidalism was a warning sign of something wrong with the game and in particular the non-acceptance of skills and other outcomes by many players. But instead of trying to cure the pathology you punished it. And now you wonder why you have fewer players? I mean...

5. What you must not under any circumstances do is create any more English spawn points. Or take any steps which will depopulate the main islands further. You must as much as possible reconcentrate your populations there.

6. But remember, in order for that to work, you have to allow for some blowing off of steam, once the population pressures build up again. You have to fix the combat system. It is the single highest priority task in the game.

(Just to show what I think, I'd say the following. Were you to set up a vanilla Cantr server with lands exactly as they were about two years ago, and without the skills system or tiredness, pretty much most people would migrate there. Anyhow, that's what I think.)

[viktor]

*nods*
ya the repair system currently absorbs too much time, and takes a society away from progress and holds it on maintenance, we need to reduce rot rates and speed up repairs this will have a good impact on making things less tedious.

an akward fighter at current from what i have seen with combat practice would need to massacre half the english regions just to reach efficient, this means the only people who can be real warriors are those who are born skillful or expert, or anyone who is 60+ who trained the past 40 years starting from akward, novice or efficient. same with drag strength we should be able to build that up to some noticeable degree (this is why some people were killing thier weak spawned chars and made the staff invoke the 40 day rule)

and the 40 day rule is a brutal game killer in itself, now i'm not entirely suggesting to do away with it but make it something tolerable like 10 days, i myself am writhing in agony for i am now on a second 40 day streach with a locked slot (the same bloody slot!) first i lost to animals on burgeo then i got killed for a social infraction (legitimatly thought i'd get away with it but was hunted and turned around expecting to be spared the fatal blow but got it anyways)

really need to fix these before implimenting new challenges like climate otherwise those new challenges will be detriments instead of interesting game features

and i have a char or a few each with plans of their own that if all goes right and nothing else impedes progress, might even make a few things interesting in game (slow enough process as it is)

[Marian]

What is happening currently is that there is too high a turnover of players' characters and this turnover is either not being replaced or else is being filtered away to those really half-baked small islands where there is nothing bar 40 wolves, 60 gorillas and 200 elephants. Where you die in 3 days. And where you cannot then replace your character for another 40 days, so in time yet still more people get bored and leave.

Sociaologist, usually I agree with your post, but really, what is it with the violent dislike of Burgeo and Aki? I've noticed it in other threads too...

I have a char on each, and they're loads of fun (being lucky enough to spawn a char on Burgeo rekindled my interest in the game at a point when I was seriously considering quitting for lack of time...) and they've got more interesting and unique cultures than anything I've seen anywhere else in the entire game. Given your name and all I'd think you'd be all for that.

[Jos Elkink]

I definitely agree with a lot of the stuff Marian and the Sociologist say ... Just so you know. Well, I don't really agree that we should force more population to the older two islands - I'm rather convinced that we shouldn't meddle at all at this point in where who lives .

Weather system: yeah, long, long overdue . Was number 1 on my priority list one week after I started Cantr . I'll think about a good implementation asap .

Repairs: that really is a difficult issue. I must admit that as a player, I'm also quite frustrated with it. But if we do too much to ease it, we make it pointless again, just like many other things we implemented. So I'm not really sure what to do to be honest. How to avoid that you can gather so much by just being patient - you should have staff to own a lot. That's fair enough, but the result is boring gameplay, which is bad. So I'm not sure.

Finding reliable staff: I think there are in-game solutions, like redundancy and tricks that you don't have to trust your staff much (e.g. pay them upon delivery of goods rather than up front), as well as starting your company in bigger towns. One thing that surprises me a lot in Cantr demographics is indeed the spread over large areas. Why does everyone want their own 10-person town to rule, instead of enjoying the benefits of large labour supply / lots of traffic / lots of trade that a big town can provide? You would expect that you can be far more powerful in a large, coastal town, than in yet another village in a forest ... So I totally agree with Marian there.

Skills: yeah, I know. This is always annoying me a bit when people complain. First they keep asking for skills when I refuse to implement them; then there is finally an approach that I get along and implement; and ever since I get complaints why we have skills. To be honest: I couldn't care less about those skills - I think they are an unnecessary element to the basic design of the game. As a player I totally ignore them, and as a game designer I don't care.

Tiredness: does it still have any negative effect? The original purpose was to have it have a strong effect and then remove the max-1-hit-a-day rule. Because it seemed more natural. That balance was never found, though. I also wanted it to be pretty much a fighting-related issue, not for other stuff, but that people found too unrealistic.

40-day rule: I really want players to care about their characters. Long term players generally do, short term players less so. You see people, even those played for a long time, where the character experiences a slightly more difficult period in life, and they just give up. Or you arrest them for a crime, and instead of being sad or upset or whatever, they just stop playing. That's boring! If we were all good roleplayers, we didn't need the 40-day rule, but I think it helps.

Animals that kill you: in my opinion an essential part of the game; sometimes it's just about survival. And although individuals can do little, groups certainly can fix it in this case.

Violence system: definitely needs an overhaul, at least to counter balance this instantanuous dragging etc. and definitely to make it somewhat easier again to have violent activities, but how exactly to change it is a very, very difficult issue. There are a zillion suggestions about it, too many to review without spending a lot of time on it, and it's very difficult for each of those suggestions to properly predict what will happen when you implement it. We are currently already working on some adjustments to make the dragging less powerful, and the discussions on this in the RD sound pretty cool. So I hope some of that will be implemented soon.

Well, that's it for now ...

[Marian]

Skills: yeah, I know. This is always annoying me a bit when people complain. First they keep asking for skills when I refuse to implement them; then there is finally an approach that I get along and implement; and ever since I get complaints why we have skills. To be honest: I couldn't care less about those skills - I think they are an unnecessary element to the basic design of the game. As a player I totally ignore them, and as a game designer I don't care.

I think the simplest way to make the most people happy with skills is just to make them easier to train. Right now it's like you're pretty much stuck with whatever you get, even if you spend years and years practicing. (I had a char that had to hunt nearly 1500 animals before going from novice ot efficient, for example...and even then there wasn't much improvement in the actual amount of damage they did.) And they do have a pretty big impact, so they're not really something that's easy to ignore. (espeically combat)

Tiredness: does it still have any negative effect? The original purpose was to have it have a strong effect and then remove the max-1-hit-a-day rule. Because it seemed more natural.

Yes please! I've always thought thats the way it should be. It would make sparring with a friend at low stregths more posible, and as for real combat, you can only get in one really good attack a day anyway, then a second so-so one, and then you're pretty much useless by the third. Maybe easy to build furniture like cots and rugs should be nerfed slightly to keep them from being exploited, but other than that I don't think it would cause any huge imbalances. (If someone goes through all the trouble of making an expensive bed they deserve to be able exploit it to their heart's content, IMHO)

Tiredness should probably effect dragging to, but I don't see any reason to apply it to anything that's not combat.

40-day rule: I really want players to care about their characters. Long term players generally do, short term players less so. You see people, even those played for a long time, where the character experiences a slightly more difficult period in life, and they just give up. Or you arrest them for a crime, and instead of being sad or upset or whatever, they just stop playing. That's boring! If we were all good roleplayers, we didn't need the 40-day rule, but I think it helps.

I like the 40 day rule, even if the guy who suggested it turned out to be a nutcase something like this was still long overdue. For the people that hate it though, maybe you should be able to knock days off with credits. Assuming they ever get implemented. (*hinthint* )

Violence system: definitely needs an overhaul, at least to counter balance this instantanuous dragging etc. and definitely to make it somewhat easier again to have violent activities, but how exactly to change it is a very, very difficult issue. There are a zillion suggestions about it, too many to review without spending a lot of time on it, and it's very difficult for each of those suggestions to properly predict what will happen when you implement it. We are currently already working on some adjustments to make the dragging less powerful, and the discussions on this in the RD sound pretty cool. So I hope some of that will be implemented soon.

I'm actually pretty okay with violence as is, except I think dragging should always require the cooperation of at least two people, unless the victim is seriously injured and/or exhausted, and I don't think locks should be so powerful. I mean, there's got to be a balance, and breaking them shouldn't be a regular thing, but I've seen suggestions before about people being able to get past them with simple tools as long as several of them cooperate, and I think that's the way to go. I just like the idea of a bunch of peasants getting mad at the king and storming a castle. Not with pitchforks though...those are expensive. (No torches either because they don't exist, even though they should, along with candles, braziers, lamps, etc, and tons of other useless RP items...but that's another thread.)

[Missy]

Skills: yeah, I know. This is always annoying me a bit when people complain. First they keep asking for skills when I refuse to implement them; then there is finally an approach that I get along and implement; and ever since I get complaints why we have skills. To be honest: I couldn't care less about those skills - I think they are an unnecessary element to the basic design of the game. As a player I totally ignore them, and as a game designer I don't care.

So take them out. Turn us back to when there weren't any. Why are we of the impression that just because we put something in, that it has to stay and we have to tweak it until we have a "proper balance," when maybe the answer is going back to before that implentation existed?


Edit:

And since some people sound like a broken record it's my turn to do that too.

Repairs suck! Take them out too! They make me bored. They make me not want to check my character. Not the times that it takes to do any given repair, but the fact that I have to do them at all. And I'm sorry you think that there shouldn't be an "endless" supply of hammers laying around but there are other ways to deal with that than implementing something that bores your entire player base. IE: Why not, if a tool hasn't been used in ten years it disappears. Poof! End of story. That would include that it hadn't been passed to someone else or dropped or picked up.
Edit: And that the character hadn't particpated in a project where specific tool was required.

[Marian]

They make me bored. They make me not want to check my character.

How is clicking a button and watching a number increase every three hours more boring than watching any other number do the exact same thing?

Face it, none of the projects in Cantr exactly make for action-packed excitement. If they were seriously the only reason I could find to check my characters I wouldn't want to either. In fact I wouldn't be playing at all and instead take up a more interesting hobby, like watch grass grow.

Are all your chars hermits or what?