Biggest problem in Cantr

[Drakulya]

The impatience and misunderstanding of players, and new ones in particular.

Example A) Speeding up the game seems pressed alot
Example B) Not liking change, no matter what it is unless its their idea
Example C) RP is put aside for in game success, and that is not the purpose of Cantr <<<those should go hand in hand

[Joshuamonkey]

I like the fact that if we have nothing to do, there's always repairs.

[Sekar]

I agree with Drakulya. I used to make my characters all sort of have a goal to obtain before a certain age. Now i'm learning though that you really can't do that...and that you should try to ignore your own age as much as possible, and ignore the amount of time you spend waiting for what you want. Plus cantr players can't die of old age yet(Which I didn't know when I first joined), so it doesn't make much sense to worry about it.

[psymann]

Ok, five weeks on, and how have things changed for me - what are my new problems...?

Here is a thought or ten on my old problems:

1) Meeting Ambitions
This is less of a problem as I feared. I have been able to modify my character's ambitions to something that is possible, and future characters have personalities or ambitions that suit the cantr world now I have a better understanding of what it is like.

The realisation that the personality is more important than the ambition is a great help. I would suggest that this paragraph from the front page of Cantr actually doesn't help much:

Playing always from the perspective of each individual character, you can try to play the worlds most famous politician, most feared criminal, most cunning military commander, most wealthy entrepreneur, or most beloved village idiot. Any role you can imagine you can play in this game and the challenge is in playing it consistently, and in achieving the goals you set for your characters individually.

I have a small handfull of characters now. I have two who entered the world with an ambition of what they wanted to do (goal), and a different couple who had an ambition of how they wanted to act (personality). The two who had a personality are both easier and more enjoyable to play, and are probably more fun to be around for other characters.


2) Tasks
My problems with these have now been solved - and the reason is that I have learned how to use the interface. But I think it's important to remember that I found it hard to start with, and that put me off.
- multitasking - I sort of can do this - I can start numerous projects, and pause halfway through and work on another one. It was not clear to me when I started that this was possible. This is related to the one below - how to start/pause/stop/cancel/ activities is not terribly intuitive.
- breaking off a task - this is of course possible, but I know why I couldn't see how. You use the same graphic in two places to mean two different things. The Cross on the main page for your character, next to the project you're on, indicates that you are leaving that project for a while - you stop working on it, and it turns to grey instead of white on your activity page. But the Cross on the activity page which look identical cancels the project completely. This is why I was so confused before. I had tried to pause my project by clicking on the Cross on the activity page, and it had obviously said that I couldn't cancel it as it had been started and/or resources used on it. But if I'd clicked on the Cross on the main page, I'd just have stopped working on that project for the time being without a problem. So - different graphics needed for pause/cancel projects, not just the same one on different pages.
- better indication of time - this was a minor one, and similar to other interface requests around the place (eg for entering amount of raw resource held rather than finished resource required). Again, it comes down to the interface for doing activities not being as good as it might be.


3) Fear of Death
- nowhere near as bad as I was led to believe.

It is strongly advised that you read the notes on the ground ... Often among these notes is a set of laws ... and in some places you will be dealt with harshly if you ignore those laws ... Laws can exist on any possible behaviour ... Your character is ... very vulnerable - he or she has no food, no clothes, no weapons - so the actions and choices your character makes will greatly affect his or her present and future life!

...read the notes on the ground first! In some locations, gathering food for yourself is forbidden or limited, because there is a limit on how many people can be gathering resources at once. Some locations also have free food available for newspawns or special work programs for them. Find this out first if you want your character to avoid jail or even mob execution.

This should help you out to avoid disappointment when your character is immediately imprisoned or killed for breaking the law. Because there is no special protection for the characters of new players in Cantr, you may want to be conservative in your character's actions at first.

I hope this will help your characters survive the first few days, which are somewhat tough to get through...

You see why I was worried though?


4) Reliance on your spawning area
This is less of a problem when you get over the fear of (3). But it still makes a difference if people say hello to you early on and give you just a little food.


Ok, and here are my new problems, which are therefore more important to me now I've got over the first hurdle of staying in the game:

5) Lack of things to make when you have little.
Most of my characters have simple resources. They are not part of major factions who own a boat-load of steel, they just want to lead a simple life - build a little house somewhere, make something nice, and enjoy life in their own way. And this is my problem - here are a few things I have considered doing, and the problems I have in doing them:
- build a home: the buildings are actually pretty good - I can build from stone/wood/mud/reed/marble/etc, which is great. The only problem is that many of them involve the requirement of iron with which to make a trowel and a lock. However, there are at least alternatives - you just have to avoid using stone/marble to build from, and, well, leave it unlocked.
- have a cup of tea: see the cantr quiz in the games forum - it takes hundreds and hundreds of grams of iron to make a single cup of tea, let alone the amount of coal/limestone/stone/etc/etc needed as well. If my character gets a cup of tea before he's fifty, I will be amazed!
- make clothes: it seems that there is a correlation between materials and complexity of product. For some reason, if a garment is going to look good, it *has* to be made out of leather and silk and cloth. If it's made out of hide and bone, it has to look a bit lame. I might have a character who is willing to spend a lot of time making wonderful clothes out of bone and hide. I can make a "simple hide dress" but I can't make a "beautiful hide dress". And there is very little I can make out of fur compared to cotton.
- make different food: I am getting sick of grilled meat... and potato chips. Being able to make a wider range (not necessarily something exciting, just something different!) of food would be good. Even to make potato chips I need string (or to borrow others' drying racks). Can't I just make a fire using some wood/grass/(potato bush/banana tree/rice leaves)/etc, and do some simple cooking with that? Sure it would waste more meat/potatoes to make, and would need more fuel and take longer, but at least the option is there.


It seems that if you have iron and steel, you can build anything and everything, but if you don't then you are constantly running out of things you can build, and you have to trade (usually in limestone, coal or iron ore so they can make more steel!) or work forever in order to get even enough iron to lock your door. Can't I at least put a big stone up in front of my mudhut doorway that takes a project to roll away, or something?


6) Too much doing, not enough RP
Not much the game can do about this as it's up to players - and it's been mentioned before in this thread - there is a lot of action in many areas but little of interest. People in some places seem to spend more time quietly working on projects, silenty shifting tons of raw materials around, and whispering to each other if they talk at all, than they do actually RPing. Some characters I have seen are active almost every hour, but I have rarely heard them speak, and if they do, it's always with no actions in stars at all, so it's not much fun to look at. Ah well, can't do much with that!



Anyway, that's my new set of thoughts, maybe I'll update again in a while...

psymann

[Marian]

Well, I'm glad to see you've gotten over most of your major complaints, I knew you would wants you got to know the game a little better.

Now adressign some of the new stuff:

5) Lack of things to make when you have little.
Most of my characters have simple resources. They are not part of major factions who own a boat-load of steel, they just want to lead a simple life - build a little house somewhere, make something nice, and enjoy life in their own way.

I remember when I first started playing I was kind of frustrated that you needed iron and steel for pretty much everything, but that's actually improved a lot now, and there are more nice simple things you can make without it so I can't really complain. The really nice stuff is probably always going to require it though, and I think that's a good thing since it makes people work together, which means communication and interaction, which means RP, which is good for everybody.

- build a home: the buildings are actually pretty good - I can build from stone/wood/mud/reed/marble/etc, which is great. The only problem is that many of them involve the requirement of iron with which to make a trowel and a lock. However, there are at least alternatives - you just have to avoid using stone/marble to build from, and, well, leave it unlocked.

This kind of ties into your paragraph about iron, so I'll get to that later.

- have a cup of tea: see the cantr quiz in the games forum - it takes hundreds and hundreds of grams of iron to make a single cup of tea, let alone the amount of coal/limestone/stone/etc/etc needed as well. If my character gets a cup of tea before he's fifty, I will be amazed!

Meh. Tea is like bronze. (Well okay, tea is more like coffee...) Either way it's one of those weird things that I doubt will ever be made, and if you're character has a desire for a cup of tea when there's no tea in existence on their island and they've never even heard of it, that's just unnatural and the CRB police should break your door down and beat you with billy clubs.

- make clothes: it seems that there is a correlation between materials and complexity of product. For some reason, if a garment is going to look good, it *has* to be made out of leather and silk and cloth. If it's made out of hide and bone, it has to look a bit lame. I might have a character who is willing to spend a lot of time making wonderful clothes out of bone and hide. I can make a "simple hide dress" but I can't make a "beautiful hide dress". And there is very little I can make out of fur compared to cotton.

Okay. Think about this now. We're talking about a piece of raw hide that was stripped straight off the corpse of an animal. I don't think it's ever going to be 'beautiful' and probably you should be grateful the clothing description doesn't include the rotting smell and all the flies that should realistically be following you around.

Seriously though, I can't complain at all about the simpler clothes since from my perspective there's a huge variety now, and it all looks pretty good compared to the loincloth and bikini that was all you could make before.

- make different food: I am getting sick of grilled meat... and potato chips. Being able to make a wider range (not necessarily something exciting, just something different!) of food would be good. Even to make potato chips I need string (or to borrow others' drying racks). Can't I just make a fire using some wood/grass/(potato bush/banana tree/rice leaves)/etc, and do some simple cooking with that? Sure it would waste more meat/potatoes to make, and would need more fuel and take longer, but at least the option is there.

Actually I think there's a really nice variety of food available even through simpler cooking methods (you can make nine different things on a fire pit alone, and that's the easiest cooking machine) And drying dung is something easy that means everybody can cook...before it was like you either used wood to cook meat or else you ate raw potatoes all the time.

The fact is that there's tons of recipes, and a lot of them aren't that hard to make, except no one ever bothers because meat is the easiest to cook and you eat less of it.

It seems that if you have iron and steel, you can build anything and everything, but if you don't then you are constantly running out of things you can build, and you have to trade (usually in limestone, coal or iron ore so they can make more steel!) or work forever in order to get even enough iron to lock your door. Can't I at least put a big stone up in front of my mudhut doorway that takes a project to roll away, or something?

I guarantee, when you get over the misconception that iron is hard to get ahold of, you will have a lot more fun with this game. You know those factions with 'boatloads of steel' you were talking about earlier? Well, they are almost always looking for help, so why not have your char get a job? And if the person expects you to work 'forever', they can obviously tell you're new and are ripping you off, and you should find somebody else. (seeing as its possible to smelt 350 grams of iron in one day I don't see how anyone can justify asking for more then a year's worth of work, and only then if one of the ingredients is ridiculously far away.)

All it takes is 300 grams for screwdriver + trowel + lock, and you can probably find someone to loan you the screwdriver and trowel anyway. (Honestly as far as houses I think the biggest holdback is just the huge amount of stone or wood required, and even that can be got around just by asking if you can move into an old building...again, getting help from others is usually the best way to do anything, you'll have a much harder time if you insist on doing everything yourself.)

Also, trade is very possible, and so what if it is iron ingredient they want. No matter where you spawn, at least on the major islands you're likely to have either limestone or hematite or coal close by. And big towns will pretty reliablely trade for other things too, like salt or healing food or wood or rubber. Just sit down for a minute and look at your map and you can usually figure out who would have a use for what.

But of course the easiest way to get what you need (other then stealing) is to find a town with a reasonably active leader and then help out a little while and show them that you're active too. It's not wasted time because you're making connections and interacting with people and hopefully developing your chars personality at the same time.

And I totally agree with what you said, about personality being more important than goals. (Even though they're connected a lot of times, IMHO the personality should come first and then the goals naturall grow from that.)

6) Too much doing, not enough RP
Not much the game can do about this as it's up to players - and it's been mentioned before in this thread - there is a lot of action in many areas but little of interest. People in some places seem to spend more time quietly working on projects, silenty shifting tons of raw materials around, and whispering to each other if they talk at all, than they do actually RPing. Some characters I have seen are active almost every hour, but I have rarely heard them speak, and if they do, it's always with no actions in stars at all, so it's not much fun to look at. Ah well, can't do much with that!

Now this I agree with 100%! Unless I'm just super busy my chars always try to make conversation and keep things interesting, but it frustrates me when no one responds even though they're hunting so they're obviously awake. (Or when something important is going on or being said and they just ignore it or talk about trading or ask to borrow a hammer or something like that.) And I get a little annoyed to because I don't see why my chars should have to be the ones who always have to direct everything and come up with all the ideas and work so hard to get other people to show even the slightest interest.

[psymann]

I have a feeling I'm not meant to discuss things in this thread so I'll be quick before they notice

- seems as if the number of things I can make (clothes/food) is on the increase, great
- just because hide is grubby doesn't mean I can't have a project to spend a day cleaning it - quality is a function of time as well as input.
- tea is in the Wiki, so my character is allowed to know that, call off the CRB police! He has a strange recollection of a possibly-made-up past life where he ate tea and muffins. He searches for them both (even though I know OOC that he will never find at least one of them!).
- not all my characters are the sort to work for people. One of mine will trade maybe, but never work for someone else. I guess he'll have to lie in the bed he makes.

psymann

[Jos Elkink]

Marian, you should start considering writing a Webzine article, or joining Cantr staff or something ...

[Phalynx]

Marian, you should start considering writing a Webzine article, or joining Cantr staff or something ...

Second that - it's a shame you couldn't stay with the PD...

[Marian]

Thanks. I've been asked to write an article before, but I seriously think I get ADD whenever I try to sit down to write something longer then three paragrapghs. And I've thought about making a guide to starting a business, but there's already a couple of articles about starting a town and thats almost the same thing...

Plus cantr players can't die of old age yet(Which I didn't know when I first joined), so it doesn't make much sense to worry about it.

Is this true though? I thought that was something that was added awhile back?

Is it at least something that's planned on being added? Because it was something I was kind of depending on...I mean, I love my characters, but I don't want to be playing these forever, and now that I've got them down to a number I can handle I promised myself I'd never let any of them have a heart attack again. I have ideas for new chars that I'd like to try sometime to.

[the_antisocial_hermit]

\

Plus cantr players can't die of old age yet(Which I didn't know when I first joined), so it doesn't make much sense to worry about it.

Is this true though? I thought that was something that was added awhile back?

Is it at least something that's planned on being added? Because it was something I was kind of depending on...I mean, I love my characters, but I don't want to be playing these forever, and now that I've got them down to a number I can handle I promised myself I'd never let any of them have a heart attack again. I have ideas for new chars that I'd like to try sometime to.

It's true for now. I think it is planned... the age it should be is debated amongst people on the forum in some thread somewhere. But I don't think the age is implemented just yet, though I've heard that it will be somewhere between 100-120yrs... I dunno.

[N-Aldwitch]

Heh, so what if it's implemented when someone hits 150 or 180 or something? Do they just die off, or become Gods?? Immortals?

[Phalynx]

Heh, so what if it's implemented when someone hits 150 or 180 or something? Do they just die off, or become Gods?? Immortals?

Is English your first language

[SekoETC]

What was the point of that comment? That sentence was fully understandable and I can see nothing wrong in it (but then again, I'm not a native speaker).

What he meant to say is "if dying from old age gets implemented, and someone has already exceeded the upper limit, will that person die instantly or become immortal?"

Now, in my opinion, if there'll be a cap to the lenght of life, instead of coldly severing the heads of those who have gone over it, it should descend gradually, starting from the oldest age present during the time of implementation. First there would be just 1% chance of dying per day (or year), then it would grow higher.

Since completing anything is very slow in Cantr, I'm glad that there is no aging other than in writing. My oldest characters are 65 now and one of them has a plan that will require at least two and a half years of manual work, not including the time spent in travelling and finding the right equipment.

[Phalynx]

I beg your pardon, with your explanation all becomes clear - please forgive my ignorance.

[psymann]

Ok, a while later... changed again.

Now my biggest gripe is that the pages take so long to load! Given it's almost entirely text and I have broadband at a minimum of 2M, I am surprised at how long it takes to load each page... I can't be bothered to wait frequently, so I flick over to a different game and then come back only to have wasted a load of my minutes while I was distracted. If anything stops me playing at the moment, it will be lack of time because I can't keep being late to work and dinner because I'm waiting for pages to load...

psymann