For businesses and shopowners everywhere: Workstations.

[Cogliostro]

On the one hand, yes. You're right, it's very convenient to the "town leader" types who annoy me too, to have a feature like this.

But on the other hand guys! Aren't we missing something? Namely, what about the fact that an antisocial newspawn, wandering the local towns, has just found a Mining Factory wherein, look! He can get iron and other stuff he wanted, and without needing to bow to any stupid town leaders with their *smiles* and "this way please, John, I set up the project for you..."

That's only one, very random example. We can come up with hundreds more. The key bit to understand is that, yes, we benefit the town leaders, but at the same time we allow totally naked men in their twenties a way to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW, as they are exploring the game, possibly for the first time. Having retained them, the town leaders are free to go to work on them, using roleplaying wiles to turn an occasional guestworker into a loyal town citizen.

In essence, we are letting the town leader make work arrangements at a time convenient to that player, and then these arrangements will patiently sit there waiting for the right and willing worker to come along, just like a mousetrap loaded with cheese. This is a convenience we owe to our players, I am certain of that. There's nothing in the design that says they must be Cantr-slaves, and if they don't login every 2hours, they can't play a town leader.

All said, I am not very confident the feature can be useful to us as it is, either, because of the clutter problems we have identified, inability to have different kinds of Workstation (I think putting tools inside of it would need a second container or something, and it seems fishy to me, coding wise), and general uncertainty of how hard it'd be to code. But as a concept, to perhaps give birth to later concepts with "better fit", I think it extremely timely and necessary.

[Cogliostro]

Guys, following the above post I realized we're overcomplicating things when they should be simple and to the point. Since in general we have no objections to such "mousetrap" workstations, why don't we forego complicating the build tree and cluttering up the environment.

Instead, let's make "Reward" an optional part of any project a character creates. It would work similarly to the idea already explained, but without any need to set up complex "linked" projects or have special machines for it.

It would be a part of the project-setup screen, where you click an option to "Set a reward for completing this project", and the reward you add is in the form of any resource, in the amount in grams you specify, that gets stored in the database together with other project parameters. Other characters reviewing the projects are able to see the exact reward specified there. Complete the project and the reward goes in your inventory.

Sadly, this does away with the interesting aspect of "tools chained to the workstation" but at least it's also a thing that won't clutter the game.

[Doug R.]

A better idea, but sadly, even less workable. The whole project system would have to be rewritten.

Since in general we have no objections to such "mousetrap" workstations

I haven't made my decision yet, but definitely leaning towards objection at this stage. Really, if we approved every one of your suggestions, Cantr wouldn't even be remotely recognizable. I'm starting to think that perhaps maybe Cantr just isn't your kind of game.

[Cogliostro]

Well Doug, you're not a coder, so maybe you don't realize that adding a reward to the project-formation screen doesn't really require rewriting the whole project system. It requires an addition of one extra database field to the "projects list" table and very simple code to handle dropping the reward into the project completer's inventory, just as the game drops the project result into the project-starter's. Way I see it, someone like marol or Seko are certainly capable of doing that!

Why do you think that Cantr should always stay recognizably the same? What is this stale conservatism that plagues nearly everyone on the game board, and causes every new feature to be nerfed, scaled back, until though it's implemented it doesn't really matter any more, since it's "only 2g per day" or whatever. I thought the point of suggestions is to improve upon what we have. And we are still in denial that what we have is dying, guys. It really is. Today, changes in Cantr are as necessary as a blood transfusion for a critically wounded person.

[Doug R.]

Adding a method of tracking the project completer is not a simple matter, as that is not currently recorded. What if more than one person were working on the project when it finished? Does the reward get split? What if unequal work was done? Do we track the participation of every single person at each tick? Wow, we're really multiplying database fields here. How does the game store the reward? Another database field. Please don't be so smug.

Why do you think that Cantr should always stay recognizably the same?

Because then it wouldn't be Cantr. It would be another game.

[Cogliostro]

We are here to work out such details in the best way possible, not to state them as though they were showstoppers and reasons for the suggestion to be rejected.

A database field, after all, isn't all that much to ask in exchange for a feature that really has the potential to make Cantr a more fun game to play for everybody!

[*Wiro]

Why do you think that Cantr should always stay recognizably the same?

Because then it wouldn't be Cantr. It would be another game.

Cantr=Cantr. Cantr != not Cantr.

[Cogliostro]

Let's suppose that we added a feature/option to the project screen that allows the project starter to set a reward for that project. The reward worked simply by releasing whatever resources the project starter added as the reward, and not into anyone's inventory but just dropped it on the ground.

That sidesteps the programming issues and lets players resolve any "division" issues in-game, while at the same time giving us the facility we need so bad to create work projects that are able to entice others into joining them.

The idea is that you'd see all projects that have rewards in the project list, maybe in slightly different colour or marked somehow. Example: "Project harvesting carrots (complete for reward: 100g iron)"

[tazer]

love it