Cantr Day 3000: Now & Then

[SekoETC]

The four categories disinclude the characters of the roleplayers who just enjoy interacting with their friends/lovers and only gather resources or produce items enough to satisfy their immediate needs, while their main purpose in life is to socialize and have fun that way. They're not leaders or workers nor bored in their surroundings because the surroundings don't really matter, only the company does.

[SumBum]

There is no such thing as small talk in Cantr, because the subjects of 99% of human small talk don't exist. This is indeed a challenge.

I've known this for a long time but only recently really realized it and the impact the void makes on RP. Cantrians' conversations often are reduced to Joe asking Jill if project X was completed, etc. The places that have satisfying RP and where bonds are forged/broken are where everyday events happen that generate small talk and other idle chatter; when chars begin to share deeper emotions and their personalities have a chance to show. I've also seen things swing to the opposite extreme where people try so hard to force RP that it becomes an annoying, silly circus act.

[gejyspa]

There is no such thing as small talk in Cantr, because the subjects of 99% of human small talk don't exist. This is indeed a challenge.

I've known this for a long time but only recently really realized it and the impact the void makes on RP. Cantrians' conversations often are reduced to Joe asking Jill if project X was completed, etc. The places that have satisfying RP and where bonds are forged/broken are where everyday events happen that generate small talk and other idle chatter; when chars begin to share deeper emotions and their personalities have a chance to show. I've also seen things swing to the opposite extreme where people try so hard to force RP that it becomes an annoying, silly circus act.

*gejyspa swings form a trapeze while juggling five balls and 4 rings* I have NO idea what you are talking about!

[SumBum]

There is no such thing as small talk in Cantr, because the subjects of 99% of human small talk don't exist. This is indeed a challenge.

I've known this for a long time but only recently really realized it and the impact the void makes on RP. Cantrians' conversations often are reduced to Joe asking Jill if project X was completed, etc. The places that have satisfying RP and where bonds are forged/broken are where everyday events happen that generate small talk and other idle chatter; when chars begin to share deeper emotions and their personalities have a chance to show. I've also seen things swing to the opposite extreme where people try so hard to force RP that it becomes an annoying, silly circus act.

*gejyspa swings form a trapeze while juggling five balls and 4 rings* I have NO idea what you are talking about!

*slaps gejyspa with a trout* Be serious!

[Doug R.]

@gejyspa & Indigo:

First, let me be clear, role-playing and simming are not mutually exclusive, and in Cantr are both required. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm saying that there are people that came to Cantr primarily to sim, and others primarily to RP. As Cantr's society changed, it became adverse for the simmers, so their numbers fell off, changing the enjoyment focus of the player base, which then influenced staff's focus onto primarily RP-related changes and implementations. Cantr changed with its players. The new GAB has been primarily focused on changes meant to stimulate the sim element of Cantr, so Cantr is changing once again.

On to your questions. What is the difference? Role-players play games primarily to role-play. Simmers primarily play games to build things/institutiions. Civilization is the ultimate sim game. When I first started Cantr, it was on the tail end of the golden age of society, when great towns led by great leaders and citizens were out doing grand things. Towns back then actually needed things, so people had to go get the resources and build them, and leaders were needed to organize and motivate them. The average town had about 20 characters, so governments were needed to be formed to lay down laws and govern them. I never had a character that was bored. My leaders led willing citizens, and my workers built things of consequence. But Cantr is an open-ended game with a closed-ended tech tree, so the inevitable happened - there was nothing consequential left to build. This, combined with no marketing and several serious server crashes, led to the free-fall in the player base that we are slowly recovering from today. The role-play fills that "boring" time you spoke of, and was also used to motivate characters. Now there's so much "boring" time, even the role-players are having a hard time filling it, leading to the die-off of towns.

What is the typical town now? A frustrated leader trying to motivate their "needless" sleeping citizens. A storage room that has a king's ransom in accumulated wealth, to the point that any newspawn that sticks around for more than a year gets a sword and iron shield. No serious threats from neighbors to motivate them (not enough players, and Yugo's massacres are always unexpected, complete, and over too quickly to count as motivating forces).

As for your second question - those areas that are at a subsistence level are in an isolated bubble of "needing things" that the rest of Cantr has surpassed. You're experiencing a micro-environment of what the game was like 2000 days ago, but with 1/5 the number of players.

@Seko - There are those types of characters, I suppose, but I haven't encountered that many, and most of those I have encountered would fall under category 4 - they used to be leaders or workers, but now just RP with their friends because there's no one to lead and nothing to build.

@Indigo - When I spoke of the role-players changing their perspective, I was alluding to the necessity of creating some characters simply for the purpose of helping, not role-playing (ones you never expect anything interesting to happen to, so you're not frustrated when nothing happens to them, and you just let them be instead of killing them off in favor of making more "lively" characters). These characters are they ones we need manning radios and working in shops. My account is split roughly 50/50 between active, semi-well roleplayed characters and worker drones. I never would have thought to do this two years ago, but I realized that with the simmers gone from the game, someone needs to be around to make things, and that places were suffering without laborers.

Edit #16: I should add that I came to Cantr as a simmer with a strong background in pen and dice role-play. The game I played out of college was a simulated space ship building game where role-play was heavily frowned upon, and where there was no perceived separation between the ship and the player. After that, I meta-gamed on a wresting sim and played some close-ended strategy games before finding Cantr, the only game I know that combined both my love of RP and Sim. So, as a simmer myself, I can speak with authority about Cantr being a dead environment for simmers right now.

[Genevieve]

I can say that I am one of the people who do not enjoy the "loudness" of some of the larger towns. I don't know if this is a function of what is happening outside or a function of a change in me since I was a councilor in Siom with my very first account and it was large, loud, and had a lot going on.

I think Doug is very correct - with resources not fading away we have warehouses FULL of stuff and machines galore. As hard as it is to think about things you worked on going away, I wouldn't mind starting either with a completely wiped world of STUFF and needing to start over again OR having things rot that don't now.

Granted, I enjoy the RP but I think RP is better when there is a goal and group effort, things to do and explore etc.

[SekoETC]

I think it would help a lot if buildings and vehicles deteriorated and required repair and could also be salvaged for materials. Then forts and such could be implemented because even though it would take too much materials for any single gatherer or even a small group, if you stole from all the dead people, you might be able to accomplish it.

[Doug R.]

I think it would help a lot if buildings and vehicles deteriorated and required repair and could also be salvaged for materials.

I agree 100%. Vehicle fuel was an enormously successful first step in introducing consumption into Cantr, and we need to follow up with it. I beg programming to implement vehicle & building destruction/deterioration. Resources is talking about eliminating daily rot, but also eliminating repairs so that all items eventually decay. This would also be a very useful addition of consumption to the game.

[Arenti]

I agree that would really help. Though it will likely not be something everyone will like.

[CrashBlizz]

I agree 100%. Vehicle fuel was an enormously successful first step in introducing consumption into Cantr, and we need to follow up with it. I beg programming to implement vehicle & building destruction/deterioration. Resources is talking about eliminating daily rot, but also eliminating repairs so that all items eventually decay. This would also be a very useful addition of consumption to the game.

I'm not against resources rotting away and I don't mind the idea of tools having a set lifetime. I disagree with the thought that fuel was successful though. I'd argue its actaully hurt the game. A lot of people where my charries are only want tandems now. Ok speed and no fuel worries. I haven't see a lot of groups using motor vehciles like they used to. Spend an extra 4 hours getting to the next town rather than spending a day making fuel. I can see this also happening with buildings if they start rotting away. It'll be 'lets just build shacks instead of stone buildings' because they'll fall down anyway.

If there was a larger player base then it 'might' work. But with people spreading out more and towns getting smaller we'll just see a type of triage in the larger towns. We'll let most buildings fall down and just use two or three. The big towns will stop being big.

[Arenti]

Actually I see still a lot of people using a vehicle that needs fuel. I say that fuel was a good success. Yes it annoys me too sometimes but it did help the game.

[Doug R.]

Let's face facts: Given Cantr's general tech level, motor vehicles should be luxury items, owned by the rich, governments, and armies. My minor characters all went for tandems, of course (what one character wants the burden of worrying about obtaining fuel?), but my characters that already had motor vehicles before the implementation are working hard to keep them operational.

The original implementation made motor vehicles hard to make, but since they had no fuel consumption or decay, they just built up in game like any other object. In my civilized towns, anyone that needed to go on a mission got at least a motorcycle. Now things are different. Motor vehicles may be common, but common people will have a hard time fueling them, and that's exactly the way it should be.

[Money]

personally my leader character loves fuel, it makes him just zoom along those express ways. I would also support the set life times of tools. It would help create more demand for new tool/ weapons instead of people just being to lazy to ask for one so they build one anyway which then just clutters things up more.

[Doug R.]

It's not set tool lifetimes, but only use-based decay (for objects - daily rot would still apply to outdoor resources). A sword, held in storage, will still last forever. A sword, used to hunt twelve animals a day for 5 years, would have a considerably shorter lifespan.

[SekoETC]

As for the argument of people building shacks instead of stone buildings because they'll deteriorate anyway, irl stone buildings or castles can last dozens or even hundreds of years, while shacks have a much shorter lifespan. It would be good if it became possible to upgrade existing buildings instead of having to wait for them to crumble and build new ones, but it should require resources. It would be good if you could add for example an aluminum roof to your shack (which they used to require in the past, by the way) to slow down the deterioration rate, or a coat of paint which would prevent the building beneath from deteriorating but would have to be repainted every ten years or so.