Cantr Day 3000: Now & Then

[Arenti]

but buildings should be able to be repaired. As its possible irl.

But of course it should require resources to do so.

[CrashBlizz]

I really can stress enough how against an idea like this I am.

[Rumaan]

I have thought of suggesting this before but didn't. In Cantr we build many things from scratch yet the technological knowledge is available all the time. People just need to gather the resources, click the appropriate buttons to start manufacturing a car or a radio. But in life the real challenge is as much with the availability of knowledge as with the resources.

We should have some mechanism where the people actually have to learn from books or by experimentation first to build something. My vision is that a town then needs a group of scholarly people to research and preserve their knowledge. Technologies, just as other resources have to be found in game. Towns would need libraries to preserve their knowledge base. Technologies could be traded with others (something similar to the games in the civilization series). Technology would actually be a valuable resource. Also, if there is an invasion on a town and the library and its books are destroyed, the town people basically have to re-invent the wheel or obtain knowledge from other towns.

I know the suggestion is vague and probably difficult to implement. But if even bits of it were implemented I am sure the game would become more interesting with actual goals, with competition between towns (would lead to towns grouping up. Now I see no real motivation for towns to group up), with more conflicts, more meaningful wars, basically everything with more at stake.

[randognsac]

Doug you said it yourself we don't have enough simmers to man radios, what makes you think the few simmers we have can keep up with rotting buildings and fuel. I have a roadbuilder charrie and he has resorted to dropping roadbuilding materials off by boat. He can't afford to make fuel, let alone buy it. He is a lowly roadbuilder and lives off of donations. People don't care enough or don't have the fuel to donate to him. It's hard to find charries that just wanna help build the society that keeps the rper's rping. I am mostly a simmer, but I mix in alot of rping if I have time. I also have total worker bees to. I usually end up being leader of a town, very reluctantly, because I am always there working. Rper's charries tend to live short lives, they usually don't care about building the society, just rping it. Not all but most. It gets so frustrating sometimes.

[Miri]

I really wonder how many of those just-rpers would just let their homes fall appart Not that many, I bet.

I'm all for the changes Doug described. They'd give something to live for. Really, how long can people keep pillow fighting interesting?

I remember my very first charrie spawning in some tinny village in the middle of the polish continent forests. Building it into a prosperous town, journeys to get resources, the Terror of Elephants, dreams of multi-location settlement... and all of this flavoured with marvelous RP. That's how I've been learning how to cantr.
Eh... in my days youths knew how to behave...

[Doug R.]

Doug you said it yourself we don't have enough simmers to man radios, what makes you think the few simmers we have can keep up with rotting buildings and fuel.

I don't. However, first realize that stone buildings would deteriorate so slowly (or not at all) that repairing them would be irrelevant.

We are in the dark ages of Cantr in many respects. The dark ages were the epitome of survival of the fittest. If I could, I'd have scavenger characters roaming over Cantr, disassembling vehicles and buildings, etc, but it's not implemented. If society collapses, then civilization should collapse around it, not lay in stasis as it does now.

I said that Cantr is in a transition period. The dark age will provide a low to recover from once society reorganizes to meet the challenges of the new reality.

[Arenti]

Fuel is in the game and whether you like it or not its staying. (I hope lol)

[Money]

I agree with Miri. Just because it isn't RP doesn't mean that rpers won't go out, and do things. What people need to remember is that Cant is not about just RP, or just simming, nor does it need to be about only one of these things. The great thing about cantr is that it lets people do both, and I think that if you are just simming, or just rping, you are missing out on a lot of the game.

[Cdls]

Cantr needs more than a few implementations to what and how things rot, it needs events to generate things for the RPers to RP and give things for the simmers to sim. Coastal towns should flood, washing away resources and damaging/destroying buildings and vehicles and injuring people. Mountain towns could have volcanoes with similar effects. Weather can come into play. (WE CAN NUKE DORY 8) !!)



Combat needs to be redesigned, as well as health/death. We need wars, conflict and all these things to get both the simmers and rpers something to do.

[gejyspa]

While I definitely agree with Cdls about event-driven gaming, which is quite differnt than Cantr (most plot lines have to be dreamt up by the characters themselves), why does everything mentioned have to be bad? Why not "meteorite made of gold falls in the middle of the town square"? "Announcement that town X has won a heretofore unknown lottery, and been granted a new boat"? "Character X strikes oil in his backyard"?

[Cdls]

Ahh, I didn't mean for the events to all be negatively influenced, of course there can be good things as well.

Why not "meteorite made of gold falls in the middle of the town square"?

Well, that would be good for the people that came to the town afterwords, not so much for those there when it impacts!

Announcement that town X has won a heretofore unknown lottery

This is something that can actually be done in game, and something one of my characters would have eventually introduced if a certain move hadn't been made.


My ideas with posting the more negative aspects is that through these negative events, it creates more opportunity for RP and simming than the positive ones. Positive creates instant gratification for the characters (which is great once in a while) but the negative takes time to head off and/or recover from, which gives people stuff to RP and sim up to the point of completion/recovery (which would then rise the negative to positive) as well as something to talk about in the future.

"Haha, remember that time Dory got nuked by those space cows? Man that was awesome!"

[Genevieve]

We're nuking Dory? Where do I sign up to push the button?

Yes, I agree, events would be awesome...especially weather events.

[kaloryfer]

In my opinion (but im a bit biased against too much talking), the more roleplaying players are driving out the simmers.

To give an example some time ago a dude spawned in my village causing a lot of drama (yes, drama, personal problems, stuff, love stories from day 2 of his life), talking a lot.
So what do i see after a week? He gets free iron shield, sabre, clothing, food, etc. Everything you strive for.

Who am I? My character is some builder in that village, he's fairly active as well (no sleeping, responding when talked to, checked often) and what's his situation? He's going to work for several years to get that kind of equipment.

In my opinion, the biggest reward of simmers is simply getting new items, stuff, hoarding.
And when you see someone get them without work, well it could be annoying a bit, at least it is for me.

disclaimer:
Real life is just like situation I've describe above, but you can't run away from real life, you have to cope with it. So this is where Cantr really wins, it's totally simulating real life, and great praise for this game for doing that.
But you can run away from this "unfairness" and "realism" in Cantr. Either by running away in game, or unsubbing.

Cheers,
Kaloryfer.

[Doug R.]

So what do i see after a week? He gets free iron shield, sabre, clothing, food, etc. Everything you strive for.

What you describe here is a problem, but I don't believe it's fair to blame the roleplayers for this. The problem is that the game provides little incentive to acquire wealth. In real life, wealth is power, but in the game, wealth just lies rotting in storage rooms. You may as well give your stuff away, because otherwise, it does you no good. If the game provided incentives to acquire wealth, we'd see much less altruism and more actual economics.

[Cdls]

In my opinion, the biggest reward of simmers is simply getting new items, stuff, hoarding.
And when you see someone get them without work, well it could be annoying a bit, at least it is for me.

I guess along that line of thinking, you can be annoyed at the 'simmers' for providing all this extra stuff laying around that can just be given out so freely. You are contributing to the problem that annoys you...talk about ironic eh?