Cantr Future: Science, Invention, Progress etc

[Oob]

Discussion forums being what they are and risking certain put down replies from those 'who know' and have 'been there done that, heard it all before'.. I mentioned in other posts about Cantr's future where the future of the game was under consideration (amongst other things) and also where the future in the game was being pondered by those sages and oracles who possess foresight and a deep knowledge of Cantr II. Not knowing too much myself, having searched the forums for previous discussions I found some interesting and relevant quotes.

I have an idea of how to improve things.

Instead of predefining Applications such as cars, radios, etc. Give all the resources "Properties". Find a way for us to be able to combine ANY resource with any other resource to produce something tangible and useful. Also, perhaps the properties could be modified by things like heating. This could give incentive for people to develop things that would help them defeat the neighboring dictator or to get around the world in 80 days...something to set them apart from all other Catrarians.

I got this idea the other day when I was reading Wichita's announcement of Barley and thought to myself, "Why can't I combine any herb or vegetable in my soup and see what happens?"

I realize this would be a MAJOR change, but perhaps we could start to move in that direction.

Just a thought.

Perhaps at some point Cantr should be reset. But before that could happen some things need to be fixed. Players should be permitted to choose the skills profiles of their characters somewhat better, assuming skills are retained at all, and combat needs to be vastly improved. Four people with sledgehammers joining a project together should be able to break a lock, and so on. Everything needs to be loosened up.

At the moment the game is so crushingly conservative I'm surprised anyone is here at all. The explanation for the Polish success is that they are still building up their world from scratch. They are not confronted with the fact that all the keys roundabout have fallen into the hands of....let me be polite....characters whose players are "charismatically and strategically challenged". So loosening up the basis of political power might help.

Oh and I'm not writing as a loser without any power charries. Those who know my characters know that. I would be prepared to run the risk of a loosened up and more dangerous system because I know my own power characters could survive it and might even benefit by it.

To sum up, if you want the game to be more exciting, then loosen it up.

I still think that almost all big developments in Cantr - Lad Empire; Quillanoi republic; Blojt; to a lesser extent Blackrock; etc. - are almost all due to more or less serious capital rule breaches. It seems hard to play within the rules and really get something off the ground.

Perhaps your loosening up suggestion is indeed a solution. I will certainly think about it further. As I said, I find the game is getting more and more boring as well, at times, although some developments are still rather cool.

Basically what are your current thoughts on the the above, does any concensus exist with regard to the future of Cantr, how to add excitement and improve the game. If any suggestions could be implemented without the constraints of time, programmers and system resources what would they be? I have quoted Jos THE man behind Cantr calling his own game boring, is this true today? What are the 'developments' he considers 'rather cool'?

I like what Stan suggested might be an idea of how to improve things, I'd call it Science, Invention, Progress also The Sociologist saying 'Everything needs to be loosened up'.

[DylPickle]

They are not confronted with the fact that all the keys roundabout have fallen into the hands of....let me be polite....characters whose players are "charismatically and strategically challenged".

Ahh, I miss this guy. lol.

I agree that the idea mentioned by Stan would be amazing, but I don't know how well it would work. First you'd probably have to find the worlds most genius programmer to realistically implement something like that, but it -would- be cool. There is another game being developed by a former cantr player, but it seems to have hit a standstill.

The idea to loosen the game up would probably be the most successful thing to come in to cantr, but its a mentality thing that will unfortunately never change for cantr players. We see it around the forums all the time : "The fondness and attachment I have with my characters is the only thing keeping me in this game right now." Thing is, these characters are usually old people, with positions of power. And the last thing these players are going to do is go out on a limb and take a risk. In fact, they become overprotective, and it maintains the problem. But they don't find any fun into "putting the energy" into new characters, because it sucks to play a new character because the game's upper echelon are tight-asses.

Maybe at least. Who knows? I kill my characters off before they get too old and restart all the time, so I keep interest. lol.

[Joshuamonkey]

Stan's idea sounds cool, but can we try to get more specific about how something like that would actually work? It can't happen unless we can figure it out.
I do think "loosening up" could have some potential.

I originally was very big into the idea of science, invention, progress, etc. for Cantr. In other games, I'm the kind of player who puts most of their focus on research and advancing technology. We would have to be careful with "extreme" items. For example, we wouldn't want to allow any weapons to be better than the current crossbow, but adding more work/tools/steel on a weapon to add to it's damage or change it's skill weighting might be a nice idea, especially when we don't want there to be "one best weapon/ship" or even two. Enhancing vehicles might me okay, like adding a trailer to a car or making an extremely hard to make car that goes significantly faster than than base 1 speed? I still think trains would be nice.

[Doug R.]

Jos enjoyed Cantr for the political intrigue, and that's all but absent now.

Stan's idea would be phenomenal, but you'd either need to program every possible combination of resources, which would rise exponentially with every resource you add, or you'd need to code some kind of artificial intelligence to figure that out for you as new combinations are tried. Doing that would mean that each resource would probably have to have a plethora of hidden characteristics that would have to be coded. If you could invent a system like this, it would be a game entirely to itself (and actually, it sort of is - my friend told me about a game where you can pick stuff and have the stuff interact on the screen following a basic rule set. I don't remember the name).

Loosening up. I agree that most of the interesting things that happen in the game are probably the result of CRBs. I agree that the practical application of the CR by the PD severely cripples political progress in Cantr. However, if you want to loosen up the game, you by necessity sacrifice a degree of fairness. The looser you make the game, the more unfair it becomes. What happens in games where OOC cooperation is allowed? The players form guilds. The most powerful guilds dominate the game. You can't get into the guilds unless you sit in front of the computer 24/7, which makes achieving anything as a casual player even more daunting. I realize that this is normal for 99% of MMOGs, but is that what we want for Cantr? Would it even make sense in Cantr? How do you explain in-game characters from towns far and wide suddenly migrating to some town because their guild leader declared war on another guild OOC? As soon as you allow OOC cooperation, to any extent, you lose oversight. People start making their own websites. If we were even to contemplate loosening up, the following would have to happen first:

1) The effects of violence would have to be drastically curtailed.
2) Character number would have to be cut back dramatically, probably down to 2-3 per account.
3) Characters would need to be spaced much further - spawning more than one on the same island would be a thing of the past.
4) Restrictions would need to be made on "griefing" in the game - those annoying things like newspawn thieves that drive us nuts, but could be serious problems if coordinated in any way.

There's probably a lot more.

[DylPickle]

I'm not sure The Sociologist really meant that the integrity of the CR should be loosened, but more in the sense that players would benefit if they loosed up with their characters a bit? Toss around a few more keys, don't kill potential conflicts too soon before they can get interesting, etc?

[Marian]

I'm not sure The Sociologist really meant that the integrity of the CR should be loosened, but more in the sense that players would benefit if they loosed up with their characters a bit? Toss around a few more keys, don't kill potential conflicts too soon before they can get interesting, etc?

Yeah, this was my take on it too, at least with the sledgehammer suggestion.

Obviously it's a topic that would need a lot more discussion (and probably wind up derailed every time) to work out the details, but if I'm reading this right (and vaguely remembering the original topic) I'm thinking the point was that there shouldn't be such a hard technology barrier, and instead characters that are active and charasmatic enough could jump in and start making a difference more quickly. IMO I think the game has improved a lot in that area since then with more alternative options for low tech chars and areas, but there are still a lot of areas where you're cut off from participating in large parts of the game without having access to certain things first. The most obvious example would still be how the person holding the keys will always be the decider in any major conflict.

In that case I could see how it would definitely make things more interesting if a large enough number of cooperating chars could eventually force open a door--just like in real life the person with the technological edge can always do things more easily, it would just no longer be impossible without it. And I think the RP it would require for that amount of people to get that organized would outweigh the fact that you'd potentially be letting lowly newspawns actually do something important without 'earning' it through crawling their way up the tech tree first.

Basically, the hope would be that it would level the playing field a little and lead to new characters being capable of doing more interesting stuff, rather than spending their first few years just focused on getting the stuff they need to do interesting stuff with...and then just getting satisfied and sleepy once they have it all.

[Joshuamonkey]

In that case I could see how it would definitely make things more interesting if a large enough number of cooperating chars could eventually force open a door

I like this idea. We could make the project take longer, but it would still be possible (and of course, with many people the project wouldn't take all that long anyway). Actually, I wonder if, given 10 days, or longer, someone could do it by them self.

[Addicted]

In that case I could see how it would definitely make things more interesting if a large enough number of cooperating chars could eventually force open a door

I have done this in game. We broke lock on vehicles and then doors by all working together. I think we had the maximum number of people and timed it that way.

[Joshuamonkey]

I have done this in game. We broke lock on vehicles and then doors by all working together. I think we had the maximum number of people and timed it that way.

The difference is being able to do it without any crowbars, or any tools, for that matter, though I think it might also be a nice addition to allow people to use sledgehammers to break locks, and it would just take longer to do.

[Oob]

For two of my chars acquiring a crowbar has been a motivating objective since their mid-twenties. Having one of these desirable and very useful objects has opened up a whole new world of possibility to them. But also being able to break locks with skill and ingenuity rather than brute force would be progress, where brains and intelligence beats brawn and ignorance!

[FiziKx]

Lockpicks ftw.

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Lockpicks ftw.

+1! Please!!

[Ryaga]

Jos enjoyed Cantr for the political intrigue, and that's all but absent now.

Stan's idea would be phenomenal, but you'd either need to program every possible combination of resources, which would rise exponentially with every resource you add, or you'd need to code some kind of artificial intelligence to figure that out for you as new combinations are tried. Doing that would mean that each resource would probably have to have a plethora of hidden characteristics that would have to be coded. If you could invent a system like this, it would be a game entirely to itself (and actually, it sort of is - my friend told me about a game where you can pick stuff and have the stuff interact on the screen following a basic rule set. I don't remember the name).

Loosening up. I agree that most of the interesting things that happen in the game are probably the result of CRBs. I agree that the practical application of the CR by the PD severely cripples political progress in Cantr. However, if you want to loosen up the game, you by necessity sacrifice a degree of fairness. The looser you make the game, the more unfair it becomes. What happens in games where OOC cooperation is allowed? The players form guilds. The most powerful guilds dominate the game. You can't get into the guilds unless you sit in front of the computer 24/7, which makes achieving anything as a casual player even more daunting. I realize that this is normal for 99% of MMOGs, but is that what we want for Cantr? Would it even make sense in Cantr? How do you explain in-game characters from towns far and wide suddenly migrating to some town because their guild leader declared war on another guild OOC? As soon as you allow OOC cooperation, to any extent, you lose oversight. People start making their own websites. If we were even to contemplate loosening up, the following would have to happen first:

1) The effects of violence would have to be drastically curtailed.
2) Character number would have to be cut back dramatically, probably down to 2-3 per account.
3) Characters would need to be spaced much further - spawning more than one on the same island would be a thing of the past.
4) Restrictions would need to be made on "griefing" in the game - those annoying things like newspawn thieves that drive us nuts, but could be serious problems if coordinated in any way.

There's probably a lot more.

You are very, very wrong.

Cheaters are going to thrive in a game that things are harder to do, because they are cheating. The harder you make it for a legitimate player to execute an action the more of an advantage a cheater has. Cheaters do not care about hard, they're cheating. So anything you add to the game that requires player persistence, organization, time, or skill doesn't really affect a cheater. So you're very wrong. The looser you make a game the more fair it becomes.

EDIT:
Hmm perhaps I misread. I think the CR is necessary to the very core of how Cantr works, but I think mechanics of the game should be made much much looser.

[Cdls]

I feel the CR and its enforcement is what adds to the uniqueness of Cantr. The problem that the game is facing has nothing to do with the CR, it has everything to do with not having the game mechanics in place to make it a true society simulation. If the proper mechanics were in place to allow for real war, real economies being set, for a real need to expand beyond the one town mentality, and try to form something bigger.

[Surly]

1. The idea of a "real" economy is completely subjective. Cantr does have a real economy, one that meets the needs and restrictions of its world.
2. I think Jos was completely right that almost all big achievements in the game have been riddled with CRBs. I am not sure that there is really anyway around that. The attempts of the PD to clamp down on CRBs have just pissed off alot of people with no real noticeable affect. Ultimately the PD can only do so much in a system where people like Yugo can get away with pretty much anything.
3. The sheer distance between towns prevent anything bigger. The introduction of fuel especially provided a disincentive to create larger communities as motor vehicles became more expensive and cumbersome. It provided even greater incentives to use boats - and provided even more incentive for piracy.

The idea of loosening up Cantr is to make it easier for people to build communities by placing less emphasis on owning the keys. Make it easier for younger characters to achieve something and give power to the people over the established conservative elders. Unfortunately, that would hardly dissuade those who kill for no reason and definitely not stop the genocide from the Poles (who kill the English primarily, as far as I can see, just because it's easier than speaking to them), or the constant threat of piracy.

GAB have been discussing changes to the game mechanic to try and "loosen it up" and make it less of a constant fight against the game mechanics. I hope those discussions reach a conclusion.