Apathy

[SumBum]

Cantr is very discouraging to the hard-core gamer types, due to the extremely slow pace of events.

Maybe it's just me, but I kind of feel like Cantr isn't meant for hardcore gamer types. It's meant to be a slow-paced game for more casual gamer types. Not to say that hardcore gamers can't enjoy Cantr, but obviously they won't if they're looking for a hardcore gaming experience. Cantr appeals to pretty small subset of people; it's just not for everyone. Yes, I realize that the game is in a decline, but I don't think that necessarily invalidates what I've said.

I was thinking something similar although I do think "hardcore gamers" can enjoy Cantr - it's more about the genre. There are genres of games that I tend to avoid because it's not my interest and has nothing to do with how much time or effort I put into them. I don't consider myself a casual player when it comes to Cantr but I truly appreciate that I don't HAVE to devote as much time to it when life gets in the way.

[Surly]

I've said it so many times over the last 8 years that I'm a bit sick of it, but - we urgently need a reform the events page.

As soon as you get over about 10 active people, the events page becomes extremely annoying to use. This more than anything else discourages people from having active characters in larger locations, especially the kind of player that would participate in more political/complex RP. This in turn leads to the lack of anything more than flirting RP and leads to the lack of depth in the game.

More so than any other change, we have to reform the outdated, overly-simplistic and user unfriendly events page. Otherwise we'll be sat here in 2019 having the same arguments that we had in 2003.

[Doug R.]

I'm not knocking the players, I'm one also, but I just know we can do better. If we took the time to develop some serious societies, the role-play opportunities would be massive compared to now.

Evolution applies just as much to Cantr as to anything else, and Cantr's societies have evolved into what we have now for a reason. Unless the reason is changed, nothing short of OOC collusion will allow us to "do better."

[Mr. Bones]

I'm not knocking the players, I'm one also, but I just know we can do better. If we took the time to develop some serious societies, the role-play opportunities would be massive compared to now.

Evolution applies just as much to Cantr as to anything else, and Cantr's societies have evolved into what we have now for a reason. Unless the reason is changed, nothing short of OOC collusion will allow us to "do better."

I do not agree. I feel that there have been plenty of people inside of Cantr that have offered intelligent methods of governing society. But it seems that people always choose simpleton methods. The players are intelligent, they control the characters, it seems that intelligent societies could be created but are not. Thus Cantr societies have not evolved one bit. They are still full of five law towns with no truly sophisticated governments, at least for the most part. If evolution were to occur, it would be for the better. However, that isn't the case; not at least since 1579 when I started playing this game.

[Cwalen]

I think Mykey raises some valid points, This time round, I have gotten up to 14 charters, several of which exist mainly to travel and expand my view of the world, been playing for a few months now, and have started to get well enough informed I hope to be able to express an opinion more based on the specifics of Cantr at the moment rather than generalities about online gaming or my past experience.

I have seen some start up towns where there is some focused activity and a lot more hippy or exploitive systems. I have also found some traveling mobs that I hope continue to provide interest and new experiences.

I am with Addicted, Pure_Dunga, and Armulus to name a few on this thread. If you want some action, come! create it! There are enough empty regions round that a decent leader type character can start up a new culture, or at least attempt to. If the culture is attractive to new players then it will grow. We might have a lower player base, but we still have new people turning up all the time. I have even had luck with having characters get into extended dialogues along the lines of "yes I understand that what you want is my character to sit here like a vegetable with me logging in to work on your projects for the good of the town, what my character wants to do is X, can we do that" (repeat 15 times diplomatically until either they stop being dogmatic about the "settle down and work for the town is the only way" or end up looking like an idiot in front of their whole town.)


I shamelessly plan to use a few of my characters to try to establish some social projects, but at the moment they are tooling up and waiting patiently to get to their 30's so they dont suffer from "Of look it's another bare naked 20 year old howling about taking over the world".

As Doug points out a world based round the assumption of exploration and expansion suffers badly from shrinkage in player base and legacy items making shortage of anything rare. I have gone so far as to dust off my boots to go treck ito a city to set up a dev environment and see if I haven't forgotten absolutely everything of the little I knew about programming in php to see if I can help.

A mechanistic solution wont make a world interesting, or at least I am not aware of any way of mapping the current Cantr world into the well established mechanisms for creating interest. Persistence and geography breaks some basic patterns. I have personally shut up about decay because it has been explained to me often enough that it's a programming issue, and I have started to look deeper into the implications of some of my broad reaching observations and decided it's time to learn more, talk less and trust those who have the hand on the tiller.


The issue of homogeneity between places is a real one, the majority of places I have seen have lots of vehicles, lots of buildings, presumably large stockpiles behind closed doors, drills, harvesters, a beehive, a pump or well, a pile of herbs, and basically the same laws. No matter how much we try to avoid it a lot of us will leak, if not specific knowledge (like the rampaging mob that just killed my character in town X was talking about hitting town Y where my next character is a sitting duck) but general knowledge. For long term players they would have to be roleplaying gods or lobotomized to not impart some of their deep knowledge of the world into their characters.

Ultimately my hope is that the more motivated time rich Cantr players, when encountering a system that is at least novel might pause to help it or join it, and eventually, through a non coordinated OOC effort we can without naming characters, places or even specific social models let people know that they do exist, are possible and spread enough of them to avoid having players such as Mykey or myself a few months ago from looking round in horror wondering why all the colours got mixed into one turning a lot of places not a lovely green but a rather drab brown.

[Doug R.]

I'm not knocking the players, I'm one also, but I just know we can do better. If we took the time to develop some serious societies, the role-play opportunities would be massive compared to now.

Evolution applies just as much to Cantr as to anything else, and Cantr's societies have evolved into what we have now for a reason. Unless the reason is changed, nothing short of OOC collusion will allow us to "do better."

I do not agree. I feel that there have been plenty of people inside of Cantr that have offered intelligent methods of governing society. But it seems that people always choose simpleton methods. The players are intelligent, they control the characters, it seems that intelligent societies could be created but are not.

To build anything more advanced than a dictatorship, you need more than one character active and dependable. There is no such thing as a dependable character. They fall asleep, they die randomly. The most sensible thing is to take your most seemingly active and dependable character and put all power in them. The more characters necessary to run a government, the less functional the government will be in Cantr. That's been an established fact for the last 1900 days. Cantrian governments have evolved to best fit the situation that societies have found themselves in. In a sense, they've devolved, but it's still an evolutionary process.

[kaloryfer]

and a few hundred hours of good programming

Main reason for everything imho.
And, being conservative with prices, let's assume 10 euro / hour. That's 5000 euros. Duh.

[DylPickle]

To build anything more advanced than a dictatorship, you need more than one character active and dependable. There is no such thing as a dependable character. They fall asleep, they die randomly. The most sensible thing is to take your most seemingly active and dependable character and put all power in them. The more characters necessary to run a government, the less functional the government will be in Cantr. That's been an established fact for the last 1900 days. Cantrian governments have evolved to best fit the situation that societies have found themselves in. In a sense, they've devolved, but it's still an evolutionary process.

But cantr is about the experience. It's not necessarily about functionality, even for players like me that slant towards the strategic side of things. As mentioned in the war thread, the Karnon Army was large and complex, inefficient as hell, but incredibly fun to play in. That was the point. The context and the culture of the system is what will attract people, not the speed at which they can complete a transaction and drag shit from room to room.

Governance is the same thing, but you've made a bit of a simplistic generalization in assuming that dictatorship has to be this terribly basic thing. Yes, the most active character will make the most efficient leader, but that doesn't mean they're going to be functional. The active leader can introduce themselves to newspawns, they can set up projects, they can complete trade transactions quickly. But that doesn't make them functional in the leadership role. The fact that modern cantr dictators, large and wide, make absolutely no effort to give their dictatorship any flavour, any context; that's their apathy. And that's why their residents are always bored as hell.

Even something as simple as giving your leader character a title can serve to add a bit of setting to their town. Generic "leader of Mulof" just sucks. Make it the "Mayor of the Township of Mulof", or maybe the "High Judge of the Citenzentry of Mulof". Yes, I did just make up a word there, and you can too! It's so simple, and it will vastly improve the outlook of your town to newspawns and visitors right from the get go.


EDIT: (I actually really like that title. Someone please use it :p )

[SumBum]

It is easier for one character to lead a town unless that char suddenly goes dormant. It can/does create a bottleneck at times but that can be worked around to an extent. A little crippling when no one but the sleeping/hiding leader has access to all the town's resources although I can't say I blame most of the leaders because too often you get burned by someone OOCly doing a 180 with their responsible char and they suddenly have the urge to run off with the town's stuff. Again, there are ways around giving someone enough access to be helpful without giving them access to Everything. Maybe I'll test that if I ever get a char in a leadership position.

As for differing cultures.... It's something I would love to see more of. I think many get pressured into the same old thing, though. Anyone trying to control their town's resources is called greedy and chastised by visitors who are only looking out for their own gain (irony?). Any group trying to maintain a lifestyle that is unusual are persecuted by the masses. Yes, that's what makes the game interesting, but you've got to have players and characters willing to stick their neck out and defend their ideals. I've had chars in towns with unusual laws where any newspawn immediately says "this place sucks! you can't treat people like that!" and off they go....thanks for playing....

[RedQueen.exe]

It is easier for one character to lead a town unless that char suddenly goes dormant. It can/does create a bottleneck at times but that can be worked around to an extent. A little crippling when no one but the sleeping/hiding leader has access to all the town's resources although I can't say I blame most of the leaders because too often you get burned by someone OOCly doing a 180 with their responsible char and they suddenly have the urge to run off with the town's stuff. Again, there are ways around giving someone enough access to be helpful without giving them access to Everything. Maybe I'll test that if I ever get a char in a leadership position.

As for differing cultures.... It's something I would love to see more of. I think many get pressured into the same old thing, though. Anyone trying to control their town's resources is called greedy and chastised by visitors who are only looking out for their own gain (irony?). Any group trying to maintain a lifestyle that is unusual are persecuted by the masses. Yes, that's what makes the game interesting, but you've got to have players and characters willing to stick their neck out and defend their ideals. I've had chars in towns with unusual laws where any newspawn immediately says "this place sucks! you can't treat people like that!" and off they go....thanks for playing....

I've done that, I created separate storages that more people would have access to than the main storage that would have moderate amounts of commonly needed things. Kind of makes managing things a little bit of a pain sometimes, but its workable.

[SekoETC]

Mulof sounds like a place with cows... Oh wait, I used to live there. Lions. I can't remember what else. ...And the lions got hunted to extinction. It was an interesting culture back when you really had to log in soon after arriving in town or you might get mauled to death (or even if not to death, badly enough not to be able to gather healing food fast enough to stay alive).

The player vs environment element is too small. Of course it's good to have some regions where life is easy, it would encourage people to group together on these regions, but if there were other places that were full of dangerous animals (well, there sort of are some but strong characters with a good shield can beat them), and burning deserts, freezing mountains, mosquito-infested swamps, razor-sharp mountains, then people would have to get special equipment to brave them or stick to the care bear lands. And there should definitely be storms at high-seas. It would be wicked cool if people could get tossed across the seas into strange places and have to find a way back home. In the past it was sort of happening due to a bug but it got fixed, and it only threw people back to places they had previously visited.

[Mykey]

Cantr is very discouraging to the hard-core gamer types, due to the extremely slow pace of events.

Maybe it's just me, but I kind of feel like Cantr isn't meant for hardcore gamer types. It's meant to be a slow-paced game for more casual gamer types. Not to say that hardcore gamers can't enjoy Cantr, but obviously they won't if they're looking for a hardcore gaming experience. Cantr appeals to pretty small subset of people; it's just not for everyone. Yes, I realize that the game is in a decline, but I don't think that necessarily invalidates what I've said.

It's not just you. You are correct. I just think the pace is too slow. That may also be the biggest problem "pretty small subset".... I'm not saying there needs to be a million more players but a couple thousand wouldn't hurt.

I've said it so many times over the last 8 years that I'm a bit sick of it, but - we urgently need a reform the events page.

As soon as you get over about 10 active people, the events page becomes extremely annoying to use. This more than anything else discourages people from having active characters in larger locations, especially the kind of player that would participate in more political/complex RP. This in turn leads to the lack of anything more than flirting RP and leads to the lack of depth in the game.

More so than any other change, we have to reform the outdated, overly-simplistic and user unfriendly events page. Otherwise we'll be sat here in 2019 having the same arguments that we had in 2003.

I couldn't agree more....

To build anything more advanced than a dictatorship, you need more than one character active and dependable. There is no such thing as a dependable character. They fall asleep, they die randomly. The most sensible thing is to take your most seemingly active and dependable character and put all power in them. The more characters necessary to run a government, the less functional the government will be in Cantr. That's been an established fact for the last 1900 days. Cantrian governments have evolved to best fit the situation that societies have found themselves in. In a sense, they've devolved, but it's still an evolutionary process.

But cantr is about the experience. It's not necessarily about functionality, even for players like me that slant towards the strategic side of things. As mentioned in the war thread, the Karnon Army was large and complex, inefficient as hell, but incredibly fun to play in. That was the point. The context and the culture of the system is what will attract people, not the speed at which they can complete a transaction and drag shit from room to room.

Governance is the same thing, but you've made a bit of a simplistic generalization in assuming that dictatorship has to be this terribly basic thing. Yes, the most active character will make the most efficient leader, but that doesn't mean they're going to be functional. The active leader can introduce themselves to newspawns, they can set up projects, they can complete trade transactions quickly. But that doesn't make them functional in the leadership role. The fact that modern cantr dictators, large and wide, make absolutely no effort to give their dictatorship any flavour, any context; that's their apathy. And that's why their residents are always bored as hell.

Even something as simple as giving your leader character a title can serve to add a bit of setting to their town. Generic "leader of Mulof" just sucks. Make it the "Mayor of the Township of Mulof", or maybe the "High Judge of the Citenzentry of Mulof". Yes, I did just make up a word there, and you can too! It's so simple, and it will vastly improve the outlook of your town to newspawns and visitors right from the get go.

This could be very appealing.... I wouldn't mind seeing a few psychotic dictators either.... They all seem to be politically dull...

[Cwalen]

See my .sig for my opinions on the value of programming. Ideas are important too but from my reading most of them have been raised, kicked about, enough have been generally accepted that we have room to move.

Frankly from bits and pieces that I have heard, including Julf's blog, completely re writing the code might not be such a bad idea. So chuck an extra 0 on the end of the EU price estimate. We would need a serious systems architect to pull that off. Anyone at that level would have to be quite wierd to commit the time required, and the rest of us poor saps just don't have the skill.

A strategic plan for where we want Cantr to be in 5 years time would be good in my opinion, or a map of the options possible with the arguments for and against each change would also be good. I have committed to producing the second but as is so usual for me I have seriously underestimated the time that it will take me.

We are suffering form organizational apathy as well as character apathy.

We have some driven individuals, with a range of talents, maybe I am just barking up the wrong tree but I am not seeing the sort of overreaching organizational structure that allows us to focus our energy.

On the character/player level.

I am imagining that there are enough active town leaders who also read the forum, that the problem with establishing new societies is not efficiency, we don't need efficiency. What we need is a reason for people, especially new players to keep living.

On one hand I don't like the old lazy dragons sitting on hordes more than most. On the other hand thank goodness for them, if they all went idealistic commie overnight we would really be screwed. Just about every gram of iron that has been produced in 32 character lifetimes is still with us. If all that hit the market at once it would be worth as much as potatoes.

With the hordes, the dragons have no drive to be active, there is nothing they could possibly want or need, except for even bigger stockpiles of healing potions. They have no real drive for them because they don't want conflict and can already beat down any young turks that try to start a revolution. (especially with radios and lynch mobs who would be keen to take down ner do wells.)

Even if we could start revolutions we just replace the old dragons with new ones, or even worse the breaking open of the vaults, frankly I've been offered keys to a town (I am not sure how seriously) just for being active.

So if we want to inject economic advancement back into Cantr, we can wait for decay, form pirate mobs who loot, pillage, preferably not kill, then send single people in charge of galleons far out to sea so that the resources are effectively lost.

Mechanics wont remove apathy, or restore joy to Cantr on masse, done well enough it could bring back some of the golden age, but it rests with us, the concerned and involved players to create the story that makes pushing bits round in a database seem meaningful.

[Mykey]

Yeah I agree. I just think those who desire that, lack the skill. (me) And those with the skill, lack the time. I like your idea of a 5 year plan, Premier Stalin Decay rates definitely need to be reworked....even iron sitting inside a building, should start rusting/disappearing around it's 50th birthday at most. What I really would dislike, is seeing more repair or higher repair rates... there is never enough time as it is. I agree with The Sociologist's essay on motivation.The proper thing to do is, require resources and minimal time. Of course 5K-10K extra characters would go a far way in the over-abundance problem. That particular economic issue could be solved by a surge in player base or even a gradual climb. I just hope when rot/repair is done, it's done with more attention to realism balanced with gameplay. It looks like a hard task....

I also like the analogy of hordes and dragons....regardless, if a changing of the guard would change anything or not... revolutions and wars can be quite entertaining.

[Mykey]

The player vs environment element is too small. Of course it's good to have some regions where life is easy, it would encourage people to group together on these regions, but if there were other places that were full of dangerous animals (well, there sort of are some but strong characters with a good shield can beat them), and burning deserts, freezing mountains, mosquito-infested swamps, razor-sharp mountains, then people would have to get special equipment to brave them or stick to the care bear lands. And there should definitely be storms at high-seas. It would be wicked cool if people could get tossed across the seas into strange places and have to find a way back home. In the past it was sort of happening due to a bug but it got fixed, and it only threw people back to places they had previously visited.

I really like your line of reasoning here....equipment requirements for certain locations would add a bit of much needed depth.