Fixing the food/eating issue

[mortaine]

So, I posted about this in general support, because it's a real frustration point for me as a new player. Now, maybe the established players here don't care if new players get frustrated and leave, but since we leave a lot of dead bodies behind, maybe you should.

There is no effective way to trial-and-error what one can eat to sate hunger. Basically, food falls into two types: hunger sating and healing. When you click the "Eat" button for a healing food, it will heal you, unless you are undamaged, in which case the system returns an error that you don't need any more strength. [It's been addressed in another support thread that this error message is misleading because what you need to heal is damage, and strength isn't really an attribute you can see anymore.]

When you are holding a hunger-sating food item and get hungry, you eat it automatically.

Leaving aside for the moment the counterintuitiveness of having food sources that you can't eat, let's talk about what happens when you click the "Eat" button for hunger-sating foods. You get an error message that you don't need any more strength.

To the new player, the experience goes something like this:
"You are hungry."
"You take 50 g of spinach."
*click Eat*
"You do not need any more strength."
"You drop 50 g of spinach."

Player conclusion: Spinach isn't food, it's healing. Same with bananas, apples, mushrooms, pretty much any food at all.

When I signed up for this game, I read the rules and saw that "if you want to go hack things, this isn't the game for you," so I'm not exactly planning on getting into a whole bunch of fights. At the same time, I like to figure stuff out for myself, and I don't always have the option of asking other people and getting an answer, due to the built-in lag of the game.

Proposed solutions:
I have three solutions to this problem, which I'm presenting in order of what I perceive as implementation complexity:

Simplest: Documentation fix. When you click "Eat" for something that is a hunger-sating food, the error message says "This food will automatically be eaten at your next meal if it is still in your inventory." instead of using the same error message as you get for trying to eat a healing food. This elegant solution solves the problem of players not knowing that they can actually eat hunger-sating food if they just hang onto it long enough.

Next simplest: Programming. Click "eat" on a hunger-sating food when you're hungry and, you know, you actually *eat* the food, lower your hunger level, etc.

Next simplest (most complex): Programming fix. Click "eat" on ANY food and you eat it. If it's a hunger-sating food, it sates your hunger. If it's a healing food, it sates only a tiny amount of hunger.

Another related suggestion is to have at least one edible food source in each spawnpoint. This just makes common sense. You have a bunch of newbies showing up who cannot eat any of the food they harvest. And because newbies are annoying, there aren't always a lot of experienced players hanging around waiting to help the new folks learn about the world. From my limited experience, of the places I have spawned at, one has two food sources that are healing-only (I leave out meat, because it requires cooking, and that's more complex than a brand-new player can figure out) and no other food sources. Another has several food sources, of which at least one is edible, and the third had several food sources, but the only ones I tried are apparently healing. From what I can deduce, the proportion of hunger food sources is very small compared to those that heal. But of course, my perception may be off by the fact that the error message is identical, so I may be assuming a source of food is healing-only based on trying to eat it (I don't think so, though).

[joshua johnson]

Mortaine,
There are always a couple odd things....

For example...there is a button to eat almost any commodity (sand, stone, iron, wood, etc.) that your character is carrying, but it doesn't really hurt anything, so the programmers spend time changing other stuff, rather than fixing minor issues like that.

Regarding eating daily vs. healing foods... some of it is explained in the "general explanation link" that I don't know how to put here, maybe somebody will do it for me. But here is what it says. Keep in mind that this page is somewhat out of date (like things can be baked now), but it gets you going.

Here it is:
There are different kinds of food. All of them work the same way - you take them in your inventory (take them up from the ground or get them from a fellow character) and once a day the computer deduces the amount of food you need from your inventory. Thus you don't have to do anything to eat, you only have to have it in your inventory. If you do not have enough food, your strength will go down. It differs per product how much food you need a day. Also note that all kinds of grain (wheat, sorghum, etc.) are not finished food products - they will be of use as soon as I programmed bakeries into the game.

There is also a second type of food. This is food that is not useful for your daily food consumption, but you can use it to gain strength when you lost some. You can click on the 'eat' icon in front of the food and enter the amount of food you want to eat.

Okay, now i am going to try my best to put in a link, we'll see how it goes...keep in mind that some of it is out of date.

http://www.cantr.net/ooc/index.php?page=generalinfo
[/url]

Oh yeah, before you read that, you should read this: (I copied it, but it was not written by me)

Please note: This game is permanently in an experimental / programming stage. This means that while you are playing this game, things might go weird. Things can go wrong due to programming errors, or wrong because I am interfering in a process while I am changing things. Or it might be strange when things are not working as they did a week ago, because I changed things, etcetera. For now you will just have to bare with me ...

Okay, one more edit....The above paragraph is good, because while it does mean that things could change for the worse for some indivudual character, it will get better for us a a player the more we suggest things, so go ahead and suggest away...and maybe Jos or the others will like an idea of yours and put it in.

[joshua johnson]

Anyway, I realized I never got to my point above.

I don't think that the current food situation is a real problem. It does, however, take just a bit to figure it out. And it takes a long time for a character to starve, so they should be able to figure it out or get help before that. A few might not, but that is life, I suppose...

One other suggestion I saw about having newspawns only go to food-rich locations I completely disagree with... It may be a bit frustrating, but it adds a layer of intigue to the game.

[mortaine]

Mortaine,
There are always a couple odd things....

For example...there is a button to eat almost any commodity (sand, stone, iron, wood, etc.) that your character is carrying, but it doesn't really hurt anything, so the programmers spend time changing other stuff, rather than fixing minor issues like that.

I hadn't noticed that on other commodities. Again, if you attempt to eat something unedible, shouldn't there be an error message like "You can't eat obsidian!" ?

But here is what it says. Keep in mind that this page is somewhat out of date (like things can be baked now), but it gets you going.

Interesting. I skimmed that guide because it specifically says on the front page "out of date," which means that, as a documentation source, it's already suspect. I realize the "out of date" disclaimer is probably there to serve as a disclaimer, but what it really does is convince the user not to read the document (any tech writer will tell you that things that steer users away from documentation are Not Good).

Oh yeah, before you read that, you should read this: (I copied it, but it was not written by me)

Please note: This game is permanently in an experimental / programming stage.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say in pointing me to this paragraph, which I am aware of. The reason I posted my original request to General Support was because it seemed like an actual bug-- I was honestly surprised when I was told that this was how the game normally operates. I thought about it overnight and came up with some suggestions for how to improve the operation, starting with what I see as a fairly simple documentation fix, something that probably wouldn't require hours of programming to put in.

I'm a very new player. If I stick around for a month or more, I'll be more experienced and I'll probably be like all the folks here who say "that's just the way it is" or "it's more fun this way." I'll probably get used to it, but that just means I'll lose this incredibly valuable perspective of the new user. I'm providing my suggestions now, before I've become part of the same culture that accepts these things as OK, because I think if you want new players, you need to know how the new players encounter your game. If you don't want new players, fine, but you should probably close registration.

[Agar]

From what i understand, spawnpoints, as least in some languages, are mobile, and based on how many people have been in that area recently. So only letting people spawn in food rich sources is impossible.

There is a mechanism in the game that makes it slow paced, but there's an easy way to function within it. Have patience. It took me three days of waiting to have my things handed back to me once, and I was very active during that time as well. Just rlaxe, not much can kill you that quickly, and if you run, you're often safe, unless it's intelligent and chases you.

I do like some change in how trying to eat daily food gives an error, but, the problem with that is several foods do both, heal and act as daily food. Those provide some interesting challenges and options.

The easiest way to fix this is to let you find out in game. It's not that hard, as long as you are at least a little vocal.

[myst]

Mortaine, I felt just the same when I started about, oooh, so many things. I can barely remember what they were now.

You are right in that the fundamentals should be more obvious. I'd just like to see the error messages be more informative, personally. It would clearly be better for all foods to fill you up, but some heal you in a "hidden" way (like increasing recovery rate), as in real life. But the programming dept have are a busy lot.