New Additions to Cantr

[The Sociologist]

I actually voted 1. Indeed I don't have a problem with the recent changes at the conceptual level.

However I do, as I've said before, have a problem with certain aspects of the recent implementation. In particular the wildly varied skill levels and the crude way that system was implemented, and of course the tiredness recovery rate. I simply don't understand why these very obvious problems weren't fixed much sooner. Why we had to wait for so many fine and needed fellow players to leave in disgust, and why there is still no fix. So I do award a big black mark for that.

There was also poor coordination shortly before these changes went in. For example, Richard was permitted to implement very complex bowmaking procedures. Did nobody inhouse think to raise the issue of the impact of the pending tiredness system on such changes? So another big black mark for poor coordination.

But in other respects I'm happy that the game should continue to evolve. And very grateful that others are doing all this hard work for my recreational benefit.

[Riddrev]

Well, Sociologist pretty much stated my opinion for me. So ditto what he said.

[Anthony Roberts]

When the Programmers think of something in their head (Or steal one of our ideas - Or 90% of the time, MY idea), and they code it, they do test it. But, the test envoronment doesn't have the character base that the live world has.

In reality, we're all guinea pigs used for their mean experiments. Item Deteroriation was tested, and it works. Right now, it is working PERFECTLY, and AS EXPECTED. You can complain all you want, but you need to look at the realism. 20 days is a year, remember. If your tool takes 10 years to break, does that seem realistic? Depending on the resource it's made from, yes, that does. If your tool takes 40 years to break, is that realistic? Yes, yes it is. Although it may LOOK like things are breaking down fast, you must realise, time goes by fast too!

Tiredness, now I can't say it's working as expected, but do you think the testers could have tested every situation in the test environment? No. That's why there's beta testing. Look at it this way, you're all beta testing the tiredness system. And look at it THIS way too, when you joined the game, it said right on the main page "CANTR IS IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT, THINGS WILL CHANGE" - You're practically agreeing right there that you realise things will change, for better or for worse, and you have to live with them. So stop your whining. I'm fine with every (almost) change, as long as it's not something that peels the fun out of the game. Although, I must admit, tiredness is REALLY making the game suck at the moment. Most of my characters are sitting around all lazy like. That's not fun.

Also, players are welcome, and ENCOURAGED to voice their opinion, as much as they want, in order to be heard, about new additions and new ideas. Without the players opinions, Cantr would be all fucked up, really! If someone didn't suggest some of the clothing articles that we have, do you think they'd exist? Probably not. If someone didn't voice their opinion on the way walking speeds are calculated, do you think it would have been improved? Probably not. If someone didn't open their mouth to complain about note bombs, do you think the Players Department would have put their foot down? Probably not. The players have an amazing impact on Cantr, and without them, Cantr would be nothing - really.

So, what am I getting at? It doesn't matter how many posts something has, speak your mind. If you don't, no one will hear (Or read.) you. If you're not heard, things won't get done.

Oh yeah, and pancakes are good too. With syrup.

[swymir]

Ok again the post isn't on if the programmers are doing a good job. There better not be any arguements on that question. It's about the over-use of complaint threads that have been popping up all on the same topic and rarely constructive. As I believe I said before I am not saying people should not voice their opinion, but I'm saying we have to ease up on it a bit. I agree that tiredness should be fixed but I don't start a new thread every day about why it should be fixed. Deseases I don't really have a problem with. I think it's perfect the way it is, towns just weren't ready for it.
I am fully convinced that the programming department will get item deterioration worked out before anything breaks, and if they run short on time I am sure it is within their power to stop it alltogether until things are worked out.

[Agar]

I am fully convinced that the programming department will get item deterioration worked out before anything breaks, and if they run short on time I am sure it is within their power to stop it alltogether until things are worked out.

I laugh out loud, in real life, every single time I see that. You are a funny, funny deluded man.

Just in passing, Primitive Bows have been "often used" for a bit now. Yet another hash mark in the march of entrophy.

[kroner]

i'd like to point out to all the prophets of doom that item deterioration will not lead to the eventual collapse of society. there's one small thing that you have overlooked and that is production. things are still being built in cantr.

item deterioration has in fact stopped the steady march of anti-entropy that reigned before. things were built and built, but nothing was ever destroyed, thus the net amount of stuff was forever increasing without bound. this would eventually (probably a long way off though) lead to the ruin of the game. i mean, you walk into town and there are 213 sabres, 419 longbows and 10575 stone hammers on the ground and 28 bikes and there are only 8 poeple there. a man in his thirties says "the rules of the town are no violence. but help yourself to a sabre and make sure to take a bike when you leave."
that would just be ridiculous. the game would die.
as it stands now, things should eventually level off. the amount of stuff in cantr will be limited to what people can maintain.

at this point people are still riding off the age of cheap iron and steel with their flashy weapons for all the gaurds and a few vehicles around without anyone doing any work. you are complaining because this is more than can be maintained. if anything, this is the fault of all the expensive stuff being made so difficult to produce in the recent past. what item deterioration reveals is whether these were reasonable changes. if steel weapons and vehicles are too hard to maintain, the difficulty of producing high end tools and weapons will have to be reevaluated.

but still i disagree with the fact that bows deteriorate so much faster than everything else. that's just silly considering they don't have much advantage over the other weapons.

[Agar]

at this point people are still riding off the age of cheap iron and steel with their flashy weapons for all the gaurds and a few vehicles around without anyone doing any work.

but still i disagree with the fact that bows deteriorate so much faster than everything else. that's just silly considering they don't have much advantage over the other weapons.

The people riding off of cheap metals are older players. So this is giving the older players a double advantage, they have the stuff that they got easy, and everyone else is going to have to bust thier butts just to keep up.

The only thing I can hope about bows rotting faster (still refusing to say deteriorate) is the hopefully, they will be much much easier to fix. Logically if a saber breaks, well, you pretty much need a new saber, but when a bowstring frays, you replace the bowstring.

[kroner]

The people riding off of cheap metals are older players. So this is giving the older players a double advantage, they have the stuff that they got easy, and everyone else is going to have to bust thier butts just to keep up.

the people riding off the cheap metal of the past were the older characters. item deterioration will in a short time put an end to that. the older characters have more to maintain, so they lose out by this this most. did you think 50 year olds' crossbows were exempt? since people will have to maintian their wealth, the rich will be those who can organize and maitain wealth, not those who have horded it from the past when it was easier to get.

if this makes the game too difficult, then it's the new difficulty of production that's at fault, NOT the fault of item deterioration.

not being able to repair things just makes the effects of item deterioration a bit more extreme. annoying, yes, but really it only highlights other problems with game balance. it isn't really a problem in itself.

(but the bow thing still makes no sense)

[swymir]

All bows except maybe a crossbow are extremely easy to replace even if there isn't a way to fix them yet. I'm not an expert on bows so I really don't know how long it takes them to break down in rea life, but I would assume that the staff has done their research and found a reasonable level. As for your comment Agar, you basically just said you have no confindence in the staff that they will fix things.

[ephiroll]

The latest additions are being made like a kid plays with toys, start something and more on to the next without doing any more then make a mess and in the process it is completly destroying the games playability. Yeah, it may be fixed soon (if ever), but it should also never have been a problem to begin with.

Really? Cantr still seems pretty playable to me. I definitely wouldn't compare the programmers to "kids playing with toys," that sounds kind of disrespectful to me. Do you expect everything to be absolutely perfect on the first try? That's just not how things work.

You don't get it, if you're going to start something then you should finish it, nothing that has been started in the last month has been finished, my analogy may have seemed disrespectful to you, but I'm a blunt person when I decide to say something, and that is the clearest analogy of what has been done. I don't sugar coat. With "things being perfect on the first time", I don't expect it, but once again, if there wasn't time to fix any potential problems then nothing should have been started.

And yes, it is unplayable if you had/have chars that actually for more then stand around talking, before I quit half my chars had been sitting for at least 15 days doing nothing and the others were barely doing anything just so they wouldn't be in the same situation, if I'd continued as I was all my chars would most likly be sitting on their asses today and for the next two or three game years, I would have more fun shoving toothpicks under my fingernails.

At this I'm sure you'd be thinking of a reply along the lines of "you can interact with the other chars while resting", let me get one thing straight. I didn't play Cantr to meet people, I didn't play Cantr to expand my social horizens. I played Cantr to have fun, but even more importantly I have my most fun when I ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING (in games and RL, it's not like I work as much as I do because I gotta), not when I'm interacting with people either in RL or in a game. People on the whole bore me (this is probly why so many of my chars interacted unknowlingly with so many chars of a few select players, weird but I never thought of that till just now). So basically, when it got to the point that my chars couldn't accomplish anything I as a player didn't have any real reason to play, the game at that point became to me "unplayable".

Ephiroll. Before you can criticise the way the programming is being done, go write a reasonably complex program yourself. You might have slightly more insight then. The ONLY sure way to test if something will work is to implement it and see what happens. Even a full testing environment cannot uncover every minor problem. That applies to small programs as well as highly complex ones such as this.

I'm not criticising the way the programming is being done. I'm criticising the basic planning and coordination that took place before the first new line of code was typed. There's (far as I know) one way to restore tiredness (other then standing around for several years), no way to repair stuff that is falling apart as I type this, and stuff already implemented that I know for a fact would aliviate some of the current problems (make the cot do something for god's sake!) if someoen took few mins to do it. NONE of these problems have anything to do with the quality of the programming, but instead are caused by not planning for the changes and by not finishing one thing before moving on to the next. If nothing else the game should have been frozen while things were caught up.

[Agar]

All bows except maybe a crossbow are extremely easy to replace

No, they're not. They take over a year of work making parts you get tired on, and you need food for the whole time. Locations without raw food available will suffer decreases in population as people can't keep themselves fed by hunting while replacing thier broken tools, destroying the societies that were created there.

I would assume that the staff has done their research

I had a real jerk of a boss once that said "When you assume, you make and ASS our of U and ME." Research may or may not have been done, but, in any case, the scale fo cantr time makes a bow that takes a comparable 3 months of real life time rot to nothingness in 2 years when real life bows can be made in a matter of cantr hours and last for decades when not in use.

As for your comment Agar, you basically just said you have no confindence in the staff that they will fix things.

Things go wrong. People's real lives intrude, families have tragidies, services get shut off, stuff happens. Unexpected bugs. Anything. The point is that regardless of my confidence or assumed lack thereof, things are being implemented in halves. Tiredness, but no rest. Then, to make matters worse, Item rot and no repair. If you don't follow things through to their completion, you've accomplished nothing.

Let's say you go to a homeless shelter and they're giving away free hamburgers. You get your tray, they take the bun and even toast it on the grill, add the condiments, lettuce, tomatoe, all that good stuff, then plop down a cold, pink wad of uncooked hamburger. They only didn't do one half of your meal, but it's free, so don't you dare complain.

Then you turn around and see the tables for you to eat at, but there's no chairs. Enjoy your meal.

Like anthony said, we have our opinions. You have yours, I have mine, and we'll just sit and watch the show. Maybe one of will be right. Maybe we'll both be wrong. I'm having a bit of fun just watching.

[swymir]

Research may or may not have been done, but, in any case, the scale fo cantr time makes a bow that takes a comparable 3 months of real life time rot to nothingness in 2 years when real life bows can be made in a matter of cantr hours and last for decades when not in use.

If a society dies away because they don't have access to food then they weren't all that strong of a society. It wouldn't be hard to try and set up a few trade route in exchange for wood? Anyhow you are comparing modern bow making technology to cantr. I doubt you can say that if you started right now you could make a bow from scratch within a few hours. I would bet that you couldn't make one in a few months. Anyhow it has been more than a few months in cantr time. It's been about 2 years cantr time since item deterioration has been implemented and from what I see steel things are still brand new most iron things are new and the worse thing that is deteriorating are bows which are "used" if you are complaining that it's unrealistic for something to look used after 2 years, then I'd like to see what type of super equipment you use around the house. Item deterioration has been something I would have liked to see in the game for the past year now. I really wouldn't care if they ever implemented a way to repair things. The purpose is to preserve the future of the game. You can't be angry that the veteran players have all this stuff and be angry when the staff initiates a way to prevent such a thing from happening. There have been countless posts about the game being unfair to newer players. Now of course item deterioration makes the game harder for newer players, but it makes it a lot harder for the players with thousands of tools and weapons stored away.

As for tiredness. I still believe many people are blowing it way out of proportion. What are you doing that makes your characters so tired. I have 1 character who is being effected by it and that is because she was attacking a criminal for the past year and he keeps healing himself. Still the fact that she is travelling gives her an extra 4% recovery every day. If you are having a problem with tiredness you don't have to stop working just start bigger projects. If you started a project that took 10 days to complete you would have gained 50-60% tiredness back (since you will be a little slow at first working on it) by the time it is complete and then you could work on something else fully or near fully rested. Now I think it is kind of lame having to tell everyone how to "get around" the programming, but if it shuts you up...

[Agar]

I posted this in another thread, but to reiterate my point:

http://www.nativewayonline.com/primarch.htm

It is a primitive bow make withour power tools or neat compsite fiber stuff, and they make them in a matter of hours. That's not modern techniques, but primitive ones.

Bow's lifespans are measured in how many times the bows is fired, because that is when it incurrs all it's wear and tear. A bow not used is a carefully shaped stick, and incurrs very very little wear and tear. It'd doesn't simply rot away.

Further, more and more bows are clicking over to "often used". We don't know if there's 4 states before they go poof, or 10 states, but things are rotting away. If I used something everyday, of course it's going to look used, but I'd LOVE to see someone in Cantr "use" a broom enough for it to look "used". Perhaps it will be like an anvil for cleanliness, you merely have it and you don't get as dirty...

[Revanael]

Agar, as has been pointed out very often before... CANTR time is not REAL time. They're not comparable. And if we were to follow that page, we'd need various tools including a metal machete to make that primitive bow.

[Agar]

Yes but we DO have machete's in the game already, don't we? Or, the time to make it could be doubled or tripled for using a bone knife, to 3 hours.

Cantr time is obviouslt not rl time and I'm not argueing that it is or should be, I'm trying to point out it's not to scale.