Alternitive to Vehicle Decay

[Solfius]

well, it is a shade less that 6 to 8 RL centuries

[Cookie]

Har de Har de har har

[kroner]

again, the only reason being presented against vehicle decay is people whining that it'll make thins difficult for them. first off, people are assuming vehicle decay rates will be fairly fast. on what is this assumption based? secondly it would be much better for vehciles to decay and be made cheaper then to leave them as they are now. decay is important outside of the narrow view of how expensive things should be to build and maintain. thirdly, yes decay makes things harder. too frickin bad. if you want the game to be easy why not just have programming give vehicles away?

[Bowser]

again, the only reason being presented against vehicle decay is people whining that it'll make thins difficult for them. first off, people are assuming vehicle decay rates will be fairly fast. on what is this assumption based? secondly it would be much better for vehciles to decay and be made cheaper then to leave them as they are now. decay is important outside of the narrow view of how expensive things should be to build and maintain. thirdly, yes decay makes things harder. too frickin bad. if you want the game to be easy why not just have programming give vehicles away?

Is not a whine, its trying to protect things that have been worked for very hard for many years.

My assumption that decay will be fast is due to experience with other item decay. I have many tools and weapons stored away... many of those items have gone from brand new to old and crumbling before they were ever used. That IS too fast. Why work hard to stock pile weapons or tools when they decay before you can use them? Are we moving towards a society that has to make tools to order like a fast food joint? Can't I make a few sabres and store some away so when mine decays from use, I have one ready to replace it? I have a few vehicles, yet I travel seldomely. I am afraid the time spent building a vehicle will be all for nothing because it may rot before I use it enough to make it worth while.

[Oasis]

Don't be so sure, Cookie Monster. I've been playing for almost two years now. And I aint done yet. So if I obtained a car early on, it would be breaking down bad now, so it's not that far fetched. And even if I obtained a car now, it would get sold or inherited by someone, and would eventually break down for them. 1.5 yrs. isn't that long, not for a car, in my opinion. (Because I don't like the idea anyways, can you tell? )

Actually, I don't think it that terrible, if a means to repair them is implemented before the detioration. As I feel it should have been for weapons and tools, which are all about to disintegrate, and we can do nothing about it yet.

[kroner]

wy would they make vehicle deteriroation rates comparible to bow deterioration rates when, as you yourself are arguing, that would be ridiculous.
i have characters with vehicles too. once vehicle deterioration is implemented, they'll have to find a way to maintain them, or lose them. i think that's perfectly fair.

why would you want to stockpile weapons? i don't understand. if you don't plan to use it, why make it? i do agree that deterioration rates for things that aren't being used should be slower than they are, but the specifics of prices and rates has very little to do with the question, which is whether vehicle deterioration should be implemented or shouldn't. if it is, i trust the cantr staff to adjust costs and rates to reasonable levels.

[Agar]

i trust the cantr staff to adjust costs and rates to reasonable levels.

I always laugh when I see things like that.

Anyhow, you can stockpile weapon in real life, why not in cantr?

One example: A merchant. You make things and then you sell them. If you could whip out vehicles like a short order cook, then it wouldn't be a problem to have them decay when they weren't in use, but if bikes rot away fairly quickly, there'd be no point in making them for anyone but yourself. By the time someone had gathered enough to buy the bike you'd made, it would have rotted away.

Nother example: Warlord. If you can make weapons fairly quickly, they're sitting around waiting for people to get recruited. if you're passing out crumbling crossbows, you're not going to get much respect.

More example: Trader. If your stock rots before you have a buyer, you can't trade for much. I've already seen traders say they only have longbows that are kinda used, so they don't think anyone would want to trade for them. And the economy continues to go down...

[Lumin]

i trust the cantr staff to adjust costs and rates to reasonable levels.

I always laugh when I see things like that.

Me too.

Have weapons and tools become any easier or cheaper, now that deterioration has been implemented? I don't know where you get the idea that the process of making a vehicle will be made easier if vehicles start to decay. On what is that assumption based, I'd like to know?

And why make weapons or vehicles if you don't plan to use them? Gee, too bad we couldn't have asked Henry Ford that question while he was still alive. I mean, the man must have been crazy, making thousands of vehicles when he couldn't have ever needed more than one. (At least until it fell apart a couple of years later, then I suppose it would have made sense to have his factory build another one...and about time, too. I bet his workers were getting sick of hanging around getting paid for doing nothing.)

[Kyle Massing]

i agree with storing items, its like if you dont use what you made every day on a project its not worth keeping. i mean a peen hammer had gone from brand new to old while i made the other tools to make a saber then make the saber and i had all the resources i needed with me for everything. its trying to introduce low pay workers to soon for the game i think, travelers weapons rot away before they get much use out of them.

We just need a way of repairing items, and im not sure if this happens but if items just disappear when they get old enough then its wasting resources, you might get on one day and in the middle of making a wooden shaft you might realize that your knife has just disappeared.

[kroner]

i trust the cantr staff to adjust costs and rates to reasonable levels.

I always laugh when I see things like that.

Anyhow, you can stockpile weapon in real life, why not in cantr?

One example: A merchant. You make things and then you sell them. If you could whip out vehicles like a short order cook, then it wouldn't be a problem to have them decay when they weren't in use, but if bikes rot away fairly quickly, there'd be no point in making them for anyone but yourself. By the time someone had gathered enough to buy the bike you'd made, it would have rotted away.

Nother example: Warlord. If you can make weapons fairly quickly, they're sitting around waiting for people to get recruited. if you're passing out crumbling crossbows, you're not going to get much respect.

More example: Trader. If your stock rots before you have a buyer, you can't trade for much. I've already seen traders say they only have longbows that are kinda used, so they don't think anyone would want to trade for them. And the economy continues to go down...

you can still stockpile weapons in cantr still. just like in real life, if they're sitting around, they will deteriorate a bit. the whole bow thing is a bit ridiculous, but that's got nothing to do with vehciles.

if you have no faith in the staff to make the game work, then i don't know what to tell you. being cynical is one thing, but let's be realistic here: if the cantr staqff was incompetent, there would be no game.

[Lumin]

if you have no faith in the staff to make the game work, then i don't know what to tell you. being cynical is one thing, but let's be realistic here: if the cantr staqff was incompetent, there would be no game.

I don't think anyone's saying they're incompetant, but it's also ridiculous to just assume they're these superhuman beings capable of nothing but perfection.

Mistakes happen, and sometimes people, even god-like programmer people, make dumb choices. I'm not going to lie; I think the way the recent tiredness and item decay changes were handled was a huge mistake.

Is there anyone here who honestly thinks that inflicting the "disease" on the players before even programming the cure was a good idea? Some attempts have been made to patch up the tiredness problem, and the efforts are of course appreciated, but there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place if the programmers had simply not been in such a rush to make life-shattering changes to the game world without taking the care and effort to give people's characters a way to compensate for them first. It's the eqivalent of implementing hunger and then spending several weeks trying to figure out how farming and hunting will work...just a tiny bit unfair, though I guess there a few on the forums who I'm sure would miss the point entirely and insist that people starve in RL and we should all stop whining for the game to be made easier and build realistic societies around a foodless world instead.

As for the item decay problem, everything is crumbling away to dust, and still no sign of repairs. In case you haven't been paying attention, that's the only example of item deterioration in Cantr we have to go by. That's why people are cynical, and why some of us may not have a lot of faith that vehicle rot will be handled in a balanced way.

[julie2]

To quote myself, from another thread:

…it takes a whole year (neglecting tiredness, which makes it longer) to earn enough iron to make a dung-fork, at the current exchange-rates, then you still need wood, and you still need to put time into making the darned thing- say, two years in all? Then, four or five years later it crumbles away. Sheesh. I think we're heading for a Cantrian dark age, at this rate.

The point is, just making simple tools isn't really economically viable under present conditions. I'm banking on the programmers altering several of these parameters soon, or it's going to be impossible.

It's absurd to make rate-of-decay around about the same as rate-of-decay IRL when just about everything in Cantr takes much longer to build than it's IRL eqivalent. If they made rate-of-decay proportional to man-hours it takes to produce the thing instead (including man-hours required to gather all the basic resource) then most of these tools would last a Cantrian lifetime I reckon, and the vehicles would last much longer of course.

Agar's right. Both tiredness and deteriotation were programmed in too heavy-handedly, without sufficient preparation, and they've had all the impact of a woldwide natural disaster. Who needs plague?

We should all be grateful to Jos and the team for providing the game, but let's not pretend they're infallible. We don't do Jos any favours by suffering in silence, then quietly giving up. We all want people to go on playing. don't we? If so, its our resonsibilty to carp about things that spoil it for all but the masochistic few.

[The Sociologist]

I voted for vehicle degradation in order to emphasize that I consider it essential. However I also like the idea of fuel for motorized vehicles. Furthermore, I'd suggest that vehicle degradation should be reasonably speedy, with repairs requiring replacement of tires, and then addition of a bit more iron and steel as well.

Remember, we spoke before about the role of inflation in online games and of the essential role of degradation in curing it. Vehicles must degrade too.

However, all this presupposes repairs! Richard only applied the parameters that he did to bows and suchlike because he assumed that repairs would be implemented. Now we have "crumbling" longbows. Soon we'll have crumbling crossbows and no sign of repairs!

The whole idea behind degradation was to wipe out the steel hords of places like Alenz Hills. To penalize characters who were basically sitting on their butts doing no work and no trading for what began to amount to RL years. It was surely not the intention to wipe out utterly yet again the forest economies and leave the major steel powers completely intact... except of course that Alenz Hills is now the Land of the Sneezing Dead in any case.

So thanks once again to zero coordination on the part of Cantr staff, we have this current farce. But it is not the fault of the players who asked for degradation to be implemented that so much energy went instead into implementing that other farce known as "tiredness". This last has by now so slowed down the game as to render it effectively unplayable.

If degradation was being implemented properly there wouldn't be these problems. This isn't difficult, you know. Even Ultima Online got decay/repairs right, more or less. And that was when? '97?

[Solfius]

If they made rate-of-decay proportional to man-hours it takes to produce the thing instead (including man-hours required to gather all the basic resource) then most of these tools would last a Cantrian lifetime I reckon, and the vehicles would last much longer of course.

I like the sound of this, however my main gripe with it, and it's a big one, is that things don't decay according to how long it took to make them; they decay according to the materials used.

Therefore, it would be appropriate to adjust the detorioration rates of items based upon the materials they're made of, after first increasing the material deterioration rates to match the Cantr Man-hour, rather than the Cantr calendar (I hope that makes sense)

[kroner]

if you have no faith in the staff to make the game work, then i don't know what to tell you. being cynical is one thing, but let's be realistic here: if the cantr staqff was incompetent, there would be no game.

I don't think anyone's saying they're incompetant, but it's also ridiculous to just assume they're these superhuman beings capable of nothing but perfection.

Mistakes happen, and sometimes people, even god-like programmer people, make dumb choices. I'm not going to lie; I think the way the recent tiredness and item decay changes were handled was a huge mistake.

Is there anyone here who honestly thinks that inflicting the "disease" on the players before even programming the cure was a good idea? Some attempts have been made to patch up the tiredness problem, and the efforts are of course appreciated, but there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place if the programmers had simply not been in such a rush to make life-shattering changes to the game world without taking the care and effort to give people's characters a way to compensate for them first. It's the eqivalent of implementing hunger and then spending several weeks trying to figure out how farming and hunting will work...just a tiny bit unfair, though I guess there a few on the forums who I'm sure would miss the point entirely and insist that people starve in RL and we should all stop whining for the game to be made easier and build realistic societies around a foodless world instead.

obviously i don't expect things to be perfect on the first try. maybe not even on the second or third. what i do expect is that eventually things will be made right. that merely requires competence, not perfection. i'm willing to accept mistakes in the short run in order to have a better game in the long run. anything contrary to that would be to oppose progress.

no one is suggesting that vehicle deterioration should be implemented without due care. but some people are arguing that it should never be implemented at all. are you saying that vehicle deterioration should never be just because of the risk of an imperfect system in the short run? think of the implications of this atitude. what if violence was never added because people were afraid that if it was, maybe crossbows wouldn't do enough damage? cantr would never get anywhere.

As for the item decay problem, everything is crumbling away to dust, and still no sign of repairs. In case you haven't been paying attention, that's the only example of item deterioration in Cantr we have to go by. That's why people are cynical, and why some of us may not have a lot of faith that vehicle rot will be handled in a balanced way.

actually, anything not made of wood has held up just fine. bows make up only a small portion of the items that currently decay. sabres for instance are all still new. keep in mind that the programmers play cantr too. they aren't blind to the current problems. when they have the time to do so, the gross imbalances will be fixed.