Things that annoy or puzzle you about Cantr

[ObsessedWithCats]

Uni: *beginning of term* Here have a few exams to test if you've been working over Christmas. Yes, on Saturday morning too.
Wakeful population of town where my character is leader: *suddenly quadruples*

[SekoETC]

It annoys me when characters starve themselves for no apparent reason, but then again, I'm occasionally guilty of that myself. One of my characters is too busy to eat and often has to move resources, so she tries to keep her inventory as empty as possible. The result is binge eating and then waiting until hunger is anywhere between 10 and 50 % before binging again.

[miirkaelisaar]

to be honest most of the time I ignore the hunger event until I actually see the little skull and then feed them hopefully before anyone notices. Though I also have a lot of characters with eating disorders, some more secret than others, caused by anything from disease and stress or self consciousness, guilt, to simply havj g a disorder due to too many times eating a huge amount of food and not eating daily for a few years or having no access to food and then having physical trou le stomaching the food when they do eat. Almost always based on my own personal experience with eating disorders. It's especially frustrating when my character hasn't eaten in half a year and someone's just like "hurry eat!" And I realistically rp my character being sick from suddenly eating food and they're like "if you don't eat you'll die!" But they ignore the complications and that it's beyond my character's control at that point, much like having an addiction sadly... they have their ups and downs thiugh, like if a particularly guilty and self conscious character gets a significant other who encourages them gently to please eat a little more often, that character tends to start getting better about not starving, though if their partner died it would probably send them into a relapse unfortunately. I can't speak for others but this is the case for most of mine, almost all of my characters get hungry often but only one is officially sucidal.

[*Wiro]

I practically ignore food unless it's done in elaborate banquet style.

[computaertist]

I have the nasty habit of playing games efficiently. If a character of mine doesn't have a really good reason to eat more than keeps them alive, they don't (I do have some characters with such a reason though, and they do eat more, inefficient though that is, because that is how they are). (In real life I'm told I don't eat enough too, so it's not surprising this has carried over into my game play when I don't consciously guard against it.)

On a different note, for the purposes of responding to a different topic (which I have sense decided to keep quiet in for now), I looked up the Cantr promo video that attracted me to signing up for Cantr in the first place: It annoys and puzzles me that this video, the main reason I signed up (since the page itself didn't say much, but really what can you say about Cantr without it getting long winded?) states proudly "CANTR II ... IS NOT A GAME" from 1:34 to 1:40, and from 2:40 to 2:50 "Live the GAME ... Play a LIFE", the whole time with music that just demands you to be drawn in to a whole new world, not to watch one at a safe distance but to be fully engulfed in it, only to learn the hard way over time, sometimes multiple times because the first time didn't take, that Cantr definitely is just a game and should be treated as such if you don't want your soul crushed. Only it's not and shouldn't be treated as the sort of game you win- it's not a challenge type game, it's a drama or sociology class type game, a playing house type game, because if you treat it as the first, more readily assumed type of game, people get puzzled and annoyed at how badly you play, and years later you finally realize "Oh, THAT'S what the video really meant by 'not a game'! It was trying to say what -kind- of game it's not, not suggest it was more than that, but less!" (I say "less" because I'm fully convinced you can get the value of drama and sociology games while still incorporating goals for winning. After all, people really live life to win it, it's just that they have so many varied views of what it is to win and how might be best to win by their idea of it that it's easy to glance at the situation and conclude incorrectly that most people do not live to win.)

tl;dr: It puzzles and annoys me that people including myself are probably signing up for the wrong game in their minds all the time, and I can't really think of a better promo except maybe to take out the lines I mentioned above, possibly replacing them with something a bit clearer to reality (but I don't know what that is in concise, attractive words).


P.S. Further exacerbating this, the video also encourages you to do or be a lot of things, speaking to you, not saying play at/as a lot of things but to do/be them, and the text of the game reports "you say", "you see", "you hear", "you're hungry", "you consume", "you", not your character's name, "you", repeatedly. And then we wonder why people don't always automatically keep distance between themselves and their characters.

P.P.S. And has anyone noticed the explaination of what a character is on the wiki begins with this?: "A character is your virtual self within Cantr." (I added the bold.) I, for one, consumed the wiki while waiting to be approved, and I would assume that that's desirable new player behavior.

[BosBaBe]

I'm still getting that really, really annoying feeling that the other player is taking both myself and my character for some really stupid, ridiculous, long winded ride. Is it worth it? Hell no... but I'm stuck in it now. :/

[Genie]

I notice there is an unjustice between some towns and islands. While some can't be bothered with working on the some resources in their stocks, others are struggling even for a piece of steel . I wonder could we have travelling helpers to make things more balanced. Game has many wanderers and sailors as I know, they could easily gather some donations from the big towns. Or maybe few towns can form an organization together and their land/sea forces make deliveries time to time.

[Snickie]

[...] the wiki had informed me as I devoured it that characters are strictly human, and I defaulted to wanting to play healthy and functional characters. This will likely not happen again as I have since decided Cantrians are clearly not human, just humanoid.

I should spawn a Bajoran... or a Vulcan. Ooh, or a Klingon! (I'd spawn a Jem'Hadar, but there's nothing to facilitate the Ketracel-white and I don't feel like having it go around fighting everyone. Also, it's less likely to pass as humanoid given its reptilian skin.)

Better yet, I'm going to spawn a Vorta, name it Weyoun, and have it conquer Treefeather. If Weyoun is assassinated, I'll spawn another one and name it Weyoun 2. (The Vorta are all clones of each other, after all.)

I have so many fanfic ideas for this concept.

[Pies]

Game has many wanderers and sailors as I know, they could easily gather some donations from the big towns.

Go for it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd-TaTKUKsc

[SekoETC]

I dislike this attitude of indifference I've developed who knows when, and it's reflecting onto my characters. Nowadays when I hear of characters getting murdered or raped or kidnapped, I know that my characters should feel something but I feel no sympathy, so it's hard to rp emotions, especially if something happened to someone my character has never met and they just hear about it on the radio. I think in the past I used to react to things and feel something, but nowadays I'm just "meh, shit happens". The last time my character reacted to a person in distress was in response to Joedi, and even then I thought OOC that what she told about being abused was at least partially made up, because I couldn't believe her Mistress would come up with such twisted stuff. And in another case where a man was accused of raping two women, I felt like the victims must've secretly liked it.

[Snickie]

This is one reason why I don't read the radio events.

[ObsessedWithCats]

I don't know if this is just a coincidence of statistics, but I tend to find that if one of my characters spawned in the same location as another person's (and thus likely lives there) I will have other characters in the same locations as the other person's other characters, far far beyond what I feel should be expected from the number of populated locations.

There's two cities on one island where I have characters and I'm 90% certain I've identified four recent-or-current resident characters in each other than my own that have counterparts (i.e. a shared player) between the two. And that's just the ones I can tell from emoting style/spawn date/death time/waking patterns - I don't know who their players are. It amounts to about 1/3 of the recent population of one and 1/5 of the recent population of the other, and I'm fairly sure one of them has a town leader with the same player as the town leader in another of my characters' homes.

I sort of wonder if there's some kind of spawning 'groups' going on, which ends up keeping certain players' characters grouped together. It'd also explain the sort of 'all or nothing' situation I have when people post lists of their recently dead characters - I either knew none or a whole bunch.

[*Wiro]

Whenever I spawn a character, the RNG flips a coin. Treefeather or not?

[ObsessedWithCats]

Whenever I spawn a character, the RNG flips a coin. Treefeather or not?

Oh yeah, that too - 3/6 of my characters have spawned on Treefeather. There's a fair few nice places on Treefeather but somehow it all comes together as 'ugh, not here again'.

[Snickie]

Spawning locations of my characters in order of spawning: Raj, Fu, Treefeather, Aki, Treefeather, Burgeo, Noniwrok, Cantr, Terra Nostra, Fu, Teregotha, Cantr, Treefeather, Cantr, Treefeather, Cantr.

So it was relatively varied until 12-16. I find the sudden exclusion of all else but Treefeather and Cantr and their subsequent alternation to be quite... interesting. There was only one instance of two of my characters spawning on the same island before 10, and then 12. 12, 13, and 14 were spawned in the 3300s, and 15 and 16 were spawned in the early 4000s.

Just some interesting statistics on my characters. Nothing truly telling I hope.