[quote=“Bonevomit, post:138, topic:6219”]And you are very welcome to my internet Kevin.
Just be chill and lower your defenses, and you too can come to bonevomits internet, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. Where the trolls don’t bite, and your users don’t fight. Where what you call the disruptive jerks, are just another one of the perks. Where the only silencing mechanisms we need are our minds, and they don’t delete every unpleasant criticism that they finds.[/quote]
Is this an attempt at poetry?
[quote=“TacticalPteridactyl, post:106, topic:6219”]This thread really put me off. It is true: there is a reluctance to admit there is anything wrong with the way DDA has been designed.
There is a lot of imba crap in DDA. Proof: First day, first house, I go down into a basement, and pull out a rapier. Pair that with a pistol for the shockers and boom. I win.
The game by and large plays out in a tedious fashion. The mechanics are set up in such a way to encourage the player to avoid conflict, train up skills, craft the best armour, etc. There is nothing to discourage the player from creating a safe space and camping. It is a problem that difficulty does not ramp up over time. The game rewards conservative gameplay, discouraging risk. Melee is op. Best tactic is almost invariably buffering enemies with a single-tile window. If you have a fire extinguisher, light a fire in it. Fire, too is op. I can instantly light a fire big enough to kill things despite their continual trampling.
Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t saying the game is crap, but it has got some serious design flaws which should be addressed.[/quote]
This thread really seems to have gone down some dark paths. Regarding this quote, when has the devteam been reluctant to admit fault with the game? When there are genuine problems, the devteams have tried to find and implement solutions. Having just played the recent experimental, I can see great differences between it and 0.A (weapon breakage system, and scaled skill gain being big ones, as well as tool qualities) most of these changes were in response to community input. If the devteam was really so reluctant to admit fault, then why is the game being updated almost daily?
Also, the fact that you found a rapier in the basement seems almost impossible in my opinion. I just tested 100 shelters (by deleting and creating new worlds) and none of them (yes, none) had a rapier or other such rare weapon. 2 Had a gun with no ammo, 1 had a machete. That means the probability of getting a rapier in a shelter is less than 1%, which seems adequate. You are talking about house basements, however which is a different issue. I agree that the “gun nut” basements could be a little rarer and should have more guns and fewer ammo (logically, a fleeing survivor would take one or two guns and as much ammo as they can carry). As of yet (no testing, just normal play) I haven’t found a rapier or other such item in a basement.
Furthermore, desire for realism explains the rest of your complaints. In a real life cataclysm, survival would require low-risk, conservative actions, as well as fortified positions or safe zones. If it feels tedious, you aren’t taking enough risk, and the game does (now) encourage town exploration over crafting (since grinding is longer is a valid option). Melee is not that op since the chance of taking hits/getting surrounded is substantially higher, bottle-necking (using the windows) is a common strategy in any rougelike, not just CDDA, and even then this strategy only works in single tile windows, which are not as common as they used to be.
Fire is op, as it should be, since it also destroys anything inside the building as well (zeds and items both). Locking a horde inside a house pre-saturated with gasoline and coolly throwing a lit match after lighting a cigarette and walking away from the ensuing destruction is a pretty satisfactory moment in the game.
Still there is a lot of tip-toeing around certain things (AI, z-levels) because of the time and difficulty of implementation, but hell, this is a free game, as long as it is free, I can be patient. The only thing I can’t speak for is the kickstarter campaign, you guys may have money set aside from the campaign for the things you promised, but I honestly don’t think the people care so much about where the money is, as much as where the new features you promised are.
This kickstarter thing is where the big problem lies in my opinion, beforehand, you guys could pretty much do whatever you want, because as I said above, the game is free and the devteam owes nothing to no-one. But now you’ve taken money from hopefuls, and you do owe them something. Just sitting on the money and adding other content while the hopefuls have to twiddle their thumbs for the content they paid for, is unjust. We get that the devteam hasn’t spent the money on something random, but for god-sakes spend it! Buckle down, do what you have to do, sweat through the difficulty, because in the end, you do owe something to those hopefuls.
(Just to be clear, i wasn’t around for the kickstarter campaign, so if this is not the general consensus for those who were, please just ignore me)
I don’t actually subscribe to threads, but any thread I post in, appears under “new replies to your post” regardless.
Is there a way to ‘leave’ threads I no longer posting in that doesn’t resort to deleting everything I’ve said in it? I see no reason to redact my input, nor do I see any reason to continue getting updates on this particular topic.
[quote=“Pthalocy, post:143, topic:6219”]I don’t actually subscribe to threads, but any thread I post in, appears under “new replies to your post” regardless.
Is there a way to ‘leave’ threads I no longer posting in that doesn’t resort to deleting everything I’ve said in it? I see no reason to redact my input, nor do I see any reason to continue getting updates on this particular topic.[/quote]
I made the thread and am also wondering this 
There is no way, you have to wait for the thread to die and then look at it to mark it as read.
Thank you for the answer.
With the humbre of a nobody
The game is excelent. It´s taking the opposite direction of the traditional rougelikes who ended as a more interactive ProgessQuest in lot of aspects…
For lategame
in games who aspire to keep the people playing they, the most efective thing I detected was a “mechanic” who stressing it motivates enough as for take the chance of losing, or for replaying for the sake of stress it more (if not a sandbox)
examples:
[spoiler]One easy: Think about crossing the portar to a more hard dimmension, then, another portar to another ever more rough and weird place, and… Curiosity of our limits and what will came in the next is good motivation.
Some games get this by giving fancy titles or stories at their end (¿remember pirates gold? 3300 RL (?) ?, Princes maker also…)
In grand strategy, the geniuses of Paradox set a global ± sandbox where you replay thinking “how much can I conquer”?
In economics (OpenTTD, Capitalism) is how much can you take of the market or resources.
AI interaction can get the posibility of acumulate power, people, influence. ¿Where is the limit? Orwell could say that with an AI good enough , there is not…
[/spoiler]
As concepts…
Something that pushes the player incrementally with time and/or with “distance” , some difficult progresive “conquests”, a faction system where the effort take some accumulative and usable effect. A combination of this could be a bright future: growing factions with more people, Whit they, secure more dangerous territory, exploit it, grow, more danger… going beyong and beyong… Good timming for add “late content” on the march.
I agree with admin in"realistic wolrd" taking account of “unrealistic situations”. Easy game coordination is gold and it appears that people enjoy a realistic variety of items.
The first creates an automatic roadmap as clear as the reality we live, for all the features. No inconsistences between developers and a objetive frame for discutions. Pure gold…
With the fixation of the first, the second is the clay for tweeking the enjoy of the game.
About CA2 and coding…
You must be a senior software architect for create from scratch an infraestructure"state of the art" for a sixty people dev team.
Im not capacitated for saying that is possible or not to redesign, but I have my doubt about the posibility of doing it for a game with no money in full time people for pumping it up as fast a possible.
as for take the risk
"something" that motivates the player to put himself in increasing
[quote=“Bonevomit, post:138, topic:6219”]
Do you have a suggestion other than everyone on the forums suddenly changing their behavior?
Yes, everyone on the forums should gradually change their behavior. Patience is the key word here, you dig?[/quote]
So basically no. I’m all for trying to raise the level of discourse and such, but the way to encourage that is by example and by discouraging bad actions. Simply telling everyone they’re wrong and need to change is more likely to incite argument than make a substantive change.
Ever been on Fark, Something Awful, Slashdot, Reddit, Stack Exchange or any other “Web 2.0” communication forum? That’s what I was describing. What they all have in common is they share systems for tracking reputation and automatically taking action such as filtering posts from people with no or negative reputation. On a ‘traditional’ forum, there is still need to do that filtering, but it mostly falls to admins to do it manually.
- You haven’t given any ‘actionable’ advice.
- If you mean I shouldn’t ban people for trolling and using sockpuppets, you’re contradicting yourself because you specifically said that wasn’t what you were talking about.
- What I have to lose is a forum with a modicum of civility. “Take it to 4chan” was not a flippant comment, that is literally what you get with no moderation, feel free to have enlightened, open-hearted discussions about dda on /rg/*
*In other news: “In Granade’s brave new world, men have babbies.” lol.
I really gotta agree with Kevin on this one.
I think it would help to reduce the amount of people booing at the devs for not yet adding certain features would by telling them what problems those features could create if handled badly.
I’ll say a few things about problems the aboveground z-levels could cause(in my opinion at least), thus increasing the time of their development:
1.How to show lower z-levels from higher z-levels and vice versa.
2.If one of the aboveground floors gets destroyed(burning down a whole apartment building, setting off a mininuke on the second floor, etc.) what happens to other aboveground floors? Do they get destroyed too? If yes, how do we show it? Do the nails from burned floor 2 magically show up on floor 1? Can we, and do we want this destruction to follow laws of physics?(the building doesn’t fall directly down, but falls in a certain direction?
3.Fall damage, partially related to problem 2.
4.Some other random issues - Should hordes spawn on upper levels, should zombies be so stupid that they jump from the windows, how to make THOSE STUPID NPC’S NOT JUMP FROM THE WINDOWS(or at least not all the time - suicide probably is a thing during the cataclysm), etc.
I don’t know how to code, but I have been waiting for features like Z-levels, but(again) I don’t know how to code and thus don’t know how difficult this is, so I don’t complain that it hasn’t been added yet. The only thing I have to say to people who do complain is: Do it yourself if your going to complain. The devs do their best. They have real lives outside of DDA, and you should realize this.
- Other games pretty much just don’t show other levels but do just fine with the ability to view other levels and a decent message system to inform of discoveries. Determining exactly what should and shouldn’t be visible and getting messages that don’t suffer from the “cry wolf” dilemma would be problematic though. On the other hand, brightness reduction, overlapping, occlusion, size reduction, palette inversion, zork-like verbal descriptions, level-cycling, multiple view panels, visible objects panel, and visual-mode toggling would all be ideas that might assist…
- X-com Apocalypse was awesome for this. Watching a slums building collapse is one of the all time most awesome moments in gaming. Apocalypse is generally a great reference for Z-levels, you can turn Z-visibility off and see how the game still works, and then turn it on and see how much of an improvement it is, and then raise your view a bit to see incoming projectiles and realise that that might be cool too… This whole issue is a big processing question, along with the obvious programming woes, a collapsing building, even with simplified physics, can be really complex, once again, ask Apocalypse for an example of a game stopping to figure it out. I think that no collapse would be an obvious “Z is not yet fully implemented” sign but would not be a crippling hole in the game. Also note that a fairly small collapse in an underground building could easily leave a character trapped, which would be very very realistic, but perhaps a bit anti-climactic…
- Well, it is always sad when a player has different rules to the rest of the world, but hey, it happens all the time and for pretty good reasons, it really isn’t a war that can be won…
- Heheh, flying hordes would be a silly, if amusing bug. Zeds being even mildly viable after falling could add some fun Z-awareness issues as walking alongside buildings may not always be the best idea… N.P.C. behaviour is an N.P.C. issue, but it does highlight that the scope of the headaches that Z-axis brings up is huuuuuuuuuuuge, everything from shooting to walking to A.I.(even the P.C.'s) to interface to input to material properties to visible arc to, well, nearly everything would need to be addressed…
P.S.
Just musing, pay no heed…
This is taken from the kickstarter page:
"So how much do you want, and what are we getting for it?
Our initial goal is just $7,000 dollars, which allow Sean to dedicate three months of effort to the project. Along with the “time”, there are a few other feature obligations that are going to come along with this. The bulk of these three months are going to spent developing the following features:
Full Graphics Support…
Extreme Vertical…
The World Factory and Mod Manager…"
The campaign raised 9.5k, from 440 people and promised the above three things within three months. The first and last have been implemented, but where is the second?
If you’ve taken money, the “do it yourself” argument is no longer valid, at least not for the features that you’ve taken said money for. If z-levels are really so impossible to implement they should not have been promised. Its really as simple as that.
They’re not impossible, but they are indeed very difficult. Work is currently ongoing on some of the foundation work to make z-levels actually possible though.
Do most people play with NPCs? I never have, because I heard it’s broken, and likely need a complete overhaul. That being the case, if most people don’t use 'em, it might make sense to temporarily remove them if it would make high priority enhancements easier.
I'm all for trying to raise the level of discourse and such, but the way to encourage that is by example and by discouraging bad actions. Simply telling everyone they're wrong and need to change is more likely to incite argument than make a substantive change.Which isn't far from what I'm saying, the only difference is that we should discourage bad actions of our community rather than trolls. A troll will always be a troll, but our community can change. And further, you can't stop people outside the forum like whales from belting out whatever criticism they please. Regardless of everything administration can do, this forum doesn't exist in a bubble and needs to be able to handle unpleasant opinions in a mature way. You said it's possible to raise the level of discourse by example and by discouraging bad actions, that's exactly my point.
1. You haven't given any 'actionable' advice. 2. If you mean I shouldn't ban people for trolling and using sockpuppets, you're contradicting yourself because you specifically said that wasn't what you were talking about. 3. What I have to lose is a forum with a modicum of civility. "Take it to 4chan" was not a flippant comment, that is literally what you get with no moderation, feel free to have enlightened, open-hearted discussions about dda on /rg/*1. My advice is that when we see criticsm we don't like, we avoid letting our emotions lead us to responding harshly, and instead respond in a more detached way. And when we see someone else respond to criticsm with excessive emotion, we remind them that it's nothing to get worked up about. By setting this example, we slowly build a forum culture of tolerance and understanding. Does this mean you won't have to moderate anymore? No. But what it does mean is you will have far fewer flamewars and drama to worry about.
-
No.
That guy who posted earlier should have been banned for using a sockpuppet account regardless, but I don’t think you can be sure if he was trolling or not. Like many upstanding members on this forum, some people have strong opinions. After all, if you look past the sockpuppet account, it’s not like his behavior was all that different from those who responded to him. -
A big part of being civil is being able to take criticism. That’s not 4chan, on 4chan when someone presents an opinion outside the norm they get yelled at and called a troll. Sound familiar?
And it’s not like I’m saying I’m perfect and everyone should do what I do. I fuck up all the time, and there are far better examples here than me. But we could all work toward being more open to criticism.
Actions revolving around getting people to change slowly over time is about as effective as slowly punching a brick wall. Sure, the brick wall might dent after a few years if you do it every day, but it’s never going to collapse and you just look stupid for trying it. People change slowly over time in response to stimuli. You’d need some hard changes to get people to change it. For example, Something Awful is very very good at the hard change part by making users pay for their memberships: if you get banned, you’re wasting money. But since we can’t pay people to enter this forum for a free game, it’d have to be something else.
lol. He compared this forum to 4chan.