Shipwrecked Characters

[Toros]

10 hours ago, The Curator said:

Have not reached the point of playing all the Shipwrecked characters, only researched them. But even in that, heard of the meta for Warly of just eating food that completely fills him so he can outlast the day requirement. Although that could be fixed if they made it so the day requirement scales based on how much hunger the food he eats satisfied.

Balance in games is exceptionally rare anyways so it is not particularly outstanding here. But yeah on some characters it is absurdly obvious.

Wigfrid is not even fun because she is so overpowered. Normally Deerclops is potentially a crisis if you are on your own, and you have to find interesting ways to kill him like Klaus, tentacles or trap pits. But as Wigfrid, just need a hambat and that is about it. And the same goes for most other combat scenarios, she is so efficient that combat is about as threatening as it is in an anime MMO. The only difference between Wigfrid and the other meta is that her bonus is comparatively weaker but with no drawbacks. While Wolfgang's is much stronger but requires food in place. It's borderline irritating to see people playing as them in the server, because it's just like oh well they have to put zero effort into survival now don't they.

 

New solution. Remove all the character quirks and abilities, and just make their statistics the same as Wilson's. Honestly, that would probably make the game more fun because you wouldn't have Maxwell leveling forests, Wigfrid and Wolfgang soloing bosses, Wickerbottom auto-growing cops and WX78 running at the speed of light all the time.

If characters were all just made cosmetic, that probably would actually make the game more varied. Because people would have to actually survive instead of relying on their RPG classes to always win the game in the same way. The developers are clearly incapable of making the characters balanced. Warly, who has problems, is almost the only character in the game whose abilities are based on changing gameplay and not giving free class specializations.

Even the modded character Womp is more creative then the other characters, because he adds a clever mechanic for using wetness that benefits and hinders players alike. And while Womp also could be made more difficult and unique, at his base he is still far better designed then any of the base game characters.

Part of the issue you're experiencing, and I don't say this as an insult, is because you aren't very good at the game.

 

Wigfrid is not remotely overpowered, as her perks become steadily less useful as your skill improves, and her downsides become steadily more of an impediment.

 

Deerclops is not a crisis, in fact it should be a largely trivial fight solo that rewards good loot.  This can be said of most of the fights that aren't Klaus, Bee Queen, Firefly, Toadstool.  Wigfrid's primary advantage is health and sanity back while attacking, as her extra 25% damage and receiving 25% less are largely pointless.  She has decent cheap armor and spear, but both will be replaced eventually with superior options, and her inability to eat vegetables is a massive handicap for early exploring (the best way to spend the first week is outlining the map) as well as ruins runs due to the plentiful supply of powerful mushrooms.

 

Certain characters (Wx, Wolfgang, Wickerbottom) are more powerful than the others, but as your skill at this game increases they become simply convenient and not the deciding factor in success or failure in surviving or accomplishing tasks.

 

From a high-skill perspective Wigfrid is not in the upper half of the cast, though some players still prefer to play her despite her weaknesses.  But Wes is a perfectly viable choice for any and all tasks.

[ShadowDuelist]

8 hours ago, The Curator said:

If every character was beardless Wilson, then the concept would not be negative because there would not be meta to out-shine the average; because every character would be average. Allowing players to choose characters based on appearance preferences over who wins, or does not win, the easiest or who functions in more useful ways.

 

This would make to people like me to entirely ruin the fun of the game, and most likely quit playing. Its the same reason why I rather play any character with traits (stronger or not) over wilson: he's the dull mediocre powerless character.

I don't normally like survival based games, and I think I got interested into this one exclusively because of its inherent humor, and the fact that each character feels unique and can add something special to the party. When I pick a character I enjoy to see what decisions the other players make, and how can we synergize in new ways with our advantages and skills, using them creatively.

The fact that some characters could use some love in the balance department does not mean that the best solution is to make them all powerless, its like having a defective door in your apartment and calling the demolition team to tear down the whole building and make a new one.

[Vixrotre]

8 hours ago, HamBatter said:

This will then depend on game difficulty for fun, and there will no longer be a reason to play once you "win".

Not sure whether it's a complete miss, as I see people liking the characters for the reasons you don't.

Yes, thank you! 

Not everyone plays to the "best meta", most of the people I personally know, including myself, play for fun. Even in DS I never played as Wolfgang or WX. I got to Wendy and I've been playing as her ever since, because she's my fave. I don't care if she has downsides that are bigger or smaller than character A or B. It's not a competition. Would I play her in pvp? No, because I don't play pvp. 

Most characters that join my server are Wigfrids, Webbers and custom characters I got from workshop that have tons of powers and disadvantages. 

If we took all the quirks and powers out and left the characters as empty shells with same stats, the game would lose a lot of its charm for me. I like my characters with pros and cons I have to get around or just live with. 

Yeah, it's not fair that this character can kill stuff very efficiently, that character can chop trees really fast and your character can just make crops grow faster, but primary function of "Don't Starve Together" is... Not starving together. And that means working together by making the best use of your abilities for the benefit of the whole group.

 

Pvp, working against each other, isn't the main focus of DST.  It's okay if it is for you and it's understandable that you want the game to be fair and equal in all aspects when it comes to that, as obviously Wes vs Wigfrid won't go well for Wes. But you could just make a mod, or download a mod (if it already exists) that strips base characters from their abilities and makes their stats equal. Not demand that Klei pretty much breaks their characters. Maybe they could make that like an option you can check before starting a server, but I'm pretty sure most of us like the characters as they are and don't want them to lose their uniqueness. 

[56933043043]

11 hours ago, Toros said:

I agree that balancing for pvp was a fundamentally poor decision, but  I think you read too much intention into the current character balance as well as shipwrecked's.

DST wasn't balanced for PvP at all. PvP was added as just an option for players to have on their servers, but it was never fleshed out or even balanced at all:

>Some options are horribly broken. This isn't so much of an issue in co-op, where some of the not-as-meta characters have noteworthy niches to fill, but in PvP, where the entire point is to overpower other players, it's a big issue. The pan flute , and Sleepytime Stories are horribly overpowered. Sleep allows you to immobilize players for a while, and multiple uses of these items will stack the duration of the drowsy debuff, eventually crippling opponents in a downward spiral. Wickerbottom players can separate and pick off individual players with help from this book, being able to solo an entire team with enough uses of the book. Don't get me started on Wx78 and Wolfgang.

Inconsistency. Klei added a 50% damage penalty in PvP, so players deal half damage to each other. This was extended to Wendy's follower, Abigail , who actually deals 25% of her usual damage to players. When Maxwell was introduced, his shadow duelists never got this penalty that Abigail got, as they, in fact, deal 100% of their damage to players. So while Abigail's damage caps off at 10 damage at night, each duelist deals 40 damage per hit. Why didn't the duelists get this penalty?(My theory is that when all the characters were ported to DST, this was added to the "player" tag and added manually to Abigail. However, Maxwell was added years after the other characters were ported to DST, so I think they simply forgot that PvP existed and didn't add the penalty to his duelists.)

Klei has never talked about their new content in what it adds to PvP. Have any of you ever seen an ANR update that talked about the uses for new content in PvP? Devs? Changelogs? Anything? Just that it hasn't been talked about by the developers really tells me that , as it currently stands, they have no intention of making PvP a truly viable gamemode in their game.

PvP is a unique experience, but I do not find it worthwhile for most players to prepare for 10-15 days only to be cheesed by a myriad of broken strategies.

Also, weren't Willow and Woodie rebalanced due to their potential for griefing, not PvP...?

[Starlogy]

10 hours ago, The Curator said:

Remove all the character quirks and abilities, and just make their statistics the same as Wilson's.

I'm just gonna tell you right now that no one would play Wickerbottom...

[Toros]

1 minute ago, Sketched_Philo said:

DST wasn't balanced for PvP at all. PvP was added as just an option for players to have on their servers, but it was never fleshed out or even balanced at all:

>Some options are horribly broken. This isn't so much of an issue in co-op, where some of the not-as-meta characters have noteworthy niches to fill, but in PvP, where the entire point is to overpower other players, it's a big issue. The pan flute , and Sleepytime Stories are horribly overpowered. Sleep allows you to immobilize players for a while, and multiple uses of these items will stack the duration of the drowsy debuff, eventually crippling opponents in a downward spiral. Wickerbottom players can separate and pick off individual players with help from this book, being able to solo an entire team with enough uses of the book. Don't get me started on Wx78 and Wolfgang.

Inconsistency. Klei added a 50% damage penalty in PvP, so players deal half damage to each other. This was extended to Wendy's follower, Abigail , who actually deals 25% of her usual damage to players. When Maxwell was introduced, his shadow duelists never got this penalty that Abigail got, as they, in fact, deal 100% of their damage to players. So while Abigail's damage caps off at 10 damage at night, each duelist deals 40 damage per hit. Why didn't the duelists get this penalty?(My theory is that when all the characters were ported to DST, this was added to the "player" tag and added manually to Abigail. However, Maxwell was added years after the other characters were ported to DST, so I think they simply forgot that PvP existed and didn't add the penalty to his duelists.)

Klei has never talked about their new content in what it adds to PvP. Have any of you ever seen an ANR update that talked about the uses for new content in PvP? Devs? Changelogs? Anything? Just that it hasn't been talked about by the developers really tells me that , as it currently stands, they have no intention of making PvP a truly viable gamemode in their game.

PvP is a unique experience, but I do not find it worthwhile for most players to prepare for 10-15 days only to be cheesed by a myriad of unbalanced strategies.

Also, weren't Willow and Woodie rebalanced due to their potential for griefing, not PvP...?

I never really paid much attention to whether the justification for Willow and Woodie were their griefing potentials because whatever argument was made was not valid.  In addtion, whomever did the rebalancing was not competent.  Torches and hammers are cheap, world rollback and the kick function do a lot more than crippling Willow and Woodie did.

 

Willow had an advantage in pvp in that fire damage wasn't subject to the penalty, but I think they put some nameless intern on pvp balancing and then fired them halfway through and never replaced them.  That's the best way to explain the results they got.

[56933043043]

Just now, Toros said:

I never really paid much attention to whether the justification for Willow and Woodie were their griefing potentials because whatever argument was made was not valid.  In addtion, whomever did the rebalancing was not competent.  Torches and hammers are cheap, world rollback and the kick function do a lot more than crippling Willow and Woodie did.

 

Willow had an advantage in pvp in that fire damage wasn't subject to the penalty, but I think they put some nameless intern on pvp balancing and then fired them halfway through and never replaced them.  That's the best way to explain the results they got.

I don't think anybody in Klei was put in charge of balancing PvP, ever.

[Maslak]

11 hours ago, The Curator said:

If characters were all just made cosmetic, that probably would actually make the game more varied.

Um...

[56933043043]

11 hours ago, The Curator said:

 

If characters were all just made cosmetic, that probably would actually make the game more varied.

 

28 minutes ago, Maslak said:

Um...

Um...

No, you'd be reducing the number of effective characters. Less varied.

Believe it or not, the other characters do get played, even if they're not  the most efficient way to play the game. In my personal opinion, 100% guaranteed success does not guarantee enjoyment.

I'm a Wendy main. There are a few things she excels at, and gives me a good challenge with her damage penalty. Believe it or not, I LIKE having an NPC ally that can tank for me. Saves me the hassle of fighting bees and actually pretty useful for killing the monkeys in the ruins, something that every other character seems to take longer to do.

I'm sure that some people , unironically, like characters like Woodie, Willow, and Webber, in terms of their mechanics. If their perks were removed for the sake of "balance" , I can't see many people being happy about it.

It'd be great if all of the characters were as viable as Maxwell, at least. But making everyone a clone is not the way to go about it.