Walls?

[D7X]

1 hour ago, lifetheuniverse said:

It's something else that needs to happen regardless. Tedium isn't good either.
These issues are such issues because they've been allowed to build up to a point where comments like this come up. The idea that fixing a bug isn't a good idea because of another issue that the game has. There's so much wrong that you can't fix anything without making someone mad.

Refusing to start anywhere leads to what we have now with buggy behavior in AI's, walls, structures, ect, which all intertwine together and create dependency on those bugs due to viable, non-tedious alternatives not existing. Resetting a tooth trap resetting all adjacent tooth traps would be a good example.
It's the same exact thinking that led the characters to be the way that they are now. Someone didn't like our changes? Welp, better not fix it or touch anything near that system for the next few years!

You're right, mostly. If someone came up with a suggestion that left me able to still make things like semi-automated varg farms and near zero maintenance hound defences I'd be all for it but so far all I've seen is people asking for something to be removed that really doesn't affect their experience as negatively as its removal would mine.

I take issue with calling it a bug though, the AI is just very simple minded and people take advantage of its simplicity with the tools they have available. It's also not just about quality of life, that tooth trap suggestion is a nice idea but I'm more worried about lowering the ceiling for what is possible in this game.

[Monkey Cups]

I don't understand all of this fuss over "exploiting" the AI using walls.

Let me ask you this: if there was a brick wall in front of you right now and you had to get to something on the other side, would you simply walk around it or would you try to bust through it using nothing but your teeth? Dumb question, right? You'd go around. That's what anything with even a single brain cell would do. It doesn't matter how long the walk is, you go around that wall. Is some mystical force exploiting you then?

I detest anything that punishes players for being clever. "Oh, you were too smart, we have to take this fun thing away from you now!" It's just a terrible practice.

Edit: I will say that this doesn't extend to "Jesusing" the water, that's an actual bug and it needs to be fixed. It was never intended to be like that unlike the walls which were meant to be...you know...walls.

[Finx]

10 minutes ago, Xehanightmare said:

I detest anything that punishes players for being clever. "Oh, you were too smart, we have to take this fun thing away from you now!" It's just a terrible practice.

Thats an interesting point that I normally would agree with but there is one thing.

Most people that use these clever wall strategy actually doesn't even have a clue why it work but it still work for whatever reason. So except for the creator of these strategy who had to spend hours and hours of testing to finally find it most people that use it aren't being clever for using it.

For comparison are you smart if you copy the answer of the guy next to you during a test?

Also in DST most if not all the time the game always favor brain over brawn so overall you are not punish from being clever but rewarded.

[Monkey Cups]

Just now, Finx said:

For comparison are you smart if you copy the answer of the guy next to you during a test?

Genuine question: how do you think learning works? Someone had to teach you how to speak, read, write. You didn't come up with the English language on your own, did you? Does that make you dumb for not inventing it?

It's hardly comparable to cheating on a math test. Killing Dragonfly isn't a test. No one is grading you on it, you're not going to get punished in real life if you fail, it's not something you have to do to prove your knowledge to anyone. Hell you can survive in the game without ever killing Dragonfly at all. I don't see how the two are even remotely comparable.

If you're trying to show off, fine, record a video of you killing Dfly with no walls. Cool. I'm sure someone out there will love it. I play solo, I don't have a team of six to just sit there with hambats whacking her until she dies. If I want her gems I'm going to get them however I feel the need to.

[MondayNight]

1 hour ago, Finx said:

People on these forum really have an obsession with bragging or what?

If you don't have anything interesting to say about the topic you can simply avoid talking because at this point you are making a fool of yourself more than the one you are targeting.

Ouch! Have I touched a nerve there? Aww!

Hey look, le some solution:

20 minutes ago, Xehanightmare said:

If you're trying to show off, fine, record a video of you killing Dfly with no walls. Cool. I'm sure someone out there will love it.

 

[Well-met]

1 hour ago, Xehanightmare said:

"Oh, you were too smart, we have to take this fun thing away from you now!"

if a larvae just wobbles pointlessly into a wall until death, it's not about you being smart, it's about the mob being dumb. They ought to attack it.

[Finx]

39 minutes ago, Xehanightmare said:

Genuine question: how do you think learning works? Someone had to teach you how to speak, read, write. You didn't come up with the English language on your own, did you? Does that make you dumb for not inventing it?

I think you misunderstood what I meant so I will explain a bit more. For that I will use your example. Like you said when you teach a language to someone else you teach them how to read, speak and write but to achieve so they must learn stuff like grammar, vocabulary, verb, etc. So to properly use a language you must learn the logic that allow you to use it well.

Now when someone try to learn a strategy lets say the Helicalpuma wall strat for dragonfly he usually just see how the wall is placed down and stop there. To be clever he need fully learn this strategy so he would have to learn that the reason it works is because the lava pool in the middle of the wall is what prevent the lavae to reach you. The logic is that for the lavae the lava pool is not seen as an obstacles for them its like if they could naturally go through the lava pool but they cant which is why it work.

44 minutes ago, x0VERSUS1y said:

  34 minutes ago, Xehanightmare said:

If you're trying to show off, fine, record a video of you killing Dfly with no walls. Cool. I'm sure someone out there will love it.

I could do it but at this point it would be redondant if everytime I comment on these forum I have to justify myself by making a video of it because I am accuse of "bragging right" no?

At this point I might as well afk stream and just loop a video of me killing dfly... no thats lame.

[GetNerfedOn]

all of this reminds me too much of the Forge rapidfire exploit arguments. 

everyone, please calm down. this senseless madness over a game feature which has been around since its conception needs to end. 

[Booklover]

Dudes, think about it for a moment, since WHEN does DST has much logic?!? I mean piggies that stand on 2 toes, butterflies that drop butter, meatballs created from ice, not to mention shadows?!?! When did the idea of logic get into your minds? DST is the complete opposite of logic. Characters creating a beautiful axe from a flint and twigs? I mean it should have looked primitive but nope. Even librarians managing to learn about bizarre things before they even arrived.

Sincerely, let this thread die. Stop arguing, DST has no logic whatsover. Please, just stop arguing over logic. When faced with problems in DST, you DO NOT think with normal logic. You think with the GAME'S LOGIC.

[Booklover]

4 hours ago, Xehanightmare said:

I don't understand all of this fuss over "exploiting" the AI using walls.

Let me ask you this: if there was a brick wall in front of you right now and you had to get to something on the other side, would you simply walk around it or would you try to bust through it using nothing but your teeth? Dumb question, right? You'd go around. That's what anything with even a single brain cell would do. It doesn't matter how long the walk is, you go around that wall. Is some mystical force exploiting you then?

I detest anything that punishes players for being clever. "Oh, you were too smart, we have to take this fun thing away from you now!" It's just a terrible practice.

Edit: I will say that this doesn't extend to "Jesusing" the water, that's an actual bug and it needs to be fixed. It was never intended to be like that unlike the walls which were meant to be...you know...walls.

THANK YOU! Finally someone with sense!

[D7X]

14 hours ago, Hell-met said:

if a larvae just wobbles pointlessly into a wall until death, it's not about you being smart, it's about the mob being dumb. They ought to attack it.

Should they though? There are enemies in the game that will target walls and enemies that won't which gives walls a use against certain enemies and in certain situations. They're a tool to be used to the players advantage that costs resources like everything else in the game. If we start saying it's dumb that some enemies don't attack walls then how far do we take that thinking before it becomes ridiculous? Is it dumb that enemies don't modify their attack patterns to catch players out? Is it dumb that enemies don't just attack constantly without leaving themselves open?

I agree that the ease with which you can cheese Dragonfly feels a little cheap sometimes but when we're talking about new-born fly larvae is it really fair to argue they need to be more intelligent? The fact that they're sentient enough to target the player at all is already pretty impressive.

[NSAiswatchingus]

14 hours ago, GetNerfedOn said:

all of this reminds me too much of the Forge rapidfire exploit arguments. 

That was a little different since a Klei sponsored leaderboard was involved. With that added element of competition the use of meta chasing exploits becomes mandatory for being competitive with the teams topping those leaderboards. 

[Swanky Psammead]

13 hours ago, Booklover said:

Dudes, think about it for a moment, since WHEN does DST has much logic?!? I mean piggies that stand on 2 toes, butterflies that drop butter, meatballs created from ice, not to mention shadows?!?! When did the idea of logic get into your minds? DST is the complete opposite of logic. Characters creating a beautiful axe from a flint and twigs? I mean it should have looked primitive but nope. Even librarians managing to learn about bizarre things before they even arrived.

Sincerely, let this thread die. Stop arguing, DST has no logic whatsover. Please, just stop arguing over logic. When faced with problems in DST, you DO NOT think with normal logic. You think with the GAME'S LOGIC.

They aren't equivalent, is the thing. DS's thematic silliness with bipedal pigs / butterflies that drop butter / Shadow Creatures etc. is all part of a consistent stylistic storytelling framework. It's Burtonesque or Lovecraftian, and the characters have quotes acknowledging its silliness (e.g. Wickerbottom on stone walls "I'm not sure why I can carry so many of these"), and so forth.

There's usually a clear distinction between that kind of silliness and the kind that's being discussed here. One of them is a worldbuilding device, the other is world-breaking. Characters don't acknowledge how strange it is that Grumble Bees choose to path around walls, and it's particularly odd when the Bee Queen herself is consistently able to fly over them (even the Grumble Bees are capable of flying over them occasionally, when it occurs to them to do so or when there's no valid path around them). Similarly there's no acknowledgment of the strangeness of Jesus-walking the ocean/abyss (equivalent mechanics, like teleporting around the edges of Shipwrecked, come with announcement quotes).

Consider a world like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. It's chaotic and unpredictable, yes. Strange real-world-physics-defying things happen all the time, yes. But they are always heralded by a pun or a reference or a mathematical conceit or some other kind of joke that ties it, however tenuously, to the real world (the Cheshire Cat in reference to Cheshire county's dairy industry, the Hatter in reference to mercury poisoning/erethism, the Queen of Hearts in reference to a card suit, etc.) It abides by a certain tonal consistency. Even in Wonderland many folks would find it rather jarring if the Jabberwock was slain through a pathing exploit without any previous mention of it being easy to confuse.

The fact that you can even refer to an abstract concept of the "GAME'S LOGIC" shows that you recognize DS is supposed to have a method to its madness. I'm not necessarily agreeing with every interpretation of what walls should and shouldn't do, or which cheese strats are valid and which are exploits (there's a lot of subjectivity to that) but I definitely am not satisfied with the idea that just because it has satirical elements that means literally anything goes : 3

[GetNerfedOn]

1 hour ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

That was a little different since a Klei sponsored leaderboard was involved. With that added element of competition the use of meta chasing exploits becomes mandatory for being competitive with the teams topping those leaderboards. 

Well, sorry, i generalized there, basing on the arguing over exploits xD

[Well-met]

16 hours ago, GetNerfedOn said:

all of this reminds me too much of the Forge rapidfire exploit arguments. 

everyone, please calm down. this senseless madness over a game feature which has been around since its conception needs to end. 

I fail to see what the age of a mechanic has to do with it being fixable or not.

2 hours ago, D7X said:

Should they though? There are enemies in the game that will target walls and enemies that won't which gives walls a use against certain enemies and in certain situations. They're a tool to be used to the players advantage that costs resources like everything else in the game. If we start saying it's dumb that some enemies don't attack walls then how far do we take that thinking before it becomes ridiculous? Is it dumb that enemies don't modify their attack patterns to catch players out? Is it dumb that enemies don't just attack constantly without leaving themselves open?

I agree that the ease with which you can cheese Dragonfly feels a little cheap sometimes but when we're talking about new-born fly larvae is it really fair to argue they need to be more intelligent? The fact that they're sentient enough to target the player at all is already pretty impressive.

I also fail to see the relevance of "realism" over exploiting AI. They're able to deal with walls normally, however they don't detect obstacles such as their own lava pools or burned up signs the same way so they just get stuck trying to go through those. It's a problem with bad AI. In this case they should just revert to attack walls again.

[maradyne]

^ That.
Again, the problem isn't with walls working as walls; the problem is that the game currently intertwines the wall system with obstacles that mobs just can't deal with. Setting a building, statue, lava lake, ect up against a wall turns the entire length of that wall into a completely impenetrable barrier, unless you bring one of 3 mobs (the bipedal Giants) into them. Everything else? Stuck due to buggy game behavior.

It's not just silly because it looks silly, it's silly from a game design standpoint. It's fine to give players ways to deal with things, but...
Say you came up with some other exploit that just outright removed the Hunger meter. No need to ever eat. No maintenance cost. No continuing effort. System removed.
That's what walls combined with obstacles currently do to Hounds, Lavae, Grumble Bees, ect.

If a portion of the game stops being, y'know, a game, it's wasted content. Nothing more than background noise.

 

As for not seeing anyone coming up with better suggestions...
It's because those are usually met with as much radio silence as these fixes to odd behavior, or completion of game elements.
Redesigning the game seems like too much effort when it won't be considered by the team, and will be buried in posts in a week, and archived beyond searchability in a month. Not to mention the kinds of responses implying that because the game contains silly elements, it should be a matching joke to play. What ever happened to the 'Uncompromising' part of survival? A little bit of difficulty is what makes a challenge fun.

The fix for Tooth Traps is just one part of a system that should obviously be expanded, to let the player conquer the world, but not completely invalidate its existence. Specifics feel like a waste of time if we have yet to even see step 1.

[Swanky Psammead]

for the sake of anyone who's interested in my specific opinions on current wall interactions, rather than my general stance on cheese across the board:

a) I think hounds having exploitable pathing around walls is fine the way it is, but I think Vargs should share their interactions with walls instead of being uniquely trappable

b) I think it's fine to be able to pen lavae out of the DFly fight as long as it's with a continuous, unbroken wall; I think lavae should be able to detect impassable objects and treat them like walls (better still would be removing their collision specifically with magma pools so that they can pass through them unhindered); I don't really think lavae should attack walls because they don't have limbs or a bite attack like hounds/werepigs/spiders, they just burn things or slam them with their squishy bodies, and I don't see that as a very effective technique vs. stone walls

c) I think Grumble Bees should ignore walls all the time, so should normal bees (Grumble Bees inherited their odd pathing from normal bees, it is a genetic spaghetti code defect, Bee Queen is only immune because she was coded as a completely new mob)

d) I think Werepigs should break walls to get to food on the ground (currently they are capable of breaking walls to chase after the player or living mobs, but when they target food items on the ground they will just run against the wall forever)

e) I am of two minds about what normal pigs/bunnies/rock lobsters should do when they have no valid path to a food item; currently they run against the wall forever, which is exploitable to keep pigs and bunnies out of their homes when they are normally noctural/diurnal (I exploit this myself in my pig and bunny farms all the time). I definitely don't think they should break the walls without provocation; that would seem uncharacteristically violent of them. But I also sort of want to preserve the sense that scarcity in the Constant is prevalent enough that even food that's clearly out of reach is mesmerizing.

I'm not married to any of these, I'm sure a persuasive argument could change my mind in any direction on most of them; I'm just throwing out my thoughts

[D7X]

16 minutes ago, Hell-met said:

I fail to see what the age of a mechanic has to do with it being fixable or not.

I also fail to see the relevance of "realism" over exploiting AI. They're able to deal with walls normally, however they don't detect obstacles such as their own lava pools or burned up signs the same way so they just get stuck trying to go through those. It's a problem with bad AI. In this case they should just revert to attack walls again.

It's not bad AI it's simplistic AI and there's a huge difference there. Not every enemy in the game needs to be able to reach you to still pose a threat. If it costs resources and time to build a wall & structure combo that blocks movement and lets you easily farm something for the rest of your days then it has still impacted your world in a meaningful way.

There are tiers to the enemies in this game, not everything needs to plow its way through what you've built like Bearger because sometimes it's nice to create something with a degree of permanence in a game that is constantly trying to drag you down with all the tedious upkeep.

I'd like to say "would everyone here be happy if Klei added an intended (near) unbreakable wall that maybe was very expensive?" but they already basically did that with statues. If they added in something even more expensive then where would that leave us but with more tedium.

The answer to this whole debate was posted pretty early on, if you don't like it or it ruins your immersion then don't use it. Asking for it to be "fixed" is just selfish and close-minded.

[maradyne]

7 minutes ago, D7X said:

The answer to this whole debate was posted pretty early on, if you don't like it or it ruins your immersion then don't use it. Asking for it to be "fixed" is just selfish and close-minded.

If we're going with this, you could say the same for the people who wanted walls in the game in the first place, in a game that had no walls. Guess they just wanted to ruin the game for players looking for a hardcore survival experience, eh? Tisk tisk! Selfish and closed-minded pro-wall players!

/facetious counter-comment

Games evolve and change over time. It's not a personal issue, and it isn't 'selfish and closed-minded'. Flinging around insults because you don't like an opinion just breaks down the conversation, and it makes it that much harder for those of us interested in the workings of games to actually bother reading through what you post.
We just think a change would be pretty neat for gameplay, as I'm sure you thought that the addition of walls in the first place was pretty neat.

[D7X]

47 minutes ago, lifetheuniverse said:

If we're going with this, you could say the same for the people who wanted walls in the game in the first place, in a game that had no walls. Guess they just wanted to ruin the game for players looking for a hardcore survival experience, eh? Tisk tisk! Selfish and closed-minded pro-wall players!

/facetious comment

Games evolve and change over time. It's not a personal issue, and it isn't 'selfish and closed-minded'. Flinging around insults because you don't like an opinion just breaks down the conversation.
We just think a change would be pretty neat for gameplay, as I'm sure you thought that the addition of walls in the first place was pretty neat.

Come on, that was barely an insult. Walls were added when the game was still growing, still in beta probably and figuring out what kind of game it was. They're almost entirely useless (defensively) on their own so I doubt anyone ever thought they made the game easier. However the simplicity of the AI in DS/DST is a core mechanic now whether you like it or not. I don't think anyone could make an argument for any of the enemies in this game being smart. They try to path to you, they attack you, they idle, sometimes they run away. That's it. Bosses are just as dumb really but they get the passive benefit of being bulldozers to stop them being subjected to the same strategies that can be used against lesser enemies. The combat has always been simple and that has left it open to being exploited by human ingenuity. Kiting an enemy is exploiting it's AI, you know what it's going to do before it does and using barricades is no different.

I'm not arguing against change, I'm arguing against the removal of something I consider a feature. I paid for this game and I like what I paid for, by all means add things but don't take something away.

 

[Swanky Psammead]

13 minutes ago, D7X said:

However the simplicity of the AI in DS/DST is a core mechanic now whether you like it or not. I don't think anyone could make an argument for any of the enemies in this game being smart. They try to path to you, they attack you, they idle, sometimes they run away. That's it. The combat has always been simple and that has left it open to being exploited by human ingenuity.

Did it not do anything for you the first time you got to the Grand Forge Boarrior after he came out of beta and learned to avoid the sleep circle? I have very consistently enjoyed every time Klei has added sophistication to their mob AIs.

13 minutes ago, D7X said:

I'm not arguing against change, I'm arguing against the removal of something I consider a feature. I paid for this game and I like what I paid for, by all means add things but don't take something away.

The distinction you make between adding / taking away seems arbitrary to me. Most change is an act of both adding and removing. Adding a new character, mob, or mechanic means removing a degree of exclusivity about the current ones. "Adding" features to the AI in this case "removes" existing exploits.

[D7X]

2 minutes ago, Swanky Psammead said:

Did it not do anything for you the first time you got to the Grand Forge Boarrior after he came out of beta and learned to avoid the sleep circle? I have very consistently enjoyed every time Klei has added sophistication to their mob AIs.

The distinction you make between adding / taking away seems arbitrary to me. All change is an act of both adding and removing. Adding a new character, mob, or mechanic means removing a degree of exclusivity about the current ones. "Adding" features to the AI in this case "removes" existing exploits.

I wasn't trying to insult the devs by calling it simple, it's simple by design because all the enemies are basically just following flow charts of what to do in what situation, they don't adapt or think creatively and they can easily be stumped by the player. I loved the Forge and I was a beast at animation cancelling with Lucy but that's a completely different thing to the base game.

It's not an exploit. I've already said what I'd be happy with in another post but I'll say it again. With the current AI you can build things like zero-maintenance hound defences, automated varg farms, krampus farms, boss prisons, unbreakable moon staff defences which then let you farm pig skins/meat and even teleport moonstone statues for decoration and aside from all that you can decorate your base in weird and wonderful ways by trapping enemies inside certain structures. If you "fix" or improve the AI you'd be removing all that plus a bunch of other random applications which to me is a massive content-ectomy that isn't justified just to satisfy some peoples need for immersion. If Klei wanted to improve the AI and add a legitimate way to do all those things I just mentioned I'd be all for it but I don't see that happening and the usual way these sort of complaints turn out is that the vocal minority that have a problem complain loud enough to get something changed or nerfed and then the (happy) silent majority suffer for it.

[Swanky Psammead]

"removes" existing strategies then, exploit is a subjective term, I was using it descriptively not pejoratively

either way I take it your point is that, semantics about adding/removing content aside, AI changes would be more of an upheaval to existing gameplay than you think the majority of the playerbase is comfortable with, which is a concern that I can appreciate and sympathize with but I'm not sure it is actually true. I think the silent majority of players struggle to reach a point in the game where they have the time and resources to make use of these kinds of pathing oddities in the first place.

[Tapirus]

I think that the Silent Majority has its own thoughts, independently of what is posted here.

[Swanky Psammead]

Just now, Tapirus said:

I think that the Silent Majority has its own thoughts, independently of what is posted here.

^ that too