Don't feel like playing anymore

[Entrails]

I think someone else made a post along these lines, but for the first time since this game was released I don't feel like playing anymore. I just don't like the disease and skill changes. Am I over-reacting? Kind of bums me out, I used to love this game. 

 

[Junksteel]

I didn't enjoy some aspects of the changes but appreciated the overall effort towards a more dynamic gameplay.

Keep in mind that we are less than a month from full release of the game and apparently there is a ton of new features we still don't know. It's hard to figure the complete scenario and how those changes will fit within.

Main problem being those drastic changes were threw pretty close to release with not much time left for testing and eventual balancing.

[JohnFrancis]

Once every couple of months I'v had to reexamine some of the game mechanics or test some new ones just so i can figure out how I can keep my level of play at an ok level. I may be a bit strange because I love it. I am only here since November though over the long term I can imagine this would get a bit draining. @EntrailsHow long have you been playing?

[Entrails]

I've got 600 hours into the game. Been playing since it was first released. I'm just sort of baffled by such major changes released in a quality of life patch. I liked things the way there were before. /shrug

 

[Sasza22]

There`s a lot of negative feedback about the disease changes. The skill changes was also a mixed reception. It was like they couldn`t find the right way to balance those and just threw them away and started from scratch. We got a half finished product so we can find all what`s wrong about them. I`m pretty sure the devs are reading all the feedback about those.

We are pretty close to release. While the stuff from the separate branch might be done already (new biomes, critters etc.) the things that got changed recently are for sure being worked on by a double team (the team doing the live updates and the second branch team). I wouldn`t leave the game right before release. I`d say take a break. On release the new systems should be more polished. Hopefully they will be more interesting and less frustrating as well.

[goboking]

16 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

We got a half finished product so we can find all what`s wrong about them. I`m pretty sure the devs are reading all the feedback about those.

The problem is launch is right round the corner and the don't have much time to iterate on the new system.  But I'll echo your sentiment that abandoning the game so close to release is a bit drastic.  Many of our sticking points with this new system might be addressed at the end of the month.

[Oozinator]

1 hour ago, Junksteel said:

Main problem being those drastic changes were threw pretty close to release with not much time left for testing and eventual balancing.

Before AU there was a system, that plants gave only seeds, when in perfect condition 80% of the time.
It was a complete downgrade for the agriculture update.
Now in QOL update, they change "skill" system to a point, where it feels like a halfbaked downgrade.
Strange but reality!

[Gus Smedstad]

I've already said all that seems relevant about disease in the other thread.

After spending some time with the new skill system, I'm a bit mixed. It's ridiculously easy now to get critical gateway skills. Morale, however, is more relevant than it was before. With the Jobs system, once you got 30 morale from the basic boosts (great hall, bathroom, bedroom, +16 food), morale no longer mattered, since all Dupes could get all skills given enough time. Now Dupes max out after mastering roughly 4 skill trees, and every point of morale you get after that lifts the ceiling a bit more.

The net result is there's now a reason to care about things like decor and the additional recreation machines like the Arcade Cabinet and espresso machine. However, it's not a a strong reason, since all you're getting out of it is the low-value skills you skipped before, the ones that do nothing for your Dupe but add +2 to an attribute.

Dupe Interests matter a lot more now than they did. In the old system they made skill gains a bit faster; in the new system you get that, and they reduce morale requirements for the relevant skills. A Dupe with 3 interests is going to have a cap that's 9 morale higher than a Dupe with none, if they take all the relevant skills. And if those are actually the skills you want.

I think stating that the new skill system is "too easy" overlooks how easy the Job system was if you knew what you were doing. The old system was more challenging for new players, but both systems are pretty easy once you've mastered morale mechanics.

[Gurgel]

44 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I think stating that the new skill system is "too easy" overlooks how easy the Job system was if you knew what you were doing. The old system was more challenging for new players, but both systems are pretty easy once you've mastered morale mechanics.

I fully agree to that. And I like how things got mixed up from time to time since I started playing some time in early 2018. 

[WanderingKid]

I personally have taken a break.  I'm hoping the new biomes can spark my interest.  The new disease system is slightly more invasive than the old one was.  Without Miserable, I'd ignore slime lung with a handful of deodorizers and strip mine the entire biome. You'd be amazed at what you can do with a pool of water below you to catch all the slime and a deodorizer every 20 wide and 5 high.

I just don't like the way the game is relying, more and more, on the dupes being important instead of just being one component of the system.  Maybe I've played too much Factorio and Dwarf Fortress, but I don't consider Nails the Fourth to be important.  Nor would I want them to be.  I do want '20% of your dupes require more morale boosters' though.  The same way I care about 'You're draining your batteries off 10% faster than you can refill them'.  I also consider 16 dupes the absolute minimum of a base.  Takes too long to do anything otherwise, and I usually prefer 24 to 32 dupes.

I've had a lot of fun with the game, but ever since expressive (yes, that far) I've been losing more and more interest as the game has changed from an adventure in base building to powering the dupe's video games.  I don't WANT to care about the dupes.  I truly don't.  Well, not unless they do something fantastic like skin Meep into an amulet or something.  Then they can aspire to Botanist Cool. 

Breaks are good.  If you take one, I recommend a completely different game genre though.  Resets the mind.

EDIT (for typo too)

I should add the current skill system vs the old one is basically a wash in my mind.  If it takes me 110 cycles to get an astronaut, it takes me 110 cycles to get an astronaut.  I don't really care how it gets there.  What I care about is if those 110 cycles were worth playing while I waited.

[Abt9]

Now I realized what is getting me drifted away from the game. It seems like there is a clear miscommunication between devs and audience.

Moreover, the fact that devs decided to give some change to the fundamental features just before release.. do they think it could attract much more players which is worth giving up the playerbase they had before? Hmmm.

Or maybe, klei is just another AAA gamedev company by now.

[goboking]

41 minutes ago, Abt9 said:

do they think it could attract much more players which is worth giving up the playerbase they had before? Hmmm.

I could be wrong, but I suspect you're overstating the degree to which people dislike the new disease system.  Sure, there might be some gripes here on the forum, but I doubt too many people are uninstalling the game over it.

[SharraShimada]

Then new skill system is just a change of state. This is up for debate, but its not a game-experience breaking thing, even if some say otherwise. Its different, and for this, its bad for some people by definition.

But the new disease system... this is a complete different thing...

Some people car for the dupes, and wont like it, when they run around, coughing, sneezing, feeling bad. Its a social thing. We dont like to see ill people. And because diseases are now a more common thing, you see ill dupes all the time, until you have medicine and/or a clean base with exosuits. There is something in us, that resist to acknowledge such things. 

And then there are players, disliking the drop of efficiency when dupes get ill... They feel cheated by the game, because ill dupes wont work as planed. 

Either way, the skill system will prevail. But the devs should take another close look at the disease system soon. 

Illness is easy to cure, but thats beside the point. People dont want it that way, because its now a common, constant, negative experience. Thats not why we play games.

[Gus Smedstad]

Reading this thread some more, I realize that I'm kind of bored, and I should probably move on. But I don't blame the game or the changes to diseases or skills. It's just that I've got nearly 600 hours into the game, and I've seen pretty much everything, succeeded at all the challenges it throws at you. "Mastered" is probably overstating it, but I've seen enough that it's not new to me any more.

I'll probably look at it again with the official release, since we're getting new biomes and critters. But I'm not feeling a lot of motivation to finish my present colony.

[Tenedas]

I love the new disease system, it is intrusive enough to force you deal with it regularly.

It's not a big deal but it force you to setup a medbay to keep up the productivity of your dupes ( in the case you ignore it the stats debuff will lower the productivity)

In a game like this you want accidents (disease, fire, malfunctioning) the reason being it keeps the game alive.

The game lack a true purpose itself and after you setup a couple of atmosuit/liquid locks you were good to go. 

I love the skill system too, but i just feel like a dupe should have a limited amount of point per life time no matter what and probably a raise in morale cost for the skill (even the preferred ones).

As it is now the game shifted from ignoring the medbay (which now you are forced to have) to ignoring the recreation room (due to the low morale demand of the skills. Atm I'm 500 cycle with my last run and not even needed to extend the downtime in the schedule further the standard 2 squares)

What i am really sad for is the zombie spore, it is in a biome so hot that usually dupes go in there with atmosuits and there's no way for it to even get to infect dupes, it's lile non existent even if they added it. Honestly was hoping for something worst since the slimelung doesn't kill the dupes anymore. 

If you don't like dupes health being involved in the "survival" run just use sandbox or debug mode. 

The game itself it all revolves around dupes (starting from the oxygen you need to provide them )

[Abt9]

2 hours ago, goboking said:

I could be wrong, but I suspect you're overstating the degree to which people dislike the new disease system.  Sure, there might be some gripes here on the forum, but I doubt too many people are uninstalling the game over it.

Nope, I'm based on the fact that major changes are always likely to wind away the old fanbase. Because they liked and was so used to the old system, they'd more likely to move on when it gets a lot of change. This disease & job system overhaul shows an example of this - whether it is good or not doesn't really matter, quite a bit of old fanbase will drop the game partly due to that.

[Grimgaw]

5 hours ago, Tenedas said:

It's not a big deal but it force you to setup a medbay to keep up the productivity of your dupes ( in the case you ignore it the stats debuff will lower the productivity)

-3 Athletics is not enough for me to even bother building medbay, training medical dupe, building whole medicine infrastructure and paying attention to this part of the game. Saves me on building exo suits too, seeing as they nerf dupe's Atheltics even more.

[Abt9]

Adding to Grimgaw, you can just scavenge required materials and craft the pills - which immediately heals the sickness. But now I suspect, balance is not the biggest problem of the latest update.

(Exosuits are for staying in carbon dioxide rooms tho)

[camelot]

 

 

1

11 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

With the Jobs system, once you got 30 morale from the basic boosts (great hall, bathroom, bedroom, +16 food), morale no longer mattered, since all Dupes could get all skills given enough time. Now Dupes max out after mastering roughly 4 skill trees, and every point of morale you get after that lifts the ceiling a bit more.

It's pretty much the same experience I've encountered with the new system. So I tried to play a base long enough, make dupes master everything and feel the difference with the old job system. And it's not that different

I have 2 specialized types of dupe. Dig and build type and operate type. The former type with no related interests that mastered everything need around 33 morales (6 morales for each of 5 categories such as Digging, Building, Researching, Operate, Supply and 3 for Tidy). 33 is the same for Astronaut in Job system

But this new system is actually better than the old one for a newbie in the early game

So yeah, I think it's quite the same for experienced players but easier for newbie. That might be the most important point of this change

[Sasza22]

10 hours ago, Abt9 said:

Or maybe, klei is just another AAA gamedev company by now.

I like how this is considered a bad thing nowadays .

8 hours ago, Tenedas said:

What i am really sad for is the zombie spore, it is in a biome so hot that usually dupes go in there with atmosuits and there's no way for it to even get to infect dupes

Maybe the sporechid will find a home in one of the new biomes, which will make it more dangerous.

As for the skill system now it`s more flexible when it comes to playstyle. We can just keep low expectations and have one dupe per job or get higher morale and have dupes more multispecialised. What i don`t like is how easy it is to get master artists. There`s like no reason to make low tier art now.

[Abt9]

13 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

I like how this is considered a bad thing nowadays

Not a bad thing, just something I happen to dislike =P

 

That being said, I wonder if there would be coming a Disease/Crisis Pack DLC and Performance Boost DLC.

I'd like to have a Chemical Revolution DLC which models chemical reactions to give vast more possibilities of processes. Some of it would be available in typical conditions, which would give something to do in early game when you lack the tools to create fully-fledged factories.

[Mullematsch]

I didn't like the new system at first and I still do feel like it could be improved. However mostly I was just playing like I always had, ignoring food poising, more or less ignoring slime lung. Because of that I continuously had a crazy amount of sick duplicants which was really annoying to micro.

After storing the food in chlorine, getting all the polluted water bottles out of the base and fixing my slime storage & mushroom farm, I get maybe a sick duplicant every 3-5 days. 

Skill system is a bit weird to me. I used to always move all my duplicants quickly through the job tree so I could get "super dups" as early as possible.  Now I just have a designated doctor, farmer etc. and train everyone in exosouit training and maybe digging / supply and leave it at that. 

Wouldn't mind them nerfing sitting on skill points a bit. Great hall also gives too much morale and the constant skill points earned notification is annoying me.

For the most part I think the new system is alright though 

[Gurgel]

19 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

For the most part I think the new system is alright though 

Same here. I think it is just the usual thing that happen with humans and changes: Some people grandstanding, proclaiming the end of the world (or rather game), proclaiming the fans are leaving, claiming the creators having disgraced themselves and the only way to fix is to reverse the changes. Some people are like that and they are loud and insistent in addition. It is a severe mistake to listen to them though, because they will kill all progress and all experimentation in the end.

In this case here, the changes are _minor_. They affect a small part of the game. The experience stays very much the same overall. 

I am confident that Klei is resistant to this type of pressure. They have enough experience to know how this works. And they wisely stay mostly out of the forums and can simply quietly ignore a (mini) "polluted dirt storm" like this and not fuel it further.

That said, would I like the older stages of the game back? Not really. They were fun at the time, but they game has had about the best early access run you can have, starting strong and then having constant improvements, most of which would be sorely missed if taken away. 

 

[argh223]

On 2019-05-02 at 12:36 PM, Entrails said:

I think someone else made a post along these lines, but for the first time since this game was released I don't feel like playing anymore. I just don't like the disease and skill changes. Am I over-reacting? Kind of bums me out, I used to love this game. 

 

You are not alone. I stepped away a while ago. Haven't been able to drag myself back.

I like statistics and numbers. If I saw dupes with a ton of inhaled slimelung germs, immunity dropping - it was an incident, a big deal. Death awaited if I didn't deal with it promptly - or at least lengthy medbay stays for the affected dupes. You had to be proactive - quarantine stuff - avoid toxic germy pockets of air (or at least closely monitor exposure) - etc.

Now - it's just RNG. Mae worked in a pocket polluted with millions of SL germs for hours. Result: 23% chance she'll get sick. And if she does - just pop a pill - solved instantly. The penalty for just ignoring it completely? runny-nosed dupes that walk a little slower. Not engaging. The empathy and care I had for them when they got sick? gone.

It's gone from potentially exciting - almost panic inducing if it went wrong (who breached the SL pocket! Fix!) to nothing more than a resource sink for pills, and waiting on the RNG to see who got sick off a stray sneeze. I'm not engaged, I'm not excited, I'm not challenged. I'm just annoyed. That's why I'm not playing.

[goatt]

I dislike the new slimelung, it's so distracting from main game play. To me, it made me spent much longer on pointless "caring about dupes" stuff, which drag my early game progression much slower.

It makes sense to have all this doctor medicine disease thing, but it doesn't matter to me. The aspect that I personally interested in has been largely affected by this slimelung thing, and I hate it.

What @argh223 mentioned might explain why i feel this way. Maybe cuz disease is not critical, i'm no longer engaged, instead, only annoyed by its stubborn uninteresting side effect.