This Game Needs Change.

[Mysterious box]

On 6/9/2023 at 2:49 AM, Gnosis said:

There are many players who enjoy creative building among other aspects of the game, and striking a balance between the original promise of being "uncompromising" and quality of life (or features just for the sake of being interesting), which improves the experience of enjoying these many other things that can be done in the game is a common thread that runs through games like Terraria. Usually finding that balance, is unironically and unsurprisingly, I would argue, a far more balanced approach to game design.

The problem I find is that the survival aspect of don't starve together is fairly shallow outside of seasons to make room for the creative aspect. That makes it far more accessible to newcomers and people who mainly just care about the design aspect but that means it's far from a balanced experience.

On 6/9/2023 at 2:49 AM, Gnosis said:

To me, using Bearger as a tree-farming machine is highly enjoyable.

Personally I'm not a fan of it as it trivializes systems in place that are meant to be spotlighted for resource harvesting like followers and Woodie. If the reason bearager harvesting exists is to make log harvesting less tedious then that means the average speed of log harvesting need looked into rather than putting every other method out of a job.

 

9 hours ago, yourAnty said:

I just don't like how nearly all of the updates that we've got after RoT has started have been mostly optional side quests, the ocean is placed on top of the base game not intertwined with it, it's been 4 years and yet still we have to circle around the mainland or build a separate boat to go from one side to the other of the ocean, the mainland has all resources you'd ever need to survive and you need the mainland to make a boat in the first place yet alone deck it out to nearly maximum potential, the ocean generation is also something that I just don't get, why is it just a blue surface filled with small setpieces instead of the surface being made of bigger biomes? I really hope a lot of rebalancing will be done in the future though I just don't see it coming like... ever.

And it's not like the updates have been bad, they just aren't really connected to the 'base game' or whatever you want to call the mainland.

Like yeah of course there have been some missed marks in some updates but for the most part they have been pretty creative and fun, once again though, disconnected.

This is largely the reason I've been dying on the hill that is the repairing pillar argument realistically we need a reason to engage with content. On the other hand with the return of them content there isn't a need to engage with it. What I mean is ocean content has zero impact on our requirements for survival. We don't make seasonal prep just because it's fun but because it's necessary to survive and overcoming those problems breeds fun. There's no stakes in ocean content making it feel disconnected and out of place because we as the player have too much choice in the matter we don't go out there because we need to be because we feel like it.

 

[Antynomity]

30 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

mysterious snip

the ocean is different to boulders in the caves, the ocean is essentially a separate part of the world that has not much purpose as of now while boulders were an annoying mechanic that did nothing good but make the game more of a grindfest, if anything boulders that'd disable structures for a few days would be better because the player would have to make a decision if a building is affected not just because it can be affected, like hm do I need this right now? If yes: I'll hammer it and rebuild it. If not: I'll let it come back to function.

I'd much rather for acid rain to be more thought out and not so brainless to overcome like it has become after the first patch (but hopefully they do that while rebalancing the armours after release). Especially since acid rain is a thing that affects the player directly (items equipped and or health) rather than potentially affecting decorations in-base.

I'm not against stuff that destroys a base to be honest but it can't be just BS 'oh hey now this happens lol noob, didnt have enough time to run away from structures lmao'.

[Mysterious box]

45 minutes ago, yourAnty said:

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

mysterious snip

the ocean is different to boulders in the caves, the ocean is essentially a separate part of the world that has not much purpose as of now

I think you're missing the point the reason the ocean doesn't have a purpose is because there's not a underlying problem making us interact with it.

1 hour ago, yourAnty said:

as of now while boulders were an annoying mechanic that did nothing good but make the game more of a grindfest,

Survival is a grind it's not something that stops at least when well designed.

 

1 hour ago, yourAnty said:

if anything boulders that'd disable structures for a few days would be better because the player would have to make a decision if a building is affected not just because it can be affected, like hm do I need this right now? If yes: I'll hammer it and rebuild it. If not: I'll let it come back to function.

All that means is the mechanic wouldn't require much thought and be negligible to the player experience  Players aren't actively using all their structures and even the ones they do use they're not using every second meaning that this solution makes it so it's a mechanic not worth caring about. You don't have a sense of loss because you're not really losing that thing and it's not really inconveniencing you in a meaningful way which means you have no sense of urgency regarding it.

In order for a mechanic to be engaging players need a reason to care about it otherwise it becomes background noise. For example try a world where all active threats are disabled and by active threats I mean things that impact you without seeking it out. Turn off seasons, sanity creatures, night time, monster waves, hunger and darkness damage things like these get you moving and the game becomes a lot less engaging without them edging you along.

1 hour ago, yourAnty said:

I'd much rather for acid rain to be more thought out and not so brainless to overcome like it has become after the first patch (but hopefully they do that while rebalancing the armours after release). Especially since acid rain is a thing that affects the player directly (items equipped and or health) rather than potentially affecting decorations in-base.

I think this is the overall opinion on acid rain it was too punishing before but too lax now we need a middle ground or a different idea all together some interesting alternatives have already been pitched.

1 hour ago, yourAnty said:

I'm not against stuff that destroys a base to be honest but it can't be just BS 'oh hey now this happens lol noob, didnt have enough time to run away from structures lmao'.

I agree which is why I'm pushing for the much longer warning phase and the repairable pillar idea.

[Fatkitty]

On 6/10/2023 at 8:50 AM, Gnosis said:

 

But hey, who am I to expect people on the internet to actually read.

You said "I had assured you that it does not" as if you were implying feedback sent to EA or Blizzard is taken seriously. You then went on to say that EA and Blizzard pretty much disregard community feedback (AKA "fall on deaf ears"). So which is it? 

But hey, who am I to expect people on the internet to actually make sense?

[veridianne]

Honestly a lot of Don't Starve needs a facelift in general, which is to be expected of a game this old. We could use something like Minecraft biome updates to shake up worldgen, cause once you've seen a biome a single time you've seen all there is to it. Not much screenshot worthy world generation going on.

[Cloakingsumo198]

I'm still waiting for a controller update.

[1moregame]

1 hour ago, Cloakingsumo198 said:

I'm still waiting for a controller update.

Amen!

[goatt]

Imagine, instead of brightshade plant, we had new island to explore with hostile lunar plants blocking the way, forming some sort of maze like atrium.

Imagine, instead of acid rain, we had shadow ocean in cave that will only fill up shadow water after opening shadow rifts, sailing on which will attract various interesting neutral, playful and psychopathically shadow creatures.

[gamehun20]

23 minutes ago, goatt said:

Imagine, instead of acid rain, we had shadow ocean in cave that will only fill up shadow water after opening shadow rifts, sailing on which will attract various interesting neutral, playful and psychopathically shadow creatures.

Which you can't see because it's dark in the caves? The same problem would arise that was with the edge claw 

[goatt]

Just now, gamehun20 said:

Which you can't see because it's dark in the caves? The same problem would arise that was with the edge claw

This problem can be solve by adding bioluminescent shadow creatures.

plus, I mainly want shadow ocean between branches of lands, which is near players and can spawn interesting creatures and events to change the game play. Not the outskirt.

It can look like beautiful horror.

[Evelo]

On 6/6/2023 at 11:18 AM, firoborn said:

(In response to "What other game can you think of that has evolved along with the fanbase as much as this game?") WoW, etc.

Yeah... Gonna disagree heavily there. Blizzard has never listened to fan criticism unless they were forced to due to mass subscription drops. I started playing in Feb of 05 and quit in 2nd tier of SL because no one (that paid attention to the lore) wanted Sylvanas to get a redemption arc. However, Blizzard did it. The story telling, the world quest diversity (lack thereof), the level squish into continuing the 10 level trend, poor PvE balancing, poor raid gear progression balancing, simpler raid boss mechanics all pushed me so far away from the game that I quit. I still love the game and what it stands for in my life but I can't ever go back to it because of how removed it is.

Sorry to go on a non-DST tangent I just am passionate about the world of Azeroth and it destroyed me the direction Blizzard took it. Dioniss aca.

[Gnosis]

On 6/10/2023 at 3:23 PM, Mysterious box said:

The problem I find is that the survival aspect of don't starve together is fairly shallow outside of seasons to make room for the creative aspect. That makes it far more accessible to newcomers and people who mainly just care about the design aspect but that means it's far from a balanced experience.

I question if you're actually making this statement in good faith or if you simply want to see the game become harder due to your own personal biases from having played it for so many hours. In my opinion, DST actually has a fairly steep learning curve, and even to be able to enjoy the creative aspects of the game comes at the cost of a serious initial investment into learning the game (a few hundred hours basically) unless you're intentionally turning off features of the game or using mods that reduce difficulty. Contrasting this fact with other games like Terraria and Minecraft, it's easy to see why your assessment of DST being "far from a balanced experience" in the sense of not being difficult enough, is a laughable assessment to anyone who doesn't have at least 1k hours in the game.

 

On 6/12/2023 at 12:21 PM, Fatkitty said:

You said "I had assured you that it does not" as if you were implying feedback sent to EA or Blizzard is taken seriously. You then went on to say that EA and Blizzard pretty much disregard community feedback (AKA "fall on deaf ears"). So which is it?

Sir, my first sentence was a response to that sentence of yours that ended with a question mark.

Frankly I question whether any of these replies to mine are written in good faith. It seems to me that you understood what my reply to your misunderstanding of my original reply meant, but are intentionally doubling down and backwards rationalizing your initial misunderstanding. If that's an incorrect assessment then forgive me, but that's how it appears.

 

On 6/10/2023 at 3:23 PM, Mysterious box said:

Personally I'm not a fan of it as it trivializes systems in place that are meant to be spotlighted for resource harvesting like followers and Woodie. If the reason bearager harvesting exists is to make log harvesting less tedious then that means the average speed of log harvesting need looked into rather than putting every other method out of a job.

I don't in fact think the devs intended Bearger to be a "tree harvester" nor do I think that using Bearger to harvest trees is actually overpowered as a method of resource gathering. It is not—the boss spawns once every year and quickly dies when faced with a few tree guards. The number of trees you actually get out of it is pretty laughable in comparison to what resource gathering oriented characters can get. If anything, the argument should be that the clearly unintended mass summoning of tree guards trivializes the boss itself, not the boss trivializing resource gathering.

There's an entirely separate conversation about characters in DST clearly and obviously being "not balanced" in the objective sense, but I'm not going to go into that. It appears to be an intentional dev choice, and whether that choice is actually good or not is up for anyone's interpretation.

[Mysterious box]

35 minutes ago, Gnosis said:

I question if you're actually making this statement in good faith or if you simply want to see the game become harder due to your own personal biases from having played it for so many hours. In my opinion, DST actually has a fairly steep learning curve, and even to be able to enjoy the creative aspects of the game comes at the cost of a serious initial investment into learning the game (a few hundred hours basically) unless you're intentionally turning off features of the game or using mods that reduce difficulty. Contrasting this fact with other games like Terraria and Minecraft, it's easy to see why your assessment of DST being "far from a balanced experience" in the sense of not being difficult enough, is a laughable assessment to anyone who doesn't have at least 1k hours in the game.

See the problem with this is the difficulty in dst comes from the fact the game hides mechanics and doesn't try to teach you which is why most players rely on the wiki or guide videos kiel has been taking steps to fix this however more recently. There's actually very little the player actually needs to do to survive because all content aside from afew mechanics are completely optional the game only really gets harder if you choose to make it harder and the game does very little to force you out of your comfort zone. It taking hundreds of hours to learn the game horrible exaggeration that I feel comes from the unrealistic assumption that no new player is looking anything up.

Your placing your personal experience as the experience of the average player I know people with less than 30 hours in the game who are very good at it and no that's not because they're really good at video games but because it's not as hard as you're making it out the game most of the games danger comes from things you couldn't have known were coming but once you do it's not hard at all the counter.

Also I think you're falling into the Trap that a lot of people seem to be these days that improving the survival aspect of the game somehow means making the game bone crushingly hard that's not what improving survival mechanics is.

1 hour ago, Gnosis said:

don't in fact think the devs intended Bearger to be a "tree harvester" nor do I think that using Bearger to harvest trees is actually overpowered as a method of resource gathering. It is not—the boss spawns once every year and quickly dies when faced with a few tree guards. The number of trees you actually get out of it is pretty laughable in comparison to what resource gathering oriented characters can get. If anything, the argument should be that the clearly unintended mass summoning of tree guards trivializes the boss itself, not the boss trivializing resource gathering.

There's an entirely separate conversation about characters in DST clearly and obviously being "not balanced" in the objective sense, but I'm not going to go into that. It appears to be an intentional dev choice, and whether that choice is actually good or not is up for anyone's interpretation.

See this is also based on how you personally do it. Players setup tree farms for him to cut down if you know what you're doing you'll get far more than a Year's worth and on top of that people keep him alive by killing the tree guards.

It's very reason the tree harvesting perks aren't valued past the first year absolutely nothing comes close.

Everyone has their own opinions on character balance and I don't really think any take doesn't have its merits and I don't think every character needs the same level of usefulness but where I say balance needs to come in is when perk overlap happens. If everyone does something different balancing them to each other doesn't matter much but sadly they don't there are various examples of this but the worst is Wickerbottom vs Maxwell a scenario where there is absolutely no benefit to using Wickerbottom over Maxwell but then again Maxwell is kinda a balance paradox anyway.

[Gnosis]

52 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

See the problem with this is the difficulty in dst comes from the fact the game hides mechanics and doesn't try to teach you which is why most players rely on the wiki or guide videos

This is frankly a problem in more games than you might think. It's actually fairly descriptive of games across the board, since the beginning of gaming even before wikis or the internet existed. Often games are not intentionally trying to "hide mechanics", but rather developers need to make an additional effort if they want their mechanics to be well explained by the game itself or transparent to begin with.

 

52 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

Your placing your personal experience as the experience of the average player I know people with less than 30 hours in the game who are very good at it and no that's not because they're really good at video games but because it's not as hard as you're making it out the game most of the games danger comes from things you couldn't have known were coming but once you do it's not hard at all the counter.

Show me these 30 hour players who can solo raid bosses. I simply don't think you're appreciating the experience of the game as a new player. Accusing me of assuming my experience as the average player's, when you yourself don't even remember being a new player to the game is not exactly a strong case.

 

52 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

Also I think you're falling into the Trap that a lot of people seem to be these days that improving the survival aspect of the game somehow means making the game bone crushingly hard that's not what improving survival mechanics is.

As I've already mentioned in my original argument, there is a trade-off between survival mechanics which by design make the game more "annoying" for lack of a better word, and quality of life mechanics that make more room for players to do their own creative stuff. My basic argument is that DST has enough mechanics that could be considered "annoying" to begin with.

 

52 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

See this is also based on how you personally do it. Players setup tree farms for him to cut down if you know what you're doing you'll get far more than a Year's worth and on top of that people keep him alive by killing the tree guards.

I did take this into consideration. From a perspective of purely surviving, a "year's worth" of wood is great, but if you're actively building structures even several "year's worth" of wood goes very quickly. So we're both "right" in this case, just speaking about it from different perspectives. Resource gathering oriented characters can get far more than a year's worth of any resource if you're using farming setups. The argument of Bearger debasing the value of resource gathering oriented characters largely extends only as far as purely playing the game to survive and only in the case of wood.

In some sense you're absolutely right in that Bearger debases a character like Woodie. Yet Maxwell debases Woodie on top of virtually every other character in the game and frankly I wonder why aren't we talking about that more often. Instead we're here arguing about a comment I originally made as a joke.

[inzecta]

Definitely think they could stand to take a step back and evaluate the state of the game. I honestly would prefer them to focus on tweaking the characters and past mechanics as well more technical improvements to things like the netcode. The refreshes might be "finished" for now but imo there are several characters that need to be looked at again. Winona is still basically a switch character. Willow is still (imo) underwhelming even after multiple passes. Woby, one of Walter's primary gimmicks, is beaten out by using it as a second chester and riding a beefalo instead. Wilson's rework was half-baked at best and the transmutation outshines literally every single other aspect of his changes.

Thinking about it some of the bosses desperately need a change too. Crab King is a rather infamous one especially considering he's required for progression. Malbatross too.

[Mysterious box]

19 minutes ago, Gnosis said:

Show me these 30 hour players who can solo raid bosses. I simply don't think you're appreciating the experience of the game as a new player. Accusing me of assuming my experience as the average player's, when you yourself don't even remember being a new player to the game is not exactly a strong case.

Trust me I do, contrary to popular belief I'm not someone who's been around since the beginning of the game. Yes I'm not new anymore but I'm not removed from my early experiences with the game which is why I bring up the artificial difficulty in the learning curve as the core in dst diffculty.

Also how is soloing content made for a group the standard for someone who understands the game that's like saying an MMO player who can't solo a raid boss is bad the game that's a ridiculous bar to set there and a completely unrealistic expectation for the average player. There's a very clear difference between how raid bosses are designed compared to other bosses.

1 hour ago, Gnosis said:

This is frankly a problem in more games than you might think. It's actually fairly descriptive of games across the board, since the beginning of gaming even before wikis or the internet existed. Often games are not intentionally trying to "hide mechanics", but rather developers need to make an additional effort if they want their mechanics to be well explained by the game itself or transparent to begin with.

It's really not in most modern well designed games.

In the past older games had this problem but it was due to design limitations and intentional artificial difficulty for example arcade games had ramped up difficulty and unfair design in order to take as many quarters as possible because it wasn't profitable for games to be easy because you put in less money.  Fast forward to home consoles and some of mentality from arcades were already ingrained into some designers and others watching followed their lead and not just diffculty either things like score and lives are also a byproduct of it.

But without getting too side tracked most games these days go to great lengths to explain what you need to do to survive or advance yes they don't tell you everything but they give you a base line to learn from and dst doesn't even do that. For example it was entirely possible for a player to never learn proper crockpot recipes before the recipe cards making Warly impossible to play without using a wiki and if you attemped to brute force it you would likely get nothing or negative value dishes in most cases before you learned a single useful dish.

1 hour ago, Gnosis said:

I did take this into consideration. From a perspective of purely surviving, a "year's worth" of wood is great, but if you're actively building structures a "year's worth" of wood goes very quickly. So we're both "right" in this case, just speaking about it from different perspectives. Resource gathering oriented characters can get far more than a year's worth of any resource if you're using farming setups. In short, the argument of Bearger debasing the value of resource gathering oriented characters only extends as far as purely playing the game to survive and only in the case of wood.

No this is you not understanding there's no cap on how much wood bearger can harvest me saying a years worth was a example of how much could generate in a matter of minutes. So long as you know what your doing he will always get you more wood than any alternatives and by a extreme long shot there's a reason he's called the best.

1 hour ago, Gnosis said:

As I've already mentioned in my original argument, there is a trade-off between survival mechanics which by design make the game more "annoying" for lack of a better word, and quality of life mechanics that make more room for players to do their own creative stuff. My basic argument is that DST has enough mechanics that could be considered "annoying" to begin with.

This is debatable on multiple fronts survival mechanics don't have to be annoying and in my personal opinion the reason a fair bit of players stop engaging with content or do go out of their way to seek out new content is it's not relevant to their survival there are plenty of ways to go about adding survival content.