Summer Wildfire Re-invented

[goatt]

Option 1. Heatless Summer Wildfire

Wildfire from smoldering in summer doesn't have heat and doesn't spread nearby. Each smoldering and fire will be a single event.

 

Option 2. Timed Wildfire.

All summer wildfires and their ignited fire have a same but finite timer. For example, when first fire starts, it will stop spreading after 30 seconds, so will its subsequent fires which share the same timer. Any wildfire in summer will be a timed event, rather than infinite event, and will stop by itself after a while.

 

Option 3. Finite Wildfire

Wildfire can only spread 5 times, for example. After 5 items or structures have ignited, the spread stops. That means each summer wildfire can only destroy finite amount of things.

 

None of the above should apply to man made fire. So griefing in summer is welcome.

In multiplyer, wildfire caused by other strangers get to destroy whatever you have built is frustrating and depressing. This mechanic should be made different from DS version, just like how fire mechanic is different in DST and DS.

[_zwb]

Make a boss called "wild fire"

[Mysterious box]

How about if instead we shrink the range from the player so it can't happen off screen while also giving the player a quote for when one is happening so it's hard to miss.

[Mike23Ua]

46 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

How about if instead we shrink the range from the player so it can't happen off screen while also giving the player a quote for when one is happening so it's hard to miss.

Alternatively I would prefer that it CAN happen off-screen, and any random location.. just like in real life, but maybe we can build some structures for Wildfire prevention.

Personally I want to set up a large tree canopy that shades my base then dig out a moat so if a sea of flames rolled across the forest it would hit a dead halt at my moat, yes sure there’s scaled flooring for this exact purpose.. BUT it wouldn’t be as fun as digging a moat full of water.

[Mysterious box]

17 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Alternatively I would prefer that it CAN happen off-screen, and any random location.. just like in real life, but maybe we can build some structures for Wildfire prevention.

No. Some things shouldn't be realistic.

[Jandri]

34 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Alternatively I would prefer that it CAN happen off-screen, and any random location.. just like in real life, but maybe we can build some structures for Wildfire prevention.

Personally I want to set up a large tree canopy that shades my base then dig out a moat so if a sea of flames rolled across the forest it would hit a dead halt at my moat, yes sure there’s scaled flooring for this exact purpose.. BUT it wouldn’t be as fun as digging a moat full of water.

I agree, the same goes for beeboxes producing honey without flowers or in winter

And few things stop you from surviving forever once you have a megabase, wildfires are one of the few threats to megabases (the plants disease was one too, i liked it)

But if the fire can spread offscreen, the world would need a way to recreate trees or anything that might have been burned

[goatt]

2 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

How about if instead we shrink the range from the player so it can't happen off screen while also giving the player a quote for when one is happening so it's hard to miss.

I know the word "balance" has stigma to many people, which it doesn't deserve. But the whole point of my post is that wildfire as currently is unfair for multi-player.

Should you take the consequences for someone's mistakes when sharing a base is inevitable in multiplayers.  

It's not about how to make it easier to handle for newer players, or to make the handling more intuitive. The wildfire will happen for sure. In DS, a burn base is acceptable. In DST, one person's mistake can ruin other 7 people's work in the past 1,000 days, and it's not even the fault of the other 7 people. Is that a fair mechanic?

No amount QoL will be enough to make wildfire justified. People will just turn it off because it is indeed unfair and tedious and stressful.

[Wonz]

Uncompromising mode handled it nicely. Only plants get set on fire.

[Mysterious box]

17 minutes ago, goatt said:

I know the word "balance" has stigma to many people, which it doesn't deserve. But the whole point of my post is that wildfire as currently is unfair for multi-player.

Should you take the consequences for someone's mistakes when sharing a base is inevitable in multiplayers.  

It's not about how to make it easier to handle for newer players, or to make the handling more intuitive. The wildfire will happen for sure. In DS, a burn base is acceptable. In DST, one person's mistake can ruin other 7 people's work in the past 1,000 days, and it's not even the fault of the other 7 people. Is that a fair mechanic?

No amount QoL will be enough to make wildfire justified. People will just turn it off because it is indeed unfair and tedious and stressful.

It's not really a case of balance at the end of the day don't starve together is both a multiplayer and a survival game meaning that while working together brings shared benefits we have to also accept that it equally brings shared consequences it's fair to accept that some might not want to deal with it that's what the settings are for.

I'd argue wild fires are well designed as they are the stress that comes from them mainly comes from the fact it's not properly handled with wild fires happening off screen without warning which is the only thing that needs fixed we have so many tools to deal with them at this point.

I get the idea of not liking it when others mess up for you but I feel like the players should be held accountable in those scenarios not the game. If you don't like the consequences of other screwing up you should limit who is allowed to interact or turn off the interactions all together the game shouldn't have to minimize the risks of survival considering it doesn't do the same for the advantage of having more people.

[goatt]

4 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

both a multiplayer and a survival game

Survival. So you log out of the game with a good base, log back in with a completely burnt base, a mistake made by a passer-by when you were offline. Does that sound like a survival game to you?

I'm very much talking about survival. I play a lot of pub game. I know I can have megabase just fine if I play single player. But survival in pub is severely punished by wildfire in an extremely unfair way, that is, once you log off, there is a chance you'll lose nearly everything in your base.

Overlooking wildfire's effects in pub limit players' legitimate freedom and creativity, and generally account for mistakes made by other people. I can play pub with wildfire on just fine. Because my base always have more than 5 ocean pillar trees in pub servers. But that's just my high-cost coping strategy for my countless PTSD experience in the past.

If game wants to use wildfire as a survival challenge, then the challenge needs to be modified to fit multiplayer for the reasons I mentioned above.

[somethin]

Man, imagine if we can grow giant trees on land. Imagine what kind of utopia and things we could achieve!

[DinsdaleP]

Are wildfires a real, actual problem for... well, anyone? Serious question, not trying to be sarcastic here, because I spend pretty much all my summers above-ground and never had even the slightest problem with wildfires.

I still carry a few water balloons or a luxury fan around for safety reasons, but I can recall one whole single instance of actually using them. A base can perfectly fit under a single flingomatic and you can essentially feed it trash you've got laying around. Add a mooncaller's staff, and summers are pretty much a second autumn from that point onward.

From my experience, wildfires seem to be a way overblown issue to be honest and not an actual danger.

[Nnumber3]

33 minutes ago, DinsdaleP said:

Are wildfires a real, actual problem for... well, anyone? Serious question, not trying to be sarcastic here, because I spend pretty much all my summers above-ground and never had even the slightest problem with wildfires.

I still carry a few water balloons or a luxury fan around for safety reasons, but I can recall one whole single instance of actually using them. A base can perfectly fit under a single flingomatic and you can essentially feed it trash you've got laying around. Add a mooncaller's staff, and summers are pretty much a second autumn from that point onward.

From my experience, wildfires seem to be a way overblown issue to be honest and not an actual danger.

Wildfires are not an issue for SOLO players, as ice staffs work wonders, but the issue is how other people can accidentally destroy a base, as people has said, and how they are unfriendly to creativity, I'm not talking mega Basers her, as a day 150 world its unrealistic to be limited to 1 circle. and the more people, the bigger the base is, and if they don't go to ruins, they may not have enough gears.

7 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Alternatively I would prefer that it CAN happen off-screen, and any random location.. just like in real life, but maybe we can build some structures for Wildfire prevention.

Personally I want to set up a large tree canopy that shades my base then dig out a moat so if a sea of flames rolled across the forest it would hit a dead halt at my moat, yes sure there’s scaled flooring for this exact purpose.. BUT it wouldn’t be as fun as digging a moat full of water.

This game(fictional) all about magic and science, don't think the game cares about realism because if there was, the constant would not exist. and that's how wildfires are right now: can happen offscreen and ice flingos are wildfire protection. for the other idea? the big tree already exists and how would digging out a moat be fun? or worth it? the idea of destroying  a tile for water is a bad idea as you can A: trap yourself in the middle B: Lock your base if you place it while you are out of base unless you have docks C: A Masters greifing tool. and  also it would be the same thing as a flingo but worse as it's forcing a base design to be a island castle type. and fires don't rage like that, unless someone started it. as just running away stops it from being on fire and trees should not be that close to your base anyway, and flingos and fire protection things like water balloons and luxury fan exist. and if it does not break water tiles then you would just be placing a bigger structure then the flingo with the same purpose, just use a flingo. So now we are in the same postion as we are in now. Btw, what happens if the flingo runs out of fuel of screen?  the base would just burn with no way to stop it if you don't notice it in time before there burnt?

 

6 hours ago, goatt said:

I know the word "balance" has stigma to many people, which it doesn't deserve. But the whole point of my post is that wildfire as currently is unfair for multi-player.

Should you take the consequences for someone's mistakes when sharing a base is inevitable in multiplayers.  

It's not about how to make it easier to handle for newer players, or to make the handling more intuitive. The wildfire will happen for sure. In DS, a burn base is acceptable. In DST, one person's mistake can ruin other 7 people's work in the past 1,000 days, and it's not even the fault of the other 7 people. Is that a fair mechanic?

No amount QoL will be enough to make wildfire justified. People will just turn it off because it is indeed unfair and tedious and stressful.

Hit the nail on the head, summer needs a rework as bad as willow, maybe even together as there about fire!  going to go brainstorm how to make it better your ideas are pretty good.

 

[goatt]

46 minutes ago, DinsdaleP said:

Are wildfires a real, actual problem for... well, anyone? Serious question, not trying to be sarcastic here

For countless times, some people log back online and ask, what happened to my base. Then we summoned admin to investigate. Sometimes, the victim is the admin himself. In some server, admin doesn't play and only moderate. So we had to ask someone to come to the game and ask for favor because we lost stuff to uncalled reasons.

No sane player would accept a burnt base when they log back into their game. People became angry, complain, grief, give in, give up, or go with flow, none of which is positive emotions, all because of things that happened when they were offline. People accepted it because it's the game they loved to play, not because this part of game experience is fair or positive. That's why they invested time to go to discord, summon admins and wait and see, that's why admin was willing to offer time and help to recovered what was lost.

This happened probably 5,6 years ago (I can't remember exactly time). And it happens today, when wildfire happened around the edge of canopy edge where every piece of flammable items were removed but a newbie mistake still happened. And same questions have been asked and investigated many times in between by many people I encountered.

I didn't know that some DS mechanics was modified to fit the theme of DST. But now I read that Klei admitted some of DS mechanics isn't good fit for DST, I want to bring attention to this severely depressing side effect of wildfire that doesn't create fair survival challenge, nor positive gaming experience.

[Antynomity]

1 hour ago, goatt said:

Survival. So you log out of the game with a good base, log back in with a completely burnt base, a mistake made by a passer-by when you were offline. Does that sound like a survival game to you?

In forum terms that is very much a survival mechanic! Why even ask? 

[goatt]

1 minute ago, Antynomity said:

In forum terms that is very much a survival mechanic! Why even ask? 

I don't understand.

[Nnumber3]

1 minute ago, goatt said:

I don't understand.

i think he means how "uncomp survival game" forum people like bulls**t base destruction as this game is supposed to be hard?

my best guess anyway

 

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Nnumber3 said:

i think he means how "uncomp survival game" forum people like bulls**t base destruction as this game is supposed to be hard?

my best guess anyway

 

No… it’s a staple part of the DS franchise it’s a weather season, it’s a thing you endure and it just happens..

like collect rings in sonic the hedgehog then bouncing off a spring only to land on a spike wall and have those rings scatter everywhere.

Like bouncing your head into a ? Mark block in Mario games and either getting coin sounds or power up mushrooms.

People don’t defend the mechanic because it’s supposed to be a “Omg pull my hair out clinch my butt cheeks together tight scream out in frustration uncompromising survival game.”

People defend the Mechanic because it’s a core part of DS.

And what scares me, and I mean honestly scares me… is that if enough people complain about it being a not so good mechanic, Klei May at any moment just outright remove it because…

See Disease.

[_zwb]

4 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

See Disease.

Disease is a bad mechanics that have no real solutions, all you can do is digging up infected plants and watch your plants fall one by one until there's none. You can't even prevent it from happening, it's just bad.

6 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

People defend the Mechanic because it’s a core part of DS.

Being a core part of DS doesn't mean it's a well designed game mechanic, wildfire is still bad and people often just completely avoid it.

[Ohan]

Wildfires fix:

No offscreen fires, smokey overlay (SW volcano warning) + survivor quote when it occurs. 

Something to drill holes in the continent for fig tree ponds. 

Aaaaaaand done. 

[Capybara007]

Klei forumites that dont play dst hate to hear it, but griefing mechanics that difficult megabasing are not good for the game

[Mysterious box]

8 hours ago, goatt said:

Survival. So you log out of the game with a good base, log back in with a completely burnt base, a mistake made by a passer-by when you were offline. Does that sound like a survival game to you?

I'm very much talking about survival. I play a lot of pub game. I know I can have megabase just fine if I play single player. But survival in pub is severely punished by wildfire in an extremely unfair way, that is, once you log off, there is a chance you'll lose nearly everything in your base.

Overlooking wildfire's effects in pub limit players' legitimate freedom and creativity, and generally account for mistakes made by other people. I can play pub with wildfire on just fine. Because my base always have more than 5 ocean pillar trees in pub servers. But that's just my high-cost coping strategy for my countless PTSD experience in the past.

If game wants to use wildfire as a survival challenge, then the challenge needs to be modified to fit multiplayer for the reasons I mentioned above.

I mean if your server is up when your not around that's an additional risk your taking what's stopping someone from burning it all to the ground when your not around with a torch the game shouldn't be balanced around that.

As for pubs why should the entire game be balanced around pubs there's no way to prevent things from going wrong with such a massive variable. If we do why stop there why don't we go ahead and approve the idea of Kiel monitoring severs and banning griefers as well that came from people who wanted the game to cater to pubs too with the very same justifications.

Edit: Honestly reading through I'm beginning to understand what "multiplayer survival" means to the some forumites it means something that doesn't effect the world in any meaningful way and only effects the player themselves with no accountability beyond death truely the survival game of all times.

[goatt]

4 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

As for pubs why should the entire game be balanced around pubs there's no way to prevent things from going wrong with such a massive variable.

Pubs includes servers with random people, with online friends and with real life friends. In all of those cases, some of us is new players, and their clumsy mistakes can easily ruin our collective experience in multiplayer. In the case of friends, rollback is not fun cuz you have to re-do your day because of their mistakes.

Saying "game be balanced around pubs" is a bad point because I can offer the opposite and say you are holding game hostage and requesting it to be balanced around single-player while it's a DS together.

 

4 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

I mean if your server is up when your not around that's an additional risk your taking what's stopping someone from burning it all to the ground when your not around with a torch the game shouldn't be balanced around that.

I said in my op that "griefing in summer is welcome".

But your limiting griefer's fire sounds like a good solution and I'd vote for it without carefully considering all aspects.

 

4 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

Honestly reading through I'm beginning to understand what "multiplayer survival" means to the some forumites it means something that doesn't effect the world in any meaningful way and only effects the player themselves with no accountability beyond death truely the survival game of all times.

I'm not really sure if I understand this sentence. But I think it was dismissive? I think you are being dismissive(?) because you don't have the frustration experience. Like if you love spicy food, you can't speak for people who can't eat spicy food in a dismissive way, for example calling them boring. My (our) frustrating experience is real and very common due to game's flawed design around multiplayer.

 

4 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

If we do why stop there why don't we go ahead and approve the idea of Kiel monitoring severs and banning griefers as well that came from people who wanted the game to cater to pubs too with the very same justifications.

Interestingly, that would be awesome for the game community. That's why many servers have volunteers to do that jobs, and those servers generally have much better experience after banning frequent griefers. Why doesn't Klei do it? I don't know. But I can think of many reasons. But this argument is another bad one.

I think game design and player experience is two good perspective to talk about in this kind of topic. But you don't seem to argument from them. I think you are saying that because the game is good for you in single-player DST, the game must be fine and other people have to take their problems as part of the survival challenge, which is unfair because those frustrating experience (including griefer and wildfire) is not challenging intended by the game. 

[Cheggf]

This isn't really "re-inventing wildfires", it's just keeping them exactly how they are but reducing how many things get burned. I think they should actually be re-invented, they aren't a problem at all, they don't hinder your ability to survive, they're easy to deal with. All they do is randomly destroy off-screen possibly unrenewable resources that you unluckily passed by at the wrong time and hinder creativity by forcing you to either spam ugly flingos everywhere or build exclusively in oasis/caves.

[Mysterious box]

2 hours ago, goatt said:

I think you are saying that because the game is good for you in single-player DST, the game must be fine and other people have to take their problems as part of the survival challenge, which is unfair because those frustrating experience (including griefer and wildfire) is not challenging intended by the game. 

Man I'd be rich right now if people had to pay money for everytime they assumed my playstyle based purely on the need to invalidate my arguments.

 

2 hours ago, goatt said:

Pubs includes servers with random people, with online friends and with real life friends. In all of those cases, some of us is new players, and their clumsy mistakes can easily ruin our collective experience in multiplayer. In the case of friends, rollback is not fun cuz you have to re-do your day because of their mistakes.

Saying "game be balanced around pubs" is a bad point because I can offer the opposite and say you are holding game hostage and requesting it to be balanced around single-player while it's a DS together.

I'm aware what pubs entails I actively play in them and I'm not holding it to single player don't starve standards what's happening is you trying to gloss over what working in a group means it means you share achievements and failures I don't support the idea of removing only the failure aspect because people don't want to teach and accept failure in games. If we're removing the possibility of failure then why even pretend it's still a survival game? Your saying it's limiting creativity but that's what happens when you join a group your individual creative ideas are limited by other people this is just a basic fact.

But hey why stop there why don't we remove fire hounds, all the season bosses, lightning and anything else that could interfere with our creativity. After all we shouldn't be expected to have any level of accountability as a team nor accept any potential consequences for playing with less experienced survivors.

2 hours ago, goatt said:

Interestingly, that would be awesome for the game community. That's why many servers have volunteers to do that jobs, and those servers generally have much better experience after banning frequent griefers. Why doesn't Klei do it? I don't know. But I can think of many reasons. But this argument is another bad one.

The conversation would probably go something like this:

Players: so how about monitoring griefers so as to improve our play experience.

Kiel: okay but we're going to have to start making our play experience far more monetized to pay for these new staff to do this monitoring.

Players: Wait what!?! Why can't you do it for free!?

 

The only thing I'd be on board with as far as the wildfire situation goes would be giving a grace period on them spawning on newly joined players.