Goodbye

[Scrimbles]

I'm leaving the forums permanently. Probably something most of you don't care about, and maybe some of you actively root for.

It has become abundantly clear Klei has zero interest in trying to keep the part of their community interested in the "Uncompromising Wilderness Survival" aspect of their game, not a single time in the last 6~ years have Klei done an update focusing on difficulty + survival. The closest we ever got was disease, which was unfinished and eventually deleted from the base experience. Even the Reap What You Sew update managed to make farms way too easy to maintain and unbalanced the game.

Instead, Klei have been focusing on removing threats, repeatedly buffing every character to make them better, and adding more and more optional 'challenges' that more amount to boss rushes or minor annoyances. And then going on to say its not power creep, by then defining exactly how they were power creeping the game, by making the game easier and adding optional 'challenges'.

It is ridiculous looking back at my old posts and seeing how long it took for me to get the hint, I can have a post about Wickerbottom's refresh stuck on the front page for two weeks that gathers a bunch of support about how disappointing it was, and then get radio silence from Klei. Compared to back in the day where their devs would actively participate in conversations, members like SethR who had left the company long ago at this point.

I expect the typical "who cares" responses in the comments, and that's great, go ahead, I know the reaction to this is going to be a lot of "who are you" and "why should we care" and "why should anyone listen to you", and you know what? You're right. Klei has fully abandoned people in my side of the fan base many years ago, they do not care.

Don't Starve is not for people who used to play it, it is for the people who jumped on after the continuous casualization of the series. I've been on these forums since 2014, and since 2018 I have been near constantly disappointed in everything Klei has done. My hopes were briefly revitalized with the creation of Hamlet, only for that to be left in a careless, broken, and unfinished state because Klei devs stopped caring, giving it out for free because they knew they had failed.

@JoeW, or whoever, please delete my account. I cannot find an option to do so myself, and I do not wish to have this account anymore. I don't want anyone contacting me. I am incredibly disappointed, I have no love for Don't Starve anymore, and hardly any for Klei.

This is just one last vent of my frustration. It's all I ever come here for anyways.

[lowercase skye]

I respect this decision a lot and I wish you the best, especially with any future creative projects you pursue. It takes a lot of maturity to identify and accept that something you used to love has lost the magic it previously held, and choose to move on for your own sake.

[Primalflower]

It takes some maturity to understand that you're not enjoying something or someplace and make the conscious decision to move away from it. If you visit the forums once more to see the replies to this post, my only two thought aside from that are: try vintage story. from my experience with it, i think it would genuinely be up your alley and a good time for you. stay safe

[Mike23Ua]

Don’t Starve Together has some weird and questionable design, at times… it just gets easier (like skill trees & reworks) but at other times.. It gets Harder-

Such as adding Varglets to the game that endlessly respawn hounds around it, or when Spider Queens got their lovely little buff with healing spiders.

Regardless, I shall respect your decision to leave. We knew ye well.

[Valase]

Farewell dear!

And as always, it is good to take some time of the internet(social medias in general), as it does take quite a strain into ones mental wellbeing.

[TheNugget]

This decision must have been hard for you and I wish you all the best.

Also Xara hello pls play isaac with me 

[dois raios]

It is okay to leave any time, sometimes we change along the way, and it is no shame to admit it.

Stay safe.

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, Scrimbles said:

Don't Starve is not for people who used to play it, it is for the people who jumped on after the continuous casualization of the series.

100%. Every recent update has shown that they're more interested in trying to make a poor facsimile of other games, instead of being their own. Why would I play a poor facsimile when I can just go play those other games? The skill trees showing that they don't really care about actually updating the game and just want to keep buffing the characters forever was really the turning point for me losing interest in the game.

[NoodlemanNed]

i really enjoy how the new updates give me a wider variety of ways to challenge myself within the game i have loved for years

[Waoling]

Goodbye, while I will miss you, I think it's for the best that you leave the Forum, why stay for a thing you hate with no sign of becoming something you like? 

[MondayNight]

Make your own game, OP. Not mods for a series you seemingly ended up heavily disliking. I reckon over years since you're part of DS/T modding community you got a lot of experience both with programming .LUA, and with rallying to "customer" preferences/feedback. Bring to life a personal gaming project, with your own sensibilities in all its aspects, based on your modding time. And get recognition for your efforts in monetary format too, since words of praise over the webs don't keep "a happy, full stomach". Being successful on personal & professional level while maintaining your (hard)core philosophy intact will be the best proof (to KLei as well) that what you advocated for works. Good luck in your future endeavors!

[JustAFlower]

Honestly, I am not at all on your side. But I respect your decision, farewell darling.

[Ridley]

Goodbye, but if you ever change your mind, welcome back. 

[Yuuko]

Uncomp mod sucks.  Combat RPG DST sucks.

What DST is really lacking is emergent gameplay focused design.  Everything is slot A and tab B now, but uncomp was no different.

[Frosty_Mentos]

I don't think you can delete your account without messing up your Klei ID I'll assume. It's kinda tied into?

I won't lie DST hasn't been really increasing in difficulty much since forever. Most of it was always content that you gotta discover on your own to find and fight it. For new players it could be a bit of a more magical experience and with the scrapbook they can actually keep track of everything that's going on ingame for once, more or less.

I'll say DST base game has been improving greatly both the lack of needing a wiki and generally having a lot more options and solutions to deal with many issues or update old ones like farms to actually do something. Renewability of resources made many things ingame grow back, giving near infinite resource of all things like shrooms, food and so on maybe breaking the old game "balance" in the process that imo made the game a whole lot more different than 'what you have is what you'll have forever or never'.

Klei been generous towards base builders, boss rushers, new players, old characters to feel all new and interesting again to try playing each one and now they're working on rift stuff which is still a big wip and a question mark where they'll end up going with. I think many years ended up adding some bit of new content and working on the old to make it new again to feel like a different more lax experience overall in some way.

In the end it'll have to a question - how do you make a base game into a uncompromising experience again? Well... I won't lie, balancing around that is a real difficulty in imagining it all. It would need to update old things like pigs and hounds in some manner, adding nature's renewal a lot more visible like how spiders spread and make new nests on occasion. Bosses don't really need much of a touch up unless some world events to trigger like how rifts zombifies creatures, but some forces to trigger that "HMM you are advancing real fast here, we should keep that a little in check" and maybe create new creatures or have existing ones to have some extra abilities or skill learned.

What I've learned over the many years that DS/T isn't an evolving world or evolving game without player's influence. Everything usually stays where they are unless some specific trigger is set. Partially, it likely keeps the world in check for not lagging like how singleplayer had issues with off screen creatures making moves, but makes the issue that nothing will evolve till the players meddle with it. Gotta take account that the game is now on Switch and been on consoles for a while, they want to keep things functional on those sides too without breaking too much of the game till it's unplayable. Not sure how much Switch can handle of the game right now or in the future but I don't think I'd be able to build a big pretty base without making it into a portable grill.

I'll make my argument that Uncompromising mode isn't exactly a perfectly balanced or great experience from my end. I've tried multiple times and every time I tried to use the game mechanics that I learned from base game or uncomp eventually gets spat on at my face or nerfed into oblivion because 'noh, you can't do that'. Uncomp tries too hard to make the game into an RPG experience, which the game itself never was in those terms and never should have been. If making it into that, then mixing of the old game mechanics and putting all these things in together to mash them without cooking won't exactly make you perfectly balanced mashed potato experience, it's mostly raw and old rotten concepts put together making it eventually unappealing and same for a fair bit of the game's audience. There's punishment upon punishment upon punishment when you try doing things, and you gotta juggle between survival, base building and adventuring to make everything work it's like throwing a wrench in it all by scaling difficulty to every creature and boss from the start so you would think twice if you wanna spend a season fighting something or not for minimal progress. While that's that, also comes the seasonal boss raids to mess you up, the old DS mechanic of them just inviting themselves in for no good reason. It never was a favorite mechanic but you had partially no choice if you want those resources they drop. Then again, I prolly never would want anything they drop since it's only supplementary to the usual survival than anything. While uncomp adds a special item to each of those bosses unfortunately it locks away behind even higher difficulty setting found in the world. In the end the mode only scales in difficulty and doesn't really try rewarding you more besides punishing you harder if you want something slightly more powerful to hold.

While uncomp has many other concepts like pied piper with the rats, new shadow entities, the little things in nature that makes an old player and new a little bit more aware that the danger is close and you have to use your general thinking and skills to either avoid or go forward with proper equipment, everything else feels unnecessarily like the game is a 24/7 boss fighting game. Which it isn't, it's base idea is survival. Uncompromising is the travel and exploration you do to find those challenges and enemies to fight for the resources they drop or guard for. I think there's good stuff in there but it's mixed in with all the bads and I used to be a fan of the mod earlier seeing it as a concept that the game's nature will be updated and new obstacles I'd need to face to reach the goodies or casual survival would have set chores to keep the base functional. But when last time I played it overwhelmed me even for 8k hours sunk into the game I couldn't handle it all at once at all times to be aware that these things will come after me either way. 8 mins for a day isn't a lot of time, there's only so much time for a breather.

In the end, I don't know if you'll read this or will care, but I don't see you as anything bad, Scrimbles. You've waited for so long for the game to be this 'hardcore survival experience' but it's in the end stayed the same-ish with more supplementary content built up overtime to not meet those expectations. I believe when Through The Ages was introduced for a concept it was what Klei initially planned for that, but they've taken a different route entirely. What I seen another comment said - make your own game. You got the coding, you got the artists nearby likely to contact and try doing things you might find fun or interesting to try making. You could make that survival rpg uncomp experience of your own and experiment with that. Or better yet, make a new world scenario like I've seen with some other teaser or two doing something drastically different world gen wise overall. I personally think it would be very cool to see that happen.

[Szczuku]

Dang, that sucks. I've always felt like you were one of the few forumites that felt the same way I do about this franchise and were willing to write it down and share with everyone.

Frankly speaking, I get you; outside of rose-tinted memories of playing vanilla singleplayer whan I was like 12, the happiest I've been with ds/t was during Forge/Gorge and when I was play-testing Hamlet. And what happened to both of these? They ended up being abandoned and forgotten by Klei.

God just writing about that made me remember how excited I was for dst when the devs did the big cosmetic rework and we got background portraits, profile icons and vignettes; all the lore and world-building that their descriptions provided. Coupled with Forge's cinematic and Pugna's lines it genuinely felt like the dst lore was going somewhere, I was so excited.

Nowadays the lore... it just sucks, like honestly. I know that the comments of every animated trailer are always like "Ohh the lore" "The lore" "Klei is giving us so much lore!" but like... what is that lore? It's been over a year since Charlie recruited Maxwell and we got nothing from that; shall we wait till his skill tree drops to find out the big lore is that Charlie is the reason for his tree's perks? Not to mention just how cliche the constant "Wagstaff/Charlie is doing something mysterious" is getting

And the gameplay. I understand, it's obvious that the big reason for 'uncompromising survival' was the lack of one's knowledge. The moment I found out (through a tutorial, obviously) how to farm Pigman and Bunnyman was basically the moment the 'uncompromising' shattered for me. But look at this year's content; the roadmap said we'd get 'something for veterans' (not exact quote) and what did we end up getting? Half baked mechanics and band-aids. People wanted the game to not be so static, Klei. We wanted there to be stuff that makes it so that this in-game year is different from the previous one. Changes to seasons, random events, new mechanics. Instead we are getting raid bosses and environmental threats with a single solution.

And the skill trees and powercreep, oh how I hate them. Giving every character a combat ability, making them shred pre-rift content, rewarding players for nothing.

I understand you and wish you the best of luck.

Goodbye Scrimbles.

[BezKa]

Oh, how I understand you. I wish I was strong enough to do the same, but I was always a hopeful idiot.

See you.

[Retepeter]

bye, im sure the 5 people that enjoy making football helmets, hambats and pierogi all the time, doing the same repetetive things over again and killing repetetive bosses with unfair game mechanics will really miss you and your unchanging, outdated views on the game

[Keigo]

Most of veterans probably will never have the same experience in survival as they used to... We just know to much lol but i see a lot of new players dying to hunger, cold, night so i think the game is just as hard. 

 

You could say skill trees make the game easier but thats because we already know how to take advantage of it, they even require to beat 2 of the endgame boss. 

[Russian_Philin]

At first I didn't want to write anything about this topic, but still something fluttered in my soul from these words. 

Time does not stand still. Everything is constantly changing in this world. And such a thing as a game and the company that developed it has naturally changed too. The old people responsible for this have retired and are overseeing the project, doing other gaming experiences and things, now other people are doing DST. It is important to understand this. 

The old experience that the single-player game gave us cannot be returned. Alas, unfortunately, this is the case. The game is developing in a different direction, undoubtedly. Some people like it, some don't. And this is completely normal. It will not be possible to please everyone. I'll be honest, I hated a thing like the ocean with all my heart when it first came out. And now the ocean is also an unloved thing in the game for me, but I have changed my attitude towards it. I stopped checking how it was before, I began to consider all these innovations as an experiment, a desire to bring something of my own into the game. In my opinion, DST has always been about this. An experiment that has no definite end. The result can be either good or disgusting. It's just a fact.

What do I want to say with all this? Change, perception and awareness. Everything is not the same as it was before, everything will be different. Everything that is happening with the game now is not necessarily bad, but, in turn, it is not good. It just exists, comes from what the developers have in their hands.

In any case, I respect any opinion, especially any choice of an individual. I can only wish you all the best. You may want to come back here sometime.

[Maxposting]

good luck with whatever you pursue next

[Uedo]

Bye Scrimbles! To be honest; I agree somewhat - I used to feel that Klei were good with community engagement and feedback but they're only really looking for bug reporting and optimisation suggestions (by this i mean more smoothing out newly released content, mainly to not completely disappoint their playerbase).

The forums are mainly places to/be ragebait(ed), people to give their eternal opinions and to give a false impression of community engagement from the dev team. Truthfully it's argueable that the forum experience has been a really negative place for a long time - the discord alone will give you a thousand and one stories about a certain someone who almost purposefully treats their community with distain and contempt which truthfully has led to a lot of old time forum members from even posting anymore. 
Imo the forums should just be closed and steam discussions used, the game should finish up whatever story beats it has planned and then updates should be completed internally in private with actually play-testers who understand the flow of their own game. TL;DR - Prepare future updates in private, internal Q&A (hire people if the devs don't play at a high level, you should balance a game/content around the two extremes of skill/knowledge - the dev team are known for their interesting choices when showing content, Q&A it against them and hire/invite some of the speedrunners to Q&A too), release, spend some time smoothing out the update, consider it complete. Repeat cycle. 

Don't starve has been my 'ooo new content' game for a long time now; whereby I see new content, start a new run - get up to the new stuff, play with it, convince myself I wanna make a pretty large base and then slowly login less and less until a new beta drops. 

I think we all need to stop metaphorically putting all our eggs into one basket and just accept that most of our ideas or wants for the game are not going to happen - They've demonstrated time and time again that 'It'll make sense later', 'we're doing this as it will allow us to deliver content in a better, more clear way', 'we'll have a clearer picture to show you very soon' are just things that are said, we've all said things like this when we're under pressure and i'm certain we've all had experiences where we weren't telling the truth because we truly hoped that if we just keep everyone happy for the time being eventually it'll work out in the end. It doesn't seem to work out in the end though here, and it hasn't, quite a few times. Perhaps it's no longer the fault of Klei, but us, for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I'll still play from time-to-time but for a lot of people I think the train came off the track a while ago and now people would like to get off.

 

[Mr Giggio]

Its the drama over an idea that you think the game should be when u not part of the devs in the first place that baffles me.

"Its not the way I want, Im leaving and making it public. "

[Hyuyu]

Take care! 

[Jakepeng99]

12 hours ago, Scrimbles said:

Klei done an update focusing on difficulty + survival

There was actually one, i forgot the name but the update which added sharks, and ocean shadow monsters along with davy jones.

There was also the moon quay which added the pirate raids which make you leave the game as soon as you hear their call.

 

However yes i would like more survival updates. I feel like they can tie into atmosphere.