[Poll] On Forum User Playtime and Skill Perceptions

[GetNerfedOn]

As always, feel free to vote and discuss in the comments!

[Maxil20]

This post made me go check which year Klaus was added so I could date my “proper” exploration of DST over DS and it was Scary to read he came out in 2016…

Anyways, seems like an interesting poll, curious to see what the responses will be. I personally consider myself to be an “impactical expert”: While I know a few people think I am completely insane pretty good at this game, I moreso enjoy making complete overkill setups most players will never realistically use, because I enjoy doing things players will never realistically do and seeing the merit of it. Its something that’s really kept me going ever since I saw people getting really far in DS back in the ROG/SW days, and I always wanted to see how far you could push those limits. It’s why I’m really happy DST has support for worlds that are old (my main world is now over 5 IRL years old at this point…).

 

 

[Auth]

i feel so old.

[GetNerfedOn]

Just now, Auth said:

i feel so old.

you and i both.

[Brotid01]

This post makes me feel old and kinda nostalgic hahaha... it's really been that long, isn't it?

This remind me the first time Bee Queen was introduced in my old days… or even younger days? I guess, when me and my old brother spend days talking about how to kill her and we end it up making a weird sort of labyrinth made by fences to distract the grumble bees or the first time we try to kill DF, when we saw the amount of Hp and complain how ridiculous was that hahaha.

My god the even the new reign trailers feels so old by now jeez.

And about the experience/ability right now I don’t think is related to how many hours you have play but how interested you’re to watch tutorials, guides and try te combat on private servers before trying the real pull.

[Gashzer]

Consider myself pretty skilled on pc but playing DST anew on switch has challenged me alot. All the muscle memory isnt there and adjusting to controller has been interesting. Been fun tho.

Rushing dfly as walter with log suits on pc klei public servers always did get me a pat on the back from people. Altho tbh i havnt been playing pc much at all for a long time.

[Gameplayer143]

Is rushing ruins and getting back to the surface close or while it is winter, after killing AG, Werepig and getting the stuff necessary for moon staff, considered "skilled". Thing is though  I see people also kill Dragonfly before going to ruins for gems and then return to the surface faster than it takes for me to rush ruins. There's also the manner my fastest with killing CC is like above 100 days, so while I have more practise with ruins rushing, I don't have as much practice rushing CC or AFW.

[Swiyss]

Idk where to put myself...

I was always a Wes enjoyer and never really cared about mods until like 2020 when I started watching chinese streams and modded my game a lot. Then somewhere in 2023 I went vanilla again and never looked back.

And I always gave my everything in the game since day 1 of playing original DS. The fact that I couldn't go past day 10 the first days of playing just sparked a fire inside of me and I fell in love with the challenge. I guess I always had a "beef" with the game in trying to prove it that I can win.

Maybe I can describe myself (and 2 of my best friends) somewhat like being able to do anything in the game, but only doing it from time to time. Basically a casual expert.

7 minutes ago, Gameplayer143 said:

Is rushing ruins and getting back to the surface close or while it is winter, after killing AG, Werepig and getting the stuff necessary for moon staff, considered "skilled". Thing is though  I see people also kill Dragonfly before going to ruins for gems and then return to the surface faster than it takes for me to rush ruins. There's also the manner my fastest with killing CC is like above 100 days, so while I have more practise with ruins rushing, I don't have as much practice rushing CC or AFW.

I would say that being good is surviving indefinitely and being "skilled" is like choosing what you wanna do in-game and doing it without failling.

Like executing a strat and not failling.

[Theukon-dos]

Hmmm. I feel like I'm in a bit of a weird spot.

On one hand, I am confident in my ability to deal with the vast majority of things the game can throw at me. I've defeated every raid boss in the game atleast once; either in a survival world or a test world; I've survived 300+ days, And I really only play with Uncompromising Mode these days, which as the name suggests, actively makes stuff harder.

On the other hand though, I'm actually pretty bad at getting into long-term worlds. ADHD is a b****h, let me tell you. And as far as rift content goes. I am actively opposed to it's existence and what it stands for thank you very much. So I have not engaged with it, and even if I ever get to AFW or Celestial Champion on a world, I don't want to engage with it. Maybe I'll do it once just to say I've done it. We'll see.

[Gashzer]

6 minutes ago, Gameplayer143 said:

Is rushing ruins and getting back to the surface close or while it is winter, after killing AG, Werepig and getting the stuff necessary for moon staff, considered "skilled". Thing is though  I see people also kill Dragonfly before going to ruins for gems and then return to the surface faster than it takes for me to rush ruins. There's also the manner my fastest with killing CC is like above 100 days, so while I have more practise with ruins rushing, I don't have as much practice rushing CC or AFW.

I think if you can solo dfly then you are skilled. She rewards only perfect kiting timing, unlike most other bosses which you can kite early with no punishment.

Rushing CC or AFW isnt so much skill as being able to handle tedious tasks like getting pearls pearl without hating life. I just cant make myself do her entire quest in one go.

[Frashaw27]

My skill level is quite odd as I've certainly mastered the basics of the game and if I the goal was just to inflate my days survived to absurd degrees, I could do it with relative simplty. On the other hand, I also consistently make relatively noobish mistakes decently often. Like not going into a boss fight/doing a task with food and so I usually start starving to death because I'm too lazy to get some food. I would consider myself an expert players, but I have admittedly haven't done much of the rift contents. Not because I don't want to, but rather I just stop playing on the world and thus never truly do stuff with it. I have defeated the lunar hound and deerclops both once with wigfrid and then never again. I also tend to not utilize advanced strategies for myself as I enjoy a more paced ot experience. I'm sure I could rush the ruins and then kill all the bosses and then subsist on Jelly beans and crab king meat while I start to build a base, but I'd much rather just do everything at a relaxed pace. I also don't employ busted strats the first time I fight a boss in a world like Dragonfly and Bee Queen as I find it much more rewarding to feel like I actually defeated the boss with my own merits instead of relying on some strat that removes 80% of the boss fight. All future fights are fair game though. I'd say it's different from casual as I do know these things, I just choose not to use them.

[GetNerfedOn]

30 minutes ago, Gameplayer143 said:

Is rushing ruins and getting back to the surface close or while it is winter, after killing AG, Werepig and getting the stuff necessary for moon staff, considered "skilled". Thing is though  I see people also kill Dragonfly before going to ruins for gems and then return to the surface faster than it takes for me to rush ruins. There's also the manner my fastest with killing CC is like above 100 days, so while I have more practise with ruins rushing, I don't have as much practice rushing CC or AFW.

I intentionally made the question open ended so you can define that for yourself especially in light of your own experience playing DST (cos that's something only you can gauge); while there are common themes to how players consider skill ultimately there isn't exactly something official and especially universally applicable

[GenomeSquirrel]

I estimated the year, while I believe I bought the game before Forge, Forge was probably when I started to play consistently

over 4000 hours in

3 Skill is contextless, based off 4, I picked "I do not consider myself skilled."

4 While casual is the closest to describing me, your wording belies how planned I am building whatever farm/structures suits my whims, time is scarce.

[YourWorstNightm]

I've been playing since 2017 and have around 10k hours, but I don't consider myself remotely close to skilled. 

[Guille6785]

For me personally I don't like to gauge skill by arbitrary goals like "kill 3 bosses before day 30" or "rush ruins before day 10" because at the end of the day these metrics don't really tell you anything about the player beyond that they probably just know how to look up youtube videos and read the wiki; I think there's an obvious massive difference if said player is just imitating what they saw in a playthrough vs. if they went out of their way to find every strategy they used on their own and/or their strategies require a high degree of execution to do consistently.

For this reason I personally like to gauge 4 different skills that apply to DST: Mechanical skill (which is largely only relevant to challenge runs), theoretical knowledge (simply knowing raw info about the game like health values and enemy AI), practical knowledge/execution (actually putting a strategy into effect in real gameplay) and theorycrafting (turning theoretical knowledge into practical knowledge, i.e. creating your own strategies). In addition to this I only really divide tiers of player skill based on overarching stages of game knowledge; basic/novice players still struggle to simply survive, intermediate players don't have issues with indefinite survival and instead dedicate their time towards optional goals like maintaing a long-term world or fighting bosses, and advanced players have significant mastery over all 4 skills which causes them to play the game in a much more analytical way (which often translates to challenge runs that push the limits of the game).

By my metric the overwhelming majority of players found in communites like the forums fall into the intermediate category, but how far along they are situated doesn't necessarily depend on completing specific goals; for example, a high intermediate player could be your standard boss rusher that kills most bosses in a year while not creating their own strategies or it could also be a person who doesn't kill bosses very fast but creates new strategies, farm designs, finds new tech, etc. Since both of these players have strong shortcomings, neither of them is advanced, but neither of them is a "bad" player and they could both be considered "skilled players" in their own way (in my view).

[The Starver]

I'm frustratingly bad at this game.

[NPCMaxwell]

22 minutes ago, The Starver said:

I'm frustratingly bad at this game.

Me too, I'm probably the worst, honestly. But that's probably because I have fun when dying so I don't care much about protecting myself. [Also funny enough I barely play DST despite owning it since earliest time that's because I went on a giant hiatus when the florid poster replaced the old stuff, meaning I didn't want to play for a LONG TIME because the Charlie theme used to annoy me.]

[The Starver]

1 hour ago, NPCMaxwell said:

I'm probably the worst, honestly.

I kind of doubt that. I play with a friend, and the 2 of us combined are still the worst at everything. Even simple things like Tallbirds and Spiders are very hard for us sometimes. Other times, we’re on top of things!

[Zima Blue]

I started playing november 2015, around when caves were first added to dst. I had a hard time learning how to play and when forge and gorge released I was on a hiatus because updates were kinda slow and I never really liked forge and gorge. I think I started playing again when Winona got her first character update and since then I've been playing a lot more, now I have about 2500 hours of playtime. I rated my game skill as "expert" because I've killed everything in the game besides Malbatross (I'm a huge sailing hater lol) and my playstyle is megabasing, so I usually my worlds last for thousands of days and I farm a lot of bosses. But as Guille metric above, I do fall on the intermediate player because most of my strategies were not created by me at all, they were tips I've learned here on the forum or social media and while I do know a fair amount about the game, I'm not as skilled as some people who rush the game because I play the game kinda slow, I don't rush anything except ancient guardian to get a walking cane in autumn and bee queen to get waxpaper. 

[mr.wilson.BR]

I started around 2015 and have over 6k hours recorded on steam, despite that i was a casual player who just enjoyed pub surfing for a lot of my dst career and just in general enjoyed seeing what people got up to, for that reason up until my 3k hour mark or so when i decided to learn the game more in depth that i become more mechanically competent in the game and spent the next 3k hours in a mixture of pub surfing and min maxing, from simple dumb standard stuff like rushing ruins gear, killing klaus as fast as possible upon joining an ongoing winter world to rushing late game bosses with some random blokes who happened to be competent or wanted a part in

I play the game fairly sparingly nowadays, usually either going back to pub surfing or trying some dumb new strategy i came up with from theory crafting and applying it to my games, i have done just about everything this game has to offer (with the exceptions of speedrunning because i don't have that kind of time to dedicate to the game anymore and base building for i am not a very creative soul when it comes to designing a pretty base) so i guess i'm pretty good at the game, but i still keep it casual since despite my vast knowledge and mechanical skill i have in this game, i will never fully be able to predict players and their shenanigans, and that is the best feature this game has to offer

[abrocator]

Forever intermediate.