On Reviled Cheese and Player Freedom

[DegenerateFurry]

Throughout my time on this forum, and especially recently, I've noticed something: large portions of the community have a very negative view of players making use of game mechanics in creative, unintended, beneficial ways. We see, in other games like Minecraft, a very different attitude from the community: redstoners who make automated farms for everything in the game are treated the same as any other players, or they're even admired for the amount of game knowledge they have (because making farms in games requires knowing how the game works, whether that's from research online or from personal experience). In both games, it's possible to make a farm that abuses mob pathfinding mechanics. In Minecraft, that's just seen as an everyday thing and accepted. 

In DST, however, there are people who think those farms need to be "patched" out of existence, as if their existence is somehow detrimental to the playerbase as a whole despite being completely up to you to make. These people insist that the existence of such useful mechanics will somehow "force" everyone to use them. Allow me to attempt to poke a few holes in that worldview, starting off with something simple.

The above image is a farm that abuses mob pathfinding. The pigmen come out of their homes, try to get to the rot because they're hungry, but get stuck because they ignore walls. This gives the player pigmen contained, pigmen they can convert to werepigs at a moment's notice and whenever they like. It can also be scaled up to allow for more houses, with the only limit to that upscaling being the food detection range of pigmen (which'd allow for far more werepigs than even the hungriest Warly could ask for). 

But this kind of farm is one you see fairly often in servers. It's very commonly used, isn't it? Should something like that be patched out? The logic of some users would dictate that it should be, but all removing this simple farm would do is make people have to wait until day to convert pigmen to werepigs. Keeping it in lets people spend less time in their base since they don't have to wait around for it to be daytime whenever they want a fresh ham bat, so it's purely positive to have it as an option. From a game design standpoint, removing it would be a bad move because it'd just inconvenience the playerbase while bringing no benefit. This is, however, a form of semi-automated farm, like you often see in Minecraft: it makes the game more convenient in exchange for the player putting in some effort to set it up.

Let's look at another one. Excuse the hasty setup for demonstration purposes, but this one, like the pigman farm, uses bait and abuses mob pathfinding to make the farm work. While walking towards a piece of monster meat, the spiders try to avoid the walls by pathfinding through the statues, which obstruct them. Then I, playing Wormwood, use a walking cane (or an ocean fishing rod - any indestructible held item works, and less damage is better) to attack a punching bag that I've equipped with a bramble husk. This procs the husk's effect, doing damage to the spiders clustered into the range of the husk. It lets me farm a virtually unlimited amount of spiders as Wormwood - I just have to replace the husks. If I add bramble traps while I'm blooming, the farm becomes both costlier to run and way faster.

This is not, however, game-breaking by any means! Other characters - Willow, Winona, and especially Wendy come to mind - can farm an unlimited number of spiders far more efficiently and for much cheaper, and some of them (Wendy) with basically zero set-up. Does the simple fact that the farm takes advantage of mobs not pathing around statues and statues being indestructible justify the removal of this Wormwood-specific farm? I would say no - in exchange for a bunch of resource and time investment, it makes me able to do Wendy's job part-time without having to play Wendy, and there's no harm in that.

Given that I've only seen one other player than myself make and use this farm, I'd say it's a pretty good example of the fact that farms like this existing doesn't necessitate their use.

Let's ask another question.

 

What, functionally, is the difference between encircling all of Dragonfly's ponds with walls to contain the lavae or doing the normal method, where you use a lava pond to make them get stuck? The only difference is that it's easier to do the latter before you first kill Dragonfly. It's not impossible, though - with a determined Wickerbottom who has enough Sleepytime Stories books and someone who can place walls quickly, you could manage it. You could do the same with the help of a Wormwood who has the right perks and a large quantity of moon shrooms. 
Most importantly, it lets players fight Dragonfly in a way they find more fun and manageable. Dragonfly has a trickier kiting pattern than most mobs/bosses in this game since it'll follow you if you run too early, and people find mastering that pattern fun - having to deal with the lavae, though? People seem to prefer to avoid that, and the lava pond wall method lets them do so. 
Fighting Dragonfly without walls is still an option for people who like it, though! That's the compromise that should exist: we give people options.

I'll finish out my examples for now with a final one: Klaus. He used to be blocked by his own stash, which allowed Wanda players to kill him without him being able to do much about it. This I actually agree with the patching of. The reason? Simple: it was a flaw in the fight itself. Klaus always stays relatively near his stash, so it's inevitable that a player will find out that he can get stuck on it, and then kiting him around it comes naturally. You don't have to go out of your way to set it up, you don't have to do anything special - you just walk so that the stash is between yourself and Klaus and bam, he can't leap at you. Klei was right to fix that, especially since Klaus isn't so punishing of a boss to fight solo that people find him frustrating or overwhelming.

And here I am, fighting Klaus as Wormwood and using moon caps to keep him from ever being able to cast a single spell. This makes the fight a lot simpler - as long as I keep them asleep (which'd be my main focus if I wasn't fighting solo), he can't cast, so he just attacks, and all I have to worry about is dodging and keeping him from getting far enough from his deer to enrage. This game is a survival sandbox with combat in it, and the devs clearly want players to get creative with that combat. Otherwise, why would they add something that lets you do stuff like this? 

As such, I think we need to reconsider our collective stance against "cheese". The only bad "cheese" is the kind that you don't really have to go out of your way to do, like the Klaus stash cheese or the old Ancient Guardian pillar cheese. Crafting a hundred knight statues and farming the Shadow Pieces on a boat, though? No normal player is ever going to do that by mistake. If you do that, you know what you're doing, and if you don't, you'll probably screw it up and get deleted by all those Shadow Knights. Why not let the farmers farm if they please? It doesn't stop those who'd rather not farm from doing things the normal way, after all. There's room enough in this non-competitive survival sandbox game for people to play it differently. 

Also, the lure plant cheese for Fuelweaver shouldn't have ever been patched for the same reason - you're not gonna put a lure plant in the specific spot you need to for that to work, then lead Fuelweaver behind it and escape so you can kill him from out of the arena unless you know what you're doing, so it doesn't affect anyone's enjoyment of the fight except the people who like doing it the "cheese" way. 

[Gashzer]

See DST is a much more beautiful and alive world compared to Minecraft.

The downside to this beauty is that when people use the pig trap or other pathfinding bugs it looks 1000% more janky and ruins the aesthetic of the game and makes the game look like a cheap buggy indie game.

Using these bugs aren't the worst thing.  It's the fact that these bugs are missed opportunities for klei to update the game to legitimize them.

Imagine doing the pig trap but instead of the pigs walking stupidly into the wall 24/7, the pigs stop to sniff at the wall then proceed to jump to try an see what's on the other side, maybe they then have convos with each other about food and how they cant reach it. There is wasted potential here for building immersion.

Its like Klei let bugs stay as bad QOL for features they should expand and update.

This is why I'm against bugs and push for them to get patched. Not because I want to ruin others fun but so klei update old outdated mechanics for DST to become even more fun.

[Bumber64]

1 hour ago, DegenerateFurry said:

We see, in other games like Minecraft, a very different attitude from the community: redstoners who make automated farms for everything in the game are treated the same as any other players, or they're even admired for the amount of game knowledge they have (because making farms in games requires knowing how the game works, whether that's from research online or from personal experience). In both games, it's possible to make a farm that abuses mob pathfinding mechanics. In Minecraft, that's just seen as an everyday thing and accepted.

Mobs were changed way back to not drop rare loot or xp unless killed directly by the player or tamed wolves. This was a compromise on the OP nature of "mob grinders" that allowed you to AFK for levels. I'm not sure of the community's sentiment of TNT dupers, since those are relatively new and I haven't kept up. They have the potential to be extremely destructive (flying piston bombers), and Mojang might patch them at some point.

Minecraft also isn't touted as "uncompromising survival". It was a creative building game with survival elements tacked on.

[Cruvimaster]

The fact that Klei is an indie company does not mean that it has to be a mediocre developer when it keeps a game on the market for more than 10 years and full of exploits.

And Klei has already made it clear that it does not like cheating.

And we can count on our fingers about 5 or 6 players who defend cheeses. It's always the same ones.

[HellHeater]

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

See DST is a much more beautiful and alive world compared to Minecraft. 

Subjective, I do agree with it.

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

The downside to this beauty is that when people use the pig trap or other pathfinding bugs it looks 1000% more janky and ruins the aesthetic of the game and makes the game look like a cheap buggy indie game.

Subjective, I absolutely do not agree with it.

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

Using these bugs aren't the worst thing.  It's the fact that these bugs are missed opportunities for klei to update the game to legitimize them.

Klei don't do things for free. If the spend money on "fixing" cheeses, they won't be able to do content updates as much. I'd, along with many people, definitely prefer them giving us a new boss or a skill tree instead of fixing some obscure strategy that affects absolutely no one negatively.

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

Imagine doing the pig trap but instead of the pigs walking stupidly into the wall 24/7, the pigs stop to sniff at the wall then proceed to jump to try an see what's on the other side, maybe they then have convos with each other about food and how they cant reach it. There is wasted potential here for building immersion.

Does this game ****ing look like The Sims to you? Do you not realize how painfully expensive this would be for a feature that Webber, Wortox and Wurt mains are incapable of giving a crap about? Klei doesn't have infinite money or workforce. Such a feature would be so irrelevant in the 99% of the gameplay while taking up ridiculous amounts of computational resources. You got pigmen detecting food, detecting walls, pathfinding, realising there are no valid paths (already have these so far), detecting that a straight line to the food intersects A wall and worst of all, detecting EACH OTHER and ACTIONS of each other. Which is just unrealistic. DST's optimization is already in a "could be better" state. This would make even singleplayer unplayable. For example, originally mobs in Minecraft were meant to run away from exploding creepers but that idea was discarded because the game lagged the hell out. The reason being, every mob constantly checked if there was a creeper nearby and if it was about to explode and drained the computers resources like a... drain. Few mobs detecting each other would be somewhat ok but many pig farms have at least 10 pigs each of them checking for each other (45 interactions every n frames) and what they are doing. 

TLDR: pigmen interact mean you lag

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

Its like Klei let bugs stay as bad QOL for features they should expand and update.

Ever heard of hoiks?

Dear god, I can feel myself becoming Mike23Ua. I need to get off forums immediately.

[Balter]

My G, are you seriously using the fact that because the game is broken that justifies why boss fights should also be broken?

Didn’t know the fanbase’s main attraction to this game were the bugs.

 

You’ll live, you’ll grow, in a month you’ll stop the cope.

[00petar00]

From what I have seen in the last couple of years of DST updates is that klei is trying to satisfy survival/hardcore survival/sandbox players at the same time which is not working as it can be seen from all the threads whenever a new addition/content leans into one direction.

In my opinion DST would be in a much better state If we had a choice with difficulty and this is what survival and endless mode could've been. Klei could really expand these 2 modes into what they can be so that everyone finds more enjoyment out of their preferred setting.

Having world settings to disable worm boss isn't a solution as it isn't automatically disabled on endless mode which would be better but a perfect solution to not miss out of new content would be to change and nerf so it could exist without destruction mechanics, eating items and lower damage on endless while survival version can stay the same or be buffed depending on what these players want.

Endless mode could keep all these exploits and bugs that players have to specifically set up to use and players that want to show off their skills can play with them patched in survival mode. I understand that this would be a massive undertaking but it seems like there's no better solution that anyone is proposing and we only comment in support and against specific suggestions. This will continue in the future without most players on either side getting anywhere close to what is their vision on good survival or endless/sandbox experience.

[ChintzyGnat]

Beequeen and armored bearger is cheese then. Pack your bags folks its time to play fortnite instead ig.

[Echsrick]

its only an exploit when random person says so

[Gashzer]

2 hours ago, HellHeater said:

Subjective, I do agree with it.

Subjective, I absolutely do not agree with it.

Klei don't do things for free. If the spend money on "fixing" cheeses, they won't be able to do content updates as much. I'd, along with many people, definitely prefer them giving us a new boss or a skill tree instead of fixing some obscure strategy that affects absolutely no one negatively.

Does this game ****ing look like The Sims to you? Do you not realize how painfully expensive this would be for a feature that Webber, Wortox and Wurt mains are incapable of giving a crap about? Klei doesn't have infinite money or workforce. Such a feature would be so irrelevant in the 99% of the gameplay while taking up ridiculous amounts of computational resources. You got pigmen detecting food, detecting walls, pathfinding, realising there are no valid paths (already have these so far), detecting that a straight line to the food intersects A wall and worst of all, detecting EACH OTHER and ACTIONS of each other. Which is just unrealistic. DST's optimization is already in a "could be better" state. This would make even singleplayer unplayable. For example, originally mobs in Minecraft were meant to run away from exploding creepers but that idea was discarded because the game lagged the hell out. The reason being, every mob constantly checked if there was a creeper nearby and if it was about to explode and drained the computers resources like a... drain. Few mobs detecting each other would be somewhat ok but many pig farms have at least 10 pigs each of them checking for each other (45 interactions every n frames) and what they are doing. 

TLDR: pigmen interact mean you lag

Ever heard of hoiks?

Dear god, I can feel myself becoming Mike23Ua. I need to get off forums immediately.

Making excuses for game developers isn't something we should encourage. We say what we want and it's up to klei to do that thing or for klei to get creative and give us something better that we didn't know we wanted. We continue playing DST and buying skins, everyone wins if the devs are smart and creative.

As a player I don't care about technical limitations, that's klei's job. We shouldn't hold back sharing ideas just because it might not work. 

Everything is subjective, it's a game we play for fun. I don't know what point you are trying to make by calling things subjective, if i subjectively think DST is a steamin pile of poo, I dont buy skins, klei doesn't get money.

Everyones subjective opinions and feelings are the most important feedback that klei can get for determining the root cause of why the game is losing or gaining traction. Or what things need updated ASAP or not.

 

[goblinball]

1 hour ago, Balter said:

You’ll live, you’ll grow, in a month you’ll stop the cope.

Ppl have not stopped complaining about fw ever since klei patched the lureplant cheese

[Valase]

33 minutes ago, goblinball said:

Ppl have not stopped complaining about fw ever since klei patched the lureplant cheese

people always have complained about FW.

[HellHeater]

58 minutes ago, Gashzer said:

Making excuses for game developers

lmao yeah no im out of this conversation bye 

[Szczuku]

Players' freedom should be limited, yes even in a sanbox game. Especially if that freedom is just utilizing bugs and exploits that actively make the game worse

[grm9]

8 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

actively make the game worse

how

5 hours ago, Gashzer said:

See DST is a much more beautiful and alive world compared to Minecraft.

The downside to this beauty is that when people use the pig trap or other pathfinding bugs it looks 1000% more janky and ruins the aesthetic of the game and makes the game look like a cheap buggy indie game.

Using these bugs aren't the worst thing.  It's the fact that these bugs are missed opportunities for klei to update the game to legitimize them.

Imagine doing the pig trap but instead of the pigs walking stupidly into the wall 24/7, the pigs stop to sniff at the wall then proceed to jump to try an see what's on the other side, maybe they then have convos with each other about food and how they cant reach it. There is wasted potential here for building immersion.

Its like Klei let bugs stay as bad QOL for features they should expand and update.

This is why I'm against bugs and push for them to get patched. Not because I want to ruin others fun but so klei update old outdated mechanics for DST to become even more fun

we all know that you just want to troll people and make them angrily reply to you about that, you admitted that you're a troll twice or thrice by now, the immersion thing's simply absurd considering that you can simply set some wormwood skin for your hands and some wortox skin for your legs and get a human with leaves as hands and a tail

2 hours ago, Balter said:

My G, are you seriously using the fact that because the game is broken that justifies why boss fights should also be broken?

Didn’t know the fanbase’s main attraction to this game were the bugs.

 

You’ll live, you’ll grow, in a month you’ll stop the cope

another troll

5 hours ago, Cruvimaster said:

The fact that Klei is an indie company does not mean that it has to be a mediocre developer when it keeps a game on the market for more than 10 years and full of exploits.

And Klei has already made it clear that it does not like cheating.

And we can count on our fingers about 5 or 6 players who defend cheeses. It's always the same ones

why do you think that some thing being a bug automatically makes it bad

[Uedo]

Just view it as; Whether right or wrong, will removing things like this lead to some members of the community not playing? Yeah sure. I play less now, I mean - there's less for me to do when i've done all of the content, that's where i'd usually look at farms or inventive uses of things but it's become a single-run type of game for me now. I liked the cheesing as a reward for beating the boss normally, like if i wanted to farm boss drops i'd cheese it, not my options are less open so I don't want to farm them

[dst_lover]

1 hour ago, grm9 said:

how

we all know that you just want to troll people and make them angrily reply to you about that, you admitted that you're a troll twice or thrice by now, the immersion thing's simply absurd considering that you can simply set some wormwood skin for your hands and some wortox skin for your legs and get a human with leaves as hands and a tail

another troll

why do you think that some thing being a bug automatically makes it bad

1 exploit are bad because it’s cheating like if u went to do it in your world you can just add your god mode and cheat however you like 

2 no

3 no 

4 because bugs in a multiplayer game are bad because abusing it is cheating and they should be removed 

 

[DegenerateFurry]

6 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Mobs were changed way back to not drop rare loot or xp unless killed directly by the player or tamed wolves. This was a compromise on the OP nature of "mob grinders" that allowed you to AFK for levels. I'm not sure of the community's sentiment of TNT dupers, since those are relatively new and I haven't kept up. They have the potential to be extremely destructive (flying piston bombers), and Mojang might patch them at some point.

Minecraft also isn't touted as "uncompromising survival". It was a creative building game with survival elements tacked on.

Not all mobs were changed that way. As far as I know, it was only blazes - creepers, skeletons, witches, zombie pigmen, and slimes all still drop stuff when they die without player intervention. Also, you can still use wolves to automate even those. 

[Anis5240]

8 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

because bugs in a multiplayer game are bad

Are they all bad, though????? Even from other multiplayer games??? Again, if you don't like the cheese ways, then simply don't use it. No one is ever going to impose a law for breaking game codes.

Sandbox games are meant for players to have fun with the environment IN THEIR OWN WAYS.

[DegenerateFurry]

1 hour ago, Szczuku said:

Players' freedom should be limited, yes even in a sanbox game. Especially if that freedom is just utilizing bugs and exploits that actively make the game worse

Actually, they actively make the game better! 

That which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

But, if you want evidence, read my original post.

[grm9]

15 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

1 exploit are bad because it’s cheating like if u went to do it in your world you can just add your god mode and cheat however you like 

no, figuring a cheese set up or how to use a bug for getting an advantage from it out often requires more thought in comparison to fighting the boss with out cheese and god mode practically doesn't require any thought

15 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

4 because bugs in a multiplayer game are bad because abusing it is cheating and they should be removed 

why? how can you even hurt other people through a bug excluding toad cheese? either way you'd need to remove all sources of fire and the ability to remove a structure for preventing people from negatively affecting other people so that doesn't work as a reason

[Maxil20]

7 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

I'm not sure of the community's sentiment of TNT dupers, since those are relatively new and I haven't kept up.

You made me go check the first video’s date of where I saw a practical application of a TNT duper (making a perimeter for mob spawning) and it scared me 

Regarding bugs, this is something I feel like will be discussed until the end of the universe, because I cannot see people trying to agree or disagree if bugs are “good” or “bad”. I personally am on the good side, because there’s a lot of untapped potential when it comes to that, and in most cases it’s beneficial to the player in a fun way.

Part of the reason I got into DS was because of what the community was doing with bugs in the first place. I got into the community right before SW got announced, and a lot of the metagame I saw relied on using buggy mechanics to increase the longevity of a save. RoG was very barebones compared to modern day DST (you could practically see everything in ~2 years once you were a developed player), and bugs like the lantern glitch, fire farms/fields, and the pinecone glitch allowed players to have more playtime in a game like DS once they “exhausted” all of the “main” content. I still hold that sentiment to DST, to an Extent.

I personally do like how Klei has been trying to approach this, with attempting to fix bugs with “intended” solutions, even if sometimes they are a bit more out of the way then the original bug utilized. I myself still personally wish things like festive lights got adjusted to be stackable and not rely on durability, as it is technically one of the oldest bugs in the book for how people used them in mushlights/glowcaps.

[Guille6785]

every strategy I didn't think about first is a bug and should be patched out

[dst_lover]

2 minutes ago, grm9 said:

no, figuring a cheese set up or how to use a bug for getting an advantage from it out often requires more thought in comparison to fighting the boss with out cheese and god mode practically doesn't require any thought

it being a multi player game doesn't mean that that should get removed, otherwise all sources of fire should get removed for preventing people from burning a base

1 if there is a bug in Fortnite and u figuring the bug and having to do steps for it doesn’t make it a non cheating method 

2 the devs will never remove fire because it’s not a bug or exploit and if they remove it this will lead to other thing like hammer to be removed so instead they add rollback and with the ability to ban people and kick people they kinda solve the problem so can u say why it being a multiplayer game doesn’t mean that they should remove it

[grm9]

6 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

1 if there is a bug in Fortnite and u figuring the bug and having to do steps for it doesn’t make it a non cheating method 

depends on the bug and the rules of the game, even in it keeping a bug or replacing it with some intended very similar thing could've been better in comparison to simply removing it since that's also how some other competitive games got some fun stuff

6 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

2 the devs will never remove fire because it’s not a bug or exploit and if they remove it this will lead to other thing like hammer to be removed so instead they add rollback and with the ability to ban people and kick people they kinda solve the problem so can u say why it being a multiplayer game doesn’t mean that they should remove it

what does it being a bug change and why don't you try to kick people that use a bug then