People Seem to be Forgetting Something About "Balance"

[Maxil20]

7 hours ago, Cheggf said:

DST used to be very well balanced, it only started becoming unbalanced in the past couple years. 

DST has not been well balanced. The difference is the “well balanced” items were items introduced in the game since Vanilla and people got comfortable with them, and only recently started adding items that could compete with the items that were added with vanilla (rift content/character things is a bit of a different story, but considering that that is lategame/character specific and DS also had quirks relating to the latter, I don’t feel it’s a “fair” comparison for the purposes of universal items).

Like, one of the most easiest ones I can think of is pre rift weapons. You find me one person that genuinely used thule clubs/morning stars as a weapon, and I’ll find you 30+ that didn’t use those and stuck with hambats/dark swords. Weapon variety has always been very limited in DST, and the genuine time I can think about players alternating between weapons from DS is shipwrecked, both with the cutlass and obsidian spear having unique upsides but not entirely eclipsing the use of the former weapons.

Clothing (much like in this thread) is also a topic of debate. You can be set with just a thermal and eyebrella/tam and ignore just about every other clothing option and be set for the rest of the game, and most people did that. I know before deerclops was guaranteed you couldn’t just get everyone an eyebrella, but it wasn’t that much more difficult (I used to rely on rain hat/tree coverage for burning for my personal needs for spring and use the good old icebox thermal for summer).

Of course, you can always branch off of these options. I know I myself get by with Warly buffs for my seasonal needs and I feel like I’m one of only five people in the world who attempted to utilize the glass cutter in a super endgame context (it’s my personal weapon of choice for klaus to maximize from electric + spice damage). The point is that for a large chunk of the playerbase, they don’t do this. They can comfortably bolt for the items they need to survive forever and have them by roughly late winter/early spring.

[Cheggf]

7 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

DST has not been well balanced. The difference is the “well balanced” items were items introduced in the game since Vanilla and people got comfortable with them, and only recently started adding items that could compete with the items that were added with vanilla (rift content/character things is a bit of a different story, but considering that that is lategame/character specific and DS also had quirks relating to the latter, I don’t feel it’s a “fair” comparison for the purposes of universal items).

Like, one of the most easiest ones I can think of is pre rift weapons. You find me one person that genuinely used thule clubs/morning stars as a weapon, and I’ll find you 30+ that didn’t use those and stuck with hambats/dark swords. Weapon variety has always been very limited in DST, and the genuine time I can think about players alternating between weapons from DS is shipwrecked, both with the cutlass and obsidian spear having unique upsides but not entirely eclipsing the use of the former weapons.

Clothing (much like in this thread) is also a topic of debate. You can be set with just a thermal and eyebrella/tam and ignore just about every other clothing option and be set for the rest of the game, and most people did that. I know before deerclops was guaranteed you couldn’t just get everyone an eyebrella, but it wasn’t that much more difficult (I used to rely on rain hat/tree coverage for burning for my personal needs for spring and use the good old icebox thermal for summer).

Of course, you can always branch off of these options. I know I myself get by with Warly buffs for my seasonal needs and I feel like I’m one of only five people in the world who attempted to utilize the glass cutter in a super endgame context (it’s my personal weapon of choice for klaus to maximize from electric + spice damage). The point is that for a large chunk of the playerbase, they don’t do this. They can comfortably bolt for the items they need to survive forever and have them by roughly late winter/early spring.

"I personally don't like this" does not mean it's imbalanced lol

45 minutes ago, Yolo-Kouhai said:

They're in two parts of the map, in a multiplayer setting (The game's called Don't Starve Together) it's very easy to find Beefalo. Speaking of multiplayer setting! Beefalo horns have RNG, you're not guaranteed to get one.

Again, you're only looking at how you play and not how others play. 

[Yolo-Kouhai]

Just now, Cheggf said:

"I personally don't like this" does not mean it's imbalanced lol

That... that's not what he's saying???

2 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Again, you're only looking at how you play and not how others play. 

Dawg.

[gaymime]

9 hours ago, Yolo-Kouhai said:

Balancing games is not objective. Something that'd be completely absurd in a competitive game is fine in a multiplayer coop game. The game may have special exceptions because of it's unique mechanics. The player may think something is unbalanced when it's completely balanced in the context of the game. My point is; why are we criticizing Klei over balance when the game has never been balanced, it's not supposed to be balanced, it's supposed to be a fun challenge. Characters downsides are still there and effective. Characters are still fun and difficult in some areas. You may have to do X to overcome this characters downsides but Y is more important, but you need X to live successfully, but Y is imminent and difficult in your current state. Wurt still needs an abundance of resources to supply and create her mermdom. Which can take up time away from farming and getting a stable food source.

thankyou!

[AliceMagtron]

11 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Beefalo are only really in one part of the map. If you haven't found those by winter you can't make the winter hat.

Thats definitely skill issue if u cant even find beefalo in 20 days

[Cheggf]

7 hours ago, AliceMagtron said:

Thats definitely skill issue if u cant even find beefalo in 20 days

It's definitely a skill issue on your reading comprehension if you still struggle to see that I'm talking about people who are bad at the game. 

[Iotion]

On 11/26/2024 at 7:34 AM, Cheggf said:

It's definitely a skill issue on your reading comprehension if you still struggle to see that I'm talking about people who are bad at the game. 

 

Just because there is people who are bad at the game does not mean that during the rpgification of DST they shouldn't touch up on the filler items and give them a bit of a niche.

Could be something as simple and hidden as making the Catcoon Hat remove any hostile tags for Catcoons against characters like Wortox.

There's very little reason to keep in these trap items as the power creep level increases, which is typical of long term development live service games.

You do not ever balance content for solely the top 1% or bottom 1%. The 98% of the players with skill ranging from playing for fun for a long time to people with 1000s of hours who know the ins and outs but don't go hard when it comes to optimization are the ones you balance for.

Doing anything differently has killed games in the past. It's important to ease in new players but balancing solely for their sake isn't a good idea.

[Cheggf]

6 hours ago, Iotion said:

 

Just because there is people who are bad at the game does not mean that during the rpgification of DST they shouldn't touch up on the filler items and give them a bit of a niche.

Could be something as simple and hidden as making the Catcoon Hat remove any hostile tags for Catcoons against characters like Wortox.

There's very little reason to keep in these trap items as the power creep level increases, which is typical of long term development live service games.

You do not ever balance content for solely the top 1% or bottom 1%. The 98% of the players with skill ranging from playing for fun for a long time to people with 1000s of hours who know the ins and outs but don't go hard when it comes to optimization are the ones you balance for.

Doing anything differently has killed games in the past. It's important to ease in new players but balancing solely for their sake isn't a good idea.

Power creep is bad, actually.

[Cats_On_Fire]

15 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

And it will lead to a cycle of players powercreeping the environment and then the environment powercreeping the players, then back to the players, then...

You get the idea.

Tbh I think a large amount of it is just the players getting substantially more crafty. Think about it. We can have a long term varg farm by early winter. We weren't doing this before

[Cheggf]

6 minutes ago, Cats_On_Fire said:

Tbh I think a large amount of it is just the players getting substantially more crafty. Think about it. We can have a long term varg farm by early winter. We weren't doing this before

[goblinball]

Balance really does not matter as much as some ppl think it does. All that actually matters is if something is fun, and things can be fun even if they’re a bit over/under powered. 
Of course, there is a point where something does genuinely ruin the fun because it’s too unbalanced. However, I don’t think anything in dst is that bad, excluding a few items which are just plain useless. 
Instead of asking yourself if something is “balanced”, ask yourself if it is fun. If you design the game purely with fun, not balance, in mind, you will naturally reach a “balanced enough” state because anything that was actually unbalanced would’ve lessened the fun and been fixed.

[Well-met]

oh boy here it is

"but wolfgang!"

[Yolo-Kouhai]

5 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

has a niche use when rain is heavy/permanent.

and so does rain hat (keeps your chest slot free.

The issue is that a rain hat has nothing to pair with it other than the umbrella which already pairs with a football helmet. Unless you're playing UM where you need 150% protection during spring, there's no reason to go over 100%.

[Yolo-Kouhai]

2 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

not having 100% during spring/perma rain all the time does work.

During heavy rain not having that last 30% can make a huge difference.

[Yolo-Kouhai]

19 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

and the rain hat has 70%?

Yeah the rain hat has 70%.

[Sacco]

40 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

But wolfgang-

Should have totally gotten a nerf with his first rework.

but no now he can just straight up do 2x damage just because he feels like it (mightiness meter is a suggestion, not a resource bar.)

His first rework was very cool.

His second rework in beta even more, i really like that downside about losing mightiness...

It wasn't the biggest nerf, it was just a a good nerf which encouraged new ways to play.

But people freaked out because they heard the world nerf.

Even keli when rework wolf for the first time seemes scared by saying the word nerf in their post about the rework (yes, they said this forbidden word in the post)

[Nikki Darks]

People seem to be forgetting that DST is still a much harder than game than DS ever was.

In DS you achieve invulnerability day 1 by wearing a football helmet with a log suit.

DST, unlike DS has actual difficulty.

So if you really wanna think about it, DS/DST as a franchise has gotten harder in comparison to the old days.

[Cheggf]

43 minutes ago, Nikki Darks said:

People seem to be forgetting that DST is still a much harder than game than DS ever was.

In DS you achieve invulnerability day 1 by wearing a football helmet with a log suit.

DST, unlike DS has actual difficulty.

So if you really wanna think about it, DS/DST as a franchise has gotten harder in comparison to the old days.

The game with infinite free revives, resources absolutely everywhere, extremely powerful character reworks and additional mechanics like beefalo domestication, extremely toned down dangers like fire taking ages to actually do anything, extremely toned down world generation trying its best not to kill you, multiplayer, rollbacks, and the million other things they've done to make DST easier has never been nearly as difficult as the game with where dying usually means your world is reset and the average character power is along the lines of "You have a torch that doesn't run out of fuel but it sucks". Most people don't know that armor stacks, armor stacking stops doing anything when the armor pieces break, armor stacking only does anything for people who are actually stacking armor, and most people aren't even dying to combat anyways and are dying to other things.

I don't know where this idea that DSA is easier comes from. I'm guessing it's either people who never played DSA and are just assuming what it's like based on reading the wiki, or they only played DSA after getting good at DST so they're obviously not going to be struggling. 

[Nikki Darks]

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The game with infinite free revives, resources absolutely everywhere, extremely powerful character reworks and additional mechanics like beefalo domestication, extremely toned down dangers like fire taking ages to actually do anything, extremely toned down world generation trying its best not to kill you, multiplayer, rollbacks, and the million other things they've done to make DST easier has never been nearly as difficult as the game with where dying usually means your world is reset and the average character power is along the lines of "You have a torch that doesn't run out of fuel but it sucks". Most people don't know that armor stacks, armor stacking stops doing anything when the armor pieces break, armor stacking only does anything for people who are actually stacking armor, and most people aren't even dying to combat anyways and are dying to other things.

I don't know where this idea that DSA is easier comes from. I'm guessing it's either people who never played DSA and are just assuming what it's like based on reading the wiki, or they only played DSA after getting good at DST so they're obviously not going to be struggling. 

The idea comes from the fact that armour damage reduction % stacks* in DS, and you get immunity to damage day 1. I am glad I was able to educate you on this very easy fact you could've discovered by actually playing DS past the menu screen.

Also not to forget that everything has 2-3 times less HP than it does in DST. And there's overall way less threats there than in DST. But again, I understand your confusion.

You actually have to play the games to learn about their content. 

If you want to act like you know anything about the topic to justify the snarkiness. Then maybe bother to put 1% of brain power into trying to learn about the said topic.

But again, glad I was able to educate a fellow gamer!

[Cheggf]

13 minutes ago, Nikki Darks said:

The idea comes from the fact that armour damage reduction % stacks* in DS, and you get immunity to damage day 1. I am glad I was able to educate you on this very easy fact you could've discovered by actually playing DS past the menu screen.

Also not to forget that everything has 2-3 times less HP than it does in DST. And there's overall way less threats there than in DST. But again, I understand your confusion.

You actually have to play the games to learn about their content. 

If you want to act like you know anything about the topic to justify the snarkiness. Then maybe bother to put 1% of brain power into trying to learn about the said topic.

But again, glad I was able to educate a fellow gamer!

See what I mean? Never played the game and just read the wiki. 

[Nikki Darks]

2 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

armor breaks and again, you are alone.

also there's fewer ways to revive in DS.

namely because there's no porta-reviver (aka Wanda [and now Wortox])

Log suit requires grass and logs, pig helmet is rope and pig skin. Wearing them both guaranteed you just don't die at the cost of resources you find day 1. 

Revival also hardly matters when mobs are overall less of a threat compared to in DST, where they are designed to be fought by multiple players.

DS also has Willow, so let us not forget about that. A character which could kill Deerclops in less than 10 seconds.

The game was so broken, poorly designed and just handholdy to the point of dying requiring skill.

DST having more food also hardly matters when DS had PLENTY of food. From berry bushes, to Wicker spam growing screens of crops, to cacti... 

Do I really need to keep going?

[Nikki Darks]

8 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

"Insert sealnado here" (factoring in your not cheezing it with a broken wall)

the like, only character that got nerfed in their rework

she also randomly burns down her base because she felt like it (you're insane).

Willow's fire starting was an issue, but not that big, especially with the reward of killing bosses in 10 seconds.

Acc deleted: Less Sealnado and more the Dragonfly that comes INTO your base.

 

[Nikki Darks]

Btw, I am trying to edit typos, and it keeps deleting my messages

Just now, SSneaky said:

see, actually hard (compared to DST which you can make alot less hard by using stone walls)

Btw, I keep trying to edit, but it keeps resetting the messages.

 

But even if we lost Dfly, we got more hounds in hound waves, we got Antlion which leaves irrepairable damage (repairable by waiting 3 business months). 

But even with Dragonfly in DS. You wear pighelm + log suit and you just, don't need healing food.

In DST healing food plays an actual role in the game, in DS there is not much of a reason to heal when 2 of the best items for avoiding damage are farmable day 1.