The Insight System has to change - Sooner than later

[ADM]

Why ? An introduction

I've been a solid Wortox main for many years, he is a character that always had many tricks up his hooves allowing us to exceed in all aspects regardless if that is combat, exploration, survivability and management of all 3 stats. He's always been strong, but also a ton of fun.

I speak of Wortox in intro because with his upcoming Skilltree that introduce more fun, but also, more... strong... my already high conviction that we need a rework of the Insight system grows over the roof with what he is capable of doing right as we spawn.

 

It's not to critique the balance of the Skilltrees(s) because frankly it does balances out in the lategame, and this also applies for a couple of other characters' tree, (but not all, more on this later).

However I do find it very absurd what additional skills can allows to do at the start of the game which is pretty dear to many of us. It is not normal to turn into an unstoppable force on the first days for characters that already have a strong kit.

With this aside, but mainly concerned by it, I am also not a fan at all of the fake / lack of progression Skilltrees emit, they are one time built, and the 'one time' does not make me (and you, I know it) want to work toward it, since it's entirely trivialized on my next games.

 

This is a feeling I share with more of my friends than my hands and toes can count and we generally have a same general idea of how to address this, even if the multiple steps of this correction can end up branching in multiple unique ways.

 

How ? With more to offer

The main parts consist of : Insight available is no longer shared across all worlds. But it is now shared across all characters.
'Locks' for affinities and others are also reset as we start, but, goals like beating Ancient Fuelweaver / Celestial Champion are shared too.

 

Making a new world is making a new start, with a real progression that is fair between everyone. There are survivors that currently cannot benefit of their affinities fully before rifts are up, while others are embraced by it immediately. The strength of each may be different, and that's relatively fair, or is it ?

With this change it makes little doubt that certain characters affinities and even basic perks will be hindered, I can mostly think of Wormwood or Winona's affinities. But for starter this is already the case as of now if it's your first time playing them for real, and second I support the idea that certain skills will need adjustments under these new rules. Wormwood's summons could either no longer be affinity perks, or possess a different lock like setting foot on the Lunar Island or Grotto if anything. Winona could access her boss / sis tech earlier but get more mastery over them later.
Even Wilson could also enjoy a double durability torch for his first earned skill point but have more compatible light items down the line, etcetera etcetera...

 

Once we reach max Insight, there is also no need to roll it back to nothing from a character change, like how it can be the case currently. We're far into our world, so we shall have the rightful amount no matter who we play, only for how much we played here.

We can also introduce a few more things, like the ability to respec skills in-game with a simpler tool rather than having to make and go to the upgraded portal, dropping all our things. This could be two distinct actions.

And we certainly should have a world config to modify starting Insight amount. Modifiable rate, all-unlocked start... you get the drill.

 

 

When ? Quickly

Seriously. Not only will this make the system more presentable and healthier, I would definitively like to play with this more like many. But also while you guys at Klei still have more Skilltrees to put together, you'd might as well want to think of them under this view.

Few if any of the characters did not inherit of poor distribution of Insight points required for skills of very variable strengths while I'm sure it would be easier to recognize this if you think "how long until I can have this ?", because asking yourself "how much it's worth ?" has not really proven to be viable when looking at Wendy skills at the very beginning (and yes mistakes are normal) and for others.

This needs to happen to make current and next trees down the line built better and for the game state.

[RozeMeteor]

Too many characters are band-aid by their skilltrees, i don't see this happening if we don't pass by yet another roll of reworks, the skilltree system itself needs ajustments all across the board, and the game combat as well to feel better a sense of progression. We got the lunar/shadow affinities problem too, what is there to do after beating celestial and fullweaver ? Almost nothing baring rifts which is very little so far, so it would only benefit people who megabase... Honestly the game is very strange place right now, i don't even know what to feel about it at this point.

[Well-met]

Absolute 100% yes.

Rewarding people for sticking with their world and providing incentives to actually play the game is what every game developer should aim for, yes?

If it were bound to worlds you could also revert the original insight growth rate, because the current 66 days is a joke. It's so small we all know it's just to get it out of the way.

older post of mine about this topic:
 

19 hours ago, Well-met said:

The entire purpose of skill trees should ideally be to make players connect to their world better with extra progression

of course because trees are tied to people and not games, already they have no purpose other than to ultra buff characters for no tangible reason. 

People treat them like free buffs because that is what they are.

[mkemal23]

Yeah this one of the biggest issues with the skill tree.

• Since they are a one time thing, Skill trees feel more like a rework v2.
• They bloat the early game with powercreep and make the late game feel less rewrading.
• They can confuse new players because they are so accesible.(c_skip)  To understand the skills, new players need to understand the basics of the character first.
• They contradict with the planar system, you start extremely strong and destroy everything early and mid game just to get all of your unique mechanics nerfed with planar entity proteciton. 

[Sacco]

13 minutes ago, mkemal23 said:

 

• They contradict with the planar system, you start extremely strong and destroy everything early and mid game just to get all of your unique mechanics nerfed with planar entity proteciton. 

Planar is useless because you got skills which counter it 100%...

[nimzowitsch10]

sadly this suggestion will get overlooked as does 99.99 percent of suggestion

[ADM]

16 minutes ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

sadly this suggestion will get overlooked as does 99.99 percent of suggestion

I'm not too pessimistic about these thing as many voiced about the same already. Although I can totally see this to fail to happen before all Skilltrees are complete which would be pretty bad to me. Still let's keep a happy face : )

[HeatAndRun]

People might be too addicted to the power creep the skill trees brought. Including myself. 

Surely there'll be some backlash against it. I don't have a strong feeling about the alternative, though.

[Maxposting]

I also want Insight to be locked to worlds, if it is meant to be universally shared between characters, having the unlocking take longer would be fine.

There probably will be an argument, but I think it'd be better to change it now rather than later when all the trees are implemented.

[Kwaik]

To each their own 

 

But the early game powercreep makes joining public worlds more attractive

 

This is a multiplayer game, with a dwindling player base and is balanced around multiplayer 

The powercreep achieved two things. It makes it more balanced to play on a world solo, and it makes it so you can progress more quickly joining public games without commiting to a public/other persons server 

 

It has the drawbacks that you mention of trivializing the early game. But to be fair 10+ years into the life cycle of this game the early game should be trivial anyway 

[Bumber64]

I'm pretty sure insight was designed to keep a sense of progression between non-endless worlds where you die and lose everything. (Like DS character unlock.) Restricting it to a single world is completely at odds with that intent. Even if you just force a CC/AFW kill in the world for alignment, that causes an issue with wasted insight points up until then, causing players to need to respec for the last 10% of the game. (I guess you could make alignment free?)

The fundamental problem is that they gave a number of survivors utterly busted skill trees. They started off well enough with Wilson, but then completely broke Willow and Wolfgang. Willow could've gotten weak ember stuff in her base kit and then some slight buffs to those and Bernie in her tree. Wolfgang should've had precisely zero boost to damage in his tree.

Planar damage should've been restricted to planar items, with a potion/food buff to add the effect to non-planar weapons and wereforms. Or planar damage could be ignored by non-planar mobs.

[ADM]

14 minutes ago, Kwaik said:

This is a multiplayer game, with a dwindling player base and is balanced around multiplayer 

I exclusively play multiplayer personally. Everyone I've been playing with for the last few years agreed with my postulate on skilltrees and they come in a varied range of playtime, not many find the system in place engaging for very clear reasons that I hope I explained without lingering too much on it. But if you speak of multiplayer more like, by joining Klei public servers and such, where players kill (or get killed by) DF / BQ and call it a day, then it's the wrong way to look at to balance or design features of the game after.

 

14 minutes ago, Kwaik said:

But to be fair 10+ years into the life cycle of this game the early game should be trivial anyway 

... no ? I wonder what that would mean for much older game that have a tougher, longer start like Terraria with that viewpoint.

[Mysterious box]

I think I'm beginning to lean hard into the direction that skills trees and even base refresh changes may need to be reworked I'm looking back at them and starting to wonder if things have gone too far out of hand we've been desensitized to the fact survivors now have skills that deal so much damage that it one shots or near 1 shots most early game mobs, followers that heal themselves, followers that destroy content without player input, panics that any mob that can panic can't retaliate against and more. I think too many mechanics are at play that the game isn't able to handle and it's not being made to adapt to them. On top of the power coming too early in runs.

The thing is though I don't think there's a realistic solution because both sides are kinda right when you think about it.

For the health of future design things should be rolled back but at the same time the power is fun. Taking it away would only lead to backlash but keeping things as they are will lead future design and balance off a cliff...

[ansuman]

I suggest giving 5 points as permanent insight, and the remaining 10 points have to be earned in every world.

[Well-met]

1 hour ago, Bumber64 said:

I'm pretty sure insight was designed to keep a sense of progression between non-endless worlds where you die and lose everything.

I have no idea what you're talking about

insight was not created to forgive deaths. Rollbacks are.

even if someone goes out of their way to join a ton of different servers, 66 days total is nothing.

if you want progression you stick to one world no matter what happens. Chronic ragequitters do not justify skill trees.

haven't you noticed klei has been making many new ways to revive players exactly so they don't get bored and leave?

[Mike23Ua]

The thing about doing it as you suggest is that there’s roughly 20 playable characters in the game, and it took me a long smurffing time to unlock all of their skill trees insight and get characters to acceptable power levels.

“Acceptable” meaning that I still can’t kill CC or AFW and will probably always and forever be locked out of any and all perks related to Affinity.

But Therein lies the problem, any player can join someone else’s game who has progressed to spawning AFW or CC, hit them only a few times then let the skilled player finish it off- Boom huge powers unlocked permanently and forever.

And I don’t think anyone is actually taking into account how many perks are locked behind this, Lunar Bernie, Shadow Merm resurrection.

People could quite literally charge other players real money (and a good bit of it too) to have them drag them through unlocking affinities.

It would be roughly on the same level as paying someone on Ark Survival Ascended to take you into a Boss fight so you can unlock the crafting engrams.

This is extremely toxic for DST, but sadly no one cares because most of this community has shifted largely away from having a uncompromising survival game, and they just want hugely busted OP powers as early as Day One.

[mima_]

well at first when they talking about skill tree i was imagining a fun quest just like wx's circuit. discovering skill after encountering something.
im pretty disappointed that they make it a survive by x day and get 1 point. 

but well they might think that not all people in the world play this game love grinding and investing their time all over to enjoy the skill tree to the fullest.
sometime they just want to play every once a while or maybe having 2 hour play at public server.

im fine with this method that keeps all point unlocked when play on new world but hope the points didnt tied to how long u survive but more like how u discover it. so if they finally decided to make another playstyle that make u lose all points and need to rediscover all the points and kill CC and afw again to enjoy the big upgrades it would be a fun quest instead.

[Ridley]

34 minutes ago, Well-met said:

insight was not created to forgive deaths. Rollbacks are.

No, the tell-tale heart and other forms of resurrection forgive death. Rollbacks are for reverting griefing/bugs.

[Well-met]

48 minutes ago, Ridley said:

No, the tell-tale heart and other forms of resurrection forgive death. Rollbacks are for reverting griefing/bugs.

you're gonna be surprised when you find out how people use rollbacks for

[Bumber64]

1 minute ago, Well-met said:

you're gonna be surprised when you find out how people use rollbacks for

That says nothing about why Klei added it. (Hint: It wasn't present in DS.)

[Well-met]

ds is obsolete and irrelevant to this topic.

What is being made to be more forgiving lately is many skill tree powers involving a new way to revive others and that's fine.

People leaving and joining servers often is not the reason skill trees exist.

[Pet Rock]

I agree that insight/skill trees shouldn't be shared through worlds. On top of the previous issues:

-I unlock insight in testing worlds which makes me feel like I am cheating and missing out on the experience of creating a skilltree.

-It goes against don't starve principles. Imo knowledge should be what is learnt

-Speedruns (think jakeyosaurus) are more complex since not all players start on equal grounds. Starting with 1 insight or the likes can be an unfair, unintentional, and largely unavoidable advantage. 

-Unlocking insight through time is boring!

 

I would be happy with the solution above. However my solution does differ from it, as I still think characters should have their own insight (and affinities) to incentivize playing each character instead of just farming them comfortably as one character and then reaping the benefits as the others. Obviously, it would be better if each character was a little more different to make them worth playing, but I still think encouraging people to play as multiple characters is a good thing.

Also, skill trees are a great opportunity to implement achievements in an intuitive way, by tying insight to in-game tasks. This would better complement the evolution from survival to progression in dst and could act as a guide for new players

These could even be different for each character to reduce redundant tasks introduced by separating insight for each character (making alchemy engine for example), highlight each character's ties to the world lore wise, and differentiate each character's experience even more. 

[-Variant]

Yeah, I'd rather they be per-world, or something. There's too many variables for me to consider writing a post about, but some characters are kind of absurd with what they start with day 1.

Like, honestly, Willow my beloved and all, I think being able to have day 1 Biden Blasts in literally any server you join is kind of wacky.

Though, insight gain needs to be something fun/enjoyable. I wish more felt like Wigfrid's, where you'd unlock skills by doing specific actions in-game. I love that sorta gimmick...

[lowercase skye]

I've never liked this idea because it simply makes a lot of the perks useless for the game's progression. Killing Fuelweaver and Celestial Champion one time upgrades Woodie forever, but if it was per-world then you wouldn't get to use the "no transforming on full moons" perk during the moonstorms (when you need it most) or the "passive shadows when in wereform" perk during shadow pieces and fuelweaver (when you need it the most). I understand seeing insight carrying over between worlds as a flaw, but it's a very very intentional part of the system.

[Pet Rock]

14 minutes ago, finn from human said:

I've never liked this idea because it simply makes a lot of the perks useless for the game's progression.

Obviously the perks are fitted to the current system. I imagine (hope) there would be perk changes to account for the switch.

Also, I often find myself refighting the ancient fuel weaver and CC so these perks would still have use for some people even if left unchanged