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Don't Suffer Together (Pooled Health Drain/Automatic Resurrection Discussion)


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This. I agree with this.

 

The reason I say I'd rather have a permadeath and no ghost than the 1/3 health reduction is that would essentially keep the Don't Starve Experience they were talking about on the live chat they are trying to keep. Because essentially, if you play the single player you only have one life and that's it. If the goal of the 1/3 health reduction is to keep the Don't Starve Experience then you may as well just have them die and that's it. This way I get to keep all my life and be able to survive on my own without that person who died.

 

I noticed you didn't quote my whole sentence though ;). The other reason I state we lose that person permanently and keep our life also is so if it boils down to just us being by ourselves, we still will be able to survive on our own just like on a single player game, though by then I know that sort of defeats the purpose of the game being multiplayer then. I really would like to have our damage the same and not reduced.

 

My biggest qualm right now is that I'm not playing it, lol. They can address the balance issues afterwards.

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I've been trying to, but to no avail. I remember other details about it, though, but nothing that seems to have been effectively searchable. I think it had "Plane" in the name, as in something like "Planescape", but that wasn't it. It was pre-release of some sort of MMO, where interactions with NPCs required you to actually type out the questions/responses rather than choosing from a list. Dying in it sent you to an underworld that you had to work to get out of.

 

By any chance, was it Planeshift? (The rest of your post was your written take which I have not decided either way on.) 

 

I haven't read all the posts on this topic, so please forgive me if anything I say has been already stated.

 

Isn't the point of the closed beta testing is for the players to TEST the game? I personally don't have a solution to the "allowing resurrection but keeping the Don't Starve experience," but this is my opinion on the matter. I personally feel they should have released the beta for testing with the ghost mechanic and let the players give their feedback of what they liked, what they didn't liked, what could be changed, and any other issues. Right now it sees they are just playing/testing it themselves and giving their opinion on what they feel is good gameplay. I say let the players decide and adjust the game as the feedback comes. Let it be in testing for a very long time tweaking with the help of the players.

 

From the posts I've read on here about concerns with possible griefing, the ghost mechanic with telltale hearts seemed like a good solution to solve that. Yeah there's touch stones but those will get used up fast and there's no point making a meat effigy when telltale hearts are so much easier to make. It all boils down to players resurrecting you. If you're a problem player, you just don't get resurrected by other players. Just make it if you permadeath as a ghost you can't rejoin the server and start a new character. Problem Solved. That keeps the Don't Starve experience by allowing a permadeath, solves the griefing problem, and allows your friends to resurrect you.

 

Now one of the issues with the ghost mechanic they stated on the livecast on Twitch was that death wasn't such a big deal because you could just resurrect your friend if he happened to die. Easy fix to that is just adjust the materials required for resurrection. Make the telltale heart harder to make.

 

There other concern on the livecast with the ghost mechanic was that it was boring as a ghost. Well, "tough cookies!" Do you guys want your friends to come back or do you want the Don't Starve Experience of stress and death? Yeah, being a ghost is boring but that's your penalty for dying. I would personally rather have a permadeath and no ghost state upon death than everybody's max health dropping by 1/3 and the fact they reduced everyone's damage to boot sucks.

 

The thing is F&F is/was already ongoing, and if something was changed from even this small sample having problems with it enough (plus the observation reactions from us video viewers on Klei devcasts) to warrant a change, then it must have been a strong problem indeed.

 

 

I'm sure if there is enough interest, the "original mode" will be retained, and we can test it and the "newer' mechanic mode we have for our feedback.  We'll have to wait for our testing and feedback to shape this decision. 

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The reason I say I'd rather have a permadeath and no ghost than the 1/3 health reduction is that would essentially keep the Don't Starve Experience they were talking about on the live chat they are trying to keep. Because essentially, if you play the single player you only have one life and that's it. If the goal of the 1/3 health reduction is to keep the Don't Starve Experience then you may as well just have them die and that's it. This way I get to keep all my life and be able to survive on my own without that person who died.

 

I noticed you didn't quote my whole sentence though ;). The other reason I state we lose that person permanently and keep our life also is so if it boils down to just us being by ourselves, we still will be able to survive on our own just like on a single player game, though by then I know that sort of defeats the purpose of the game being multiplayer then. I really would like to have our damage the same and not reduced.

 

My biggest qualm right now is that I'm not playing it, lol. They can address the balance issues afterwards.

 

I don't mind the damage reduction too much, if someone dies, someone else can join.

I like the idea that I think I heard in this thread, which was anyone uses meat effigies immediately, as a pooled resource, and we all take the health hit for having them and then no revival items -> permadeath.

 

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By any chance, was it Planeshift? (The rest of your post was your written take which I have not decided either way on.) 

 

 

The thing is F&F is/was already ongoing, and if something was changed from even this small sample having problems with it enough (plus the observation reactions from us video viewers on Klei devcasts) to warrant a change, then it must have been a strong problem indeed.

 

 

I'm sure if there is enough interest, the "original mode" will be retained, and we can test it and the "newer' mechanic mode we have for our feedback.  We'll have to wait for our testing and feedback to shape this decision. 

 

I had totally forgot about the Friends and Family phase. I was just going on what they said on the live cast and I totally forgot about that. By what they said, I didn't even know they received their copies yet.

 

That's a very interesting point. So I suppose they already gave their feedback and the stuff about the ghost mechanic being too easy and also boring was their feedback perhaps?

 

I suppose this keeps the multiplayer experience not a single player experience by just getting rid of everybody and just having one person left in the long run, as I stated in a post above in reply to someone replying to my post. I can see how that makes it more of a cooperative effort and a collective fail. But as you stated in an earlier post, I'm in agreement with you that I'm not for the 1/3 health reduction.

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you read this, replied to me, and informed me of that.

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I had totally forgot about the Friends and Family phase. I was just going on what they said on the live cast and I totally forgot about that. By what they said, I didn't even know they received their copies yet.

 

That's a very interesting point. So I suppose they already gave their feedback and the stuff about the ghost mechanic being too easy and also boring was their feedback perhaps?

 

I suppose this keeps the multiplayer experience not a single player experience by just getting rid of everybody and just having one person left in the long run, as I stated in a post above in reply to someone replying to my post. I can see how that makes it more of a cooperative effort and a collective fail. But as you stated in an earlier post, I'm in agreement with you that I'm not for the 1/3 health reduction.

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you read this, replied to me, and informed me of that.

You and everybody else of course, but my pleasure!

And just speculation, not from word from the top mind you.

 

But glad i could list a possible reason why from my numerous other beta test experiences. (Okay Klei and everybody, no "but truthseeker said..." :p

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I'm under the impression that the vast majority of people playing online will be people that have at least made it through their first winter. And completely new people will play offline for a bit before coming online.

 

I think it would probably be a bit worse for a new person trying to join servers, only to get kicked after they die two stupid deaths (like we all did when we first started) because the people that have been working on the server for a few hours don't want to lose all their progress because of some newbie who may be a griefer. I could also see people getting kicked immediately if they let anyone know that they're new, if the "pooled health" system stayed.

 

 

I agree with you. In this thread I've been advocating for tweaking the ghost system instead, but with the general idea that you keep ghosts and give players more control over how to interact with them, but when a ghost runs out it causes permadeath (as in they can no longer reconnect to the server to make a new character, at least until the server has been reset).

 

Perhaps this thread has gotten too long and is starting to get a bit circular :(

 

By any chance, was it Planeshift? (The rest of your post was your written take which I have not decided either way on.) 

 

Wow, I think that was it. I'm glad to see I did remember the death system correctly, because it was a long time ago and a very brief period of playing for me!

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In that case would you care to pitch an entirely different new system to replace the current one to us? Because it's one thing to try fixing a system that's in place even if it's difficult to work around, (which I think the community is doing a good job offering suggestions and fixes with our discussion) but it's quite another thing to just walk in, say the idea is terrible and all solutions to fix it are terrible, then leave without any sort of recommendation for an alternative.

 

I refuse to the notion that there is absolutely no way to make this particular mechanic work. In its current state it needs significant reworking, but depending on the goal you are trying to reach with a game, in this case to create a fulfilling co-op survival experience that doesn't fall as easily to the traps of a kill-or-be-killed mindset, being closed-minded about conventional game design and saying that certain things automatically make a design good or bad will take us nowhere. I'd rather see Klei trying new ideas and failing in their experimentation rather than giving us the base minimum of a multiplayer mode because they're afraid to develop further and make some mistakes along the way.

 

I mean, do you want DST to be good? Help out then! Klei is one of the rare and beautiful examples of a development team that actively listens to their community, take advantage of that! It's a wasted opportunity not to voice your opinion beyond just, "I hate this, it's bad." because that helps nobody.

 

I don't see why you feel the need for an over-complicated system to force a "game over" state.

 

Death is not a particularly harsh mechanic in don't starve, even in single player.  You'll find touchstones, and eventually can craft amulets or effigies to make final death even more difficult.

 

For multiplayer, death shouldn't be trivial, but it also can't be too expensive otherwise people will just want to remake the world if more than one person dies.  the best costs will be time and resources to revive someone.  Meat effigies are reasonably expensive, especially in a multiplayer game where there are more mouths to feed.  Similarly, red gems are not trivial to acquire.

 

The community offering suggestions about death mechanics when we haven't even seen the full developer implementation yet is at best, a waste of time, and at worst, counter productive.

 

 

Your idea is particularly bad for several reasons.

 

1) Punishing players for things beyond their control

 

2) Assuming that players need more incentives to work together

 

3) Permanent punishments for what amounts to a temporary status effect

 

It is a textbook example of what someone who doesn't understand how game mechanics and players interact.

 

If death is trivial, then players are reckless and there's not the sense of vulnerability that makes the single player so compelling.

 

If death is too expensive, then players are forced into a lose-lose situation:  Do I continue on crippled by the death/reviving of an ally, or do I lose my progress and remake the world?

 

There are difficult questions about how the mechanics will work.  

 

For example, how does leaving/rejoining affect servers?  If I'm dead and quit/rejoin, doesn't that leave me with a free, easy way to revive?  What happens if people join in summer/winter, when they can die due to exposure before they have a chance to get established?

 

 

Your suggestion, however, doesn't have enough positive effects to justify the effort to make it less detrimental to having fun in the game.  There are a number of ways to encourage interdependence (aka, co-op) and trigger "game over" situations.

 

One such change would be removing touchstones in a multiplayer game, leaving telltale hearts (with a large (non-max) health cost to craft), and the limited/expensive options of effigies and amulets.  This makes griefing/lone wolfing a much more dangerous proposition, because if you're dead you won't be revived in any reasonable timeframe, so unless you are out teching organized players you're at a heavy disadvantage.

 

No touchstones gives players a variety of different options for revival, but they all are either expensive or require intervention from other players.  Unskilled players will be significantly weakened from having to craft telltale hearts to revive, while more organized players will be able to acquire beard hair and meat fast enough to have an effigy or two on hand in case of emergencies, and some amulets around for tough fights.

 

For the most part, the current system with some tweaks strikes a good balance between death not being trivial and half the players dying not ruin the run.

 

I fail to see how your suggestion adds anything needed, or deals with the more difficult situations I mentioned earlier, which is why I suggest scrapping the entire idea instead of trying to transmute it to something helpful like lead to gold.

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The community offering suggestions about death mechanics when we haven't even seen the full developer implementation yet is at best, a waste of time, and at worst, counter productive.

We have seen two mostly-complete implementations so far: ghosts, and permanent health penalty per death. Devs are essentially proposing implementations to themselves right now, so crowdsourcing the idea generation to the community can definitely help bubble up some good proposals.

 

I don't see why you feel the need for an over-complicated system to force a "game over" state.

Your idea is particularly bad for several reasons.

 

1) Punishing players for things beyond their control

 

2) Assuming that players need more incentives to work together

 

3) Permanent punishments for what amounts to a temporary status effect

 

It is a textbook example of what someone who doesn't understand how game mechanics and players interact.

It sounds like you're describing the game's current health penalty system. As in the system that is now in the friends & family, phase 1 beta. This is what this thread is arguing against / trying to find ways to improve upon. Am I missing something?? If not, then you basically just called the developer's most recent decision on how death should work a textbook example of someone who doesn't understand how game mechanics and players interact... Awkward...

 

There are difficult questions about how the mechanics will work.  

 

For example, how does leaving/rejoining affect servers?  If I'm dead and quit/rejoin, doesn't that leave me with a free, easy way to revive?  What happens if people join in summer/winter, when they can die due to exposure before they have a chance to get established?

Questions 1 and 2: In the ghosts implementation, it gave them a free respawn. In the current implementation, it gives them a respawn but the world keeps track of the number of deaths (without touchstones/effigies) and resets on 3, essentially.

Question 3: This is a great example of why the current system is bad, at least without tweaks. Examples of tweaks could be: players have a short grace period when joining, or a warning before connecting that the world is currently in a perilous state ("Warning: this server is in Summer. Are you sure you want to join?").

 

For the most part, the current system with some tweaks strikes a good balance between death not being trivial and half the players dying not ruin the run.

This is what Quady suggested... ? Or perhaps you mean the current single-player situation? In no implementation shown so far have they had an unaltered system from single-player... because it doesn't make much sense.

 

---

But you're also responding to Quady as if his post was a single cohesive suggestion, which it wasn't. It was a list of problems he saw with the most recently shown system and various suggestions for improving it. If you want a more comprehensive alternate system suggestion, that covers grey areas like the ones you brought up, you can look at a summary of the one I've been discussing in this thread:

 

Description of the system:

When you die, you become a ghost for a short period (around 10 seconds). Telltale hearts can be used to resurrect you in that period. When the ghost times out, you die, and are prevented from respawning on that server until the world is reset (disconnecting and reconnecting doesn't change this). What you could do otherwise is up for debate, but this could mean you are banned from the server until then, or locked into an observer mode, or several other possibilities. (the previously shown ghost implementation was similar, but with a longer ghost period and no banning upon death, which is what trivialized ghosts and death in general)

 

This addresses common scenario of an accidental death while foraging with a friend by providing a period where premeditated mitigation can be applied. Another scenario that I think needs to have a mitigation method would be where you have an established base, but are out alone and die. For this, I suggest the following:

 

A ghostcatcher structure can be built, perhaps for 4 boards + purple gem + 10 spider glands. The recipe could be changed to adjust balance. Players can activate the ghostcatcher, pairing them with it and causing an individual -30 max health penalty like a meat effigy. For any player paired to a ghostcatcher, when they time out as a ghost they appear as a ghost at the ghostcatcher with a renewed duration (around 20 seconds). This enables players near the base to sprint by and help, or for resurrection materials to be stored in the base, such as meat effigies, which mostly restores the single-player behavior of a meat effigy being a safety net regardless of where you die.

 

Analysis of the system:

The ghost system has the attractive feature of being agnostic to player cooperation (you can cooperate with a ghost, but if you aren't going to, the ghost phase ends quickly). The current system of maximum health penalties is very heavy-handed in terms of forcing cooperation. I think there are communication issues here, but it sounded like you agree with us on that point.

 

The ghostcatcher functions just as well for solo and group play, although like many other things in the game implicitly facilitates group play by being a public good (non-exclusive, non-rivalrous). That is, nobody can prevent you from pairing with the ghostcatcher, and you using the ghostcatcher doesn't interfere with others using it. This is essentially the same interaction with groups vs solo play as you'd see with a firepit.

 

We can also look at this system as compared to others from a design goal perspective:

  • Death needs to be impactful.
  • Desynchronization between players is not fun and there should be mechanism to avoid it. An example of desynchronization is one player being dead without any method of revival and the other still being alive.
  • Griefing is not fun and there should either be metasystems for dealing with it, or preferably death as a mechanic should be relatively resistant to it.
  • Game mechanics should not force particular playstyles any more than necessary. For example, you shouldn't feel compelled to cooperate or to compete based on the mechanics, the motivation to do either should be intrinsic to you.

Okay, so how do these systems measure up against the design goals?

  • The first revealed ghost system fails (1). Death is not impactful because you can reconnect and respawn, and being a ghost just adds an annoying addendum to death. It doesn't really have problems with the rest of it, as desync is very easy to solve (reconnect), griefing isn't that much of a problem (death has no impact anyway), and you can decide to help the other players or they can help themselves just fine.
  • The most recently revealed global health penalty on death system brings back (1) in a big way. Probably too big, since it's permanent and irreversible. (2) is solved by having the consequences of death be directly tied to the world, rather than individual players. (3) is a huge problem, any random person can join and add a permanent penalty, even several times over. (4) is in bad shape, because you are unreasonably compelled to cooperate, competition or opposition are completely suicidal.
  • My suggested ghost + ghostcatcher system restores (1) by preventing any method of respawn after ghost-death. (2) is in good shape because players have means to prevent desync by thinking ahead (having telltale hearts, preparing a ghostcatcher and resurrection materials at a base). (3) isn't a big problem because a random person joining and dying isn't going to affect much of anything. (4) is met because you can decide to help ghosts or not, and even have methods to help ghosts that are far away if you prepared for it well beforehand, but no mechanic is compelling you to help them if you don't want to (you could even be really evil and make a ghostcatcher for them, then burn it while they're away if you want to).

Granted, my design goals may not be their design goals, but I think this is at least a reasonable subset of goals for attempting to scale Don't Starve's single player toward multiplayer.

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Death is not a particularly harsh mechanic in don't starve, even in single player.  You'll find touchstones, and eventually can craft amulets or effigies to make final death even more difficult...

 

Your idea is particularly bad for several reasons.

 

1) Punishing players for things beyond their control

 

2) Assuming that players need more incentives to work together

 

3) Permanent punishments for what amounts to a temporary status effect

 

It is a textbook example of what someone who doesn't understand how game mechanics and players interact.

 

Okay just to address that first bit, if you don't consider death in Don't Starve, which can occur anytime from half an hour to whole tens of hours of play in a single world, permanently erasing said world and all your progress within it as being a harsh mechanic, I would really love to hear what is.

 

Moving on, why are you identifying this as my idea? Are you sure you read the first post correctly? Because you're inaccurately throwing a lot of blame on me for this design being bad, when realistically there is nobody to blame for the mechanic, and if anything we should be working together to improve it to a more workable form, or at least offer alternative ways to deal with death, because there ought to be some result beyond just respawning back in, that's certainly an option but it seems the easiest and laziest in a game where death is very much supposed to matter.

 

At the beginning of my post I stated that this new mechanic was explained in the Rhymes with Play stream. Everything that I suggested was based upon what they introduced in that broadcast, and the whole point of my suggestion was to lighten said punishment so that unless a large party of people all died at once, in other words I was trying to work towards the opposite of all the problems you listed above, or at least make some headway into discussion on how to improve them from how they were in the latest build which the devs showcased.

 

1) I was recommending a system where everyone could bounce back and recover from the pooled health drain on their own merit by crafting and consuming Telltale Hearts. No it doesn't entirely remove the fact that their fate is partially out of their control, but you have to understand that with what I'm suggesting, you wouldn't die quickly enough for a sole griefer to kill you, and unless a whole party of people died (talking like a 6 person group here) at once you would never die from the health drain. I like to think that's a step up from just keeling over after 3 cumulative deaths in the entire world, which is the system we saw in place most recently.

 

2) Friends and some strangers won't need incentive to work together, it'll just happen and that's the beautiful part of social freedom in constructive multiplayer games like this, but the idea here (which the devs stated themselves) is that Don't Starve Together is a co-op survival game first, and they want to cater to that before specializing settings for PvP servers. To prevent the more common multiplayer survival mentality of actively hunting down other players or allowing them to die for your own benefit, Klei wants you to care about a starving passerby and offer him hospitality, because everyone is indirectly connected via their life force.

 

That said, Klei's initial approach to this concept came on way too strong and was far too punishing that it didn't really account for how abusable it was if players didn't behave exactly how this system wanted them to. Our discussion here is all about how to lighten that punishment without completely laying bare the idea of inclined hospitality, because it's a pretty nice system to work towards, and a somewhat unique approach for a multiplayer survival game like this, being unique though, there are some kinks that need to be worked out and experimentation has to be done to see what works best.

 

3) Regarding death as a "temporary side effect" seems completely out of whack here. Yes, there are ways to prevent your final demise, but that absolutely does not excuse the fact that in the end, this game DOES feature permadeath, you CAN die and it DOES matter a lot, and as I interpret it the whole point of death in Don't Starve is, to be a permanent punishment, which you identify as a particularly bad mechanic. Having played Don't Starve or any rogue-like, one could assume there is supposed to be a degree of permanent punishment in this type of game while still offering long-term progress, such as Don't Starve's unlockable characters.

 

The pooled health drain was to transfer this idea to a universal scale, so if somebody dies, they may be able to come back, but if people keep dying, you lose the entire world, and that completes the idea of true death, because while you may all respawn in the end, everything you built, everything you explored and everything you worked towards will be gone. We don't want that to happen so immediately, because there's a fine line this balances between being way too punishing (universal 3 life limit) and way too forgiving, (simply respawning as many times as you want, as it was with ghost form) so we really have to make sure that there's a careful system set in place to not be off-putting for either direction.

 

Some people want DST to be really difficult, getting booted and temporarily banned from a server once you die, and others want DST to be really easy so you can play with your friends without fear of losing everything you work on in whichever server you join. There should be server settings to cater to both, but as a default there should be a balance of both, some sort of compromise that can make both parties happy.

 

 

I'm trying to compromise with what Klei has designed without just throwing it out the window entirely. They're the ones doing all the work on this after all, it's better if we can help remedy an existing mechanic rather than scrapping it after the Ghost Form had just been scrapped previous to that stream.

 

And if you could, avoid telling other people that they don't understand anything about the topic of game mechanics or player interactions, I think everyone has something of value to offer on this thread, even the simplistic suggestions hold a lot of merit as to what the community as a whole might like for DST as a final product. You're taking a little too much emphasis on shooting other people down and pointing out what's wrong with what they say, and very little time throwing your own suggestions out there. You have yet to really explain what your alternative plan to the issues you presented might be.

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Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you know that the discussion here has been useful. We've also done a fair amount of playtesting in the last little while, both with seasoned players and new ones, and we're gradually converging to a better, less griefable and still substantial mechanism. 

 

We'll likely discuss our thoughts in this week's Rhymes with Play and our reasonings behind it. Thanks for your input - I really appreciate it!

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Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you know that the discussion here has been useful. We've also done a fair amount of playtesting in the last little while, both with seasoned players and new ones, and we're gradually converging to a better, less griefable and still substantial mechanism. 

 

We'll likely discuss our thoughts in this week's Rhymes with Play and our reasonings behind it. Thanks for your input - I really appreciate it!

 

Maybe it's just because I'm used to other devs (looking at you, Nexon) but I never expected anyone higher up than a forum mod or a community manager to post here, or to even read or hear about this, so I'm surprised, happy, and impressed with this result!

 

This feels like it should be normal practice, but so few devs actually do it. Thanks for being awesome, guys.

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Maybe it's just because I'm used to other devs (looking at you, Nexon) but I never expected anyone higher up than a forum mod or a community manager to post here, or to even read or hear about this, so I'm surprised, happy, and impressed with this result!

 

This feels like it should be normal practice, but so few devs actually do it. Thanks for being awesome, guys.

 

They post here all the time, our fearless leader @Bigfoot included!

 

Another reason I put Klei in the "Awesome" category of gaming companies. 

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Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you know that the discussion here has been useful. We've also done a fair amount of playtesting in the last little while, both with seasoned players and new ones, and we're gradually converging to a better, less griefable and still substantial mechanism. 

 

We'll likely discuss our thoughts in this week's Rhymes with Play and our reasonings behind it. Thanks for your input - I really appreciate it!

 

Wow, that is awesome. Thank you for hearing our suggestions.

 

I apologize that my post that I made came out a little angry towards the developers. I should've understood that this is a work in progress and you guys are trying your best to make the experience as good as possible. Please forgive me.

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