Share your thoughts on the current Survival Mode Design

[Zackreaver]

So I was about to make a mod for a separate game mode that had the challenge of survival mode but with an adjustment to loopholes and frustrations.  But first I wanted to ask what people thought of certain things

 

 

1. What do you think of mandatory Survival Mode Reset?  It's current design is dependant on the amount of living CONNECTED players and in my opinion this feels like it's really easy for players to get screwed over simply because 1 player died all by themself while the others were offline.  A dedicated public survival server is effectively impossible since if all participating players log off for the night and 1 lone new player joins in and gets killed, the whole entire world resets and all progress is lost even though everyone else might have been doing just fine!  

 

For servers hosted by player, 1 player can act as a host while the others all join their server and play until 1 player decides to get off, then the host shuts down the server effectively putting it on pause. (This is the method I use to play with my friends.)  The only problems with this method is that everyone can't play until either the host, or the group (including the host) are all online. But this is something we openly choose to do because we want the survival experience to be with the group as a whole from the very beginning to the very end.

 

And that brings me to another thing.

 

2. What do you think of the way players can effectively dodge seasons, dodge hunger, dodge death, by simply logging out and then logging in later when everything has been made better.  I've actually had one of my friends (Who felt wasn't contributing anything useful but in reality probably didn't feel like playing) logged out because he was worried he was just effectively draining food from the camp and not bringing anything in return to make up for being there.  Only to then join back later after an establishment was setup and everything was going better.

 

I've actually noticed that if I start up a don't starve together server I am capable of getting multiple fully fledged camps up and running, a large stockpile of food and an extremely durable fort all without any real concern or effort.  However, add other players to the equation and suddenly the food supplies drain alot faster, things become more drastic, much greater and stupider risks are taken and death is surely to follow afterwards.

 

See the thing is playing by yourself means you only ever have to worry about yourself, your the only person that needs food and every resource that you come across is a resource that you will use, while playing this game with other people right from the beginning makes it immediately more challenging because food, materials, and tasks get divided, this means that the scale of everything becomes much greater which makes the game more challenging and in my opinion more fun.  So the ability to effectively skip stages of the early game feels like cheating in a sense.

 

I like to look at the "Days Survived" as a sort of score indicating how long I was capable of surviving, but this number wouldn't' really mean much unless you knew the blood sweat and tears you had to go through to get it.

 

After all, it's alot easier to get 100 days survived when you start your day 1 fully geared up with a dark sword, marble armor and football helmet with several pieces of jerky in your inventory and a fully built base to fall back on.  And I understand that this is all in beta and once we get the content klei is promising (Beefalo riding, etc...) then these stigmas of mine will quickly be a thing of the past.

 

 

But what I'm trying to get at is, the world reset of survival mode would be alot more interesting if it only really happened if everyone is dead including the people that aren't online at the moment.  The only problem of course is you can have an infinite amount of people join a public server and it would be extremely easy to just have 1 person join, then leave, then the server never resets and everyone just waits until that 1 person gets them all back up.  But this would simply be like playing Endless Mode with the portal Resurrection off.

 

Instead, survival mode would be more interesting if there was a cap on how many different players could join the game at any given time, much like how theres a cap on servers right now, but if the server fills up and one of the players leave, another player can't join in because their slot is taken up.  But the host of the server could then choose to kick that player from the slot and let someone else join in their place, but they get stuck with whatever the original player had.

Additionally, the world should get harder the longer it's been alive for, similar to how players individually get their own difficulty level based on how long they've lived for right now.  But instead of making the game harder for the players that lived longer, it should make the entire world harder.

However, to prevent skipping time while living players are offline, if every living player is dead, then time should freeze until one of the remaining living players logs back on.  That means no one can do anything until a living players joins back in.  Freezing time when everybody is logged off on a dedicated server would also prevent this while allowing dedicated servers to run this variant.

Then, if every player in every slot is dead and became ghosts, then the original world reset timer starts and everyone has that long to revive themselves through whatever methods they have available, or else the server resets and that ends their survival run.

 

At least that's just my thoughts on it, I could probably emulate a good portion of my idea through modding it in, probably not the time freezing idea as that would involve effectively putting everything in the entire world on pause including the player, but considering that this is still in development, and we have no real idea what klei has in store for us there might be a lot more being added to the survival mode to make it's design make a lot more sense.  

 

So what do you think on the current survival mode design?  What would you consider changing it for the better?  Do you feel everything works well as is?

 

And this is a big question being that I might plan on modding it. What kind of cooperative mode would you make if you had the chance?

 

[rezecib]

@Zackreaver, I agree that the things you discussed are problems, at least as far as they are systems with loopholes that I would prefer not to be there. Solving those problem, on the other hand, is pretty hard.

 

I don't think your system of a player cap with replacement sounds very good. One of the major reasons why a cooperative game can become not fun is if there's desynchronization between the players, such as when one can play and another cannot (this is why players are not booted and banned from a world on death, for example). Your cap behaves the mostly the same way as it already does until the cap is exceeded, and once it's exceeded, it just causes desynchronization. The main difference in how it behaves before the cap is if someone leaves and another joins, which would not increase the number of player entities that have existed in a game. This works, I guess, but it doesn't fully close any of the loopholes, it just relies on people setting a character cap that matches the number of players that intend to play for the full extent of the game. And if you're relying on that, then they could just increase the cap by one to use the same exploits you were trying to avoid.

 

What if the survival mode reset countdown started whenever there were two people dead on a server, counting those who are disconnected and dead? This would introduce a griefing loophole, where two people could join a server, die, and basically guarantee a reset, but if we're assuming this mode (maybe it should be a variant of survival for this reason) is only going to be used in strictly cooperative play (e.g. private games among friends), then it closes the joining/leaving loopholes with ghosts.

 

You could also fix the problem of someone dying and (maybe they have to go) disconnecting causing the world to be stuck in a one-death-starts-countdown trap by having disconnected ghosts leave behind a grave that could be given a telltale heart to reduce the ghost count-- when the ghost returns, they get resurrected as if they had been given the telltale heart then.

[ryouryou]

I don't think Survival is really a good choice for dedicated servers at this point for those reasons, but those reasons work perfectly well with player-hosted servers in my experience.

If someone dies and leaves, I don't necessarily know if players on the server need to be punished for that. If anything it just makes ghost griefing EVEN EASIER, because you can just join, suicide immediately, leave, and go do the same on 20 other servers instead of being stuck logged into the game griefing just one group. You can grief them all. You can be the very best, like no one ever was. Even if you're not griefing, people could essentially end a game by joining during winter/summer and dying. 

Maybe dedicated servers need some survival tweaks due to their persistent nature that survival mode on player-hosted games doesn't need. I'm unsure. It is sucky to log back on and realize all your things are gone and the world is gone, but... then, this is Don't Starve, isn't it? We should be use to the loss by now.

A good compromise between persistent graves and current ghost mechanics might be to have a small, flat sanity loss happen at the moment the person dies, and to slightly decrease the ghost sanity aura to compensate. Over a specific amount of time (balance to ~1 ingame day) the sanity loss would be the same, only frontloaded a bit so the effect of the ghost leaving right after dying is not as alleviating. A flat sanity loss can be recovered from more easily than having 6 people join, die, and leave scattered graves that not only drive you insane but require crafting mats and personal health/sanity expenditure (which can be unsustainable pre-good crock pot recipes) to fix.

If we want to protect new games from suicide sanity bombs, the penalty could gradually scale up until reaching its full effects on around day 5-10 OR for a different balance the effect could gradually scale up based on how many players have died on that server, e.g., first person dies, x sanity, second person, 1.5x, third person, 2x, fourth person, 3x, probably capping around there so it doesn't become impossible.

I'm basically just suggesting tweaking how the math works so that more of the burden of someone dying applies at the time of death, for clarity.

I seem to see a lot of perception that Survival and "cooperative play" in general are only for "private games with friends" but since that's the opposite of how I play, I just feel the need to chime in and give my perspective. Survival with strangers is an amazing challenge in both social organizing and actual gameplay. It reminds me of pick-up group raiding in MMO's. It might be hard, occasionally frustrating, and full of noobs and outright trolls sometimes, but when you get all those dissonant moving parts to work together, ahh~



 

[Pyromailmann]

Survival is the worst choice for a dedicated server, you'd be better with Endless, it actually is much better. Survival is meant for private servers with friends most likely.

[Zackreaver]

Survival is the worst choice for a dedicated server, you'd be better with Endless, it actually is much better. Survival is meant for private servers with friends most likely.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this wholeheartedly, the whole idea of survival on dedicated servers seems pretty much an impossibility.

 

 

As for survival on privately hosted servers with friends, I think it would be nicer is the system was better setup for it though.

 

Perhaps with the concept that survival mode is only going to be done with a group of friends for the cooperative aspect, what would we want to change to make a setup like this better?

 

Essentially your going to have people either hosting their survival mode games publicly to try and meet new people and work with it, or your gonna meet them in an endless game first and plan towards a survival mode game.

 

 

 

And if you're relying on that, then they could just increase the cap by one to use the same exploits you were trying to avoid.

 

Well doing some rethinking on it, I figure a player cap idea I thought up is essentially not necessary, but really rather the concept dodging stuff as loopholes are things I want to think more of.

 

 

Back on my thought of "people can disconnect to dodge seasons, danger, hunger drain" to make the game unintentionally easier.  What could we do to remedy this?

 

The main reason it makes it easier is essentially if 1 player doesn't have as much time to play so they only log on for a little bit, do a couple things then log off, they essentially are online for less amount of danger.  The days survived act as a sort of scoreboard indicating how long each player has managed to survive for, but as a scoreboard alone it has it's flaws obviously since you can end up having an easier time surviving if you join a game fully geared out.

 

 

Considering how pretty much no one is going to host a survival mode game on a dedicated server, we can assess that when the host decides to quit, the server is going to be put on pause.  If we think about constructing the mode towards that respect, then instead of recording the days survived on the players, we should do it on the world instead.  

Since in the games current system, while the host is alive the entire server is safe, but once the host is dead it gets put in danger.  

 

This works pretty well so far since if the host decides to play without the full group dangers can arise that they have to deal with.

 

I just had a thought, as an idea for a survival mode variant that I might try making into a mod, how about an "Arranged Team" survival mode (better name requested) where it acts like a normal survival mode, however the difficulty of the game is determined by the player cap set by the host when he creates the server for the first time.  

 

This way, if you host a server that can have up to 6 players, the difficulty would scale to face a group of 6 players, as opposed to hosting a server that can have up to 2 players.  Raising the cap even further through mods would probably make deerclops seem like an epic raid boss that causes massive amount of destruction in his wake.

 

But with this adjustment, if the host decides to host an unmodded cap of a 6 player server, then the challenges in the game change to accommodate  having to face against 6 players online actively at a time.

 

The only obvious problem I can think of this at the moment is players joining a server fresh later in the game could jump in with full default stats, but unless the original player that was in their slot had worse than starting gears worth of progress then this shouldn't be a problem, especially if the camp is nowhere near the portal and it's the middle of summer or winter.

 

 

 

I think I might try to create some kind of difficulty setting mod for don't starve together so we can try something along these lines.  Though I'm also mostly excited to see what klei has planned for us first, because the "over the horizon" update might do something similar to this any rate, since they stated that we've been having it a little "easy" lately .

[ryouryou]

A lot of games have a mechanic where there's a delay before you can log off, like a 10 second countdown. Furthermore, if you disconnect forcefully (Alt-F4 or internet failure) it leaves your character "spawned" for a certain amount of time server-side, so harm can still befall them.

Some also disallow logging off when in combat. 

Maybe something like this would work for Don't Starve Together.