What is the purpose of making The Forge a temporary event?

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

I don't understand the purpose of making a decent chunk of content a temporary event. The skins and emotes and such seem pretty dope. I personally don't like the combat skins, because it furthers the idea that the game is an RPG, but a lot of the content here has had decent effort put into it. May be this is some way of making players want to purchase skins more and so for you, Klei, to make more profit. While it may work, it's a bit saddening that the content gets removed permanently. At least to my knowledge, it will be removed permanently.

May be, after the 3 weeks, we could still host servers of the Forge in some form, may be with the inclusion of the base game's mechanics? I do not like the execution of the content as an RPG, but the content itself seems neat, so, why remove it?

[BiddoBams]

We don't know how often these events could happen. Could rotate a new theme every month, or could happen quarterly! They did say they want to use The Forge as a framework for future events. Once they got the framework working, it should be easy for them to design more monsters, weapons and environments to battle/do other tasks in. 

Suppose we gotta wait and see, I'd really be bummed if these events with all their shiny bells and whistles goes away for a long time. Plus would seem like a huge waste of effort on Klei's end.

[Rellimarual]

Because they plan to replace it with something else, which will then be replaced by something else, etc.

The Forge seems to be a way to offer longtime players new things to do  on an ongoing basis without changing the base game (or not too much). If The Forge stayed exactly as is for months and months, people would probably get pretty tired of it, especially if all they get is skins.

[The Curator]

24 minutes ago, Rellimarual said:

Because they plan to replace it with something else, which will then be replaced by something else, etc.

The Forge seems to be a way to offer longtime players new things to do  on an ongoing basis without changing the base game (or not too much). If The Forge stayed exactly as is for months and months, people would probably get pretty tired of it, especially if all they get is skins.

Is that really your logic. They shouldn't just, make a new event, make it permanent so players have it forever; and then make a new permanent event so on and so forth. No, they need to specifically delete the old event before a new event is made; because the cosmos demands it. Screw all the players who may want to play the content afterwards, the first time one player gets tired of it delete the whole thing. So by your logic, after a few months they should just delete the whole game and make a new one since if there's a chance of players getting tired of it clearly the best course of action is to just remove that content before they have a chance to get tired of it. Because reasons. A never ending loop of wasted content and development time, which is what temporary events are.

 

It's the short-play strategy. Developers think that by making content temporary it will force players to flock to it in greater numbers, as opposed to making content permanent which builds onto the game but doesn't spark as much of a crowd.

Developers usually resort to it when they become desperate to keep their game alive, and so they abandon the idea of actually building onto the game and just start creating and deleting content in order to force players to stay tuned. Since they have to play the content quickly and often since it will disappear eventually. It works, in a trying-to-peddle-merch-while-everybody-is-downing-just-so-you-can-see-the-extra-cash-before-the-brine-takes-you kind of way.

 

They would be better off overhauling The Forge to be completely randomized then selling it as a permanent bonus mode for like five dollars. At least then it doesn't hinder the main game in any way. Instead, it's extremely linear and thus repetitious in the wave composition; and it's only going to exist for four weeks for free as far as we know. As in, the developers spent however many months working on something that is only going to exist for four weeks.

 

[Zeklo]

If I'm to take a guess it won't be gone forever. As more events like this get added they'll rotate between them. If we had 12 events they could rotate each month. That'd be cool imo.

One thing to note is that the servers are Klei hosted. Meaning if they kept to going forever they wouldn't realistically be able to host more events because their servers would be occupied with previous one(s).

I know the common question is going to be: "Why not just let people host it themselves?" That's a different issue. They've done this in a way to prevent cheaters—a lot of the code is handled server-side and not downloaded on the client. Meaning even if you wanted to have a no-reward self-hosted sever that would require having the data—which they want hidden.

That's my take on it at least.

[BiddoBams]

Also: There's quite a lot of servers. Klei didn't just buy all these servers for a 3 week event and that's it.  

 

(that, or the pleated shirt fund is really lucrative) 

[fimmatek]

3 hours ago, Ashkain said:

Suppose we gotta wait and see, I'd really be bummed if these events with all their shiny bells and whistles goes away for a long time. Plus would seem like a huge waste of effort on Klei's end.

 

I, with the others, also don't think the even will be completely gone, that would be a waste of effort for a 3-weeks event, and new players wouldn't have a chance to try it. Klei maybe gives these events back as a non-rewarded, self-hostable component, similarily to the previous event. Like the Year of the Gobbler ended, but we still can play it, even if it's not there everywhere and we don't have its event skins.

49 minutes ago, Rellimarual said:

If The Forge stayed exactly as is for months and months, people would probably get pretty tired of it, especially if all they get is skins.

Besides, after a month: required XP to next level: 957 383. gg.

3 hours ago, Ashkain said:

They did say they want to use The Forge as a framework for future events. Once they got the framework working, it should be easy for them to design more monsters, weapons and environments to battle/do other tasks in.

I'm not 100% sure the next events will have the same mechanic, e.g. this fighting arena. In the speech files the Forge event is called "Arena Event", which doesn't make much sense if the next ones will be in an arena too. (It also could get boring after a few events I think.) 

After looking the speech files more carefully, the mobs and the weapons have a regular name (like healingstaff), but the hats, armors and the arena stuff have a name beginning with "lavaarena_", which could imply that indeed there will be more arena type events and the monsters and weapons are (at least partly) shared by these while the rest not (necessarily), and the whole series of these events is called the "Arena Event".

Now that I looked carefully I realised that Lucy and Bernie are also have a "lavaarena_" name. Maybe they'll be different in the other event? (Abigail, however, is not listed under the "Arena Event")

[Darklokey]

I feel like we should be able to pick through a list of these events rather than have them being a time based thing, it would preserve the different gamemode of an arena event and still make the skins something to get. I personally have most of the skins I want from the event but there is no way I'm going to get much of what I want in a 3 week time period, especially since what I've gotten in the beta will not carry over whatsoever.

[Xedlord]

7 hours ago, Zeklo said:

If I'm to take a guess it won't be gone forever. As more events like this get added they'll rotate between them. If we had 12 events they could rotate each month. That'd be cool imo.

One thing to note is that the servers are Klei hosted. Meaning if they kept to going forever they wouldn't realistically be able to host more events because their servers would be occupied with previous one(s).

I know the common question is going to be: "Why not just let people host it themselves?" That's a different issue. They've done this in a way to prevent cheaters—a lot of the code is handled server-side and not downloaded on the client. Meaning even if you wanted to have a no-reward self-hosted sever that would require having the data—which they want hidden.

That's my take on it at least.

Ah Zeklo... If only I still had your childlike optimism... but sadly, even though I'm still (basically) a child, I no longer have that... for this life has broken my spirit... and may soon break my mind...  

[Rellimarual]

8 hours ago, The Curator said:

9 hours ago, Rellimarual said:

 

Is that really your logic. They shouldn't just, make a new event, make it permanent so players have it forever; and then make a new permanent event so on and so forth. No, they need to specifically delete the old event before a new event is made; because the cosmos demands it. Screw all the players who may want to play the content afterwards, the first time one player gets tired of it delete the whole thing. So by your logic, after a few months they should just delete the whole game and make a new one since if there's a chance of players getting tired of it clearly the best course of action is to just remove that content before they have a chance to get tired of it. Because reasons. A never ending loop of wasted content and development time, which is what temporary events are.

Calm down. We don’t yet know exactly how the portal will work, and whether this particular arena battle will be an option to choose from in the future. But Klei has confirmed that The Forge is an experiment in creating a modular part of the game, separate from the main game, in which new content in the form of events can be introduced and tried out. Unlike the main game, it is meant to be changed regularly. Hopefully, more interesting events will appear there in the future, like some multiplayer version of adventure mode. Or maybe there will be slightly different arena fights every few months. Whatever it is, chances are that when it comes along, it’ll be much harder to assemble a team of 6 to play the old version whenever you happen to want to play it because everyone will be wanting to play the new thing instead. For all we know, the new thing will be much more appealing, even beyond its newness. There could be technical or resource limitations on how many servers Klei can or is willing to host, but that’s a total guess on my part. In any case, this is still a work in progress.

[Michi01]

18 hours ago, fimmatek said:

Klei maybe gives these events back as a non-rewarded, self-hostable component

That's exactly what I'm expecting too. With the level and skin earning system they made, the only way to prevent cheaters is to host the servers themselves, which they can't keep doing forever. That does not mean that they can't bring it back for everyone to host and without the rewards.