Downgradeable WX (gear refund)

[StealthBeast]

It sucks when a WX eats gears when it's clear the base is in dire need of a fridge or flingomatic. Which leads me to never being able to enjoy eating gears unless our base is in a very good position. Sure, you can commit suicide, but that doesn't give a 100% return.

Got me thinking, what if WX had a more elegant way to get the gears back? Like, as an arbitrary example, what if eating an electric doodad caused a short-circuit animation followed by the dispensing of a gear (and of course the reduction of both the long term and short term stat boost associated with gears. Maybe a bit more out of the short term stats, just to disincentivize some sort of ouroboros relationship being abused between multiple WXs).

I wouldn't have to be so damn afraid of eating gears in the early game. Sure, I could still die, and that would suck, but it might be a worthwhile risk depending on the situation. As it stands right now? If it's early game, and you eat gears, and you're not a ruins god or something, you're being a ****.

[fimmatek]

It's a really nice idea! With this a lot of unpleasant situation could be avoided, especially on public servers where a newbie WX joins. 

The only issue here is that gears give damn good stats when eaten (they restore a lot hp, and maybe sanity too?), so the abuse of eating/despesing the same gear over and over should be prevented. Just imagine, electric doodads were the best healing items for WX! Maybe a temporar speed reduction (WX must recover from losing some gears, you know)? I don't know how could it be well balanced, but if it could be done, this would be a great thing!

[Sinister_Fang]

18 minutes ago, fimmatek said:

The only issue here is that gears give damn good stats when eaten (they restore a lot hp, and maybe sanity too?), so the abuse of eating/despesing the same gear over and over should be prevented.

They suggested losing current stats in addition to the maximum. Just for reference, when WX eats gears he restores 60 health, 75 hunger and 50 sanity. So if the gears were removed and he took damage equal to what they restore, then removing gears would be a pretty painful process. As I'd imagine pulling out parts of your body would be. So you'll still think twice about eating those gears if you think you might need them for later.

[fimmatek]

1 minute ago, Sinister_Fang said:

They suggested losing current stats in addition to the maximum. Just for reference, when WX eats gears he restores 60 health, 75 hunger and 50 sanity. So if the gears were removed and he took damage equal to what they restore, then removing gears would be a pretty painful process. As I'd imagine pulling out parts of your body would be. So you'll still think twice about eating those gears if you think you might need them for later.

Hm, maybe I wasn't clear enough, sorry for that. With "damn good stats" I meant the 60 health, 75 hunger and 50 sanity, not the max stats.

My point was that someone could craft a ton of electrical doodads (assuming that this is what WX needs to refund gears), eat one, then eat the gear they just got. Then eat another doodad and the next gear they dispended. This could go on as long as WX has doodads, and at the end he would have the same max stats as before because they ate all the gears they gave back. If there is no drawback upon the dispention of gears (other than consuming an electrical doodad), this mechanic would make the doodad an extremely effective healing/sanity restoring item for WX, because getting gold and rocks is quite easy. He could tank the Deerclops without armor or going insane... 

[Sinister_Fang]

7 hours ago, fimmatek said:

My point was that someone could craft a ton of electrical doodads (assuming that this is what WX needs to refund gears), eat one, then eat the gear they just got. Then eat another doodad and the next gear they dispended. This could go on as long as WX has doodads, and at the end he would have the same max stats as before because they ate all the gears they gave back. If there is no drawback upon the dispention of gears (other than consuming an electrical doodad), this mechanic would make the doodad an extremely effective healing/sanity restoring item for WX, because getting gold and rocks is quite easy. He could tank the Deerclops without armor or going insane... 

But there is a drawback. You're taking damage equal to what the gears would normally restore. WX would be losing that 60 health, 75 hunger and 50 sanity from eating a doodad. So recycling a gear like that wouldn't achieve anything other then wasting doodads.

[fimmatek]

57 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

But there is a drawback. You're taking damage equal to what the gears would normally restore. WX would be losing that 60 health, 75 hunger and 50 sanity from eating a doodad. So recycling a gear like that wouldn't achieve anything other then wasting doodads.

Whoops, I missed the "both long and short term boosts" part in the OP, my bad. Thanks for pointing that out!

This would make getting back more gears (especially from newbies) a bit complicated, but it looks quite fair and balanced. 

[StealthBeast]

So in the interest of going devil's advocate, if the devs have a problem with this sort of idea (which they might, as it's a pretty simple idea that's probably been considered), it may be because of the ability to "store" valuable resources in an unlimited fashion. You could just eat gears, wait until a time you have a lot of spoiling resources, electric-doodad yourself down and consume the resources. Now you effectively have the perfect jerky. An unrottable, super-dragonpie.

So uh... To try to solve this... there's some ways. Firstly, is of course to make the stats removed upon electric-doodad'ing very sharp, which still allows abuse not in a way that's usually worth it. Alternatively, we could have it be so a WX, when electric-doodad'ing, drops a "Rusted gear" or something like that. Something that can turn into fridges, flingos, and whatever recipes, but can't be re-ingested by WX, or maybe they can be but it causes a massive detriment or something.

The problem then however is that it fractures a lot of elegant code surrounding literally anything that runs on gears, because a hammered fridge would have to drop "rusted gears", not gears. We know this is a problem they probably don't really wanna go balls deep into because, for example, prestihatitators drop normal tophats, even if they were made with a cosmetic derivative.

A more elegant solution might be to make it so ALL hammered things only ever drop "rusted gears", but this creates the relatively small side effect of WXs not having the option to opt to destroy spare fridges/whatever in emergencies.

I guess "elegant" really is the master word here. In whatever way that this idea would be interpreted into the game, it would have to be a concise solution. After all, I'd imagine they've considered just making it so WX has a new, independent upgrade material in DST, but they didn't do that, and if I had to take a guess I'd say it's because it wasn't a very elegant solution and it creates too much disparity between DS and DST.

That being said, I think any of these solutions is a lot better than just ignoring it. They set WX's stats to Wilson's, so it's not like they're unaware of the issue, and it's not like they're unwilling to make changes between the two games even if it breaks consistency in the interest of balance.

Err.. I think I'm playing a bit too much 'armchair dev' at this point, but I would really like to see some sort of gear-refund feature make it into DST. And of course I guess this is the entire point of this subforum anyway.

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

WX being able to eat gears will result in players who are about to die with upgraded hp to downgrade a gear and then eat it for re-gaining hp, unless you lose hp as well even if you could just lose max hp without losing hp (e.g. if your health is at 350 instead of 400, but your max is 400), in which case it seems like it could work, but just having some slightly better way to renew gears than ruins or tumbleweeds could also easily solve the problem, like clockworks respawning on full moon or something.

Btw, devs barely look at ideas nowadays. They just throw out stuff, and people take what they get, because screw feedback. You'll be lucky for a solution in reference to a suggestion to be changed in terms of the new content, which is just temporary events anyway.

[MondayNight]

Hmm. To me this proposed mechanic seems rather pointless as it's a surrogate for lack of knowledge (if you can't find chess pieces on the map or are not able to fight them at all, not even indirectly via other mobs, you can always sit in DF desert a bit, picking Tumbleweeds - at worst case scenario you'll get 1 gear in 33 tries) or newbie/troll behaviour. If the latter, trolls/griefers won't go for the regurgitation via diode mechanic for obvious reasons and newbies tricked into downgrade (dreaded sanity and HP loss for this type of players) have a chance afterward to just grief your entire base (burning/hammering) because of your trickery.

[StealthBeast]

On 3/1/2018 at 10:21 AM, xxVERSUSxy said:

Hmm. To me this proposed mechanic seems rather pointless as it's a surrogate for lack of knowledge (if you can't find chess pieces on the map or are not able to fight them at all, not even indirectly via other mobs, you can always sit in DF desert a bit, picking Tumbleweeds - at worst case scenario you'll get 1 gear in 33 tries) or newbie/troll behaviour. If the latter, trolls/griefers won't go for the regurgitation via diode mechanic for obvious reasons and newbies tricked into downgrade (dreaded sanity and HP loss for this type of players) have a chance afterward to just grief your entire base (burning/hammering) because of your trickery.

I know how to get gears. This thread wasn't really meant to apply to people of my skill level, rather, of people who are in relatively early stages of learning. It's not supposed to replace learning, it's supposed to make eating gears turn death into a personal risk/reward gambit instead of the, "hey *******, we have no fridge and it's two days before winter"/"hey *******, we have no flingos and it's two days before summer" gambit that WXs place upon their team.

The idea that we'd have a epidemic of people griefing because of an influx of newbs that were tricked into eating doodads to surrender a gear is being a bit over dramatic.

Edit:

But I probably should mention, the more I think about it, the more I think that this downgradeable idea isn't really necessary. I think it's a good idea, as I think it improves the relationship WXs have with gears, but I don't think it's the end of the world if it doesn't get implemented (which, like most community ideas, is probably the case)

I'm just a bit of an environmentalist I guess. When I go into a public server, and someone hands me good equipment, I use the equipment to get better equipment, and when I leave the server, I leave behind everything I contributed plus anything that they gave me. It's because of this that I almost never ever eat gears as WX. Because I can't give those back, not at a good enough ratio anyway.

So I guess I'll admit to a bit of an ulterior motive. I'd like to eat gears. And I don't get to. Damn it.