Beta feedback: "Don't Play Together"

[pigfriend]

I took a quickish look and didn't see an official thread so am starting my own. 

My wife and I are both huge Don't Starve fans and we were super stoked for the multiplayer extension.  We've played the beta a reasonable amount now and I have also played a bunch on the public servers.

"Don't Starve" is already not an easy game (especially early on) and 'Together makes things even more difficult while at the same time discouraging co-operative play.   The "ghost" mechanic is not fun for either player, does nothing to help encourage co-operation (just frustration) and drastically lowers the chance for co-operative encounters.   Part of this is the equally unfun lack of global directional markers or map points for players.   The only way my wife and I could reliably work together was in split-screen by having us both open maps and cross correlate our locations.  Having to abuse the interface so we can actually play together is not a fun mechanic.   

On the public Klei server a typical game session goes like this:

Spawn into night / winter, die. Wander around in ghost form trying to find a respawn point, punishing everyone else on the server by wrecking their sanity. Eventually give up and disconnect.  Try re-connecting and discover you are still a ghost, give up and play something else.

I have literally only had one fun public server game where two of us had mic's and were co-operating until I got killed by a giant and then got stuck in the ghost loop, eventually logging out as all I was doing was punishing the other player.   As it stands, the public server is really just a more difficult single player server that resets constantly and provides a very simple mechanic for griefing (connect, die, stay logged in to annoy other players).  That is not how multiplayer should work.

Fixing this situation requires two changes:

-  global and constant player markers (directional pointers or markers on the map)

- short timeouts on ghost the mechanic (a few minutes maximum) and / or a much quicker, less costly method to resurrect

 I had visions of the multiplayer expansion enabling my wife and I to finally make decent inroads on the lowest underground level but instead, we are lucky to make it more than a season before we get stuck in the ghost loop.

Cheers

 

 

 

 

[fb03]

7 hours ago, pigfriend said:

and / or a much quicker, less costly method to resurrect

It's not that hard to resurrect, actually. You only need 3 grass, a gland and 40 HP, or a touch stone, every world has one.

[Shian]

Don't worry, eventually the PS4 version will get as easy as the PC version, they probably just haven't finished porting everything over yet. Currently with PC each touchstone can be used Once for EACH person instead of just once for one person, telltale hearts don't cost sanity and actually give you sanity when you resurrect someone, sanity loss from ghosts is greatly reduced, and not to mention booster shots (which will increase your HP after you lose it from telltale hearts) are ridiculously easy to make.

Basically you don't have to worry cause it's gonna get a whole lot easier.

[Tree45]

A long time ago when I played on PC it was the same way. Finding a dedicated server that's any good is tough. Honestly though for a game like this a public dedicated server is almost guaranteed to let you down. Me and my buds played password protected servers of our own, to me that's the only way to play this game online. The best solution to me would be a private dedicated server so you can decide who's playing and people can play without host logging off and making everyone else quit.