Glommer

No as a matter of fact I was not condescending in my first post, disagreement can be civil and doesn't always mean a personal attack, that was all in your head and your personal interpretation. My main point was basically that I don't think a player that has played a moderately complex to master game like DS for a relatively short time can make valid suggestions about game balancing. That's got nothing to do with you or even with the game, I'd hold the same to be true for any game. Personally I don't care all that much about achievements either, so yeah imagine that there's people who don't share your opinion out there. I think you did make a good suggestion about difficulty settings actually. There is actually a hard mode already and the default mode is just normal. Making the game easier than normal... well put in more carrots and berry bushes and maybe even a shorter winter and there you go. If that does not give you a sense of accomplishment then learn the ropes in easy mode with your friends and switch over to default settings later. Difficulty settings are... well I guess an okay idea but whatever you can do a manual preset for easier difficulties and harder difficulties are already implemented. Scaling carrots and such to the number of players online... I guess an okay idea as well but honestly just put carrots and bushes to lots, who cares you're not gonna be noobs forever just stick with it and upgrade to default eventually. Guess what I don't like you either, based on how you reacted to anyone not sharing your views in this thread. You sound like a young angry teenager crybaby slamming the door and screaming "y'all don't understand me, none of you do!" down the hallway. So yeah I think you're ridiculous, but big whup who cares what other random people on the internet think - apart from you.

Achievements would be fine to have, in some games I feel they add a lot (in Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV I find them very goal-orienting and fun to shoot for). I don't know that achievements would add all that much to DST though. However, if we assume there's a significant opportunity cost to implementing achievements into the pc version, basically some other feature isn't getting done at all, or something good gets delayed just because of implementing achievements. I wouldn't like that so I'm slightly against "wasting" time on achievements even if they could prove to be fun. I feel the game doesn't really need them, you should play the game how you want and to the best of your abilities, achievemetns don't fit its style so much. Achievements are fun if they inspire you to set absurd goals to shoot for that you wouldn't think of on your own. Achievements just for the sake of bragging rights now that I find truly ridiculous. Anyone actually impressed by steam achievements isn't a person worth impressing in the frist place and anyone getting a significant ego boost due to achievments in a game is a pathetic hilarious clown. Also the thread starter is behaving in a ridiculous fashion and is entirely worthy of ridicule imo.

No offence, but I don't think you've put in the hours yet to make any valid suggestions that concern balancing and spawn rates. If you need to set carrots to "lots" just to not starve with your group that doesn't mean the game needs rebalancing, that only means you need more experience. Again that doesn't mean you can't make valuable suggestions just because you're a newbie, but you ought to be a bit more experienced before you tackle something delicate like game balance. The game really does get exponentially easier with more people contributing, but only if they are experienced people instead of resource and time drains.