I know that slots have made it impossible to simply sleep on the floor anymore, because of the way they work, but would it be possible to put cheap furniture in Cadfael's (Like maybe for just a slight req cost) that brings back the 5% boost for sleeping on the floor mechanic? The cheapest furniture there now takes 10 cigs, and only gives a 6% boost, which I suppose seems like a good deal compared to 0%, but if I want to add say, rooms to a clan hall and give the members a place to sleep in their own personal room, now it's an added cig cost for me to do so, in addition to the stamina and materials burned to build and expand the room in the first place.
Places are great, don't get me wrong, and I'm thankful for all the hard work that went into making them, I just sort of miss some of the things we could do with dwellings that didn't burn cigs all over the place.
What about floor mats, or something similar?
I agree that a cheapo furniture option to replace lost floor spaces would be nice. Though, really, couches weren't that amazing of an upgrade before (1% wasn't enough to justify the cig expense, imo) so Floor Mats (or whatever) could be maybe 2% or 3% stamina instead of 5%, or perhaps couches could be boosted a little. I dunno.
What's the added benefit of 2-3% stamina? What would you do if you could choose between spending 5 cigs for 3%, or 10 for 6%?
I am personally happy with the cigarette dump, and I hope double beds will be in the 50 cig range.
And hey, compared to 50 cigs, 10 cigs isn't all that much, is it?
What's the added benefit of 2-3% stamina? What would you do if you could choose between spending 5 cigs for 3%, or 10 for 6%?
I am personally happy with the cigarette dump, and I hope double beds will be in the 50 cig range.
And hey, compared to 50 cigs, 10 cigs isn't all that much, is it?
What's the added benefit of 2-3% stamina? What would you do if you could choose between spending 5 cigs for 3%, or 10 for 6%?
I am personally happy with the cigarette dump, and I hope double beds will be in the 50 cig range.
And hey, compared to 50 cigs, 10 cigs isn't all that much, is it?
I'm looking at it from a gameplay balancing perspective.
More cigs needed on the island means more monsters get killed. That's a good thing. Especially when A Certain Outpost is in trouble and 'goodness, I need 10k req for a bed! I'd better take a train and enjoy the increased payouts.'
Even if that doesn't happen and people resort to throwing Improbability Bombs for cigs, that's still a good thing. When they rise in cost, Jokers will catch on and as a result, grenade prices in NH climb too. Rookies profit from that.
That's why I'm against a low-cost furniture item.
The idea of starting a clan is nice Swede, but I'd rather buy and donate lots of beds. See Cake Ninja's dwelling in the PV square. Those 42 beds were donated by yours truly. More people can enjoy from my cigs that way.
Heading to the scrapyard to get contrivances and contraptions is already enough of a new housing related cig dump.
I'm looking at it from a gameplay balancing perspective.
More cigs needed on the island means more monsters get killed. That's a good thing. Especially when A Certain Outpost is in trouble and 'goodness, I need 10k req for a bed! I'd better take a train and enjoy the increased payouts.'
Even if that doesn't happen and people resort to throwing Improbability Bombs for cigs, that's still a good thing. When they rise in cost, Jokers will catch on and as a result, grenade prices in NH climb too. Rookies profit from that.
That's why I'm against a low-cost furniture item.
The idea of starting a clan is nice Swede, but I'd rather buy and donate lots of beds. See Cake Ninja's dwelling in the PV square. Those 42 beds were donated by yours truly. More people can enjoy from my cigs that way.
I believe Maniak just meant that a system that requires cigs to put to use, like furniture, forces people to fight sometimes, instead of just sitting around chattering in an outpost all day. Roleplay is good and necessary, but it's just as necessary to keep the outposts standing.
That said, maybe danger level could influence cig drops?... Though that's not really a good idea, with Ranks in place. Never mind.
We've long been taking trains for granted. Without trains now, I'm sure people are far less likely to do their fighting in CC or whatever beleaguered outpost, even with the (minimal) incentive of increased req payouts. All the same, the req cost for furniture is probably more of an incentive to fight than the cig cost is--generally five cigs collects faster than 10,000 req does.
More on topic, I like the idea of a floor mat or something just to let one log out inside their dwelling. Fox Kelfonne's second post has good points. The stam bonus doesn't make too much difference to me, but I imagine enough stam for one extra fight would be helpful for people with higher action costs.
Then again, Maniak's biased because he does Bastard Ranks for fun and thus is probably drowning in cigs, but it's probably not a bad idea to try some harder ranks or donate for some SP now that we have more things to spend cigs on.
I vote for cheap furniture to replace Floor Spaces.
But the main thing ... I would like to be able to log out from in a dwelling without taking a sleep spot.
Because, say you've been roleplaying in a house for a few hours, and now it's time for you to go and do something away from the computer. Meanwhile, the game clock has kept ticking, and NewDay has rolled around. So you get into a sleep spot, intending to log out.
"It is a new day!"
Oh ... ffff. Now I feel as if I ought to run around and use stamina and swat the pinata and eat something and listen to Seth and run through the Factory and oh look there's some nice roleplay going on there and so on, but maybe I should go and get into a dwelling so that I can get the stam bonus when I'm ready to play again, but then if I'm parked in a sleep space then nobody else can use it and what if they need it -
- it all comes to making me feel like I can never actually leave; which, although the Island is a wonderful thing, can get somewhat inconvenient if you need to do things like sleep or work.
Or is it only me who gets that?
(My usual solution is to simply close the tab and let it time out, since I'm the only one who uses this computer. Then when I log back in I'm still in the room I was in, and can hop into a sleep spot for a few seconds when I'm ready to start a new gameday.)
Unsurprisingly, I'm with Maniak yet again. In my perspective, it's not much of a bias on Maniak's part as much it is a strong desire for challenge. Being able to do whatever you want without any sort of gating or obstacle to overcome is less fulfilling to a lot of people (consider Wizard Mode, God Mode, Creative Mode--it gets old much quicker). The means exist for most players to be able to acquire many cigs with the same effort; this isn't the closed monetary system of many real-world nations and there are very few analogies of fortunate sons and undeserved inheritance in this game.
We like to lobby for higher cigarette costs because it makes our effort in acquiring cigs and devising methods of acquiring cigs feel more worthwhile. It gives us new goals to reach and conquer and at which to make crude bodily gestures.
My ideal design for the furniture issue in this thread would be req-only floor mats. New days done au natural should give a 5% stamina penalty. Floor mats in a dwelling would neutralize it to 0% bonus/penality. This conveys the mentality of "try to get to a bed before the new day!" even moreso than the current system. Successive grades of furniture should be 4/7/10%, or even 3/5/6%, at steeply rising costs.
I understand there are a large amount of players that would view this as a highly prohibitive cost, and it's a shame that the gap widens so much between players of different playlengths. But every player, with the same amount of time playing this game, can reach the same ability to purchase these items--there's very little luck involved, which has a hint of irony about it in this game.
I think a better compromise between my desire and Swede/Iriana/Kelfonne might simply be req-only Floor Mats at something near 3%. Req + 5 cigs, perhaps. But the more of these in-game currencies that I collect by nature that I can actually spend, the better.
God, money in GTA III was the worst. Huge rewards of money for missions, NOTHING TO SPEND IT ON. I DON'T NEED MORE AMMO, I GET A SURPLUS FROM KILLING COPS.
Let's have a visual aid here. Something one might call The Shape of the Game:
Every single thing that players can accumulate in this game shows pretty much the same distribution curve. That's cigs right there, but it could be req, or cards, or the number of rooms in houses, or just about anything. You could swap the axes and the curve would still be the same general shape.
There are always a few players who have insanely large amounts of whatever-it-is.
There are always many players who have almost none.
That is a very telling graph, and it definitely makes me rethink my position. Not change it immediately, but it's something that I'll have to factor in and redecide. Also, the graph is very hard to believe (not crying deception, just bewilderment). There are less than 50 players with over 23 cigarettes? And how many of the players in the total are abandoned accounts of those that tried and left the game?
*snip*
I always hate reading over everything I've written so far and realizing that I have no cohesive direction to my post. I removed it.
What I want to say is that the gap between the richest of the rich and the average of the poor is regrettably huge. The broader the gap, the harder it is to make everyone happy with the same game. The gifted kid will be bored in a class taught at the lowest denominator, and the dumb kids will be lost in the high level course.
The gap is not because of inheritance or exploitation, though--it is simply going through the system in closer-to-optimal ways versus less-close-to-optimal ways. That, and the amount of time spent.
And a third thing: that the less-close-to-optimal ways are catastrophically less-than-optimal. Cigs are awarded to the players who concentrate on the combat aspect of the game. Cig costs are also the barrier to most non-combat features of the game. There are a LOT of players in this game that do not concentrate on the combat aspect of the game, and so a lot of people who are catastrophically less than optimal. But Maniak and I focused on combat first, which means we're now able to do whatever we need to do easily to make our Dwellings be what they are.
That there is a difference between the various ways of playing, I think that's fine. But, for the richest in this game to enjoy their riches, they must spend it--and therefore they must have the things to spend it on. The price obviously can't be too prohibitive to the poor, but this is a game; prohibitive costs are what help create goals, which is often, perhaps usually, what creates fun.
Goddamnit, I still can't keep my post on-topic.
What we need are targeted cigarette sinks. We need low costs for things that people with low cig incomes (due to playstyle choice) desire, and we need high costs for things that people with high cig incomes desire.
Alternatively, we need ways for more playstyles to acquire high cig incomes. Playing the market, helping out people, building municipal outpost projects, Dwelling-related achievement awards, whatever singular events that signify achievement in the non-combat aspects of the game should reward players with Cigs regularly.
I think that graph is absurd--again, not that it's factually wrong, but that it's absurd that the state of the game is like that.
To add a new idea to the sleeping-outside discussion,
If we have a folding bed--a different type of one that would stick around over DKs--or some sort of portable bedding that we could set up in the jungle, we should be able to have a boost in the morning. Personally, I absolutely love sleeping out under the stars, and some of the best nights of sleep I've ever had were spend in a clearing in the woods in a sleeping bag on a thin camp pad with my fleece jacket as a pillow. Just saying, if we carry a set of portable bedding or something in our inventory, it would be cool to be able to have a boost for sleeping in the jungle. Personally, if I want to sleep under the stars, I just sleep on the folding beds on my dwelling's roof.
Cigs are awarded to the players who concentrate on the combat aspect of the game. Cig costs are also the barrier to most non-combat features of the game.
Uhg, please no penalty for sleeping outdoors. Being able to at least just log out in places, like in outposts or on the map, would be much welcome. No stam boost needed.
If you want higher costs, then I am for special treatment of players with the names Fred and Maniak! 
Everything costs 20 cigs more than usual and if they don't log out in a bed they lose 50% stam. How does that sound?
Interesting discussion. It made me rethink a lot of things, still not changing my view though.
Thinking about it, the cigs do seem to force people into fights they otherwise might avoid.
A nice form of game balance.
I do like the 5% penaly idea for sleeping outdoors if the floorspots return. The penalty also shouldn't count for sleeping in towns.
Interesting discussion. It made me rethink a lot of things, still not changing my view though.
Thinking about it, the cigs do seem to force people into fights they otherwise might avoid.
A nice form of game balance.
You're both reading the graph wrong. This isn't the hall of fame view; the high-resource players are that long tail off to the right where only one player has that exact high number of cigs. The chart was made a month ago, I just happened to have it around, so... fresh data: 52.82% of the players committed enough to the game to have supporter points have fewer than 25 cigs. And 84.2% of them have under a hundred.
Don't fixate on the details of this particular chart; the point is that everything in the game has roughly the same general distribution. You'd see pretty much the same shape if I analyzed the number of comments posted. There are many, many factors that contribute to this; if I had to sum them all up, it would be... people are different. Some are new to the game, not yet sure if they'll even stay. Some are very busy with that thing called Real Life, and the Island is a place they come back to for short intervals of escape. Some are only mildly interested in the combat side of things. Some are here to write collaborative stories. Some make many alts for lols or storytelling. Some do all of the above.
When there are multiple paths through a game, you have to expect that not everyone will take the same one. We want all players, no matter which path they've chosen to wander, to have enough fun here that they stay around. (And, eventually, start donating!)
I put my vote to the being able to long out in the place, no need for a buff or debuff just a way to 1 click log out rather then closing the browser and timing out.. if possible, really the matter isn't a big deal to me but being able to log out like that would be nice.
I put my vote to the being able to long out in the place, no need for a buff or debuff just a way to 1 click log out rather then closing the browser and timing out.. if possible, really the matter isn't a big deal to me but being able to log out like that would be nice.
In response to Awesome Fred; I love the idea of -5% stamina for camping out in the jungle. Biting mosquitoes, Lions in your shoes when you wake up, those are rough nights...
In response to Awesome Fred; I love the idea of -5% stamina for camping out in the jungle. Biting mosquitoes, Lions in your shoes when you wake up, those are rough nights...
Okay, let's think about this:
You are new to the game. Your stamina doesn't last long. You probably have problems with nutrition and fat food, or are starving among all the other things that bother you. And now you should lose another 5% when you're not sleeping on furniture? Lose another couple fights?
Does it apply to outposts? There's always something going on there. Lots of noise. Sleeping there shouldn't be as nice as in a bed, right? Bam! 5% less!
Then you might want to try the places on NH's map square, if you are even aware of the benefits of beds yet. Whoops! Every sleeping spot is taken! Bam! Still 5% less!
Can you at least log out there without having to let it time out? Probably not!
Would the penalty apply there nonetheless? Very likely! Bam!
Maximum penalty for bad or no food brings you down to what? 85%? That means you are down to 80% in this worst case scenario.
Remember you are a newer player. Traveling is still a bit scary. Kitt is faaaar away. Pville across deep waters. You lose stam when traveling. Maybe you can't reach the outpost with better food in time. Maybe you get lost. And maybe you have to log out in the wild, get failboated, or have to crack a chrono. BAM! -5% stamina penalty!
So, how would you feel then? Would you be confused? Would you ponder why you get punished even more? Does the game hate you?
Now what was this about? Ah yes. Floor spots or cheaper stuff to put into slots. Yes, please. At least a button to log out in dwellings again.
Maybe a cheap mat for some req and one or two cigs, to replace the old floor spots?
And for those veteran players with absolutely no idea of what to do with their cigs I suggest an item similar to cookies, but of course less effects, that can be purchased with many many cigs and gifted. Or perhaps a rank harder than Bastard, available for 1000 cigs per try. Or just to go and buy beds for other players, or help with buffs, play in the PSK, smoke them, whatever. Try to find ideas that don't punish half the island's population.
And for those veteran players with absolutely no idea of what to do with their cigs I suggest an item similar to cookies, but of course less effects, that can be purchased with many many cigs and gifted. Or perhaps a rank harder than Bastard, available for 1000 cigs per try. Or just to go and buy beds for other players, or help with buffs, play in the PSK, smoke them, whatever. Try to find ideas that don't punish half the island's population.
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