September 29th - Using Protection

Apologies, Il avoid it in the future Jonesy.

 

I am not going to waste my time being polite to someone who is deliberately being very rude and needs to be told off. At least the other participants are willing to debate, that guy just wanted to selfishly shut the whole thing down because it somehow offended their sensibilities.

It was rude of me to say that because it was meant to be. I was originally going to give them a talking-to about not barging in on other peoples' conversations and suddenly demanding silence like a spoiled punk but I figured it would fall on deaf ears and since this is probably the billionth time I've seen this kind of thing on the internet, I wanted the satisfaction of saying exactly what I wanted instead of pretending to be civil toward someone who I don't feel deserves it. I will deal with the consequences of my choice, knowing full well what they might be when I made it.

Also, what traits you respect in a person are obviously different from mine because if I saw someone else replying to an annoying troll like that, I would upvote it and give them my personal seal of approval for being honest and verbalizing the exact sentiment I would be feeling, but that's why people are different.

I can tone down the swearing if it's a problem and just ignore the guy in the future but I've already said the words and I don't like to take back what I say. It's dishonest.

 

He realy wasnt being rude or incorect, I found his response(mysyify) quite objective, to be honest, as he tacled every problem you stated, and I didnt find anything realy wrong with his solutions.

And effectively, your playstyle is somewhat radical to the style of progress Starboun is/should go, somewhat like Terraria, wich you already said you hated, you seem to go towards a more Freeflow style, less combat, more bulding and such, wich I can relate.
However.

Various progression styles are being developed, yet he does have a point, by the final release, Dungeons should be optional anyways, or a Mod would alow you bypas them, and while I dont in anyway refute your complaints about toning down the dificulty and alowing various factors from it to be toggled, effectively, you are complaining that they arent developing the game in your rather radical style of gameplay, wich is ill-suited for Starbound progression and gameplay.

Absolutely no chalenge makes a Stanley Parable, and while that game is good, Starbound isnt adequate or going towards those ways, atleast not yet(until the implementation of Rentign and Farming, but surely, thos will require combat aswell).

Again, I saw no trolish behaviour, and whilst I can understand how you woudnt want for anyone to barge in and start saying their oposite opinion, realy, saying piss of to a guy that wanted yall to stop is kinda mean, and could just ask for them to Agree to Disagree and let it go.

And no, actualy I do respect anyone who can stand up to themselves and say straight to any guy or girl what they think, yet saying for someone to piss off when they were trying to calm both of you down, well, thats low, atleast on my acount.

Take what you wish to take from this post, agre to disagree, if you like, yet you realy shoudnt either start insulting people who mean absolutely no harm, or to judge other peoples ideals.
Always a bad idea.

 

It does hamper my experience. I will be sitting here going "man, I am putting forth all of this effort to get this reward, and I could get it for free" Then I get it for free, and the game is that much worse.

Challenge is /crucial/ to being a game. What level of challenge a person desires can vary greatly; this is why difficulty settings are a good idea. But if you remove all challenge, you don't have a game anymore. You have a toy. This can be fine, but you are dealing with an entirely different set of design goals at that point. Starbound is clearly aiming to be a game, though, and hence the challenge is important.

Sandbox games should support self imposed challenge, they should not /require/ it. Bypassing the dungeon effort isn't just removing the challenge of doing a dungeon. It is getting the rewards from the dungeons for free.

Elder scroll's biggest flaws have always been about its challenge. Your power curves can easily get out of line with the opponents, the difficulty of opponents can whiplash randomly, going from a dungeon full of trivial monsters to a boss in that same dungeon that will one shot you. The game does a lot of things right, which is why it is so successful despite this, but it is its deepest problem. The developers even realize this, and keep changing how that works between games in an attempt to fix it while keeping all of their other design goals working, and while it has improved, it is still problematic.
In broader sense, just because a great game has a game element doesn't mean that element is good, and just because it lacks an element doesn't mean that element is bad.

In games with large amounts of content, you should be able to pick your challenges by deciding which parts of the content you engage with. If I think that farming is boring and waiting for crops to grow is tedious, I don't need an option to make plants grow instantly, I need to not bother with farms. If I think having to craft warm clothing and heat sources for ice planets is a pain and its not fun, I shouldn't disable cold, I should avoid ice planets. I shouldn't be able to disable the challenge yet still reap the rewards.
Adding in a zillion options means that the developers are not making one game, they are making a zillion games. This makes it drastically harder to design things. For instance, say I make enemies toggleable. Now I need to make sure any item only obtainable from enemies is only needed for dealing with enemies, so players without enemies don't get screwed over by not having the item. I also need to evaluate other aspects of the game, like random chest contents, and make sure they aren't enemy centric. Finding 100 guns in a game without foes is just wasting the player's time. If I don't take these steps, then we end up with blocks of the progression locked out because you need items you no longer get, and most of the rewards in the game are useless, and the entire structure of the game has been compromised. That is just one toggleable option. If I have 10, I need to do this 10 times, and make sure that all of the 1000+ combinations between these options won't compromise the game; for instance, if I say you can get a crucial item in 1 of 3 ways, and someone disables all of those ways, they can't get the item. The game is broken. Additional options need to be carefully considered and made to fit into the overall structure of the game.

 

I have played minecraft and it does start you out with everything - if you play in creative mode. If self-structured play was so much more appealing, as you assert, than game-structured play, then creative mode would be the most popular and most-played mode in the game, but you didn't even consider its existence. Survival mode is played more often than creative mode for a reason.

None of us deserve anything from the game. We're not entitled to have this game work the way we want it to, and I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise. Chucklefish are the ones making the game, they are the ones who have the right to decide how it's going to work. They have no obligation to change the game to suit you, me, or anyone else.

At the most, I suppose you could say they have an obligation to consider our feedback because they have promised to do so, but no more than that. If they disagree with our suggestions, that's the end of it. You have no inherent rights for how a game should treat you.

 

I can tone down the swearing if it's a problem and just ignore the guy in the fut

I was specifically referring to the guy I quoted who was telling everyone else to stop arguing. I told HIM to piss off, not the guy who was actually participating.

 

...

Thats much worst, you do realize that, right?

 

It doesn't sound like you actually enjoy that challenge if your first thought is "Someone else can get this easier so why am I bothering?" It sounds like all you want is the reward, which is exactly what I want too. Meanwhile I actually know people who would do the platforming sections anyway even if there was no chest at the end.

Needing someone to enforce rules on you shows a lack of initiative and interest on your part. I've never had a problem with finding my own fun in anything, I'm not sure why it's so important for someone to hold your hand and guide you but I'd think any sentient creature would rather bite that hand and go their own way. (I quite literally have.)

Maybe you should just admit that you don't actually enjoy the challenge instead of trying to force everyone else to play it so that it can validate the need for you to do it because that's basically what it sounds like you're saying. There is no shame in opting out of something you don't like doing, even if it is a challenge. Just because society has tried to shame you into believing that seeking challenge is a noble pursuit doesn't actually make it true, especially since the rest of nature proves it to be false. Every other thing in nature takes the easiest option, and humans have just constructed that belief out of some insecurity complex and desire to feel valid.

They have an obligation to consider our feedback because we are literally paying to beta-test their game and that is our compensation for our time and money doing a job that was originally something we would get paid to do. But they have no obligation to take every bit of feedback, that's why when you want something, you need to be prepared to make a case for it, and make it as convincing as possible. Even if they don't take my advice, I would kick myself if I didn't try my hardest to convince them in the first place, because if I didn't, I would know that because I didn't try, not having a feature I wanted would be my fault for not speaking up in the first place.

The "deserve" thing is not directed at them anyway, it's directed at other players who think they are more entitled to something than others because of the method in which they obtained it. It's kind of like how some people think they are superior to others who play minecraft because they play hardcore mode on hard difficulty and everyone else is playing the game wrong. (This is why I don't play on servers.)

Also, I play creative mode more often than survival - but survival is still a valid, unmodded option just as much as creative is.

Not really. I don't know why you would, but trying to stop a fight you aren't involved in is actually one of the most offensive things a person can do in my view.

 

This is the exact opposite of how a game should work. What makes games fun is not the reward, it is the gameplay. You can have gameplay that's fun without giving you rewards, but giving you rewards on their own without any gameplay isn't even a game anymore. Playing the game should be inherently fun, even without rewards. If it's not, it's a bad game. If all you care about is the rewards, that means you don't enjoy the part where you actually play the game.

I don't mean this in a mean way, but you literally don't understand what game design is and what makes games what they are. The entire premise of a "game" is that the designers put in place various rules to guide or encourage the player to have a particular experience. It doesn't mean players are "too lazy to play on their own", it just means they're interested in experiencing the game the designer envisioned.
What you are saying is basically the same as saying that people who enjoy watching movies or reading books just don't have the initiative to make up a story on their own. This isn't the case, because you can enjoy both reading and writing, you get different things from both of them. Writing allows you to express your own ideas, reading allows you to experience someone else's ideas. Same with undirected vs directed gameplay.

 

Till this day, and I have found people saying the strangest things, this beats the cake with a Power Hammer.

Honestly?Il just say it, your playstyle is ridiculously radical compared to what Starbound will be, and your personality is just as radical, if not more.

Lets agree to disagree, for trully, you baffle me way too much for me to even muster a f*ck.
No offense.

 

Movies and books are not interactive, games are. Giving the player a sense of agency means that agency needs to be taken into consideration at different points depending on the genre.

And since we're talking about an open-world game, that means the ability to obtain the same things in different ways.

Like I said, I've never found certain tech outside those dungeons and the food example listed before doesn't work because if you don't want to grow food, you can always buy it. It is actually available in different methods.

I like the experience interactive media offers, and for the most part I like starbound's experience but this to me is not only a radical departure from the rest of the game but is also not the kind of challenge I enjoy. In fact, if you don't count the armor nerfs, it's really the only update I'm unhappy with. (And thankfully unlike terraria which is a steaming pile of garbage, I can basically stay on the lower tier planets once I have my armor and be invincible while I colonize the living hell out of them.)

I also don't expect you to believe me on my word but I've beta tested more games than a sane person would bother with - and this was before the alpha funding craze - as well as played more games than a sane person with an applicable skill would bother with, so I actually know quite a lot about game design. Not even including how often I've lurked and sometimes participated in game development-related discussions.

Granted, if they teased a puzzle dungeon with physics or riddles or something I'd opt into that so fast you'd need to physically slow the speed of light to stop me but that's just my subjectivity speaking, since I will do puzzles in games regardless of the reward, and understand if it's not that appealing to everyone.

An alternative to allowing people to disable a shield generator in the world gen would probably be to make all of the items found in dungeons available elsewhere. (I'm not just talking about tech or weapons, I'm also referring to decorative blocks and furniture.) It would probably fit into your idea of something "game-y" because there would be an alternate route to obtaining those items.

It's kind of unfair to say that placing dirt blocks over tesla coils is getting an item for free though, because even when that was an option, I still had to fight my way inside an apex lab, watch my step quite often, strategically place my blocks to make sure I didn't trap myself or fall short of a jump, and once I had the chest I had to work my way back out. It ended up being a lot more work than you're giving it credit for and I have died several times just trying to get into those labs. I'm not saying it was a thoroughly bad experience but it isn't "giving away free items" at all.

I don't know what that has to do with telling someone to stop trying to interrupt a debate in a gruff manner but, sure.

 

So I want to make sure I have this right - the main reason you dislike these jumping puzzle dungeons so much is because you believe that they're the only way to get certain techs?

Then, if Chucklefish made sure that you could get every tech without being forced to ever do a jumping dungeon, would that solution work for you? Like, say, finding chests in various other randomized locations around the world, maybe buying them or something, whatever.

That seems like a solution that'd work well for everyone, then. You wouldn't have to play dungeons that you don't think are fun, but others still have them if they want to, and Chucklefish doesn't have to spend time adding a bunch of toggles to world creation. What do you think?

 

I love a challenge. I am also a hardcore optimizer. Doing things in a suboptimal way just to be more challenging goes against my basic tendencies, but if I take the optimal route and the challenge disappears than I will lose interest. The issue there is a matter of game balance; optimization should not render the challenge moot. It may expect you to play on the hardest difficulty, but there should still be a balance for it. If, for instance, optimal play yields you dealing 100x the normal damage without any risk to yourself, the problem is not that someone is playing optimally and breaking the game, it is that the game is unbalanced and broken.
Games are about risk vs reward. A higher challenge for a greater reward is a great dynamic. It encourages you to take on the hardest challenge you can manage, to get the best results. This is part of why games with difficulty settings often set up greater rewards for higher diffuculty settings, even if its as simple as a score multiplier at the end.
Imagine if you have a game where you unlock more and more powerful characters as you progress. Now imagine you have access to all of them at the start. Would you expect people to hold off on trying the more powerful characters until they have played the less powerful ones?
A proper challenge curve is important for a game, but you can't expect players to self-regulate it beyond broad strokes like the difficulty setting.
As I've said before, there is a distinction between a game and a toy. A toy expects you to find your own fun. If that means platforming for the sake of platforming, then people will do that. Like the parkour maps in minecraft. That doesn't mean that same dynamic works within the context of a game. A game does not work by offering you 12 pointless tasks without rewards. A game does not work by making all of the challenges optional.
If I am playing a game as a toy, I don't care what its stated goals might be. I will use cheat codes to break its rules, I will try different self-imposed challenges, I will mess around without any goal. But none of those works for playing a game as a game. There have to be goals. There have to be obstacles. Those obstacles should present a fair challenge. If I am playing a game, you can't expect me to stop in the middle and treat it like a toy. If I am progressing through starbound, my goal is to advance as fast as possible, and build up my own might/empire/abilities etc. If that means braving a dangerous dungeon to reap its rewards, then bring it on, it will be a blast. If I can get the same rewards without putting in the effort, then that effort is wasted and suboptimal. The balance of the game is crucial. These dynamics are important. You can't just throw out all game dynamics in the name of being a toy.[DOUBLEPOST=1413041474][/DOUBLEPOST]

Different ways, yes. Most definitely, that is a great thing. Offer the players choices in how they obtain them.
But "skip the work and just get the reward" is not a good option, which is exactly what mutable dungeons becomes.[DOUBLEPOST=1413041619][/DOUBLEPOST]

This is exactly what I have been advocating. You find a dungeon, and it is "here is a challenge, which WILL offer cool rewards if you complete it".

 

The derail is strong in this thread.

This is NOT the place for any discussion that stems from the desire to see more/less platforming. That's a suggestion, feedback, or discussion topic -- appropriate for the Suggestions or GD boards. Also, the manner in which the derail was being discussed was rather distasteful. Let's show each other some common respect, please.

Let's bring this thread back into the fold or I will have to lock it up, and I would rather not have to.

 

What's the point of making a discussion board for news updates if people are not actually allowed to state their opinion on it?

 

You can state your opinion on it. And you did. And then you kept going (which can be fine, really). And then the discussion became a tangent. And then the thread wasn't even about the update anymore. I hope that helps clarify. You are welcome to discuss this upcoming feature of Starbound and how you feel about it here. But if you want to go on a tangent about it and draw conclusions about your peers and their perspectives and agendas, it's a discussion better off in it's appropriate board (or in a PM if aimed at specific users). The manner in which the discussion was held doesn't help your standing.

(this is for everyone) please be respectful of your peers. Being snide, condescending, or abrasive does NOTHING to help your credibility when trying to support your views and opinions.

 

I'm ok with that then. I have been yelled at a lot over the years for extra-long posts though so you'd have to tell me when I'm doing it because I actually don't know the optimal length. (Assuming that's what you mean by a tangent.)

As long as there are other options for obtaining things you can only get in those places, then yeah. That was actually the thing I was most excited about in one of the earlier dev blogs - a desire to offer multiple ways to progress although it pertained more to not having to fight bosses or having different "trees" to advance through, but I haven't seen it cropping up much lately outside being able to buy things instead of the "normal" method of obtaining them. It would be nice to have 3 or 4 methods of obtaining anything - including blocks or items only found in protected dungeons.

I read everything you said, but do not understand most of it - I know people who would hold off on using more powerful characters for the sake of it, and those encompass pretty much all of my friends who are "hardcore" about gaming. (I wouldn't pick the most powerful ones either, I'd go with the one that appealed to me aesthetically or had the coolest story.) My perspective on the subject is entirely founded by their behavior, and since I rarely encounter someone of your style of gaming I don't have enough experience to really appreciate what you're saying intellectually.

I would say though that I agree about being able to opt out of doing these things in favor of something else. Or at least, picking the lesser evil (which is kind of subjective, and that probably works to a dev's advantage since no road can be objectively "better") which at this point in development might end up being this option in the end and for me, and the imp in me would find the irony hilarious.

I can't resist but to tell this story so I'm putting it in spoiler tags to shorten this reply. I have a friend who loves hard games - not just any hard game though, fast-paced IWBTG-brutal hard games so much that he will marathon-play Meat Boy for hours without getting frustrated. Earlier this year we played the online co-op on a fangame called Sonic Robo-Blast 2 and he died 18 times in one area of the last level and was actually laughing. I, meanwhile, got fed up with trying after I died twice and just left the game, which confused him a lot. He explained to me that he really enjoys the rythem of figuring this stuff out which is an alien concept to me, but watching him play it did solidify that it is a legitimate way for people to enjoy themselves even if I still think my friend is an insane masochist.

And the inverse of this is that my friend cannot understand how I have fun at all either. Not only am I really big on puzzles (think FEZ, antichamber, hohokum, the original zelda because I am that masochistic, jigsaws, sliding puzzles, and blendoku on tablets which I am currently addicted to) but I also gain enjoyment from aspects of gaming that I honestly have never encountered in someone else. I like Don't Starve, part of my enjoyment in that game is reading the wiki. In fact, reading wikis is part of how I enjoy myself in general. If you throw a new word my way, I will immediately look up its encyclopedic entry anywhere and pay special attention to its etymology and place of origin. I basically like to acquire knowledge - at my own pace - and not only that, but I like to use it as well. Give me a semi-creative project like building a nice Sims house or making a Minecraft skyblock not look like a Borg ship (no offense intended toward Seven of Nine) and the outside world won't see me for a week. Granted, I take forever to do anything and I do mean anything. I am basically a tortoise. A lot of my gaming friends are hares. Even the utilitarian ones who make some really awesome WMDs in LittleBigPlanet do not understand my way of having fun and would actually view it as quite boring and slow. It honestly wouldn't have even occurred to me that I was slow if people didn't point it out constantly.

The point of that could be an example of the aforementioned subjectivity but I mostly just wanted to tell a story. I do think open-world games have the greatest potential to stimulate a wide audience though. This is coming from someone who played the easiest difficulty of elysian tail and still didn't like the game because of its combat focus which is a chore to me regardless of difficulty.

 

Good then, since that's how it already works in the game. I went through the loot tables and checked, and the techs that drop out of the chests in those jumping dungeons are the exact same set of techs that drop everywhere else. Every tech you can get from those dungeons can also be found outside those dungeons. The problem you have with the game is imagined.

 

On the flip side, just because there are multiple ways to progress doesn't mean all of them have to get oyu the same extra stuff. Take farming; it would be really cool if you could set up advanced farms that allow you to get special food items that give you bonuses. While farming would be a way to earn money and advance, these food items wouldn't be practical without farming, even if you could get one or two through other routes. All of the routes don't need to give you the same things, they just need to be viable, and mixing different approaches to get benefits from them should be feasible too. Hence, if there are things which are specific to dungeons it should be fine, as long as those things are not key to the progression.

Yes, some people will add in arbitrary limitations to challenge themselves. That doesn't mean you should expect it. That is basically saying "I don't need to design a game with a coherent structure, I'll just rely on my players to be proactive enough to enforce it for themselves".
In very early minecraft, survival mode was not a thing. yet there was still ores underground. I still held myself to counting how many ores I mined, then placing the equivalent amount on the surface. By adding on my own structure, I was able to glean more satisfaction out of it. But the game was still vastly improved by actually implementing survival mode, and enforcing inventory limits and crafting requirements.
A player that is willing to self-limit will be able to self-limit on any game. If the restrictions are too loose, they can still add on their own. A player that is not willing or able to do that will flounder if the game doesn't offer enough structure.
I will self-limit sometimes. Those times are always on repeated playthroughs of the game; the first time, I will just play optimally. The second time, I will probably play even more optimally. Then I will do things for the novelty of it, like beat ratchet and clank with only the wrench. But if the game instead gave you a RHINO at the start of the game(the most powerful weapon in the game by far), I'd end up just using that, find the game too easy, then dismiss the game for being unbalanced and move on to a better designed game.The challenge of a game should not be "ok, now don't use your powerful options, they are too strong".
if you are playing a platforming game, and you come across this complex obstacle course that leads to a chest on the ground, which you can just walk up to, the game would be invalidating the challenge. Sure, some people would do the platforming anyways just for fun, but it weakens the structure and makes it pointless for other players.