Hey fellow farmers! After playing a 2-player game for the 2 year period, I thought I'd give my feedback of my experience. So summarize my findings: With 2 players, time management becomes an issue. This is coming from someone who usually plays rather "efficiently", in the sense that making loads of money fast is a priority for me. For my 2 player game, we sorta went that route, but of course, we wanted to make sure we experienced all the new stuff and tried stuff out. And our conclusion is that the multiplayer seems not to be balanced around playing with just 2 players. My personal impression is that with just 2 people, keeping up with a single person playing in single player is actually quite tough when it comes to making money and such, the obvious reason being time doesn't stop anymore for anything. The other being that the game kinda "punishes" you for not splitting your work power, penalizing when you do things together or share things. Let me elaborate. First things first, I am having a blast. Having that out of the way, the lack of pauses in the games cause some obvious problems with events which people have already adresses a plenty, so I won't get into that. It also does alot of good things, like balancing food. If time doesn't stop, you cannot munch down your 100 salmon berries in one go to regain stamina and/or health, you have to eat the good stuff. This is a GOOD thing and I liked very much that this simple change gave food a whole new level of consideration. But when it comes to doing work, the lack of time stoppage adds up tremendously. Considering 10 in game Minutes are 6ish seconds, everything just chews aways at your time - and I am not even referring to things like fishing yet, but screen transitions, organizing items in your chests, small things like that. The game becomes alot more hectic and fast paced and requires you to do alot more planning ahead if you want to get things done. Two players do not equal double the effective work force, and I'd question if it even net-gains anything at all. The only thing where having too players is truly helpful is with farming, and it IS alot of fun to do that together. That said, things like mining, which is still alot of fun together, and fishing, which I DO enjoy, are not things you actually do together, you do them parallel to each other, especially fishing. With mining, you could argue that you could split work between killing enemies and getting ores and such, but in reality, if you want to get ores, due to the lack of time in the day, you are very inclined to just hit different levels on the mine. Speaking about fishing, fishing is hit REALLY hard from the lack of time, to the point where I can outfish 2 players as one player in a day, simply because the time stop during the catching mini game prolongs my day more than threefold, probably even more. Fishing is a main source of income for me during the first year and I couldn't for the life of me get even close to where I was money and skill-wise even with two playes fishing. I am under the impression that the bite-rates have been adjusted, it kinda feels like that fish bite alot faster in MP than in SP. Still, the difference is very notiable in profits. Skills are also a topic I'd like to adress: Like I've stated, the game KINDA punishes you for sharing work. Since there's less time in a single day due to all the small pauses missing, you don't get twice the work done with two people. This also means that your skills are increasing at slower rates, which becomes especially noticable with foraging, a skill that is notoriously hard to level to begin with. This, again, is a problem when it comes to profits. Two players sitting at foraging 8 is worse than one sitting at 10 and one at 0, simply because of the access to talent. Same goes with Farming, though this skill is easy to level. But it boils down to one player doing only one job, the other doing only one job, and as soon as each player hits ten, they help the other to get there as quickly as possible (e.g. buying crab pots so the other player can get to fishing 10 while letting the other player sell the fish with the added price bonus from the lvl 10 skill). I DO like that the game caters to division of labour, but again, with the lack of time we are facing now, doing stuff together seems too detrimental. These things become even more an issue if you want to play "casually" and don't chase profits too much. Don't get me wrong, I of course realize that constant time-stopping like in SP is out of the question for MP and would destroy the flow of the game. My point is that the time pressure the game puts on you MAY not matter when playing with 3 or 4 players, but it definitely becomes a larger burden on the game's pace when playing with 2 people than seems necessary to balance out the additional money that could potentially be made by 2 players working together. The synergy of 2 players is, for my taste, countered too much by the time just running through your hands. So what would be the solution? I know CA seems to be very hesistant to change the time you have in one day, and for SP, I am perfectly fine with that. If you know your way around the game, time is still plenty enough to do what you want to do. Same doesn't seem to hold true for me with 2 players in MP. May suggestion is obvious: Make the flow of time dependened on the player count. E.g. With 2 players, 10 minutes ig become 10 seconds irl. With 3 or 4 players, I do not know since I have not played with more than 2. Of course, maybe y'all have made different experiences and might say the time flow is fine for 2 players. To me, it feels like the game becomes too fast paced to truly be able to delve into the game.
I'm just using a time-mod to make ticks 11 seconds instead of 7 seconds -- this gives my wife and i time to actually chat with villagers and still get work done during the day. I'm considering dropping it back down to 10 seconds, but I'm unsure on that. we'll be getting a lot of cinematics from friendship hearts soon so I think we'll need the extra time.
I'm also playing with my girlfriend and it really is unbalanced if you play with just 2 people. I feel forced to skip some events just because it takes several ingame hours and I wouldn't be able to do what I wanted to do before triggering the event. I never had any issue playing SP. But MP needs a bit more time per day (rearranging some chests took 14 ingame hours, opening just some geodes can take several hours - especially if your bag isn't upgraded yet, and so on).
Hey, I'm with you. Started a thread some days ago that affects the same issue with time in multiplayer. ( https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/you-have-to-hurry-up-in-multiplayer.143489/ ) 7 seconds with no time-stops in cutscenes etc. like in singleplayer is really harsh.
I'm going to add my support to this suggestion as well. The current speed is fine in single player when tasks like managing inventoyr/chests, shopping, fishing, and cutscenes all pause time. Basically it's causing me to skip cutscenes even though I like watching at least the heart events. Maybe even tie it in with the profit margin option for multiplayer for balance? 100% = normal speed 75% = +2 real seconds per in game 10 minutes 50% = +3 real seconds per in game 10 minutes 25% = +4 real seconds per in game 10 minutes Edit: Although, I get a feeling that this would be a difficult change (to do right) because of what I've read about mods that change time screwing up NPC schedules a bit by making them arrive a places earlier than normal.
