Future of Screeps: What do the devs envision?
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Ted, this frustrated me recently and has before. I was extremely disappointed that you backed out of leading what might be an excellent chance for reconciliation between the devs and us.
If the goal is to improve the state of things, you can't just raise issues and attack without being willing to take steps to solve them.Honestly, you have some good ideas and do a lot technical things for the community, but I think the tone you take has a tendency to turn discussions into arguments. I do think we've got a great opportunity on our hands though.
Hopefully artch will aim to deliver what the community wants, so if others share how we feel then they'll want to do whats best for their players. I have faith, I think this game is really cool and we all want it to succeed here. Part of how we get there is keeping things civil.
artch I do want to make sure that everything remains open to the public so we can see the raw survey data.
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@davaned if you quote the rest of the conversation I also state that my involvement in the project itself might cause it to be ignored, and I think that the messages in here from various people support that. Having someone else in the community take lead on this project seems like the best way to get more people involved and to keep the accusations people make against me to the minimum (I won't be trying to "speak for the community" with this survey if someone else is taking the lead on the survey, for instance).
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Esteemed colleagues and friends,
I see spirits and tensions run as high as they always tend to. I won't feed the conversation surrounding Tedivm and do think it should be discussed somewhere else. This thread is here to hold an important discussion that is likely to yield a useful outcome for the game.
Here are my thoughts around the tick time.
I personally don't believe that the tick rate is a major cause of player loss. I think the tick rate is a simple excuse. A visible thing to point to. Whether the tick rate is 2s, 3.6s or 5s, it's still in the same order of magnitude. This game is (and should be) a slow game with engagement over hours or days. In fact, this is one of the things that has been very attractive to me about the game.
I have been playing mmo games for a long long time now and I've had a special attraction towards mmo strategy games. One of the core problems with most mmo games is that they require time. Lots and lots of time. Which is fine if you're a teenager. Not so much when you've got a job, wife and kids. It's natural for interest to rise and wane over time. The beauty of Screeps is that it allows players to maintain a connection with the game during their low periods.
I'm strongly in favor of a 3.6s tick rate. It makes understanding and translating game events into the real world much easier. An hour is 1k ticks, a day is 24k ticks. You send off an attack and log back in one hour to see it in action. It segments interaction with the game in a clean way.
2.4s is another reasonable choice due to the creep life cycle but does not translate Screeps time to real-time as clearly.
Still, the only reasonable choices IMHO are 3.6s and 2.4s. The choice of which to pick should be made on ideological grounds of how the player is meant to interact with the game and not on which one is the cheaper or fastest choice. A faster game is not necessarily a better one and, again, I seriously doubt that the game's speed is the real reason people would leave.
Personally, I feel faster tick rates benefit established players more than they do new ones. The faster the game, the more automation plays in and new players can't be automated at the required level. My memory of 2s tick times was quite a stressful time when the game was sucking much more time then I could afford to give it. I was close to quitting a number of times due to the game being too intense.
Fundamentally, I think people are not having a problem with the tick time, but with reaching a point of equilibrium with their environment and losing the pressure to survive. Once a player is in that state, it doesn't matter what the tick rate is.
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I've waited quite a bit with replying to this conversation due to the controversial nature, but I've decided it's quite a good idea to share my vision on it as well.
@atavus said in Future of Screeps: What do the devs envision?:
This game is (and should be) a slow game with engagement over hours or days. In fact, this is one of the things that has been very attractive to me about the game
I got the same feeling as atavus here. I've got quite a demanding day job and have very little time interfering/fixing my scripts. If someone were to exploit a bug in my script it could take days before I could have time to fix it. If ticks were really fast I would not have time to fix it and some rooms could have been lost.
I do not mind losing rooms, but I could do exactly 0 things about it at that time, which is an issue for me. I would not have had the time to improve my scripts. This game for me is about perfecting my AI to deal with a lot of diverse problems. With faster tickrates that could become problematic for me. Especially with timezones of different players, they could schedule full fledged attacks in times that I'd be alseep.@atavus said in Future of Screeps: What do the devs envision?:
I'm strongly in favor of a 3.6s tick rate
I agree with this tick time, it's fast enough for ~1 wave of creeps to do something in 1 hour. But for others, it might be too slow.
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Guys,
It's hard to deny that slow tick could be a negative experience for some players. On the other hand, fast tick could also be a negative experience for another players, primarily for those who can't afford checking out with the game too often. Some people got a job after all.
Given the single shard, it's obviously not possible to satisfy everyone. Fortunately, the game now have shards system now so there is fast shard1 for players who want intense and/or interactive gameplay as well as slower shard0 for those of us who prefer to have more time to react on world's events.
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@artch I really like this idea
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@artch Just going to throw my 2 cents in here. I don't really care what this game costs (given the number of hours a month I play it) and would definitely pay 2-5x more per month if tick rates were faster.
Have you considered tiered subscriptions? There might be better ways to implement them, but one simple idea is to create a faster shard for $20/month subscribers. Based on what I have seen for other games, probably 20-30% of your playerbase would opt for the upper tier.
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@shedletsky This idea might seem reasonable, but it has a major flaw in it - we will need to create an isolated shard then, without portals to the rest of the world, since otherwise it would look like pay-to-win. And you will end up playing with only small subset of players who are willing to pay more.
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@artch I agree about the isolated shard. I already don't interact meaningfully with 99% of the players on shard0 and shard1, so I don't know that it would really be that different to play on a 100 person shard. The new shard1 => shard0 portals are so dense that I have lost track of who is potentially an inbound threat. It's basically random.
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@artch I also, don't like the idea of a paid shard, it would split the community too much imo.
