Is cross-sharding too difficult?
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I believe that the difficulty of crossing between shards with CLAIM creeps could make cross-sharding a non-viable option for players in shard3 looking to expand. As a result, shard3 players are likely to find no reason to buy a CPU subscription and spread out into the rest of the map, which could pose a monetization issue for the game. There are two reasons for this:
1: With a total lifetime of 600 ticks, a claim creep must traverse the distance to the portal, then the distance out of the portal to a destination room. This is not as much of a problem in other shards where the player can build a new room right next to the portal, but is a problem in shard3 where a player might not have the CPU needed to establish an outpost next to the portal to send a claim creep through, or might not have any viable expansion routes because all of the inter-shard portals near their rooms lead into controlled territory.
2: Cross-sharding an AI is difficult as memory is not shared across shards normally. Thus, the AI on the arrival shard must either guess as to an arriving creep's function, or utilize the raw memory inter-shard segment, which must be manually typed and filled with data about each cross-shard arrival.
Now, experienced players are quite likely to find a way around these limitations, but it seems that new players could face trouble if they want to expand without respawning and losing all of their rooms in shard3. Can anything be done about this without breaking other aspects of the game?
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Honestly I think that subscriber should be allowed to have the respawn mechanic per shard,
but only in open rooms not in respawn / new player areas.
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Using portals is difficult because it's hard to integrate with the existing pathfinding system. Perhaps you have to have a higher layer of routing between portals, that sits above routing between rooms that sits in turn above pathingfinding with a room (or rooms).
That doesn't mean it's too difficult.
Using the intershard segment to create a message to the other shard with the creep's memory when it goes through the portal was far easier for me to solve than the problem of navigating with the option of portals.
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Natural expansion from shard3 is a harder way to leverage recently purchased subscription. Much easier is just to click Respawn and choose another shard to start over.
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@artch said in Is cross-sharding too difficult?:
Natural expansion from shard3 is a harder way to leverage recently purchased subscription. Much easier is just to click Respawn and choose another shard to start over.
Yes, but respawning still feels kinda punishing...
However if the respawn mechanic is per shard that wouldn't be a problem.
I think that is a perk for the subscriptions that could also lure more people into buying one.
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@mrfaul the shards were introduced so players get better distributed over shards and to take load from the servers.
If it's easy for everybody to play on every shard that's against the reason the shards were introduced.
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The thing is that in this case, due to the design of shard3, players are likely to not want to get CPU subscriptions when they know that they won't be able to cross-shard effectively without losing all progress. Even if it's good game design, it's bad for the business end of this game if people are disincentivized to get CPU subscription.
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@crusher48 I really think that most if not all our permanent players understand that the only progress that matters here in Screeps is the progress of their GCL, power, and, the most important, their game code. None of these things is lost when you respawn.
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@o4kapuk said in Is cross-sharding too difficult?:
@crusher48 I really think that most if not all our permanent players understand that the only progress that matters here in Screeps is the progress of their GCL, power, and, the most important, their game code. None of these things is lost when you respawn.
That is exactly the problem, as you stated permanent players.
New players are very likely to have other metrics at first.
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@mrfaul They'll end up either coming to that conclusion or leaving after they get wiped a few times anyway.
