[Discussion] Uniformity of the world
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How about a less homogeneous world?
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@Davaned @wtfrank
Seriously it is funny how you come exactly to the same conclusions I have but don't see my point.
But getting my point across is not one of my strong points.
I'm not talking about compounds and what I meant by "base minerals" are only
and 
since those are necessarily needed in big quantities.
With "actual stuff that does things" I was referring only to
, 
, 
, 
and 
.The whole point is to drastically re-balance the minerals so trading becomes a thing if not a necessity.
As @Davaned already pointed out you can produce anything currently yourself since in 99% the stuff you need is just around you.
By artificially increasing the demand by making it very very hard for a player to get everything the market becomes your best friend.Heck I would even go so far with rooms with no energy but a mineral and controller so you need to constantly supply it in order to harvest it.
That in combination with @Ciber's world proposal would be really fun. Then it is actually viable to fight for a strategic advantage.
To put it bluntly I want create a pseudo job system where people need to think about specializing their creeps to do certain tasks.
Only then will player interaction develop naturally.
P.S. The script running on the official server is the botched tutorial stuff since I only play on nonpublic private servers with friends.
And sits mainly there to ultra slowly collect GCL.
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You seem to be implying that trading is not a thing.
Trading is very much thing right now. You don't want to have to rely on getting the perfect balance of minerals especially given you have a varying need for boosts. Market is heavily used.
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@tigga yes it is used.
But still, I wouldn't call it a integral part of the game.
IMO that's a shame. In it current state it wouldn't make big impact in gameplay if we would get rid of it.
You always would have every necessary thing around you it is just more time consuming at all.
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Uhm well I should stop writing stuff past 12 pm my "articulated finesse" drops near zero
I think my last post was slightly misunderstood.@GimmeCookies and @Davaned please elaborate your negative reactions.
I maybe able to explain what I want to achieve then.
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@mrfaul " In it current state it wouldn't make big impact in gameplay if we would get rid of it." Start playing on public for a while and you will understand that the market is needed in this game. Especially on shard3 where not everyone has good enough code to claim one room of each mineral
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@gimmecookies OK if that is your view point I'll accept that after all it is a discussion.
Now make a thought experiment what would happen if the market would just vanish istanly.I'm looking forward to your conclusion.
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@ciber I think this would be a game changing thing, if they added this i'd be extremely happy, you could maybe manually place your controller then you have a certain area that is now claimed by you, then maybe you could put down things like claim extenders that allow you to further expand your base or "area". Then this compound with areas where maybe "supply crates" spawn and you could go there to get some boosts, but if you want the higher boosts from these crates you first have to defeat a boosted guard, I also think it'd be a cool idea if even the players weren't able to see into rooms they don't have vision, like there are no buildings there until you go and look and then later if you go back in look you'd see the buildings that you saw, but you'd have to go back to update the buildings. This would give players a REAL reason to scout. I really do think it'd be cool to see something that you contest. Of course the map would have to be on a new shard but id think it's worth a try.
Sorry for any weird sounding things or grammatical errors I don't have time to go back and look through what I typed.
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@communication you are jumping to far ahead
his suggestion just changes the world gen.But it is good to have enthusiasm
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@mrfaul Do you have any experience using the market on the main world? You might not be getting a realistic impression of it if you've never used the market on a server with a population.
If it was suddenly removed, probably 1 in 5 empires would start to collapse over time. Many new settlements would die off, people often use boosting/terminal transfers extensively for bootup time.
Tons of people do GCL farming via market.
Any new player would be at an enormous disadvantage. Until you get 10+ rooms, you probably don't have all the minerals you need in sufficient quantities to make what you'd like. Even after 10+ rooms, you often have gaps in your supply chain where you need more H/X/etc than you have, so boosting would stall.
Finally, anyone who doesn't keep large banks of boosts on hand would be extremely vulnerable to warfare. People absolutely rely on the market for quickly gaining stockpiles of minerals on defense.
If your argument was that the market could be better I would agree with it. I'd love to see more interaction built into it. However, you said it wasn't an integral part of the game, and I disagree with that. @mrfaul said in [Discussion] Uniformity of the world:
@tigga yes it is used.
But still, I wouldn't call it a integral part of the game.
IMO that's a shame. In it current state it wouldn't make big impact in gameplay if we would get rid of it.
You always would have every necessary thing around you it is just more time consuming at all.Of course, technically you are right in the long term. Because if they removed the official market, players would definitely create their own market after some time. The official one is just more convenient, even if it does have a 5% tax.
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@MrFaul @Communication @Davaned if the market were to totally vanish, it'd prob revert to exactly how it was pre-market. ppl in #trading would advertise what they needed to get rid of, and other players would agree to a trade, 10k of 1 mineral for 10k of another, etc
the Market was a game changer, in that you could automate that. getting rid of it would be bad for the game, as it would do exactly the opposite of the entire premise of this game: automate things.
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So to sum up, if the market vanishes all what happens is it results in a giant inconveniens.
New players are at disadvantage regardless besides the fact that advanced players can crush them they are also penniless.
But would there be actual Gameplay lost? (Besides the automated trading and I'm only talking about the market it self not the terminal)
People would self organize, I see that as a plus.Oh one thing, I don't want to get rid of it, I just want it more interwoven with the game.
You see there are subscription tokens which are not really traded partly because the value/afford feeling is off.This doesn't just affect the market it is apparent in the entire game. There is just not enough worth fighting for.
Rooms almost don't matter much, minerals are plenty, power... hm, well it is there.
There is currently nothing worth enough that could aggregate a conflict besides a personal grudge.
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@mrfaul said in [Discussion] Uniformity of the world:
But would there be actual Gameplay lost? (Besides the automated trading and I'm only talking about the market it self not the terminal)
This is incoherent. You ask a question, then immediately redefine it, to exclude all the ways that gameplay would be lost and get the answer you want.
Rooms almost don't matter much,
In a given sector I might find that there are less than 5 rooms I would consider colonising.
Have you actually played the game?
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@mrfaul said in [Discussion] Uniformity of the world:
People would self organize, I see that as a plus.
I see it as a minus. This is a game about automation. I don't see any reason why the market shouldn't be automated. Self-organization using out-of-game methods is bad IMO.
You see there are subscription tokens which are not really traded partly because the value/afford feeling is off.
Subtokens are P2W. They let you take outside of game resources ($$$) and turn it into an in game advantage (credits). Now obviously the "W" part doesn't come without good code. I don't really see sub token trading as a major part of the game and I certainly don't think it should be promoted further.
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@tigga said in [Discussion] Uniformity of the world:
I see it as a minus. This is a game about automation. I don't see any reason why the market shouldn't be automated. Self-organization using out-of-game methods is bad IMO.
Subtokens are P2W. They let you take outside of game resources ($$$) and turn it into an in game advantage (credits). Now obviously the "W" part doesn't come without good code. I don't really see sub token trading as a major part of the game and I certainly don't think it should be promoted further.
Yes using out-of-game methods is a minus, but we have enough in-game tools that those methods are not necessary just convenient.
After all programmers are lazy by nature.
Creeps have public memory segments and the say method.
Granted implementation of a communication protocol is annoying but also very rewarding.
Even the Gmod community managed to boil down to some common interfaces for inter-mod use.
And that community is 80% based on narcissistic script kiddies, which included me at my humble beginnings
I see no reason why this community shouldn't be able to achieve something way more sophisticated.
If you view subscription tokens as p2w I can't deny that completely.
However I also view them as a really big chance to bring a coherent value feeling to the game which is necessary for a working and thriving market.
Every form of currency is a intrinsic value based on availability and demand, and currently this is totally off in Screeps economy.
It would be much more interesting if a specific amount credits in Screeps would be generated for actually bought subscription tokens.
This way the credits would be finite and inflation is based on real world demand.
At the moment inflation is through the roof since credits are somewhat infinite due to the current redistribution mechanic.
Also I think it is fair that "advanced" players have the ability to minimize their costs by leveraging sub tokens.
To put it frankly the sub tokens should be the way to play this game a infinite amount instead of the lifetime subscription.
@wtfrank I'm sorry if some of my posts seem incoherent but I assure you that my thoughts are very so.
I just have a very bad habit of using implications that are very clear for me but you can't look into my brain.
So please bear with me and ask me if you find some of my arguments nonsense.Also how you view rooms is totally up to you, everybody uses their own metrics there
And please stop to assume that I don't play the game just because of that excuse of a script which is currently on the server.
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The reason I asked if you play the game is because you have some strange ideas, that don't seem to have been tested by experience. For example, you're obsessed with your idea about changing subscription tokens, but if you don't really play on the MMO, I don't understand why you're interested in this idea because subscription tokens are meaningless outside the MMO.
You seem very enthusiastic about the game which is commendable. To the extent that you're writing summing-up posts of peoples' arguments in various threads, which is...something.
But then you say some things which I completely and utterly disagree with. In fact huge numbers of things. For example:
Every form of currency is a intrinsic value based on availability and demand, and currently this is totally off in Screeps economy.
The first half of this phrase is completely true, and the second half is in my opinion completely incorrect. For example, the minerals that I need the most of to run my economy are X, L and H. Guess what happens if I look at the credit price of base minerals in the market (on shard 2)? X and H are by far the most expensive. This says to me that a) other people have similar demand for base minerals as me, and b) the price in the market is well-correlated with the supply and demand of these minerals. The opposite of "totally off". What leads you to say that the value of a currency is completely off in screeps? (Surely by the definition you provided in the first half of the phrase the value cannot be "totally off" because the value is what the value is based on supply and demand, so are you arguing against yourself, even within the same sentence?)
Then you go on to say:
It would be much more interesting if a specific amount credits in Screeps would be generated for actually bought subscription tokens.
This is another thing that I completely and utterly disagree with. If you have a fixed exchange rate between credits and subscription tokens, then there is - in effect - absolutely no difference between credits and subscription tokens, and the credit value of subscription tokens doesn't vary in line with supply and demand (which it does at present). So what this change would do would be to in effect reduce the number of tradable resources by 1, and make the game slightly less complex thus less interesting. Definitely not "much more interesting".
At the moment inflation is through the roof since credits are somewhat infinite due to the current redistribution mechanic.
Do you have any evidence for this? If it were the case that inflation is through the roof, I might expect that minerals have increased in price on a particular shard by say a factor of 5x or 10x over the last year. This is not what I've observed, so it feels like you're arguing from within a different subjective reality to me. On that topic:
Also how you view rooms is totally up to you, everybody uses their own metrics there.
Yes this is 100% true that everybody has different metrics for things (wow I agree with you!), but you've just pivoted from saying "Rooms almost don't matter much," to saying that it's completely subjective whether rooms matter or not. If it's completely subjective whether or not rooms matter, then would you accept that it's completely subjective whether "there is currently nothing worth enough that could aggregate a conflict" as you argued earlier?
This brings me back to what I started off with, that your ideas don't seem to be grounded in the game that I play. It's as if you're playing an entirely different game to me!
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@wtfrank Ah now we are getting where.
Yes I'm making suggestions to evolve this game, some which are radically trans-formativ to achieve a better overall experience.
These are based on my experiences, knowledge and opinions as it should be and I'm pretty sure you are on the same page there.If you view this argument here abstract it is almost similar to the whole left vs. right battle raging over the non biased news. hilarious imo.
So yes almost every point you make is valid, viewing it as a rigid system that you currently like.
But I don't view screeps nearly as a finished product yet and see still a long way to go.
So I make suggestions that indeed result in vast gameplay changes. I love screeps concept and hold it dear.
But that doesn't mean that I'm satisfied with the current gameplay. (which should also be clear by now)Almost any changes I suggest have the goal to make the game more fun in the overall picture and better sustainable for the devs.
You see, for it to be sustainable it has to attract a constant stream of new players willing to give it a try.
And I'm willing to make trade-offs here and there.Best example the sub tokens, I don't like pay to win, I really don't.
But in my current situation I'm not able to sustain a subscription, so a sub tokens are a very good method for a win win situation with a marginal loss of fairness:
Devs get paid, I get to play the game.
The private servers I play on, are already available infrastructure with open capacity as soon those are gone so are the servers. My suggestions to strengthen low-mid lvl rooms are to an extend to somewhat mitigate the effects of p2w but also to make sure that RCL 8 is not necessarily a key goal.
They work in a system.So what I'm missing... right my definition of a fun game:
A competition that gives clear results, without the infringement of harm to the participants.
(This doesn't count in game violence that is part of the rules, you are free to chose the games to play. So don't bitch about them)So Screeps is a game that is deliberately in a sandbox style, with clear developed rules that allows creativity.
But the competition part in screeps is completely underdeveloped.
A sandbox game needs also a lot of possible goals to achieve.
Goals that need specific decisions to be made even if that means sacrificing some other ones.
But the beauty of this is that you can try again for a different path.Next thing, the "Rooms don't matter much".
Yes every one has different metrics for choosing one, but in terms of gameplay the only value they boil down to is time.
By drastically diversifying the world, values like resource, strategic position etc. would get predominant in room choice. And that is my reasoning behind the rooms don't matter much.OK this is long enough already I gave a piece of mind. I'm absolutely not hell bend on my solutions and would happily accept other that satisfy my points.
But only if they involve refining what we have instead of just adding a additional layer of complexity games are only fun if people play with you.
A complex rule set is toxic to new players since they have to spend enormous energy of learning the rules before they can play.
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@mrfaul said in [Discussion] Uniformity of the world:
So yes almost every point you make is valid, viewing it as a rigid system that you currently like.
But I don't view screeps nearly as a finished product yet and see still a long way to go.
I don't view it as finished either.
But in my current situation I'm not able to sustain a subscription, so a sub tokens are a very good method for a win win situation with a marginal loss of fairness:
If you don't have the money for a subscription, then you don't have money for sub tokens so buying them with IRL cash is ruled out, but you can buy sub tokens with credits. If you don't have the ability to generate 8 million credits per month in-game (last time I checked) then you don't have the ability to exchange your mineral harvesting/compound construction/trading for another players' IRL cash. You have said that your code on the server is "an excuse of a script". Given what you've said subscription tokens are irrelevant to you and will always be irrelevant to you until you have substantially improved code and GCL to farm them in game, or you have access to more IRL cash.
Consider a game like EvE Online - a new player couldn't really expect to farm PLEX to pay for their subscription, unless they spend a substantial amount of time doing really tedious and inefficient farming of one kind or another. But an old player might quite easily be able to generate ISK to buy a PLEX depending on the areas of the game they've got into.
From what you've said about your code, you're not able to generate the credits to pay for a monthly subscription token, and splitting the tokens into smaller sizes won't change the rate at which you have to generate credits. So sub tokens are for now out of your reach, and there's no realistic change to the game that would put them in your reach, unless the game is redesigned to be a lot more P2W (but you say you don't like that). I don't see any reason for you to bang on about subscription tokens.
My suggestions to strengthen low-mid lvl rooms are to an extend to somewhat mitigate the effects of p2w but also to make sure that RCL 8 is not necessarily a key goal.
RCL 8 is an inevitable consequence of creating a small script that spawns creeps, harvests, and upgrades and leaving it running. If you have a script that does this you cannot avoid reaching RCL 8 unless someone wipes you from the game. You have posts in the forum that are 9 months old so you could easily have 1 or more rooms at RCL8 on MMO, even under the old 10cpu regime.
So you're asking for the limited dev and rebalancing effort to be spent on a part of the game that almost no-one plays because they grow out of it quickly, in order to make the game "better sustainable for the devs". Does that seem like a logical proposition?
The private servers I play on, are already available infrastructure with open capacity as soon those are gone so are the servers.
Why don't you just play 20 CPU shard3, which you've got for free for life once you bought the game instead of moaning about private servers that disappear for whatever reason? Alternatively if you really want to change the equation at lower RCL rooms, why don't you write a mod for the private server and experiment with changing various constants to reduce the amount of upgrading required per RCL, or decreases tower damage or whatever you want. If you did that then maybe you would have a proposition you could make about how low RCL combat should be improved. But until then why don't you figure out how to upgrade rooms at the maximum possible speed so that you get higher RCL.
right my definition of a fun game:
A competition that gives clear results, without the infringement of harm to the participants.
May I humbly suggest that competition without infringement of harm exists in form of the GCL leaderboard and the power leaderboard. The trophy of trophies is to be at the top of both the GCL and power leaderboard in the same month. I am unaware whether anybody has achieved this but it would be an impressive feat.
A sandbox game needs also a lot of possible goals to achieve.
Not necessarily wrong.
Goals that need specific decisions to be made even if that means sacrificing some other ones.
Choosing whether to compete on power or GCL leaderboards is a prime example of this tradeoff. Have you tried competing on the GCL or power leaderboards? How did you find that experience?
What other ideas do you have for this type of competition you talk about? Are you concerned that adding new ways of competition to the game, may make the game more complex? Because in just a little while you go on to talk about how the game should be less complex. Ok lets look at that:
Complexity is toxic to players since they have to spend enormous energy of learning the rules before they can play.
Ok, the game certainly is complex. This is the kind of thing that some people relish and others don't. It's not simply "toxic" full stop. Complexity can give more scope for players to figure out their own solution, rather than there being a single meta that everyone uses. Complexity can give greater rewards for mastery, rather than capping out early once a simple system is mastered (consider learning draughts/checkers vs learning chess). Complexity can cause players to stick around for longer. But yes, complexity can also put players off.
So you want the game to be more P2W but also less P2W, and you want the game to have lots more goals to achieve but also you want the game to be less complex, and you want to get rid of the market and write off development work but you also want to make the game better sustainable for the devs.
I'm very much reminded of a quote from Alice in Wonderland:
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
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OK you seem to have a lot of assumptions about me, and still some misconceptions what I said and what not.
So the first part of ranting about I won't be able to afford subscription tokens is true I don't have the money to buy those.
But the second is completely false on the account you don't know anything about me and my programming skills.
I haven't put any afford for the script live on the official server for various reasons that I'm not going to discuss, maybe some of them but not now.
And I have absolutely no reason to change that just for an argument.Please don't compare this to the careful designed and constantly adjusted marked in EVE.
And you are right new players are very unlikely to gain PLEX but not unheard of especially if they found a good corp.The idea to split the sub tokens into smaller units is to speed up the acquisition of such to give a small achievement without changing the value.
Besides that a boost of CPU a couple of days maybe just what you need, to allow you to sustain yourself.RCL 8 is not a inevitable consequence, it is a consequence of the design choices made by the player.
That said, there is currently almost no reason to willingly stop upgrading a controller.
The botched thing on the official is clearly proof that you will reach it someday by simply leaving it be.
So you are valid to an extend there.It is logical due to the fact that virtually "no one plays" it, all that means it is lacking a reason to be played.
What makes you so certain that I haven't done exactly that.
Stating the obvious, my point is to extend on that with i.e.: a trade rank. and various other metrics.
Sorry haven't specified exactly the complexity I mean:
Complex rule system -> rigid gameplay -> bad for new players, only provides a handful ways of best practices.
simple flexible rule system -> complex gameplay -> easy for new players, provides a myriad of solutions (hard to master)And sorry again missed a "new" by the toxic argument. (fixed that)
And where the did you get the idea that I want to abolish the market, hell no. Look up the definition of a thought experiment.
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@mrfaul Humbly, I'm with @wtfrank on his points. I won't reiterate them, but I don't feel like you're approaching this from the perspective of a player, but rather as an enthusiast. That's totally fine, we have a number of non-coding members of the community. However, when it comes to pure gameplay interactions, it's very difficult to have reasoned and well thought out feedback without having personal experience.
I disagree with many of the core statements you've made about how gameplay works. Things like
RCL 8 is not a inevitable consequence, it is a consequence of the design choices made by the player.
Is totally incorrect. You will quite literally always reach RCL 8, and should always try and reach it. If you stop upgrading your controller it will start downgrading, so as long as you maintain a room you will slowly reach RCL 8.
I won't even start addressing the rest of it. I've never played WoW, but based on what friends say the majority of the game is after you reach max level in the game. The same can be said for screeps. Most of the complexity in the game is self selecting, you don't need to tackle everything at once, it's more about unlocking the next level.
Unlocking that next level IS the reward, the challenge you are looking for. Developing cool shit is why we play this game. Drowning in complexity is what happens when you try and take on everything at once, rather than piece by piece. It is GOOD that screeps is complex, and that the complexity is gated behind challenges to overcome. In a very rough subjective order:
- 1 room, mining to raise RCL and GCL
- Claiming more rooms, growing them
- Remote mining rooms to increase resource harvesting
- Basic defense
- Mining SK for resources + minerals
- Terminals, market, and credits
- Labs, boosting, creeps
- Basic offense
- Advanced defense
- Advanced offense
- Power
- Far late game on whatever you what to tackle. Portal mechanics, intershard, market manipulation, room autoconstruction, full automation.
In most cases, you can't achieve the later steps without unlocking them by achieving the earlier ones. That is the progression of the game. Not some classic MMO "leveling up" a skill by grinding. But by actually learning a complex system, tackling real technical challenges, and writing performant code to handle it. It takes real work and results in real learning, not fake MMO grinding. I applaud @artch and his team, because this is one of the rare times when achievement in game translates to real achievements in real life.
There is plenty of room for improvement in this game, which is why I made this topic. I don't agree with a lot of the direction you seem to want though.
Ps. @MrFaul can see where some people are confused with the fact that visibly you are only on step 1 yet feel strongly about lategame. It doesn't mean that you don't have experience with it. It's totally possible you have some kickass AI on a private and for whatever reason you've decided to leave terrible code running on the main world. It's just a bit harder to believe than the alternative. If you do have one, I wholeheartedly extend an invitation to come compete in the #botarena battle royale I'm hosting at the end of this month. It's a great way to show off, everyone starts from the very beginning (RCL 1 GCL 1) so you'll be on even footing.