Salem

Greetings Salemites,
While it is true that there is more than enough that could use development time and attention I keep finding myself distracted by what I believe to be two fundamental and core issues in Salem. So the question to y'all is would you like to see development time spread out to tackle what would be fairly monumental reworks to some core systems. While on vacation I spent quite a fair bit of time pondering two things that were primarily bothering me, and I will try to explain them as follows.

#1: Personal progression tied to 'work':
Why does Salem feel like 'work'. I know we have joked about it for some time but it is quite true that no other game quite has that same feeling of 'work' associated to it. One can log on, do 2-4 hours of 'work' for their town, log off and quite simply say to that they have 'worked' on Salem. I feel that this is perhaps a core issue with towns in general that has been missing. The idea that you can get 'lazy' townmembers who simply consume more of the 'work' than they contribute is quite simply possible because sometimes the burden of producing meaningful progress in the game itself is not worth the effort. To be honest though, I largely love the inspiration system and did not want to do a core re-work of it in any way.

So what would effort shifted to this look like? It would look like passive personal gains for 'work'. Did you chop 100 trees today and some other guy used ALL of them for board piles which went towards some building you didn't even want? Well at least you got a few levels of Hammer & Nail chopping all those trees. Did you mine thousands of boulders only to find that everybody smelted them when you returned and then sold the iron or got scammed out of the iron? Well at least you got a few levels of Mines & Mountains. Etc. etc. What would the game feel like if tasks of burden also increased a proficiency? Would it undermine the inspiration system? How low would those gains need to be to make them 'meaningful' to 'do' things but not so good that studying becomes a thing of the past for character advancement?

OR

Should work to tied to some completely different system? Perhaps one related to the unlocking of skills themselves? Want to learn Joinery and Finish? Better finish sawing those 300 boards. Want to learn Whittling? Better finish chopping 100 wood blocks.... etc. etc. The point still stands that I feel more and more like Salem requires a direct and instant gratification for 'work' to make it feel less like work and more like character advancement.

#2: Gluttony
As many of the veterans know, we adopted and inherited a 'form' of the existing gluttony system from Seatribe. We feel that we vastly improved it from its original implementation, but we cannot help but feel that Salem 1.0 (pre-providence) gluttony system was still superior. Perhaps it is nostalgia, or perhaps it is simply the complete elimination of a time-gate (full & fed up). However, I have also been very tempted to look deeper into the entire way that humour advancement is achieved. Why are there two different ways to 'consume' food? Why does a piece of food have to have 10+ data points all being relevant? Why does the average player not understand, or take advantage of the current gluttony system in its current form?

Solutions you wonder? A simplification akin to what we did with Alchemy. Something that leaves the opportunity for complexity still open but something that also focus' a new player (and a veteran) a bit more. A very rough look at what that could look like is as follows:. Players have a craving for a type of food several times an hour. Each time you eat a food for regen (of which eating food for regen becomes the only way to consume food anyway) it will see if you are satisfying a craving. If you MATCH the food group of the food you are craving with the next regen food you eat, then you gain some permanent humour gain. However, if you MATCH the EXACT food you are craving, then you would gain some permanent humours AND trigger another craving. This system would then come with all the bells and whistles of a redefined feasting bonus, a bonus for group dining sessions where players sitting at tables who trigger cravings can 'reroll' the cravings of their dinner guests to create combos, etc. etc. etc.

The point being that the system itself could be quite simple.. "Match the picture of the damn food or foodgroup you see, with the next food you consume". However, we could then build complexity from there in the way in which you eat. Players can then carry diverse palettes of food so they can maximize the gains of a craving, or alternatively just continue with 1 or two foodgroups and only 'gain' when they get cravings that match what they conveniently carry and eat anyway.


Conclusion
These are not small tasks, nor easy implementations. But they are seriously achievable in a reasonable time-frame. While I feel strongly they may very well be steps in the right direction they are far too large of investments for me to feel confident tackling without some general consensus that the community believes it is worth our time in the first place. For that reason I"m simply polling it out to see if I am a minority in the areas that I feel are lacking, or if y'all would even like to see me open this can of worms now that I'm back. You may vote for up to 2 options.

I just cannot believe that you have identified a problem of "lazy townmembers who simply consume more of the 'work' than they contribute" and attempt to fix it by turning Salem into another skill-grinding game. You have at your hands one of the most unique progression mechanic and you are considering streamlining it into another soulless mechanic used in almost every other game...

Procne wrote:I just cannot believe that you have identified a problem of "lazy townmembers who simply consume more of the 'work' than they contribute" and attempt to fix it by turning Salem into another skill-grinding game. You have at your hands one of the most unique progression mechanic and you are considering streamlining it into another soulless mechanic used in almost every other game...

A fair point. But by having 100% of all advancement tied simply to material wealth how do you create that feeling of personal progression while still contributing to the common good of a town for example. Perhaps I should add a built-in DKP system as well?

#1: I don't feel the second solution is on track with salem, i think the first solution would work alright but i feel there should be 2 progression bars per proficiency, one for work which fills and you get a level after certain hours of doing such work and one for the studying which resets after you gain a proficiency level.

Right now the system is alright but if you also gain proficiency levels by doing work then it will be a welcome addition.

* Would it undermine the inspiration system?

Nope, it will only be a reward for ginding up an awesome fortress. But if you want to be a master at it you still need to hoard those insp.

How low would those gains need to be to make them 'meaningful' to 'do' things but not so good that studying becomes a thing of the past for character advancement?

The gains should be slow but also meaningful, almost like leveling up your character in any rpg, requires more time the more advanced you are. (6 hours of mining to get from 200 to 202 in mines and mountains? measured in mined tiles ofc.)
Which adds another thing, as you keep upgrading your tools you are more efficient at leveling up this way -> Even more addiction.

#2: Needs some work, large gluttony sessions should remain, but i can imagine pop ups and shiny pretty icons coming from you character's head while gluttoning, icons which resemble a certain food group and if you consume it, it gives four times the normal gain without reduction!

Great ideas!

im dont uderstand what you say...
examples... pls...


but Ultima Online have good system grow character

JohnCarver wrote:

Procne wrote:I just cannot believe that you have identified a problem of "lazy townmembers who simply consume more of the 'work' than they contribute" and attempt to fix it by turning Salem into another skill-grinding game. You have at your hands one of the most unique progression mechanic and you are considering streamlining it into another soulless mechanic used in almost every other game...

A fair point. But by having 100% of all advancement tied simply to material wealth how do you create that feeling of personal progression while still contributing to the common good of a town for example. Perhaps I should add a built-in DKP system as well?

This coming from a person who refuted any complaints about lack of anti-spy protection mechanisms for towns with the argument that it can be sorted out with proper investigation and probing period for potential town citizen candidates?

Has anyone ever complained that the game needs better mechanics for "personal progression while still contributing to the common good of a town"? Or is that just a smokescreen?

If people want personal progress then they play as hermits. If they want cooperative progress then they play in towns

Procne wrote:Has anyone ever complained that the game needs better mechanics for "personal progression while still contributing to the common good of a town"?

Yes.

But what is more concerning is that even veterans like yourself like to pretend that 'spies' are a real problem if you know what you are doing when they clearly are not. The problem lies with members of towns more often than not do not pull their weight and/or contribute enough when given the opportunity to bask in communism. A direct reward based on the highest contributors is needed, the question is how to get there, and if it is priority.

Oh crap, I think I'm in the wrong dimension again. Gotta find my way back

Right, this will take a whole lot of rethinking and editting to put into a readable form, if I even manage focusing long enough for that >.> That said, here go my thoughts on the matters presented :

#1 Doesn't really feel like it should be tinkered with starting from the premise of "lazy townmates" , as that sort of thing is pretty subjective and sounds more like something that should be sorted out via diplomacy and discussing the issue with the party in question. If anything I'd rather you eventually add sort of work stations where people do the work for the town and can't do much more than store the results for the town, with the leading members later deciding redistribution. Either that or in-town taxes that are enforced by some in-game mechanic rather than the players themselves.

So either, you leave it at : member is lazy, mayor says "i'm watching you noob, work more harder or else" , and depending on their behabiour the person either easily gets kicked out or they sort out their behaviour. I like that option because it forces people to have social skills, something that most games don't really encourage.

Or, you move it to some a new status quo where your effort is logged and you're required to pay upkeep for your membership, in the form of taxes. It's in line with ye olde feudal contracts for using a patch of land owned by a mayor, where you kept part of the gain but had to pay the rest to the boss. After that point the mayor could decide where the separate taxed resources would be used. But again there begs the question if this couldn't be established by just giving towns something like a message board as has been previously suggested or telling them to figure it out and send each other notes IRL to plan chores and keep track of everyone's progress/effort.

Having moved past the laziness issue, I do feel the personal progress paths could use even more customization, the only issue would be the fact that it'd make grind-bots a very desireable thing, and you might end up having to check on 30 people a day to make sure they're not bots, or not bots with clever replies to being approached :\

Presuming you can overcome the botting conundrum though, I'd rather see a system where there's a sort of affinity/expertise for jobs/specializations based on what work they do in conjunction with the stuff they've studied. For a real life example, an engineer fresh out of college that then works 20 years cleaning toilets will be excellent at cleaning toilets even though he never studied for it, but will likely suck at engineering if he's not actually practiced the profession. So this personal progress thing you're thinking of could be a second bar working in conjunction with proficiency values to add two types of bonuses for a certain type of profession.

Say you're a woodworker for your town (or solo), and you raise your H&N to 300. You would indeed get more boards from a log by using your technical know-how, but perhaps someone that's been doing it for the past month while you just started would be able to saw a bit faster, or have a higher success rate when planing or something. Preferably things boosting the same step of the woodworking industry, so as to not warrant two alts for maximum productivity.

Similarly all professions could have such an affinity that give a bonus to the work they do based on how often they do it, maintaining them the best candidate to keep doing that work, but possibly burning out or capping out after a certain point, and instead reducing productivity to perhaps half the bonus until you either wait, or go and do something else along the same line of work. Perhaps study for that profession and get a bonus to studying/levelling it up to mentally invigorate you.

That ^ would be the how, but while the best thing i've come up with on short notice it does rather lack a long-term gain for the character, up to you guys to decide if active players are to be rewarded as long as they stay active, and be further incentivized to specialize, or if you'd rather go with a gain that never decays (as I'd have imagined a system where switching jobs, like, being town miner for a month and then only hunting for a week would have you losing a lot of your buff. hard to tweak perhaps but in theory at least sounds like fun).

As for how important it'd be to prioritize something like this, I'd say not necessarily that important. It'd be nice to see the game grow both in terms of content as well as in terms of core mechanics, but you'd need to let us know what the alternative would really be, because inspirationals, buildings and content need to be pretty compelling and engaging to warrant you sticking with just them.


As for #2, the one concern i've heard with the gluttony system that I seriously agreed with was that it requires a break of flow, gameplay wise, to set up. Your suggestion of normal eating being the driving force for humour gains seems a lot better in terms of not having us need to come back from hunts or exploration trips just to eat that big meal because "zomg the cooldown is nearly gone!". I think that was the biggest concern when Jorb/Loftar implemented the time-gate system, and later on when you guys picked it up and tweaked it. And while purgatives did indeed mitigate some of that, while the timer itself forced people to really think out their sessions/tactic for eating, it does still feel a bit like a chore. Added to that is the fact that feasting sets are so damn conflicting in that they do add fun complexity to it on the one hand, but are so tough to get properly and so easy to lose. It'd be a hit akin to that of previously losing high purity fields/pots. It really stunts your progress when raided so perhaps a more skill/mental prowess oriented system could be more fun if done right.

Again though, the how isn't necessarily the main issue, the why/should you is again in question, and I guess you need to ask if newbies can stay engaged with the old system and stay competitive while having little to no clue what a feasting set is. And again very dependant on wether the content you'd consider working on next would be relevant enough and engaging enough to keep the game interesting on its own.

if this is about people not pulling their weight in a town then just allow more village controls...
and maybe zoning rights.

so say throw down one of those boundary stones and click on the stone to set permissions for each village member.

example:
throw down a boundary stone over the cooking area and set it so any villager with the permissions of a "cook" and/or "village elder" can take things from the chests/sheds/ovens and such.