What discourages new players

[Lazun123]

What i told my friends and gf is, "just left click a lot and where you want to go and around things. Also got the mod to shrink the trees so they could see the stacks of logs and cliffs that a new player would get caught up on. Work for most of them but one. Quit for the same reason, but to be honest he is a stupid cry baby rage quitting little *****, who was to fat and lazy to just click around ****.

[lachlaan]

Firstly, let me just throw out some anecdotes : I don't remember a moment in my life where I just decided to run into a wall at an angle, and just kind of grind my face nice and good against it for the remainder of its length until whatever wall it was ended. Secondly, I never (so far, who knows in my old age) seem to clip objects and just pin-ball off them or .. again, grind my face against them until I pass them. Presuming your character is from far in the past, where they didn't have fluid movements and were generally stiff and prudish religious zealots, it'd be natural that they wouldn't half-dodge a corner to keep going. If they were visually impaired they'd just get a black eye, or a sprained shoulder, or a banged knee. (have you seen soccer players as late as the 1920s? they seem to be made of wood, i can only imagine people in Salem days used to walk like they were LARPing robots)

Anecdotes aside, if you REALLY want these changes made, then considering the slight validity of my anecdotes, you'd need a hefty amount of damage to be taken when running headfirst into a wall. I want my character to yes, eventually manage to slide his body off a wall tangentially, but also yes, to spend a good 8 seconds cursing like crazy and essentially being stunned. Then the character may indeed carry on "autopathing" on its merry way. But for each unwarranted collision it takes a variable stun, takes damage, takes BB damage because of all the cursing and getting aggravated. How well it can path around things scales with how full BB is, more concentration and all that. And last but not least you can legit knock yourself the ***** out but facehugging a tree or any other solid object. You can slip in swamps and just put your character through a whole lot of hell for not just walking properly through obstacles.

Now that I'm done playing devil's advocate, I can say that the movement system in game is pretty easy to get used to, and the sole fact that people are used to other movement systems doesn't mean we want to turn Salem into a MOBA just to fish for players from that genre only to have them ***** about how character balance is not like in their favorite genre, and then how animals are not exactly like in their favorite genre, and so on and so forth and soon you'll have someone suggesting we just port the game to a 3D shooter game engine, call it Call of Salem and shoot one another with boomsticks and change the knife skin to a sabre skin.

The only argument to be made about the current state of the game is that it is very damn clicky, and some people can get used to that while others might not. Perhaps the models for certain things are a bit too bushy and obstruct view. You could suggest balder trees, or some translucent objects to see shadows of other objects under them to not have to wildly flail your camera around to not eat stump. But the idea of automated movement sounds utterly silly to me, mainly because yes Salem combat is highly dependant on movement, and secondly because it's just the gist of the game, it's not an RTS, it is what it is.

[Reviresco]

It just takes getting used to.

And even then, if you think you should be able to ride a horse-sized grasshopper through a dense forest without Sonny Bono'ing into a tree every once in a while, I don't know what to tell you.

[TotalyMeow]

Firstly, let me just throw out some anecdotes : I don't remember a moment in my life where I just decided to run into a wall at an angle, and just kind of grind my face nice and good against it for the remainder of its length until whatever wall it was ended. Secondly, I never (so far, who knows in my old age) seem to clip objects and just pin-ball off them or .. again, grind my face against them until I pass them.

I had a vision of exactly this happening in real life when I read the comment about movement being 'not physical' in the game. I think the game's movement physics are actually pretty realistic in that if you run into something irl, you're generally going to stop cold. Or maybe bounce off and stumble, maybe we should add that to the game.

With regard to the newbie perspective, I was talking about new things we add. We all played with the old mechanics as newbies and movement without any sort of pathing is something we all handled just fine and would like to keep the way it is.

[saltmummy]

Or maybe bounce off and stumble, maybe we should add that to the game.

Accidentally getting stuck on a flower pot or tree is annoying enough with bouncing off and stumbling.

[Taipion]

No pathfinding, I think we read that line enough times already, and that's fine, pathfinding would not really fit into Salem...



On the other hand, the way you "stick" to objects instead of moving along them in the general direction with reduced speed, is just stupid, and makes the game look unfinished.
(spare your "RL arguments" here as they are all invalid, and you know it)
Salem related arguments would be like "it would be too easy that way", but seriously, do you believe in that?
Look at it as you want but there really is no argument that justifies this ... "kind of movement", or non-movement near objects.
Now add the always odd shaped and mostly unproportional and frequently too big hitboxes of objects and you got a part of the game that looks like a (not so talented) 10 years old programmed it for a school project.

Please not: I am not arguing like "oh help I'ma gettin stuck all the time!" - no, it is no real added difficulty, especially not after a few hours of playing,
but it looks bad and makes the game look much worse than it actually is.

[MaxPlanck]

Firstly, let me just throw out some anecdotes : I don't remember a moment in my life where I just decided to run into a wall at an angle, and just kind of grind my face nice and good against it for the remainder of its length until whatever wall it was ended. Secondly, I never (so far, who knows in my old age) seem to clip objects and just pin-ball off them or .. again, grind my face against them until I pass them.

I had a vision of exactly this happening in real life when I read the comment about movement being 'not physical' in the game. I think the game's movement physics are actually pretty realistic in that if you run into something irl, you're generally going to stop cold. Or maybe bounce off and stumble, maybe we should add that to the game.

With regard to the newbie perspective, I was talking about new things we add. We all played with the old mechanics as newbies and movement without any sort of pathing is something we all handled just fine and would like to keep the way it is.

Bullrun is a fine example of running into obstacles; running into a wall(Gives imbalance) // compared to running into the open which gives a stun.

[jophbot]

As people say, you get used to it.

It works, leave it be ... Just consider it the first gameplay filter against whiney *****, rather than a newb deterrent. If movement was 'fixed' then those same players that complain about it would just find the next something to ***** about ... giving them something to quit over so early just saves the rest of us from having to respond to things like this constantly

[Dallane]

On the other hand, the way you "stick" to objects instead of moving along them in the general direction with reduced speed, is just stupid, and makes the game look unfinished.

No, it doesn't actually.

Another high quality post brought to you by Taipion.

[TotalyMeow]

"We like it this way." Is that a 'justifiable' argument?

All hitboxes are rectangles.