Insanity!

[Kish]

I already have a tobacco, I do not know the extent of his madness.
And if I'm going to play for 30 hours in one session what the chances of dying in my character?
I take breaks in the game is the character doing monotonous work (crushing bones)

[JohnCarver]

Wheres the meter from 0 to the first maddness level? A meter that shows something before i stop smiling

You are not intended to have a meter on the 'small' gains of insanity in your day to day life, as this is not meant to be some bar that consumes your every moment and is constantly on your mind. In fact, I purposely designed the system so that the server does not even communicate your insanity levels to the client thus Ender and Kandarim cannot save you! Instead, I only update your clients to their 'madness level' when you do indeed gain one (needs a minor fix atm because its not remembering inbetween logouts so if you log on later you'll have to gain a madness level before your masks update, however, the voices are just as good an indicator imo). Anyways, the IDEA here is that you play salem for (3) 8 hour play sessions. Then on your 4th 8 hour play session you sit down and notice that your masks are starting to look a little bit bad and the voices are every 30 seconds to 2 minutes now. On that 25th hour of play time you decide "hey I should spend an hour or so getting some tobacco and calming all this madness off". Depending on the 'hassle' that crafting a pipe and finding tobacco turned out to be, you may change your play habbits slightly to make sure you toss in 5 minutes of 'calming' actions for every 2-3 hours of neutral ones, or 5 minutes of 'calming' actions for every half hour of insanity buildings ones etc. etc.

[NeiroShop]

Im not playing Salem to be whittling for 50hours of my 200hours of playtime.

Applying some absurd metric to combat insanity like 25% of the playtime would certainly make things look silly. Unfortunately, it would make the person making up the absurd and silly numbers look silly too. Feel free to voice a concern once you are finished creating unrealistic and hilariously off-base assumptions on the time it takes to combat insanity.

Perhaps you'd give us some numbers then. The only numbers we have to go by at the moment are in your posts. 5min of the passive insanity by 1 note. With a "good deal of insanity decreased" means that whittling & flower picking is less productive does it not due to the "small amount of insanity decreased"

[Argentis]

Wheres the meter from 0 to the first maddness level? A meter that shows something before i stop smiling

You are not intended to have a meter on the 'small' gains of insanity in your day to day life, as this is not meant to be some bar that consumes your every moment and is constantly on your mind. In fact, I purposely designed the system so that the server does not even communicate your insanity levels to the client thus Ender and Kandarim cannot save you! Instead, I only update your clients to their 'madness level' when you do indeed gain one (needs a minor fix atm because its not remembering inbetween logouts so if you log on later you'll have to gain a madness level before your masks update, however, the voices are just as good an indicator imo). Anyways, the IDEA here is that you play salem for (3) 8 hour play sessions. Then on your 4th 8 hour play session you sit down and notice that your masks are starting to look a little bit bad and the voices are every 30 seconds to 2 minutes now. On that 25th hour of play time you decide "hey I should spend an hour or so getting some tobacco and calming all this madness off". Depending on the 'hassle' that crafting a pipe and finding tobacco turned out to be, you may change your play habbits slightly to make sure you toss in 5 minutes of 'calming' actions for every 2-3 hours of neutral ones, or 5 minutes of 'calming' actions for every half hour of insanity buildings ones etc. etc.

Does that mean that we will never see the change of madness level reflected on modded clients? Or just not meter for insanity between levels?

[JohnCarver]

This insanity system sounds great. Time will tell how it turns out. Two small ideas to regain a small amount of sanity:

1) Spending time in Providence town area (It might bring back people to socialise in town). It would be great to add a building with affluence requirement to further speed up this process (kind of upper class bar).
2) Eating food to regain humours (not gluttony) could add a tiny amount to your sanity meter

So far I love the progress of this game. Nice job from JC and the dev team!

We hope that music playing will be a fun social event that players can come to town and all listen to some music. Somebody could easily play a 30 note tune in town in about a minute which would take off like 3 hours of insanity for everybody who spent that minute in town listening.

[ShadowTani]

Thing is Dont starve is a single player/coop game. Salem is not.

Yet they are also both Roguish Sandbox games that already share certain game mechanics…

The problem isn't whether the games are different though, it would still not be absurd to draw some inspiration from the other even if the games where completely different genres, some concepts obviously fits in multiple genres. It's just that people that don't like this patch are making up a bunch of irrelevant excuses at the moment, while the real problem is that their comfort zone has been threatened and thus they have paranoia about losing their character. As a result they don't even want to give it a try before complaining despite it taking a good 3-5 hours or more of AFK to gain even one madness level, which should be completely manageable by even those who use Salem as a chat-room.

[Rubberduckbandit]

It's like people forget this is a permadeath game, should have it so all carebears gain insanity twice as fast since they're all so paranoid, and never leave their walls.

[JohnCarver]

Perhaps you'd give us some numbers then. The only numbers we have to go by at the moment are in your posts. 5min of the passive insanity by 1 note. With a "good deal of insanity decreased" means that whittling & flower picking is less productive does it not due to the "small amount of insanity decreased"

Whittling a spinning top for example would give 2-8 minutes off. A sharpened stick near the same. Thus making a single spinning top could give between 4-15 minutes off insanity. I could easily see a session where somebody makes a dozen spinning tops and immediately frees up several hours of playtime before getting close to jumping another madness level.

Does that mean that we will never see the change of madness level reflected on modded clients? Or just not meter for insanity between levels?

You will never see a meter between the levels for modded clients. The modders can easily give you an 'easier' way to display your madness levels than learning which mask means what next to the humor bars. Also, fun fact, if you try to smoke at 0 madness it will give you a system message letting you know you are at the lowest level of madness. Another fun fact: the lower you are to 0 madness, the harder it is to remove a madness level by smoking.

It's like people forget this is a permadeath game, should have it so all carebears gain insanity twice as fast since they're all so paranoid, and never leave their walls.

Complaining about the direction of my development on the forums does indeed add insanity in-game

[NeiroShop]

Perhaps you'd give us some numbers then. The only numbers we have to go by at the moment are in your posts. 5min of the passive insanity by 1 note. With a "good deal of insanity decreased" means that whittling & flower picking is less productive does it not due to the "small amount of insanity decreased"

Whittling a spinning top for example would give 2-8 minutes off. A sharpened stick near the same. Thus making a single spinning top could give between 4-15 minutes off insanity. I could easily see a session where somebody makes a dozen spinning tops and immediately frees up several hours of playtime before getting close to jumping another madness level.

Something other that annoys me is that you spoke about "neutral things" to do. What does this mean? Considering youve also said insanity is also passive?

[JohnCarver]

Something other that annoys me is that you spoke about "neutral things" to do. What does this mean? Considering youve also said insanity is also passive?

Well sure, all players are in a passive state of gaining insanity. Doing certain things make this faster, doing other things roll it back. "Neutral' is just the term I use for the "AFK" gain-rate.

I think maybe the devs need to inform the community beforehand if they intend to introduce a new means of permakilling the players and give more clear instructions. This flow of comments only shows that the impact of the patch
is not clear to people. Also, getting comments like "have you read the notes" etc is not what I appreciate from the part of the people working on the game. It only shows lack of respect and, I am sorry, but I do not find it acceptable.

Consider this your warning that I intend to add new ways to kill you from now until the end of my reign here.