Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Announcements of major changes to Salem.

Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby Demek » Tue Jan 05, 2016 1:13 am

Newbie player perspective here (until I lose my "main" I will consider myself a newb).
I find it strange that all of you are discussing expanding the sandbox whilst not mentioning:
skeletal ui with no customization(keybinds!),
akward character and camera movement,
counter-intuitive mouse-keyboard hybrid,
little to no in-game information about anything of importance.

These might work for dwarf fortress filtering the retards but won't get you a growing population base.

Half of my clicks is attempting to move character around stumbling over everything and failing to select things on the map, and adjusting camera over and over again when I get stuck.
Someone trying the game out for the first time won't start with 2 hour wiki/forums read either to start a fire, drown fibers in the water, and get diseased when entering town.
Made a suggestion thread already, so just throwing this out here for 2016 discussion.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby Kandarim » Tue Jan 05, 2016 8:35 am

that's because you're using a crappy camera mode.
Try out one of the custom clients, or type

Code: Select all
:cam sucky

or
Code: Select all
:cam freestyle


in your client's console (I'm not 100% positive on which one it is for default client).

The whole information-scarcity is 100% intentional, and forces you to try out everything for yourself.
As far as the witchcraft system is concerned, it's actually been stated by the dev that it would all change when details become too public.
I have neither the crayons nor the time to explain it to you.
JC wrote:I'm not fully committed to being wrong on that yet.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby salemwutwut » Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:08 pm

Stumbling upon things makes bots lives harder, though making objects transparent between camera and character could make closer camera viable and add to immersion.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby Iracus » Wed Jan 06, 2016 8:47 am

Change up the weapon foraging system and combat system to allow for more weapons that can fit to different situations and playstyles.

You could make it so weapons cost a variable amount of resources, and depending on the types of materials used, would result in different weapons.

For example you could have alternative recipes for a sword using different types of blades.

For example, you could have three different versions of craft. Speed, damage, defense and standard. If you crafted a speed blade it would have bonuses to attack rate, slight decrease in defense, and large decrease in damage. A damage blade would have large decrease in defense, and then slight decrease in speed. And then a defense blade would have slight decrease in speed and large decrease in defense. Each of course would have medium-large increase for whatever blade it was. Standard would be just a cheap version that had no bonuses and was easy for players to make

Then you could have each weapon type have their own advantages. Swords would be a more defensive weapon giving a player passive bonuses to defense while having average damage/speed/reach. Polearms would have bonuses to reach/speed but would do reduced damage to targets that were too close. Clubs would get a damage bonus but would suffer in reach/speed.

Each combat tree could have advantages to specific styles of play. So for example, someone who thinks along the liens of "defense is the best kind of offense" would use polearms. It could have skills that helped you keep out of reach of other players in order to do maximum damage. But would require more physical effort (phlegm) than the other styles.

Basically it would create a more varied style of combat and someone who was able to master each system and apply them in the correct situations would do very well.

So yeah, there is my suggestion. Sorry for any grammatical errors or if things don't make sense. I am about to pass out from lack of sleep but randomly thought of this
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby jcwilk » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:26 am

The thing that I think I miss the most in the new system ("new" as in since pre-providence) is a more complex purity system. It was really rewarding in the old system to gradually get all your ducks in a row as you inched your way through mid game, getting first hand or trade sources for your purity of choice, or for more sophisticated bases/groups with more ambitious goals, sources for all the purities. It was really satisfying getting that last ingredient pure and finally getting your end product at the same level as your ingredients.

Although it's less absurdly tedious now to get higher purity, it also seems so linear. I thought it was really cool that there were people who could specialize in some of the less sought after elements and get high demand from a niche market rather than trying to compete for maxing out merc.

I haven't spent enough time in the new system yet to have strong opinions on what exactly should be done as saying it's a complicated paradigm is an understatement and so much has changed (definitely mostly for the better), though I believe there's been talk about utilizing the other elements again one day... Would love to see some of that in 2016.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby JohnCarver » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:47 am

That is a very valid point. We should definitely give some thought to fleshing out the other elements or at least giving them some direction in the year to come.
ceedat wrote:the overwhelming frustration of these forums and the unnecessarily over complicated game mechanics is what i enjoy about this game most.

Nsuidara wrote:it is a strange and difficult game in no positive way
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby Argentis » Thu Jan 07, 2016 1:25 pm

jcwilk wrote:The thing that I think I miss the most in the new system ("new" as in since pre-providence) is a more complex purity system. It was really rewarding in the old system to gradually get all your ducks in a row as you inched your way through mid game, getting first hand or trade sources for your purity of choice, or for more sophisticated bases/groups with more ambitious goals, sources for all the purities. It was really satisfying getting that last ingredient pure and finally getting your end product at the same level as your ingredients.

Although it's less absurdly tedious now to get higher purity, it also seems so linear. I thought it was really cool that there were people who could specialize in some of the less sought after elements and get high demand from a niche market rather than trying to compete for maxing out merc.

I haven't spent enough time in the new system yet to have strong opinions on what exactly should be done as saying it's a complicated paradigm is an understatement and so much has changed (definitely mostly for the better), though I believe there's been talk about utilizing the other elements again one day... Would love to see some of that in 2016.


If I remember correctly purity pre-providence was based on purity nodes that were finite in numbers in the server. It didn't give any chance for new arrivals to catch up as all the nodes would have been claimed by big factions and veteran players. I like the new purity system better as, sure it is linear but, it gives everyone some equality. This is balance at work. Moreover new arrivals can speed boost their purity through buying high purity seeds and products which encourage either trade or secret holding, mechanics that are both core to Salem.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby jcwilk » Thu Jan 07, 2016 3:30 pm

Argentis wrote:If I remember correctly purity pre-providence was based on purity nodes that were finite in numbers in the server. It didn't give any chance for new arrivals to catch up as all the nodes would have been claimed by big factions and veteran players.


Nah, every resource had its own unique node map and even if that was somehow the case in the old system (it definitely was not on Jamestown and many/most of the nodes were unclaimable so I doubt even a significant fraction could have been taken on the other servers), Providence is massive so it's like saying that granite boulders could run out... Sure it -could- happen but realistically, no.

Argentis wrote:I like the new purity system better as, sure it is linear but, it gives everyone some equality. This is balance at work. Moreover new arrivals can speed boost their purity through buying high purity seeds and products which encourage either trade or secret holding, mechanics that are both core to Salem.


The same was true of the old system.

The things they did with Gluttony in the new system are awesome, I love how the ever increasing complexity of it ties into driving you towards expanding your industries to cover the various bases and push yourself further...

Purity used to be the same as well, you could get ok purity that would give you 20-50% higher values without too much effort by buying a few things or finding a decent water source, but to get really high values you had to really invest in it across your industries but you still weren't king of the world unless you did that with all elements, and even then you couldn't find all the nodes so there would always be the potential for someone to have a fundamental edge over you. Mishaps with adjustments and pre-patch legacy goods made that be not quite so true but that was just a dev screw up, not fundamental to a more complex purity system.

I thought the nodes were pretty cool and added a lot to the game but they also limited it in other ways. Alternatively, I've always wondered if there might be some mechanic that could let you influence purity nodes so that a faction could take over a region and start investing in it but that gets complicated and kind of weird... lol. Could be cool though. I mostly just would like more complex purity across multiple elements and purity used in and drawn from more things, with or without foraged purity.

Anyways, glad to hear its on your guys' minds, JC.
JohnCarver wrote:This way no matter how bad my day gets, a text message that one of you died to madness always seems to brighten it.
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby reeper_aut » Fri Jan 08, 2016 2:13 pm

Kandarim wrote:that's because you're using a crappy camera mode.
Try out one of the custom clients, or type

Code: Select all
:cam sucky

or
Code: Select all
:cam freestyle


in your client's console (I'm not 100% positive on which one it is for default client).

The whole information-scarcity is 100% intentional, and forces you to try out everything for yourself.
As far as the witchcraft system is concerned, it's actually been stated by the dev that it would all change when details become too public.


not working for me

sys says "no such camera type" for both
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Re: Happy New Year! 2016 Road Mappish

Postby Kandarim » Fri Jan 08, 2016 3:10 pm

oh, but isn't there a decent options menu in the default client now? you should be able to open it through your menu or through ctrl+O
I have neither the crayons nor the time to explain it to you.
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