one problem is nobody uses honey anymore for fruit since kandarims bot happily lets them piss out a waterfall of berry juice in a day that is enough to last for ten summers, variety is good as is depth but adding another ten steps and processes to honey personally speaking would just cause me to say ***** it altogether and stop keeping bees as is it enough of a pain in the ass already once you go over a certain number of skeps, wait weeks for the skeps to fill, then go dig clay for an entire day to rebuild them while checking once a day for a new queen (if your doing it properly, i already tend to just let my hives sit due to said pain in ass factor.
if i dropped about 1500 bucks on lumber, a dozen starter colonies and beekeepers protective equipment i would have between 2000 - 3000 pounds of honey and around 300 - 500 pounds of beeswax after about a year of minimal maintenance, less than i spend currently on bees in salem.
this is why salem sucks and nobody plays, because like every other game 90% of salem is a levelling treadmill to stay competitive, the remaining 10% of the "fun" in a given game is what you get to experience after suffering through that particular games treadmill and engage in end game pvp (which was broken well over two years ago for all the exact reasons i pointed out when the stupidity laden "jinglebombs" patch was released and the numerous mini patches around that timeframe) or dragon raids (which dont exist here, unless you count me i suppose) or whatever that game has. the primary difference here is that the "leveling" has taken the place of hours and hours of pointless chores that you must complete or the "levelling" you have done up to that point takes a **** and you start over. additions like the kandarim client has made the problem exponentially worse and cause people to lose touch with how the game "really is" and how much of an ungodly timesink many of the things in it are.
i am easily the top player in the game by far, regardless of whatever lie or embellishment i tell about the number and strength of my characters i easily have the strongest character on the server in terms of biles and skills (and have not done much to him since returning from popham with him nearly a year ago now) and i easily have more combat ready fighters in the mid to high hundreds than any other faction on the server combined. but i have barely played salem in a year and a half since i locked down popham, literally almost ALL of my game time since then has been doing stupid ***** ***** i cant stand doing. i get to do the exact same real life chores that i could choose to do in real life except in a pixelated world with no reward and then on top of that the amount of time it takes to do most of these things in game takes about 3 - 5x longer than the same thing in real life.
when i can prepare an AMAZING dinner in a few hours of occasionally going back and forth to the kitchen but it takes me either weeks of waiting on summer and 8 hours of picking fruit at the end or far more than that by prepping/cooking 8 billion dogturd pies things are just ***** stupid.
example of my typical gameplay these days:
help newbs starting out not lose everything and quit by answering forum pms
get ***** at by literally anywhere from 2 - 5 nerd chicks that want my **** because i do not have time or ***** to give about small talk or idle rumors/gossip so spend an hour or so going round and round with whoever is butthurt at me on that particular day.
breaking down and rebuilding skeps once every 12 days or so (something most others dont bother with at all thanks to kandarims distiller bot)
growing approx 400 fields of food to feed animals once every 2 - 3 days
feeding animals daily or twice daily
curing animals daily or twice daily
moving/butchering animals every two days
growing treats to lower anger every 3ish days
managing anger levels of them daily
feeding turkeys daily or twice daily
checking for TBFs and paying upkeep on 2 dozen towns daily that i only keep since i raided them because there was supposed to be a salvage feature added 2.5 years ago
keep in mind we are not discussing 2 cows and a pig like most of the retards in this game would have, you need hundreds of each if you want any usefulness out of them. this includes turkeys, you know the things that "taipion of the masons" (
) and creator of the cowardbot that plays an alarm for him so that he can blindly ***** through the game in condition white and have an automaton let him know when he needs to **** his pants and run away because a player loaded within a 100 tiles of him.
absolutely none of the above is "fun" once the novelty of it wears thin which is quick and you can ask any of the few people i have on my kin list about what sort of "mood" i tend to be in for the duration of each evening when i log on to do all this stupid ***** that i should not have to do, couple this with a scandalous and trashy as ***** playerbase with no integrity made up of 90% euro's who have been the classic "ill just use a cheat program" sector of the online gaming community since literally the dawn of the internet and the first games in existence. this is why many games have "regional" servers even though the server is located in the same building and the latency times are the same, it is a marketing move because many americans simply wont play on a european server due to the rampant third party program abuse that occurs, and will not play on chinese servers unless they want to fight the entire server (the chinese and korean players are as bad if not worse than russians when it comes to dogpiling on anyone not of a common language/region)
anyway guess what im saying is none of those are particularly bad ideas with regard to honey, but until sweeping strides are made to make the game less of a "job" it would prob not compliment the already overwhelming and lifesucking flow of gameplay in general
the server will burn from one end to the other the day that i decide i no longer care about checking satellite "towns", keeping turkeys, quickly replacing a lost raider or playing whatever new expedition comes out for a statue i still have not gotten from the last one 8 months later when that was the whole god damn point i went there. store credit i still have not gotten 8 months later (i raid most of the **** i need and get stock certs for killing murderers fairly frequently so am not a big store buyer like the retards that buy 200 couches and sit in town for 14 hours a day trying to sell them to people but regardless have spent about a grand on salem total over the years, but never another dime until there are mass improvements across the board), the 1600 stat t3 witch that has still not been copied over 8 months later, the chest of bringbacks that have still not been brought over 8 months later, reward items that still do not work 8 months later and so on or maintaining a useful size herd of animals and instead just go back to what i consider fun, kicking the asses of giant gnat clouds of loud talking forum retards that pretend to think they are better than they are.
if JC is not back by mid winter with a lengthy list of things that suck less i am going to circle the wagons and move everything of value to my impregnable northern fortress, drop an assbeating on every last retard on the server i have a grudge against, let the animals starve to death and just ***** on the forums since currently that is by far the most time rewarding and fun aspect of gameplay.
no idea how honey got me into rant mode but trust me i have a lot more, luckily i have to go log in and spend the next 2 - 3 hours doing maintenance for absolutely no ***** reason whatsoever.