Simplifying gluttony

[Mereni]

When I was a newbie, I had a pretty hard time raising my humors evenly. With all my foods being 0% purity, with all possibilities being equally possible, I had to arrange a large amount of food for any gluttony session. More than I actually planned to eat. When I wanted to raise Phlegm by 5 points, I'd arrange a bunch of food that would Probably give me phlegm, but I'd also have to have foods for all the other humors, because the phlegm food would often not give me phlegm, but something else. It was worst of all when the first food gave me something like YB, but then the YB food rolled me blood, and the next food, frantically chosen before the bars run out Still didn't give me a point. And the little boxes I could afford to build didn't hold a lot of food for gluttony arrangements.

The randomness there and the timer were very frustrating. There's also the fact that some of those foods were very difficult to acquire and ended up being wasted when I didn't get the rolls I needed to get out of them. I think it was the ability to get 60%-100% chance of a certain roll as much as the multiplier that made purity food so attractive.

Why can't the gluttony system be set up similar to the inspirational system?

First, remove the timer and requirement to stand still so someone with limited resources doesn't have to be pressured by not having much space to set up a gluttony array in.

Second, leave it able to chose any of the four based on the purity like we have now, but don't make the point increase be based on the max point anymore. If a person gets 10 BB and still have 5 of all the others, make it only necessary to roll 5 blood worth of gluttony points to get a new Blood point, rather than 10 like it is now. That will make the randomness okay because people don't have to worry when their humors get unbalanced through bad luck or inexperience. They won't feel limited to foods like Cabbage Cakes that are more certain.

Third, keep people from spamming one food by doing the same thing study objects do. Have the first food give 100%, the second of the same food 70%, an so on until a new food is eaten and reset it. It would be a bad idea to simply make it impossible to eat more than one of the same food for a point, or make the reduction too harsh, because newbies and casual players have a limited choice in the foods they can eat. In this system, the new improvements to some tiered foods might be OP, but that can be adjusted.

Just some thoughts from someone who was both a newbie all alone trying to gluttony on small foods and who later had access to some of the best food on the server and clearly experienced the differences.

[Potjeh]

By taking the worst case scenario, ie a simple, grade-school, linear addition of worst events. It's same in effect as having deterministic gains, except the interface is a lot busier.

That works for a smaller subset of dishes, sure. The general case still stands, but I have to admit that I find it fairly pointless to argue these pesudo-points. Why not take some interest in the general thrust of my argument instead of harping on over these irrelevant tangents?

No point discussing things we agree on

[DemonEyes]

I think I get the gist of what Jorb is postulating about, the forced idealism of Gluttony means it becomes a spam fest of the same items with no real investment into side industries.. i.e why would I grow pumpkins if all I need to do is spam cabbages to spam cabbage cakes and crumbs?

I think an idea has been mentioned before, the facility of making meals, but implemented in the fashion that limitations to the development of meals make ssure you need a wide variety of industries to achieve the required bile with 'ideal' combinations that are multitude and rewarding. In effect the generation of a FEP rainbow of Haven and Hearth per meal. Yes H&H does also force the issue of that 1 ideal that is spammable for certain stats. But in order to achieve these ideals there must be a strong and well balanced industry behind it to make the ideal a true reward for a lot of effort.

A meal system that modifies the eating time, the bile input and the effect on the liklihoods of bile increases would create some balance with a lot being put into determinism without losing the randomness..

A meal system that limits you to 1 meat item, 1 veg item and a desert would prompt the development of industries to produce items for each part. Each item can be weighted to give a total benefit to the meal rather than the modification of each item (i.e. Humble meat pie gives 18 points, in a meal with a salad it will give 30 points (regardless of salad item) the desert will add purity to choose which event will happen (i.e. berries on a straw pushes sulphur) again regardless of intial stats.

In order for randomness and the limitations of the cookbook to be defeated and something brought to bear that can truely have a variable impact upon gluttony ot make it more interesting (if not fun) is to force modifciations to the results from eating foods through the combination of other foods, beyond the current limitations of purity and events. This would all be calculatable and mapped out and so become determinable. The variations of purity and events would still have their impact, it would just pay to bring in the variations brought by other industries..

[Snowpig]

*) Right now there is a problem of calculation involved in the gluttony minigame. This is a skill based problem, and solving it represents some sort of challenge.
*) Trivial, full-information determinism removes this problem of calculation -- or at the very least reduces it to simple, grade-school, linear addition -- and thus makes the system devoid of all challenge.

@1) cannot say anything here, since it seems to be a design/coding problem
@2) In my eyes you run here into the old game developers dilemma: You try to prevent the "full-information determinism". This is - frankly speaking - a tilt at windmills. Even with the actual gluttony system you have a player-written wiki, where all values and percentages are listed in detail. You need only one player who makes a decent probability calculation and everybody who reads/uses it can almost pinpoint the exact amount/types of food required to raise one bile.

Every new system you are trying to invent will face the same fate: first people will try different things and find out the most effective way of using it - then there will be a "generation" of players who will simply take a look at the wiki to get the information they need/trade in the items to get the job done.

But there is another problem you will face when trying to prevent the determinism: The more RNG-heavy your calculations become - the less fun the system will be for the players, because doing things repeatedly and producing completely different results will quickly make the whole process pointless (see agriculture & purity nerfs).

Therefore my proposal: instead of preventing the "full-information determinism" how about working with it?

[Procne]

@1) cannot say anything here, since it seems to be a design/coding problem

You misunderstood, jorb didn't mean the problem as an error or something that should be fixed. He meant it as a challenge for the player. Just like designing your base is a problem / challenge that you, as a player, have to solve in order to progress.

@2) In my eyes you run here into the old game developers dilemma: You try to prevent the "full-information determinism". This is - frankly speaking - a tilt at windmills. Even with the actual gluttony system you have a player-written wiki, where all values and percentages are listed in detail. You need only one player who makes a decent probability calculation and everybody who reads/uses it can almost pinpoint the exact amount/types of food required to raise one bile.

I don't think jorb's main intention is to avoid determinism. He already said it few times that he prefers deterministic mechanics. What he meant though is that removing RNG (and thus removing risks of failure and part of decision making) in the current form of gluttony system would make the gluttoning minigame devoid of challenge, too simple and boring.

And this is something we can argue about. Do we really need the gluttony minigame? Personally, I find more fun in building infrastructure and crafting food than in gluttoning. I find it tedious to gather the food, do all the calculations and preparations and then do the hectic minigame. To a point where I simply stopped gluttoning when I reached around 70 humours. I didn't need more, but if I was thinking about raising humours more for PvP then I would treat gluttony as a chore.

Having said that, there is one thing I expect from gluttony system - to promote variety and some decisions about what to eat, instead of just spamming whatever food is the most efficient. The system I proposed on previous page meets those requirements and it would be fun for me.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, I'd say the current gluttony minigame is the antithesis of fun. I've similarly stopped gluttoning at a level where I can comfortably farm argopelters, simply because gluttony is such a chore.

[Snowpig]

@1) cannot say anything here, since it seems to be a design/coding problem

You misunderstood, jorb didn't mean the problem as an error or something that should be fixed. He meant it as a challenge for the player. Just like designing your base is a problem / challenge that you, as a player, have to solve in order to progress.

yes, I clearly misunterstood here. But after reading the thing over, it correlates to my conclusion of @2): you have a pseudo-random process where - by using same items - you either click fast and get a point in your bile or miss the right button/that mushroom pie in your inventory and don't get that point. Therefore a "+1" from me on the

...because gluttony is such a chore

[Dallane]

What I hate about gluttony is mostly that it isn't like hnh. But what Really bothers me is that there are 3 major crops that you will only use once you start farming. There is basically no need to hunt or forage for food when you got cabbage pumpkins and flour. Making so you need to eat more diverse foods and having them being worth the effort to make and eat would really help things.

[DarkNacht]

There is basically no need to hunt or forage for food when you got cabbage pumpkins and flour. Making so you need to eat more diverse foods and having them being worth the effort to make and eat would really help things.

There may be no need to hunt/forage for those who have legacy purity crops, but for the rest of us things such as cabbage cakes and pumpkin pies become close to useless fairly quickly and hunting and foraging is very necessary. This is especially true early on when it is easier to find animals and foragables with OK purity then it is to get your crops up. It still create a problem that you are mostly eating the same thing over and over but there is some verity, especially since some of the best recipes require more than one kind of meat and the best mushrooms are a bit rare.
I like the work it takes to figure out the best stuff for glutting and I hope that they don't take that away, but I do think they should do something to make more foods useful and to force you to eat a larger variety of foods. It would also be nice if they made the any plant recipes work like the any meat/shroom/cabbage/ect. recipes.

[Tamasin]

So far the best idea i've thought of to fix the problem of having optimal foods while others are useless is to have a meal or feast system which would use a collection of foods from different categories, with a variety of foods in each category which have similar value. I used to fantasize about an imaginary game very similar to salem lol, what i imagine i'd do would be something like this:

Instead of the minigame we have, i would make it that instead of eating foods stored in your bags and containers, you would have to place a variety of food on a table to enable some option like feast or something. It would need one or more foods from each category, like drink, side dish, bread, salad, meat, main course, dessert etc. And for each category there would be a variety of choices which gave similar amounts in a humour. I would have several options for a small amount suited to a noob, several options for a medium level player, etc. You could inspect your feast to see the value of what you would get, which might randomly be a bit better or worse for what you wanted it for. Then you eat your food, and maybe you get your humour point/s, then you have a 'stuffed' debuff where you can feast again within a limited time and have the food add on to leftover gains from the previous eating, but at a reduced value.

I'm sure there are plenty of problems with my idea and it wouldn't totally fix the problem of optimal foods, but i like it! I think something like this would be a lot more fun. And i would really like to see a benefit from eating different sorts of food, like a main meal or a snack or appetiser, and i would really like there to be drinks and to eat at a table. Maybe there could even be bigger tables for players with more advanced skills.