Bug fixes: Purity

[Salient]

I approve of this patch, and appreciate it. Now you need to reset all the exploiters stats to 5/5/5/5, or else it's all for naught.

[Inotdead]

pew pew pew!

BANG! BANG!

Bullets flying everywhere!

[Banok]

@jorb

I'm definitely aware you are only 2 guys working on haven, salem and haven 2.0. Its kind of saddening as a consumer since I would prefer one finished superior product, I wish you could somehow get more developers on your team.

I also find it exasperating since I personally feel like salem is weak in areas haven is strong, and vice versa; combining aspects of both would make a "complete" game. (Altho I think most your players disagree with that since they tend to favour one and hate the other in my experience )

But if you didn't work on what inspired you the games wouldn't be interesting in the first place, they might be complete but no one would be playing them if they were dull. ultimately haven and salem are 2 of my favourite games of all time, even tho neither is near complete and I strongly dislike aspects of both. they are simply extremely inspired games, and nothing else out there is anything like them.

Please continue! I would like to know what your plans are; more salem updates next or back to "hafen"?

[Banok]

Pre-purity nerf screenshot ?

they did not wipe the food when they refixed it so there is a lot of high purity good floating around.

This is definitely not true, why would you say this? I had crates of 33% boiled food, which I dedicated 1 or 2 whole days making, which all turned into 0%.

I once got like 15 humours in a gluttony session with em but it also gave me like 36 hours cooldown. The truth is I could have leveled up as much (or more!) without them in 36 hours and had balanced level ups instead of a huge black bile bias, it just would just require more logging in and more crafting.

they were mostly op for healing, or stacking black bile imo ;p

[Powowcloud]

Anything that makes the pale skinned "tribe" cry is a great update..continue on. I imagine the black eyeliner and tear mixture is heavy with them, just hope they dont all bleed out from the constant cutting.

[darnokpl]

Top five list of all humours.

Blood
Phlegm
Yellow Bile
Black Bile

How about make list like this accessible all the time just like server status http://login.salemthegame.com/portal/state ?

Updated every 24 hours... so if someone will try to do something nasty with biles people will let you know very fast:)
Do I have to write something that makes you guys angry to have simple yes/no/possible "soon"/gtfo?

[jwhitehorn]

First of all you are an ungrateful, spoiled child, and I have no intention to work for your pleasure what-so-ever, and to the extent that you derive any it is entirely incidental to my future actions.

I am spoiled in the fact that you have indeed given me a playground that can only exist by the hands of a self-less developer who chooses to value tears and drama over profit and conformity. The fact that you allow stray animals to **** all over it and the swingsets to rust off due to neglect and lack of maintenance does not change the simple fact that yes, there is still a playground. To say I am ungrateful based on our previous conversations seems like an emotional reaction to a harsh criticism and I'll let you fester on if you truly think I'm ungrateful for my home. To develop the game to cater to my pleasure has never been your objective nor will it ever be, but airing this simple fact will do well to eliminate the rumors of "Jorgen".

Secondly, all the systems you mentioned grow and expand all the time --

This is broadly inaccurate. The major systems mentioned were: Purity, Food Diversity, Combat Artifice, Wells, and Prof. Significance. All of those have remained COMPLETELY untouched since their implementation with the exception of some minor reasons to have this prof. or that one. You have added no meaningful way to increase natural occuring purities, no increase reason to explore other damage types, no fix for "any plant/fish/pumpkin/etc.", no expansion of wells and/or their usefulness.

just recently we added more artifice, for example

You added yet another artifice that adds yet another set of set of values that did not previously EXIST in the game. Gastronomy & Woodworking to be precise. These new bonus' now seem represented by a SINGLE artifice and as a result seem to just add to the list of yet another unfinished project. "Fleshing out" your artifice system would have been to add a purpose to the EXISTING Artifice bonus' that you already have in place that currently do nothing, and therefore, add diversity to the damage types socketed.

-- and what you are dissatisfied with is simply the development pace.

Sure, but that is not the focus of this discussion. The speed in which you implement things has been trademarked as "Soon" as a perpetual joke to the speed in which things happen and I'm fairly sure everybody here understands that IF **** gets done, it won't be fast. Few would be satisfied with this, but few would be justified in attacking it given the scope and budget of the project itself. My points were not about the speed in which you accomplished things, but the priority in which you do. You continue to "start" new projects that inspire you, only to lose interest or focus and then "roll out" a largely unfinished system. Perhaps you lose inspiration at that point, or perhaps you become overwhelmed with everything that system COULD be and simply surrender to the current state of things. Either way, we, the playerbase, are left with broken unfinished system as a result of where your "inspiration" takes you. Instead of selecting small milestones as a goal "I am going to make each Prof do (2) meaningful things". "I am going to include each food into (3) recipes", I feel that there is no goal-oriented structure in the development process itself which is how we arrive at a world where some stats quite literally do nothing, some artifice quite literally add nothing to 99% of combat situations, and some Structures serve no purpose (wells). To say that these are direct results of "pace" would only be accurate if the expansion of new systems did take place before the completion of old ones. In this case, it is a matter of Priority not pace.

This is a common complaint from many of the ungrateful, spoiled children who play our games, because for some reason the fact that we are only two people building at least two complex MMOs of rather enormous scope never quite seems to sink in or fully register.

You are two people who were given, have been given, and have been offered a tremendous amount of resources and assistance in overcoming the shortcomings of your projects. Much of this can be seen by the overwhelming amount of good ideas offered in both the I&I and the 33 that would fix MANY of the issues that cause a loss of player retention. Now if this was a project that was NOT funded by Paradox, and DID NOT have a wealth of solid ideas platered to your forums on a weekly basis I would say that the challenges ahead, and your complaint of manpower would be a legitimate excuse to rest on. At this point its time to own up that the size of the project is a self-imposed constraint in an effort to maintain and retain creative direction, and that the "Creative Direction" that you fight so hard to retain is a large factor in the lack of player retention itself. This is little different from the man who refuses to work because he doesn't have a car, then refuses to take a free car because he doesn't like the color.

Fortunately, no single ***** is given by any single dev, because ungrateful, dissatisfied end-users really are a dime-a-dozen.

If one can rationalize everything that doesn't fit into their own personal opinion as simply the words of an "ungrateful" user then it makes it pretty easy to fall into the same habbits that have lead them down the same roads. Once ***** start being given by developers, ***** might start being given by players as well. Attempting to discredit good ideas and solid courses of direction in development because they are contrary to your own by simply arguing the merit of the person making the observation and criticism will leave you with a less than ideal objective viewpoint.

You can point to a thousand things that we did not do -- I can point to a million -- but have you ever considered pointing at some of the things we did do? How dare you complain that "willows are useless!" when you have never once said "thank you for making willows!"?

Thank you for making Willows. Do you thank your Mechanic for washing your car when you took it in for an oil change and he failed to change it, causing it to break down on the side of the road just a few short months in the future all over again? I appreciate the small token of aesthetic value that was not essential to the health of Salem. Now can you please address the things that are? Surely there are a million things that COULD be done, but there are less than 20 that are game-breaking and/or pulling players away from the game itself. We are asking that those 20 items that cause players to quit, and Salem to NOT be commercially successful take some level of priority in your development schedule.

They are not useless. They make the world exactly one blip more colorful and varied.

Agreed.

I, for my part, wish to remain flexible. I do not wish to tie myself down and brute force simple content implementations to systems that I do not feel inspired to work on, but rather I believe firmly in opening up many avenues of development experimentally, and try to explore them as it feels meaningful, fruitful and fun to do so.

And as long as this is your hobby you should continue to do just that. Do what makes you happy, enjoy what brings you smiles. No amount of ***** here, on IRC, or in forum PM's should inevitably change the direction of something someone is doing simply out of leisure. However, this would be no different than watching an athletically gifted 7'7" man insist that he is going to shoot basketball with two hands in a "Granny shot" because it is what he likes to do. If that person has ambitions of truly becoming great, and doing great things with his gift, he would be wise to take a bit of coaching here and there. So what is it? A ***** hobby that goes where it goes? Or something that you truly wish to develop into greatness?

These games will never be "finished", so why should I feel any compulsion to rush for a goal I know to be non-existent?

This is a simple failure in goal-setting. As you have referenced, an MMO is never "finished" but it can reach a measurable level of "present-ability" to the public and/or industry. Instead of pretending that this goal is impossible, and therefore, dodging the expectations and responsibility that would be present if you had indeed created a goal, why not make your OWN goal? Why not decide to have every Biome spawn 3 unique items? Why not set a goal for players to reach 50% purity in a way your happy with, and then tackle 100%. Why not create a goal where a player has (4) Viable moves in combat and then work on getting to 10 next year? Small goals can be set, and reached. It is the complete absence of goals that allows for broken mechanics to exist for over a year.

Why no alchemy? Because we do not know what to do about it. Very simple.

Yet you have an abundance of ideas given to you on several mediums by several factions of players that all have tackled the system in a vastly superior nature to its current state. As you have conceded earlier, perfection and absolute completion is not an option you have a luxury of pursuing, so what stops you from adopting and/or improving upon any one of the dozen viable systems and improving the status quo?

Why no this, that or the other? Because you got something else instead.

The heart of my arguement. Why no important things? Because we got less-important things instead.

Maybe that is not what you wish, but, quite frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

When you give a damn about broken or unfinished mechanics in your game that your players want fixed, you might have a few more players.

I am immensely grateful that anyone plays our games at all, I am humbled by every login, I love you all dearly, and you owe me nothing.

Any player who truly respects the perma-death sandbox environment that you have provided owes you for having the balls and fortitude to produce/publish/pursue a world nobody else will give the time a day. Selling yourself short of this fact seems like an attempt at modesty after several paragraphs of "i don't give a damn I don't give a *****". You once mentioned that you tolerated me and my presence in your game because of my perpetual rosie outlook and amicable nature towards your status quo. Instead of taking pride in this acknowledgement from the once "Great Spirit" himself I felt guilty. I felt that perhaps my fun, as warped as it may be, has given you justification for the direction in which you took this project. Perhaps it is the fanbois themselves who give you the strength to keep the ship pointed firmly at the storm looming on the horizon. Thus, you have had your title of The Great Spirit stripped from you and the Tribal Idols taken down and burned. Just this morning I paved a representation of your face and covered it in Turkey ****. It took much time, and I didn't want to do it, but I refuse to accept that you accept the fate of something that could be so great.

In my opinion Salem has the makings to a Permadeath MMO for a niche crowd of several thousand players, maybe 2,000 maybe 8,000. Either way, enough to give you the fiscal comfort to develop it, nurture it, and drink form its tears for decades to come. For those who understand and respect the type of interaction that can come with the emotional attachment to pixels in Salem it also has the potential to offer the best Gaming experience of a gamers lifetime. For me, this is already the case. Unfortunately, the fate and possible future rest in your decisions, so here is to hoping you start making better ones.


Chief PeePooKaKa
MM Tribe

[Sosisochka]

you owe me nothing.

My history for last week, also friend playing with me has the same.

Also there is not written anywhere, that you wont be able to use anything from alchemist pack, until you have dried woods and stove. This game is so new user friendly. Thanks, jorb, awesome game, make more donate packs, less bugfixes.

[DarkNacht]

they did not wipe the food when they refixed it so there is a lot of high purity good floating around.

This is definitely not true, why would you say this? I had crates of 33% boiled food, which I dedicated 1 or 2 whole days making, which all turned into 0%.

That was from the first 'fix'/purity wipe, but they forgot to fix the problem so people cooked more and they did not bother to wipe the purity of the new bugged food.

[naosnule]

Top five list of all humours.

Blood
Phlegm
Yellow Bile
Black Bile

How about make list like this accessible all the time just like server status http://login.salemthegame.com/portal/state ?

Updated every 24 hours... so if someone will try to do something nasty with biles people will let you know very fast:)
Do I have to write something that makes you guys angry to have simple yes/no/possible "soon"/gtfo?

He might not know the answer. Loftar is the coder, Jorb is the visionary.