Game Development: Project Mayhem

[Procne]

I like building in Salem, I think it takes proper amount of time and materials. The only problem I could have would be how easy it is to destroy someone's infrastructure. But then, I don't have any experience with this after couple of last updates so can't really tell.

In general, I think there's less grind in Salem than in HnH. Wood requires less effort, farming requires less effort and is more fun with tiers and fertilizers. But then again, I haven't really put more than 10 fertilizers on a field, and I never had more than 30 fields. I can imagine that person with more fields trying to push for higher tiers very hard will suffer some bad grind. Maybe if there was limit on number of fertilizers?

[Dallane]

I like building in Salem, I think it takes proper amount of time and materials. The only problem I could have would be how easy it is to destroy someone's infrastructure. But then, I don't have any experience with this after couple of last updates so can't really tell.

In general, I think there's less grind in Salem than in HnH. Wood requires less effort, farming requires less effort and is more fun with tiers and fertilizers. But then again, I haven't really put more than 10 fertilizers on a field, and I never had more than 30 fields. I can imagine that person with more fields trying to push for higher tiers very hard will suffer some bad grind. Maybe if there was limit on number of fertilizers?

You don't think there is a grind because you are not actually grinding. You are playing at your own pace and having fun doing so. Others who want to push purity and play "end game" find it to be a massive grind with high risk and little reward.

[Procne]

You don't think there is a grind because you are not actually grinding. You are playing at your own pace and having fun doing so. Others who want to push purity and play "end game" find it to be a massive grind with high risk and little reward.

Yeah, pretty much this. But then again, is it even possible to make game not grindy for people willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort to be the best?

[Erunildo]

The only grind that i find not fun and rewarding is the tree purity. Farming got a lot better with the last update since you can actually play farmer and find different recipes. Yeah it needs a lot of hay,but still you get some rewards for grinding that.

Trees on the other hand are TOO slow and really not worth it. I have been grinding since the update on trees and i got to 1%-2%. Now at least you have the option to go for high tiers and raise your humours.

As for reaching the titans,i don't really care,i just want to see some rewards for my work (which will happen i think with the current farming system) and have some fun doing so. They worked hard,they deserve it. It would be good however to find a way for newer players to actually have a chance at surviving. Mostly talking about infrastructure. 1 or 2 guys shouldn't be able to raise a whole base to the ground.

[alloin]

need something like 300 - 400 hay to take a field to t3 in a couple of harvests
& bots bots bots !!!

Exactly 200 & 2 harvests, again you have no clue what you talk about

[MagicManICT]

Derail posts removed: personal flame wars will not be tolerated here.

[colesie]

the crippling grind in nearly every aspect of the game.

This is interesting. Where is the crippling grind, more specifically? What's the difference as compared to Haven, for example?

Building is a bit of a PITA in Salem, and I guess that the time sensitivity of gluttony could make it feel grindy, but more than that? Farming requires some mental attention, I guess.

From what I've seen/done/heard from new players it goes a little something like this

Early game:
Foraging: Running around aimlessly looking for studies and food until about 20 or so in a few select stats; this now comes with the added bonus of boiling mushrooms for regen food! Because of this, even more time is spent crafting noob foods and looking for specific items in order to make them which is even more derping around aimlessly and then derping around even more to make a tinder drill for the chance of cooking your finds. (If the drill breaks, guess what? You get to forage more to heal that blood champ!) Since the cauldron bsns, a whole branch of the noob food groups is basically ignored. People without access to the skill to make a cauldron, people who lack the materials for one, or people who have no set location yet (aka noobs) will simply avoid mushrooms. If food is not readily available your skill grind is not as seamless and much more annoying. Skill grind is very repetitive and after you do it more than a few times in early game you'll learn to dread it.

Looking for a base location: Scouring the map looking for an unsettled patch of land with no real neighbours around and that is preferably on the edge of multiple biomes that you feel you'll need. (You'll still need to make a lime alt regardless because there's no way to have enough lime near you to sustain any form of decent base.) Selecting base location can take hours, or even days.

Money making: Shooting crickets with a sling over and over and trying to punch them down in order to afford your first true weapon. After you get your necessities (backpack, sword) you then need to start grinding crickets even more in order to afford your p claim. You're expected to do brain-numbing tasks yet again in order to continue.

Gluttony: Grinding animals and making various foods/boiling mushrooms for many hours in order to get to humours that you can actually do something with (30-40ish) (Not to mention the grind for all of the butchering/cooking skills just to make anything semi decent and the skills needed just to damage the animals in the first place)

Claimed land: Grinding crickets to buy a shovel, grinding to labouring, foraging and cooking for a few hours in order to get enough food stockpiled for you to start flattening your land.

Flattening land: Hours upon hours of flattening the land just so that you can begin working on a base. Many bases end up ****** and half-assed because people simply get tired of this step. Even more forage grind needed after your initial food stores run out.


Mid game:
Foraging: Still derping around and studying inspirationals. You're able to kill animals now which helps with the silver grind of making leather, selling hides or simply gluttonying food that isn't poisonous and takes 20-30 minutes to be edible. You may still be grinding hay in boston for cash but some might be saved to test out farming and tiers now. By now you know the Boston claim inside and out. Every grass patch, every ridge and every lake. Why? Because you've just spent the last 3-4 weeks on it foraging for crickets and grass bro! You're likely covering a lot more ground looking for purity nodes in your area.

Metal: Grinding crickets/hay to afford materials for your first smelters/stamp mills and finding your first mine (likely not in the ideal place where you would prefer to settle, but you settle there anyways out of convenience). Burning a few bars and moving lime around from nearby nodes (lugging them back to your base or running back and forth) You're expected to either, risk your main/your farmer or make a lime alt and port the lime to your base through boston.

Gluttony: You're likely not eating meat anymore but the food you are eating will take a lot more time and planning, grinding of tiers and constantly checking purity.

Claimed land: Your land is likely claimed now, but you're currently feeding upkeep via crickets or metal. You've likely got the main area of your base leveled and a few walls up, but you'll soon be wanting to expand which requires more flattening.

Base design: Your walls are up and the rough outline of your base is established so you are now going to start burning metals for braziers/industry. You spend the better part of your day making coal clamps and lighting them, the next few days are spent staring at your clamps and foraging/afking until they're ready to be used. You then spend a long time transporting lime or making a brand new fresh character to use as a lime alt for porting it back to your base which requires 2 clients as a minimum to do metals. You finally get your coal and lime ready and in your smelters and they're burning. Most of your time is spent fueling smelters and watching movies while they burn. This process is put on repeat for a few days, weeks, or even months depending on your play times and how many people are with you.


Late game:

Your base is now established, you have a decent amount of tiered fields and you are able to support your upkeep with metals or raid loot. You're likely either buying your own hay, or you're grinding it harder than ever before because you now need it for field tiering. You must make coal clamps en mass and port thousands of lime to your base to store in signposts via your lime alt to always be thinking of defenses and you now have to worry about village upkeep (likely this is also the case midgame as well but endgame for sure) Lime must be ported every few days in order to keep your fields overflowing with crops per harvest (because with all that tiering you're going to want to get dat bang for your buck) You're constantly looking for purity nodes, worrying about purity and checking and rechecking items compared to others. You're destroying and debuilding industry objects as you upgrade (not so much yet, but in the future yes) and raiding is likely a big part of your time spent ingame.

If you do not own a stall, or you do not have friends who allow you to sell on their stall you likely will not be making it to the late game stage, nor will you be able to rebuild in a decent amount of time without having to grind most of it back all over again. Should your character die in pvp or your base be raided, you go back to square one. Not many people make it to this point in the game and the ones that do are usually running the entire server.

Even with muli-clients running all day long it is still a very large amount of work for someone to be doing (and some of us do it alone). In nearly every stage of growth there is some needlessly overcomplicated step or two that slows you down and it's just not fun after you've done it more than once or twice.

In haven it goes a little more like this:

Start by discovering things for the first few skills and studying some nooby curios you find. Kill ants and fish for food and get your first few stats up. (50 exploration, 56 survival, 40-50 intelligence, etc) This can take a few days but can be shortened if you're not slack-ass about it.
Making a palisade and p claiming it. This is fairly straight forward, cut down trees, make the materials from foraging in your area and then build your first wall.
Making a brickwall and village claim it then setup crossroads leading in and out. This can be done within the first few weeks of playing and it's a major step into the game.
Potentially making a curtain wall to avoid rangers but it's not needed if you want to invest in some armor and keep your hearthfire inside.
You're now able to start competing with the other players, or you can begin farming in peace. There's no purity, just quality. Quality increases based on your farming skill which you can raise with studies from your farms. The quality simple is just much simpler and much easier to understand for the average player and there's far less running back and forth/grinding the same **** over and over again for small results.

You can have a fighter alt and a farmer alt which is encouraged, but at no point do they need to be logged on at the same time in order to accomplish your daily tasks. Building is very nice, you can take in your location square by square and trace out your design in stone right away. There's no flattening and no ***** around with phlegm. Just stamina, water and generic food every few buckets of water you drink and you're golden. You don't need to forage around for specific things to regen specific biles, and you don't need to bake cabinets full of pies before you begin. It's just gives you a far more productive feel. For the time you actually spend building in Salem, the other 80% of your time is spent doing grindy ***** in order to continue your work. Not to mention it's just dust in the wind once your base is found as a hermit anyways.

I've been saying this since alpha,

Salem takes a very simple idea and makes it 10x's more complicated then it ever should have been
Metal, purity, gluttony, humus, witchcraft, flattening, early skills, alchemy, field tiering, just to name a few. The idea of this is I suppose to add a dimension of realism to the game, but in the end it just translates into more grind and way more time invested in menial tasks and comparing numbers to one another.

Late game takes far too long to reach and it is fairly hard to do without the help of others or without a stall to help with your living costs otherwise, you're still stuck killing crickets in boston until you turn blue in the face. Since there is no reincarnation system other than keeping the claims, losing your base/character really does put you back on your ass for months to come. This might be fun for raiders, but when thinking of the average gamer who is trying out the game it will not end well.

Yes. Salem is a "crafting MMO" but if you're going to make it so complex and time consuming, at least let people have a better chance to keep what they've worked for.

To summarize:

[wiatrak]

+1

Endgame = PvP = raiding starting players, is this the way we want this game to go?

If so, change the game name.

Im there because i LOVE crafting and i love this system, just bein TOO MUCH TIME CONSUMING.

You'll never see me in HoB forum because i personally don't like pvp. Im here for crafting and i'm trying to get you on this way. For now i have 5+ weeks to wait till cuttings on my Lead tree respawn(because 0/4 trees sprouted from the last part, wait i got 1 Beaming-Proud Sunflower GREAT!). Fun like hell.

[Nimmeth]

as much as i hate to say it.
+1

[Borgins]

I've been playing for a few months now. I don't see any crippling grind, there is a grind, but it is a crafting game I expected it to be a grind and I expected it to be hard so far I'm not disappointed.
I suppose that is part of the sandbox you set your own definition of what you need to do to "win". My objective has always been to survive in a hostile environment not to dominate the PVP.
The general theme of many who post on the forums seems to be that end game raiding is the only objective you can possibly have in the game and why would you want to do anything else. If that is your only objective then I can see the grind but if you want to be a Titan it should hurt to get there.