Add rocks to refined gem recipes?

The AOE thread is not stickied.

You admit right in said thread that you flubbed it.

Both this idea and your AOE analysis, before the community corrected it, ignore basic game mechanics. Ignoring basic game mehcanics makes one bad at design and analysis. Also the premise for this idea is flawed in that you artificially or ignorantly limit the possible cases. Regardless of the reason it’s still a flaw in the design work.

The community corrected you in the other thread. I proposed an alternate idea, which you said you liked, in this thread. We’re doing what you claim you want people to do.

Saying you’re bad, with clear objective reasons, is not a personal attack. It’s simply feedback. If accurate and truthful feedback hurts your feelings that is a problem only you can fix.

Thanks for the well written reply, it seems I misunderstood your first post and it devolved from there. I actively try to avoid using “you” in written communication to avoid it reading personal but I should give ppl more benefit of the doubt when reading it too. Especially on a forum with many languages.

I will continue brainstorming ways to combine changes I’d like to see with future content. I’m not as opposed to nerfs as others when I believe they are for the greater good so my thinking doesn’t immediately rule out nerfs.

I don’t see how I am misunderstanding another poster who seems intent on convincing me my past contributions are worthless.

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Hahaha I do this. When I find a locked door and notice the build has a bunch of nooks and crannies, I’m all over it trying to find a way in.
I think of it as suggestions for home security.
So far no one has come around when I’ve broken in, but when it happens I’ve planned to just wave all friendly-like and make like Spiderman and zip out the way I came, leaving them baffled and possibly making a note to plug in that hole.

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My god, you just voiced my feelings like, perfectly.

Hubs and I are Joe and Shirly in this instance.

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After taking a nice relaxing shower and reflecting on this more I believe I need to change the way I’m running these threads. I’m looking for something like a brainstorming or whiteboarding session and they seem to be getting stuck on one or two points.

In my head ideally these go like this:

And we continue from there iterating on the idea until we’ve extracted all the value out of the topic. Instead what happens is the threads get stuck clarifying one point back and forth across multiple people. One idea I had is to constantly update the OP with a summary of the conversation so people who join later can get up to speed without reading 50+ posts.

Well, you are asking people to skip the voice you don’t want lol.
If this is the case you should open the thread on the discord or your personal facebook, not official game forum.
I assume you write all this for devs to read as well.
So you need to take the different voice from people. You can defend your points with some prove or your option.
But asking people to ignore other’s opinion is really not respectful :sweat:

You don’t “run” the thread. You just the one who start a topic in the forum.
And people join the thread to share their thought and they want dev to see their opinion as well.
As i know so far, I don’t think you can represent Wonderstruck.

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I’ve seen this or similar said a few times. AFAIK making a thread doesn’t bestow upon you control of its course (though they do lock threads at an OP’s request here often which I find odd and unhelpful). I think that’s a good thing, like I’ve said before to others I think you often get useful ideas amongst the noise.

There was another thread (different OP, similar dance) recently which I found interesting, illuminating and productive but it was locked because people were trolling it. Not that I think posters here are doing that, I just dislike how quickly conversations can get halted here. This has been interesting and useful even if I don’t agree with some of the initial aim, so I’d like to request that you don’t request it locked, please.

I had someone exploring my base when the door was locked a while back. They must’ve sanctum bumped in but very politely asked to be let out like they thought they were stuck. Made me grin. :slight_smile:

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Lol there was a time i was making use of my death pen and mapping alnitians, except I had a run of bad luck and kept coming out of the sanctum portal only to either hear an ominous powering-up hopper noise or a “whaaa?!” Before more death.
So I kept going back and forth, dying, respawning, never being able to regen health, then it opened into what was obviously someone’s base, which they were working on. I’m like"Soooo… Can I stay here while I regen so I don’t die right away? "
They laughed and said sure. We talked, then they let me out like some stray that had wondered by for a free meal. They even killed the cuttletrunks and hoppers around the area first. =3

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No I’m asking to add the voice to the conversation history and then move on rather than go back and forth on the same point. Without any moderation every thread trends towards that, and since I created the thread I feel responsible for keeping the discussion productive.

There’s a difference between acknowledging a dissenting opinion and then opening up or redirecting the discussion to accommodate that point of view, and attempting to skip voices. The only voices I want to skip are the ones repeating ground we’ve already covered. And I only want to do that for the sake of keeping the conversation from getting into a back-and-forth rat hole. We’re limited by the forum format and its single-threaded nature so any way to organize the discussion for people joining later will be an improvement to the discourse.

Yes, okay, I can stop requesting to close them. I do think there is a difference between a thread where someone is attempting to explore a design space and one where someone is making a straightforward suggestion. Maybe something in the title like “Brainstorming session” would help set the stage better. When I first joined the forums I had tried writing single suggestion posts like you describe and then not replying in it anymore; that definitely kept the threads short and sweet but didn’t allow the idea to evolve as people chimed in with their different takes.

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What the game needs is more, “Moving forward, let’s do it this way,” thinking than “Hmm… let’s nerf this, add more pointless ingredients to that, more grind to this, and less power to that one thing in particular nobody is complaining about.”

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Thanks for saying it in a nice way. There was another poster that said my same thoughts in a nice way too. I’m a very blunt and straight to the point kind of person and often get mistaken for being a jerk. So I tend to avoid commenting on threads like these

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You caught me on a good day lol :joy: I get very passionate about my video games - they were my babysitters growing up 30 years ago.

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I’m in my 30s and they are still my babysitter lol keeps my from spending money on stupid stuff(ie drinks at the bar)

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If anyone remembered the reaction people had with Pure Boon Compound and how a lot of folks echoed the opinion that recipes don’t need to have stuff added to them just to give stuff a use. It decreased the amount of fun you have. Although that and this aren’t very closely related in subject matter, the opinion is still the same.

Whether or not refined gem blocks need rocks or not is pretty irrelevant. What I think really should be asked is what other really cool recipes can we come up from scratch to introduce new uses for existing crafting materials. There for always making sure there is some sort of demand for them in the economy and by players in general.

Adding rocks to refined gem recipes actually does absolutely nothing for this game in adding more elements of fun. You’re just using materials you already get from mining and adding them to a recipe for no reason.

Why not have it used with iron and copper to start creating different metal items. How about that being something that is commonly used in construction: steel. I know Copper isn’t used in real life to create steel but this is a video game. We could add other metal resources too, along with gems, to add in a lot of other recipes.

Aside from this post kind of being in multiple places in thought, the point I am trying to make is: suggest more recipes to make more items with and don’t suggest to make existing recipes harder for no reason.

Just some thoughts. :man_shrugging:

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There are some good ideas in here and I don’t think OP’s idea deserves to be dismissed based on it being a nerf. Of course it would be ideal to find alternative solutions to not alienate players, but when it comes to long term health of the game, it’s worth considering simple nerfs over inaction and delays due to complexity of alternatives.

I don’t think “eating stone pies” as I like to call it feels right. As soon as I started doing it, I felt kind of guilty, like I found a loophole. A way around actually playing the game to level up. As others point out, it’s not particularly fun to do either. Which I don’t think is a good reason for it being considered “fine”. If something is easy but boring and can be easily automated, it’s a good indicator that it’s not fun, possibly broken and might need changes (also hello, Regeneration Bombs, but let’s not get off-topic). But if it’s also efficient, of course people will do it regardless.

Did I want to exploit the fact that rock crafting in massive quantities gives a lot of EXP and logging off with an active Teaching Pie buff will not deplete it while offline? No. Did I want to level an alt quickly so I could finally get into forging? Yes. Did I want to develop carpal tunnel or make myself uncomfortable by pressing the same button hundreds of times? No. So, AutoHotkey it was. And I’m not too happy about that. Maybe Shift-clicking the craft button should just automatically fill the queue as far as it can, assuming we really are okay with this whole thing?

Anyway, that’s not even what I came here to post about, because I was thinking of a different approach, one that addresses another issue I’ve had with the game:

Mining is the aspect of the game I probably enjoy the least and I’m certain I’m not the only one, but it’s also one of the most important ones for progression. The reason for this is that it is also very repetitive, not excruciatingly so, but definitely has a much more mind-numbing quality to it than the other aspects of the game.

So, what if we had… more caves? Actual spelunking and exploration instead of mindlessly eating through rocks? At least for those of us that prefer doing that as an alternative. When I first went to Houchus I to look for Sapphires and realized that there are these really long caves and a lot of surface to find resources on, was probably when I enjoyed getting gems the most since I started playing the game. Of course they were plentiful too which helps, but it was a really nice change from the standard AoE mining.

It’s just an idea, but I feel like with more caves to explore and thus the option to sacrifice excess rocks for less forged tool durability wasted, there also wouldn’t be this much temptation to gobble up those stone pies.

Yep that might work! Thanks for offering, appreciated.

It definitely felt like there were more/more productive caves in the old EA worlds and I agree it’s fun to spelunk. I used to do a mix of tunnelling and spelunking and enjoyed it more.

Before I had access to AoE tools I always spelunked for my resources. I would dig in hopes of hitting that massive cave system and then explore every inch of it. I was completely against AoE tools at that time. Grapples were used. It was very fun.

When i got to t5 and t6 planets I realized the caverns aren’t as readily available, at least not in the gem and alloy hotspots I’ve been digging. So I started to see the necessity of AoE in that environment.

Whether you’re using a natural cave or a man made cave, the outcome is the same. You can scan many blocks at once to find resources. I view that as a necessity for player satisfaction. But in the AoE case you also pull in thousands of rock as a side effect. The only thing stopping players from taking that rock home is backpack space and we can assume the rock that makes it back to civilization is getting turned into xp by someone.

I would have to look at xp progression in depth, same as I did for AoE, to determine if the devs have already accounted for this extra xp. If so, it’s possible we are playing the game correctly and not exploiting, and conveniences like “click mass craft 30x” change from symptoms to QoL improvements in my book.

I remain bearish because even if the rock were justified by a sharp uptick in xp needed, what was the plan for non-miners to climb that curve? And why can the same rock so easily be applied to early level xp on alts?

I am also worried that guilds will create a third issue since the same rock pie technique will now net both xp and guild endeavor. The devs are trying to limit endeavor to primary guild, but it’s an easy constraint to get around with rock+pie. I have already mentioned in that thread that they should cap endeavor that can be banked until they’ve had time to observe. That’s a forward facing nerf.

If I had another backward facing nerf to share, and I do because it’s the morning and this is when I get myself into the most trouble, it would be to bring up the idea of reworking teaching food to be based on a set amount of xp rather than a time limit. Like a teaching pie is good for 10000 bonus xp on your next 10000 earned (e.g.) which closes the scaling on the exploit if you log out with rocks in the tables. It also turns teaching pies into a more direct salve for death penalty. And should be good for crafter’s because they can sell more pies.

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Acctually it does the opposite. If teaching pies grant less xp they are less useful for clearing death penalty. The manner, time or fixed amount, in which they grant xp has no interaction with clearing death penalty.
What you’re proposing is a blanket nerf to teaching pies except for low xp earners who can’t earn your new x withing the current 30 minute timer. But that’s not the group buying pie.

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