A bunch of players are joining the game following the Hytale announcement

[Omega Haxors]

The devteam should absolutely be watching these streams to see common pain points among fresh and blind players. A lot of the reason why this game "isn't for" so many people isn't necessarily because of the mechanics, but because a lot of bad or confusing design that is invisible to so much of us because we either got in early or had discord/friends carrying us through the early game. This is a rare chance where people will be giving genuine feedback and it would be foolish to completely ignore it.

Speaking from personal experience, most of the players who I try to introduce the game to (including myself when I first started) drop off not because they don't find the game fun, but because of a specific thing that that really shouldn't be the way it is. They don't even have a chance to get into the game before something takes them out of it and most aren't going to be coming back later once they're convinced the game isn't for them.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Nothing]

you're very much right the learning curve for this game is to big to ever grow super big.

[Rudometkin]

3 minutes ago, Nothing said:

you're very much right the learning curve for this game is to big to ever grow super big.

If the learning curve drops too low, it will lose what made it popular to begin with.

Edit:

Welcome to the Vintage Story forums!

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin

[Omega Haxors]

18 minutes ago, Nothing said:

you're very much right the learning curve for this game is to big to ever grow super big.

It's less that the learning curve is so big, it's that the game does not let you have fun until you overcome it.
The whole discussion of game difficulty being conflated with punishment.

Perfect example of this is how the cooking system is ridiculously overtuned to the point it completely trivializes the game once you unlock it, but it's absolute hell before. Newer players will spend more time before unlocking cooking so thus get punished harder by this design. Experienced players will know to rush cooking and therefore the bad design goes mostly unnoticed by the community at large.

Speaking from personal experience, I was brutally punished by not knowing about cooking that I started getting used to the gigantic difficulty of having basically no inventory and having to spend almost 100% of my time collecting food (which was made harder by not having inventories) Learning how to make hand baskets was what I consider a reasonable jump in power (though requiring the player to make 4 is just grind for the sake of grind) as it gave me more time to do other things, but once I had the cooking pot set up, the game basically reverted to minecraft with a 64x texture pack. I was glad I could finally start to play the game, but i've been missing that early game experience ever since, and i'm sad that I will never get a chance to finish the game under those constraints.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Rudometkin]

1 hour ago, Omega Haxors said:

It's less that the learning curve is so big, it's that the game does not let you have fun until you overcome it. The whole discussion of game difficulty being conflated with punishment.

Perfect example of this is how the cooking system is ridiculously overtuned to the point it completely trivializes the game once you unlock it, but it's absolute hell before

Hard disagree.

I believe I demonstrably played over 12 hours in my first world (wilderness survival, and documented) before I ever cooked my first meal, and I loved and enjoyed every bit of the entire experience.

[Rudometkin]

1 hour ago, Omega Haxors said:

Speaking from personal experience, I was brutally punished by not knowing about cooking that I started getting used to the gigantic difficulty of having basically no inventory and having to spend almost 100% of my time collecting food (which was made harder by not having inventories)

Dude, didn't you read the survival handbook you were given?!

That works to drastically solve the learning curve problem. The information you need is right in your hands from day 1.

Do you think it's the game's fault if people don't read the instructions? It literally supplies you with a book that contains knowledge for the necessities.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin
Refinement

[Teh Pizza Lady]

23 minutes ago, Rudometkin said:

Do you think it's the game's fault if people don't read the instructions? It literally supplies you with a book that contains knowledge for the necessities.

100% yes. The game should make it obvious for a first-time player
1) that there even IS a handbook
2) how to use it

But I've also heard that it's something they want to work on, but it's taking a lower priority to things like performance fixes, bug fixes, and pushing out the rest of the content that was supposed to come with Chapter 2 but didn't because it wasn't working right. So my opinion is biased because I know it's the direction the devs want to go.

Edited July 2, 2025 by traugdor

[7embre]

11 minutes ago, traugdor said:

100% yes. The game should make it obvious for a first-time player
1) that there even IS a handbook
2) how to use it

But I've also heard that it's something they want to work on, but it's taking a lower priority to things like performance fixes, bug fixes, and pushing out the rest of the content that was supposed to come with Chapter 2 but didn't because it wasn't working right. So my opinion is biased because I know it's the direction the devs want to go.

Devs have dedicated coder working on QoL for a handbook, which joined VS team relatively recently (pizza). So, probably more of the things will come in later updates, but what I have seen already from Tyron streaming 1.21.dev, cooking got some love on a handbook in unstable version already. Newcomers were almost certainly playing on 1.20.12, which is latest stable.

[Vratislav]

18 minutes ago, traugdor said:

1) that there even IS a handbook
2) how to use it

Definitely should be part of the tutorial. I have found about "Shift+H" trick in the forums after I was playing like for 50 hours. 

[7embre]

3 minutes ago, Vratislav said:

Definitely should be part of the tutorial. I have found about "Shift+H" trick in the forums after I was playing like for 50 hours. 

True, I found out about this thick only after dev stream, and, like, 200 hours in. That's just bizarre

[Grym7er]

1 hour ago, 7embre said:

True, I found out about this thick only after dev stream, and, like, 200 hours in. That's just bizarre

Wait, what is the shift+H trick?

[7embre]

2 minutes ago, Grym7er said:

Wait, what is the shift+H trick?

Yeah, you can look at a block, press these keys, and it will open the handbook of said block/object. Really helps with mushrooms. I don't remember if it's tied to a sprint key, so if you're using default control settings and it doesn't work, try ctrl+H instead. I switched places for ctrl and shift for my layout, as I prefer it that way.

[Omega Haxors]

2 hours ago, Rudometkin said:

Dude, didn't you read the survival handbook you were given?!

That works to drastically solve the learning curve problem. The information you need is right in your hands from day 1.

Do you think it's the game's fault if people don't read the instructions? It literally supplies you with a book that contains knowledge for the necessities.

If you looked at the creation date of my account you would have seen that I played a very early release of the game. But the detail is irrelevant because I'm seeing people giving the game a try now, having a hard time and being turned off because of it. This isn't even getting into skibidification and rise of American reading comprehension, though those factors no doubt play a lot into it. Maybe it's not necessary to appeal to players who literally can't/wont read, but I feel like the game should at least be playable and fun to those groups, even if it means they probably won't make much progress. What I do for my minecraft modpack is break the game into various skill brackets and ensure that no matter which bracket you fall into, you have plenty of content to keep you happy. Not all of us will be doing nuclear physics or coding a self-aware AI, and that's fine. The content exists for people who like that, while those who never played a video game before can enjoy it too, just at a different level. Players will naturally move up as they get more experienced at the game, and are free to do so at their own pace, or not at all. I've never been a fan of locking a playable game behind a skill or progression test, nor punishing players for not meeting those checks.

The thing you have to realize is that something like 90% of the game when it first came out was locked behind the saw. You couldn't do anything in the stone age. Sure a lot of it got patched when the majority of the playerbase realized how much it sucked, but the problem there is how by that point the floor of the least experienced player was so high that it completely left behind the average new player. This is our chance to see first-hand what the NPE is like for an outsider coming in.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Rudometkin]

15 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

If you looked at the creation date of my account you would have seen that I played a very early release of the game. But the detail is irrelevant because I'm seeing people giving the game a try now, having a hard time and being turned off because of it. This isn't even getting into skibidification and rise of American reading comprehension, though those factors no doubt play a lot into it. Maybe it's not necessary to appeal to players who literally can't/wont read, but I feel like the game should at least be playable and fun to those groups, even if it means they probably won't make much progress. What I do for my minecraft modpack is break the game into various skill brackets and ensure that no matter which bracket you fall into, you have plenty of content to keep you happy. Not all of us will be doing nuclear physics or coding a self-aware AI, and that's fine. The content exists for people who like that, while those who never played a video game before can enjoy it too, just at a different level.

Well with that said, I certainly think it can be or already is fun to many people of various kinds of groups as it is.

I'm not for the game changing its core experience to make compromises for new players.

Let's not forget it is specifically designed to be an uncompromising game about wilderness survival.

It could be selling out to suddenly change the direction of the game just to lure more players in to take advantage of a new potential fan base.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin

[Omega Haxors]

16 minutes ago, Rudometkin said:

Well with that said, I certainly think it can be or already is fun to many people of various kinds of groups as it is.

I'm not for the game changing its core experience to make compromises for new players.

Let's not forget it is specifically designed to be an uncompromising game about wilderness survival.

Except it's not that uncompromising, is it? I can only list two times I have ever felt like I was on the back foot, the rest is just grind or artificial difficulty. It's only uncompromising if you're going in blind, which should be something that a majority of players don't do because of the discord and handbook telling them how to play. The game just frontloads all of its difficulty off the bat with very little scaling once you start getting a hang of things, and that's just a huge shame.

I would consider things to be 'uncompromising' when failure comes from small bad decisions you made catching up to you, not just when the game decides to f you over because you failed to comprehend the inner workings of the game itself, or because you got one-tapped by an undodgeable high tier enemy that spawned inside of you during a storm.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Rudometkin]

12 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

Except it's not that uncompromising, is it?

Yes it is, in a good way. But I'm all for it getting more uncompromising in the form of more complex systems and whatnot.

 

12 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

I can only list two times I have ever felt like I was on the back foot, the rest is just grind or artificial difficulty.

The entire game is artificial. It's a simulated game.

Artificial difficulty is difficulty. Difficultly and grind fall into the uncompromising aspect.

 

12 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

It's only uncompromising if you're going in blind, which should be something that a majority of players don't do because of the discord and handbook. The game just frontloads all of its difficulty off the bat with very little scaling once you start getting a hang of things, and that's just a huge shame.

Fine, then it should be more uncompromising, not less.

 

12 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

I would consider things to be 'uncompromising' when small bad decisions you make catch up to you, not just the game decides to f you over.

Well, I affirm that F-ing you over is precisely uncompromising.

But you are entitled to your opinion!!

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin

[Omega Haxors]

Okay this is clearly devolving into sophistry. I'm not going to engage with you any more.

[Rudometkin]

2 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

Okay this is clearly devolving into sophistry. I'm not going to engage with you any more.

Or, it is clearly not devolving into sophistry. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

4 hours ago, Rudometkin said:

Or, it is clearly not devolving into sophistry. 

When your default is to try to argue with everything that has moves, then yes, it is.

[Rudometkin]

12 minutes ago, traugdor said:

When your default is to try to argue with everything that has moves, then yes, it is.

Well I don't see how. How? Sophistry is to make fallacious arguments, to use subtly deceptive reasoning.

Just because I have a counter whenever someone disagrees with me wouldn't mean I'm regressing into sophistry.

That wouldn't be a fair assessment of my engagement.

And it was just asserted. But not supported.

You know, people could say it's obvious. That alone doesn't make it true, no matter how many people jump in and say it.

In fact, if anything, it seems the wrongful assertion that one is regressing into sophistry would be the actual sophistry.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin
Refinement

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 minute ago, Rudometkin said:

Well I don't see how. How?

Appeal to Authority is the main logical fallacy at play here. At least I assume that's what you're doing when you keep pushing that "BuT tYrOn SaiD uNcOmPrOmiSinG" button that you're wearing out over there. You also use another logical fallacy called Loaded Labels in which you assume because something is an untrue statement then the exact opposite must therefore be true. An example of this would be to look at any compromise taken by the players or developers and say it's bad because it's not uncompromising because of your (already pointed out as fallacious in the first sentence) belief that uncompromising is good, when in fact, compromises are good because they allow freedom for everyone to be equally happy with a situation. Just because something makes you happy doesn't mean it will make 95% of the players happy.

To summarize:

1. Appeal to Authority by using the words of the game developer to falsely enhance your position when you do not speak on behalf of anyone on the dev team.
2. Loaded Labels by using the stance taken from #1 to assert that the opposite must be untrue.

And that's only the most recent ones. I don't really care to make a deep dive into everything you've said, because I'm already annoyed at having to spell this much out for you, but just from these two examples it clearly is sophistry.

[Rudometkin]

9 hours ago, traugdor said:

Appeal to Authority is the main logical fallacy at play here. At least I assume that's what you're doing when you keep pushing that "BuT tYrOn SaiD uNcOmPrOmiSinG" button that you're wearing out over there.

That button will never wear down   (it's made of titanium steel, 12 inches thick)

But it's not so much about what Tyron affirms it is, like an appeal to authority might suggest. It's about what the game is and how it is officially described.

I even said in another post that if Tyron showed up and said something like, "this game is not an uncompromising wilderness survival game", or "not a challenge-based game", that we would all have the responsibility of respectfully disagreeing with him.

See, Tyron is the 'authority' in that situation, and I bluntly said we should disagree with the authority if they disagreed what the game is and how it is officially described. That is precisely not an appeal to authority, but quite the opposite. Instead, it is a proper focus on the relevant content at hand. The game.

It could be said that the game is the authority or that Tyron has authority to arbitrarily define the game however he wants to. In those cases, appealing to Tyron or the game description is precisely relevant, and not fallacious.

Another way to approach this is to examine closely what an appeal to authority is said to be:

An appeal to authority becomes fallacious when the person cited as an authority has no expertise in the specific field related to the claim. For example, citing a famous actor's opinion on a scientific matter. 

So I listened to you, and made my case thoroughly, showing why I don't think I am appealing to authority in a fallacious manner.

 

9 hours ago, traugdor said:

You also use another logical fallacy called Loaded Labels in which you assume because something is an untrue statement then the exact opposite must therefore be true.

Well I don't think so, especially in this case.

I said, "Or", and then suggested the opposite.

This is not me assuming the opposite was true on that basis. A suggestion is not an affirmation of necessity. I specifically was careful about not assuming the exact opposite was true merely on the basis that it was opposite.

Also, due to the laws of logic (law of identity, law of contradiction, law of excluded middle: A=A, A does not equal nonA, something either equals A or nonA), some statements actually are true if others are false.

But really what I've been doing lately is just showing everyone that, hey just because this person said this thing, doesn't make it true.

I like to make it easier for the readers to decide for themselves. It helps to see both sides instead of being overstimulated by the loudest one.

A healthy way of doing this is by saying, "Or", and then suggestioning the opposite could be true. Of course I don't do this in every case, just when I see it is appropriate.

This encourages deeper discussion, rather than just people prancing around making arrogant assertions everywhere without backing them up.

Like hey, you can say these wild things, but I can just as easily say the opposite. So now you ought to go deeper and support your claim with more than air. Because I've met you where you're at.

 

9 hours ago, traugdor said:

An example of this would be to look at any compromise taken by the players or developers and say it's bad because it's not uncompromising because of your (already pointed out as fallacious in the first sentence) belief that uncompromising is good, when in fact, compromises are good because they allow freedom for everyone to be equally happy with a situation. Just because something makes you happy doesn't mean it will make 95% of the players happy.

Well I agree with this, except for the part where I'm misunderstood as doing that.

I'm not saying any compromise for the players is bad (though I do have my fun making sure everyone knows I think more uncompromising is generally suitable for the game). Earlier I took special care to say, "I'm not for the game changing its core experience to make compromises for new players.", just in case this situation would arise. I specifically mentioned I'm not for the game changing its "core experience" in the name of compromising. This is because I understand occasional compromise for the player can be fine.

So I am not so extreme about it that I say or teach that any compromise is bad, as you suggest. Just moreso that more uncompromising is generally suitable. And of course, it is a given that too much compromise is bad, on the basis that the game is meant to be uncompromising in general.

I'm actually a lot more reasonable and thoughtful than many people here give me credit for. (Uh oh, I think I can sense some narcissistic accusations coming!)  

 

9 hours ago, traugdor said:

To summarize:

1. Appeal to Authority by using the words of the game developer to falsely enhance your position when you do not speak on behalf of anyone on the dev team.
2. Loaded Labels by using the stance taken from #1 to assert that the opposite must be untrue.

When the dev team releases an official description, I can rightfully speak on behalf of the dev team at least when I repeat what they have already established.

 

9 hours ago, traugdor said:

And that's only the most recent ones. I don't really care to make a deep dive into everything you've said, because I'm already annoyed at having to spell this much out for you, but just from these two examples it clearly is sophistry.

Man, I can be a powerhouse with coherent replies. (Just giving myself some credit, which it is totally fine that we pat ourselves on the back sometimes, since I think I have been unappreciated here - except for Enjen noticing and standing up for me earlier)

Since you summarized and I thoughtfully and carefully countered after listening to you carefully, it is only fair I make a counter summarization.

1. I did not fallaciously appeal to authority.

2. I did not fallaciously use loaded labels.

3. I did not devolve into sophistry.

At least here in this thread. However, I could see how my posts come across that way at first glance. And if someone wants to make another argument to show I am, then I am willing to consider it.

Can you respectfully see where I'm coming from in my summarization now?

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin
Patted myself on the back

[7embre]

Omg. I'm begging you, stop turning another thread into bragging over word's meaning. Not only does it go off the topic, but also poses a threat of a valuable comment to not be seen by the devs due to all that bullcrap. It doesn't matter who is right or wrong, that's not what this topic is about.

Edited July 2, 2025 by 7embre
typo

[Rudometkin]

19 minutes ago, 7embre said:

Omg. I'm begging you, stop turning another thread into bragging over word's meaning. Not only does it go off the topic, but also poses a threat of a valuable comment to not be seen by the devs due to all that bullcrap. It doesn't matter who is right or wrong, that's not what this topic is about.

Words have meanings. I'm being logical, friendly and coherent here. 

What you are doing is discouraging logic. That is bad for the community. Imagine if we banned all logical people.

Discussing the meaning of relevant words is precisely on topic.

Of course being right or wrong matters.

Do you want this forum to be full of wrong information? I don't. I want it to be full of correct, valuable, meaningful information. Help me get there.

It is said that one of the first rules of critical thought is to define your terms.

Edited July 2, 2025 by Rudometkin
Refinement

[Zane Mordien]

@Omega Haxors I hope they are as well. I really enjoy watching new people go cold into playing the game. It's interesting what they get hung up on and sometimes it reminds me of the struggles I used to have. This is usually why I push back on ideas of making the game harder in the beginning. The way the game is now, is hard enough at the start in my opinion for a new player.