The Lerf

Ah, that's kind of unfortunate. I understand why, of course. I just feel some of these things, (incentivizing cheesing with ugly workarounds, inadvertently creating undesired incentives like running away from home for the duration of the storm), are situations we already face with the current implementation. Some situations, I argue, are maybe worse (Death loops and community opposition). One thing that I do want to say though (bringing it back to Minecraft), is that if it wasn't already in the game, the Creeper would never be added with the modern mindset of Mojang/Microsoft. Because it's a similar idea of a mob that can damage player placed blocks and kind of has to be considered and engaged with. And I don't think there's nearly any pushback against the Creeper in the Minecraft community calling for it's removal. I get the sentiment behind 'don't mess with the player's creation', but I think that forgetting 'the player can and should creatively use countermeasures' understates the influence that the Creeper had on Minecraft's development and community. And personally, I think it's a stance that's way too risk-averse for VS, that markets itself as a uncompromising, hardcore survival game before as a homesteading one. I would argue that there aren't that many instances of consequences in VS. From what I can think of, is losing your satiation/total health points on death, or losing your dropped inventory to the despawn timer, or not having a spare hammer and getting sent back to the copper age, or losing your domesticated animals to predators/lighting. And this form of loss is what I want to focus in on, because it's so similar to having a creeper blow up your walls. It demands the player prepare with fences or a lightning rod, or potentially suffer losses. Should predator attacks be removed from the game? Or why is that acceptable, but a monster doing the same isn't? On a greater level, I think the question becomes "Why, if something bad happens, is it bad?" (These aren't accusatory/hostile questions, but meant to inspire discussion, as on reread it sounds a bit harsh) One of the things I worry about with creating more incentive via loot, is the emotion around storms becoming one of excitement of what you could find rather than one of worry about what you might lose. We already have valuable and unique loot spawn in storms, but how much more does there need to be until it's deemed acceptable, and players who hide will start to participate? Can you suggest a different incentive that could be implemented that positively reinforces participation over hiding? To me, hiding needs to be disincentivized because it's a neutral outcome. But participating in storms as they are currently usually results in a negative outcome. Disincentivizing hiding would go hand-in-hand with incentivizing participating, and changing the way storms work; I am absolutely not suggesting one or the other because that's not how changing behaviors works. Listen, I'm gonna play a card here that's kind of hypothetical, should a player who ignored the coming winter not suffer any consequences? We could be having a discussion about how there's not enough animals spawning during winter, and players would like to be able to hunt to survive it easier. I haven't actually, I'm not much into mods because of how often they seem to trivialize certain aspects of the game, or become overly centralizing. I may look into it though, just to see how it feels. It might inspire more ideas about how Storms work. I like your ideas about storms, but I don't think it would change anything fundamental about them. I agree that the simplicity of mob behavior causes some strategies to work too well, aka farms and such, but I think it directly goes back to some things you bring up here. I've spoken about it in another thread, but the majority of mobs in this game follow the same code of "pathfind to player and melee attack", making swarming the player with high numbers of mobs the easiest way to overwhelm them. If different mob AI behaviors could be programmed in, maybe enemies could be made tougher without increasing their numbers to a ridiculous degree, meaning you could have periods of panic and periods of calm during storms instead of just one overly long kiting fight. I think that the monster spawning rules changing during storms is a game design mistake, and would instead like to see areas where many rifts open and enemies spawn specifically near them, rather than just about anywhere. Ultimately, I don't think hiding can be discouraged without punishing the player, and I don't think that loot for storms should reach the point where the hiders come out, because the real problem is with participating usually being a negative outcome for the player. Until that changes, players will continue to enter the feedback loop of Temporal Storms removing their food buffs just to die, and then hide/skip them.

Of course, part of the idea refinement process is disagreement. I mean, I don't even think that what I've offered up is a complete solution, because I agree with this. My angle focuses more on immersion and integration with other gameplay systems, but he's right that the core problem is some players don't want to be interrupted just to hide for 10 minutes, or to die. But like, I don't know if that can really be helped. Temporal Storms are supposed to interrupt you, and make you say oh ****, I'm in the middle of something that I could absolutely die if I don't stop and prepare (or at least, that's how I react to them). If a player doesn't like that, I don't think there's a solution beyond turning them off... like, is the core of the problem that you've been interrupted, or that you don't like fighting mobs, or that the punishment for dying is too high? Some of these have real, tangible solutions that can be introduced, and some of them can't. And narrowing down the exact reason why players aren't enjoying them is part of it. I just don't think that players who are upset at the interruption can be helped. It's the nature of the storm, and the desire of the developers for them to be this way. At the very least, they can be tracked and predicted, so I think that providing ways that the player can either skip (by sleeping) or shortening the storm (by a new storm mechanic involving prep work or actively killing things) is a step in the right direction. Some players don't actually want better storms, they just want them gone. And that's already in the game. Their actual complaint is that turning off storms turns off all story/lore stuff. And that's a completely different topic, one that I don't think I want to entertain in this one.

Is that frequent enough to justify adding damage types? Those are the situations where such a system would shine. The overwhelming majority of the game has you dealing with only one type of enemy at a time.

I'd forgotten completely about Locusts. And you know, that might be the only situation in game where two different enemy types can meet and be fought against simultaneously.

If there was a mixture of enemies that had weaknesses to different weapons, I'd support it. But as the game is now, damage types as you describe just removes the reason to use any weapon you want. If you're going caving, why would you bring a spear if a Falx gets bonus damage on everything you meet? You've put yourself at a disadvantage without it. We just don't have any situations in game where there would be a mix of enemies weak to these different damage types, that would benefit from the added complexity.

It's an idea to prompt engagement, and encourage players to participate in storms. If they find themselves annoyed by their base being altered, then they must fight the enemies off. If they cheese it by chiseling, it would actually make storms harder since there's no structures to pull aggro from the player. To that, I shrug and say suit yourself. There's no cheese-proof plan without literally forcing the player out via temporal instability drain, and then if a player isn't ready they will surely die. It provides a choice of active involvement of defense, or preparing and repairing. And I think you overestimate how many players will cheese a mechanic that adds immersiveness and something to do, even if it's annoying. Personally, I like playing with cave-ins, and a portion of the community loves loose soil/sticky soil, along with every other mod that adds the strangest of minutiae. The broken bits could be cosmetic, they could not. It doesn't really matter to me, because what matters is that frustration from the player who didn't bother to defend and now has consequences for it. If your goats and chickens were at risk, would you fight them? If your cozy cabin got splotches of rust all over it, would you defend it? These questions are interesting to me, because if a player says 'well, I'd rather not...' then there's already an option for them. Turning Temporal Storms off. But for others, it means you can do something if the fight doesn't go your way, or you're unprepared. Alright, this is new to me. I haven't made it to the village yet, because it's literally a 30 minute boat ride away and I would rather play the game than do that. Pffft, I dunno. I'm just some guy, not a programmer. I imagine some mobs would be designated to aggro the player on spawn, and some would be designated to attack structures. And then once they destroy a block (or multiple?) then they would aggro towards the player. Or maybe destroying a block takes the whole time of the storm, to allow the player to intervene. If they can't reach the player, they attack structures/roam. I don't know how much destruction would be appropriate, but I was not thinking that you'd walk outside to a completely demolished base. Just like a few parts of your base that had signs of damage. Figuring out the code for it isn't my job though, but I doubt it's impossible if you're coding to create the illusion of it.

The end goal of all of this is to reimagine Temporal Storms in a way where despite not being well equipped, players in the early game will still be able to participate in storms without hiding. In this hypothetical scenario, imagine the storm being rebalanced in the early game so fighting without falling into a death spiral is possible, and hard enough in the endgame so that the losses suffered by hiding become a setback. Drifters and Shivers are capable of it sure, but restricting this broken door mechanic specifically to Temporal Storms is the purpose. I would not want each night to require the same level of vigilance that a storm would need with this. Besides, you wouldn't need a bar on the door... gotta think like a player would. Dropping any blocks in front of the door would stop anything from entering because I'm not giving them the ability to destroy blocks like the player can. And to me, that sounds like barricading the doors for invasion. We're already in a situation where players are gaming such a system, and I think that's unavoidable. The same min-maxxers who will chisel every block of their structure are most likely the same ones with a surface-to-mantle farm, so I'm willing to overlook it. It's not a mechanic that I envision as bad as Valheim, but more like how you have to replace bricks in the cementation furnace. I don't imagine these 'broken' structures losing their functionality though, just be cosmetic in nature. When a drifter would damage a fence, the fence model would change to a broken one, and it would still be 1.5 blocks tall and prevent pathfinding through it. Maybe if it was done to cobblestone block, it would just add the mold or rust overlays found in ruins to it. This could be a way to collect previously unattainable clutter, or could be farmed to create an older, grosser aesthetic build. Maybe the hammer gets a functional use without the chisel in the off hand, and becomes the optimal way of repairing things without replacing them. The idea of base repair would only come into play if you ignored the storm and hid. To say, look what you allowed to happen through inaction or fear, which I feel resonates with the lore a bit. And if you were away from home when a Temporal Storm hits, well then your base is in an unloaded chunk and it doesn't really matter. The goal of these ideas is to disincentivize hiding or ignoring storms, and I don't think that you can provide too much positive reinforcement (loot) without making farms too lucrative. So yes, I think there should be a bit of extra work involved if you don't bother to defend yourself. With a determined set of spawns, the devs could specifically say that, for example, heavy storms get 3 top tier enemies, or even set that to increase as more time passes in the world. This would solve one RNG layer, and let your chances to get Jonas parts be determined by your rolls on when you harvest them. This is all just spitballing, by the way. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of these things. Edit: elaborating on broken door mechanic

Well it doesn't sound like the storms are too easy... you're saying they're too easy to disengage with and ignore. So I'm not sure about the source for this, but more than a few times I've heard that the devs want Temporal Storms to feel like tower defense. Obviously, they haven't nailed that yet, but there are ways we can go about changing or adding things about storms to make it feel defensive, and less able to be ignored. Something I would really like to hear people's opinions on is the introduction of consequences to ignoring Temporal Storms. I have a few ideas floating around in my head about it, that absolutely should not all be implemented at the same time for the health of the game, but that I think would add an interesting set of decisions to make about storms. The first is giving mobs the ability to open/break down doors, given enough time. Or alternatively, a new specific monster type that is the only one who can open doors, and only spawns during storms. With enemies being able to gain access to your home under the right circumstances, we'd want to remove the ability for them to spawn inside rooms (and given that the game is already programmed to define rooms, that shouldn't be too hard). This means that you must now patrol your home in order to keep it safe, but as long as you do, you will be guaranteed safety, given you've built it right. It also means that how you build your base from then on will be a factor you consider: Do you have too many entrances and exits to defend? Will your courtyard be the reason your base falls? And so on. The second is limited destruction of player placed structures. Minecraft devs had this concept in it's infancy with Endermen moving blocks, but they were too worried about annoying players. I have no such reservations, and would love to see a portion of spawned enemies make efforts to destroy fences and weak building blocks. This would reduce the amount of enemies that aggro to the player, and give some flavor during and after the storm. In my head, these blocks aren't straight up destroyed, but replaced with damaged clutter like we have already in the game, so that way the player can know what got destroyed and where, in order to replace it. Ignoring enemies during storms would mean you need to dedicate time to repairing and replacing things around the outside of your base. A third idea is kind of a system to tack on to the side of either of the previous ones. But a quota of enemies to kill in order to prevent consequences from happening to you, or to end the storms faster. With storms being used to farm flax, gears, and Jonas tech, I know this isn't ideal. But perhaps the storms can have a definite number of enemy spawns that can happen, say 30 mobs. You kill 30 mobs, and the storm ends. If you don't kill 30 mobs, the storm continues until some reasonable amount of time later. This is flexible, of course, I haven't thought to hard about these things or have the modding skill to try them out. But man would I love to see Temporal Storms improve in literally any way, because I don't hate them either. They're just badly implemented at the moment.

You're right, I like to refer to it's balancing as the old RPG style, where it's the player's responsibility to turn around when they encounter a threat beyond their ability, or they die. I believe the first 3? Temporal Storms a player gets are actually weaker than normal to account for early game, but I think that the difficulty spike and scaling of storms gets a bit out of hand until late game. In regards to the player's ability to retreat, it's not something that you're really allowed to do during Temporal Storms, which is why hiding or sleep skipping is so common among newer players. That, and they don't have the equipment or game knowledge to deal with it yet. But the lack of 'game knowledge' isn't solved by reading the wiki, it's solved by the player learning the cheese strats of kiting backwards and pillaring. An unfamiliar player might die during their first few temporal storms, and the game design goal should be for them to learn how to deal with storms by playing them. Storms as they're currently implemented is such a huge barrier that without cheese strats, being outside is almost always a guarantee to die. And after the first death during a storm, it usually spirals into a death loop because you don't have your weapons and equipment, you have a smaller health bar, and you haven't found a temporal gear for a spawn point at home so you gotta run back, and then there's 3 monsters camping your corpse, and repeat. I remember my first storm, lol. By the end of the storm, your original death marker is no longer on your map, and you may have lost all your gear. I can completely understand why newer players will avoid every single storm from that point, or just drop the game. The first hill is tremendous with a pitfall back to day 3. That being said, Temporal Storms aren't a game skill/knowledge check, which is what I mean by that. The battle during a storm is hard, but not because of players not knowing the cheese. They're hard because they're poorly designed with an enemy sandbox that's too deadly to play against with honest tactics, and too high a penalty for inevitable failure. I don't think that the difficulty is justifiable just because if you're new you can cheese, and if you want challenge you can cheesen't.

Here's the thing though, I don't think that unfamiliarity with the game and it's AI is an adequate justification for these things. Playing the game is the same as learning the game, and the difficulty spike of Temporal Storms forcing players to hide is an issue, but it's not because they haven't learned the most effective tactics. Temporal Storms became unbearable with the addition of Bowtorns, and I don't feel like they've been tuned correctly for the situations Storms put you in. I think their projectile speed and accuracy is too high to make dodging or blocking a reliable way to avoid damage, and when you get a Bowtorn Storm it's suicide to try and fight when there's so many of them at all angles around you. I don't see a no-win situation as difficulty, because then the most effective tactic to survive is to hide. And if players are hiding, it's because they recognize these situations. Sure, I could stop kiting drifters (I don't personally pillar), but where does this line of thinking stop? Should I restrict my use of weapons too? At what point have I stopped playing the game in the way I want to play it, just to get more variation out of an incredibly simple system? I'm not seeking more difficulty, or artificial difficulty by tying my right arm behind my back. I'm seeking more ways to think and react to combat in VS. I want to sprint in combat to dodge attacks and be mobile, I want to have the best weapons to defend myself with, I want the list of choices to be larger than kite, pillar, hide. That's why I think the best way to improve it is by changing enemy behavior from being heatseeking meatball missiles to things that would make kiting and pillaring less effective.

Oh I definitely agree, some posters are... overzealous with their ideas, but I understand it comes from a place of wanting to enjoy VS more. It's the challenge of dictating what is within the realm of vanilla, versus what's better left up to mods... and that's really only a decision that can be made by the devs. Players are all trying to interpret the future of their vision based on what we have in our hands, all based on our own personal tastes. It's the different interpretations of art and discussion surrounding it that really interests me, and I always wonder if they also expect the same level of commitment applied to things like making cheese or plank cutting. I think a certain level of simplicity is expected in vanilla VS, and I don't see anything wrong with that. But with so many different systems and the game still under development, there is an inconsistency we currently face. I like the variation and choice between plate, mail, brig, and gambeson armors, along with the falx vs spear vs bow arms. Even the rust enemies as I said before have three distinct archetypes, slow vs fast vs ranged; but the systems where they interact with the player are too simple. They reduce player health by running at you via the shortest possible path (excluding bowtorn). And it's this area where I'd like to see more development work before I start to hope for more complicated combat features like dual wielding or stealth takedowns. Not to say that I am hoping for those, but you get what I mean. I want to see current systems all brought to a similar level of verisimilitude before committing to brand new ones, if that makes sense. I agree, and think that status effects like poison, blinding, and hallucination are within vanilla's 'feel', and can introduce some decision making and target priority during fights without feeling too complicated. Maybe we don't even need to overhaul the point-and-click combat if it feels right after adding. It's all up to dreams and developers, and thankfully they're pro-modding, but I just find something special about playing vanilla as someone's undiluted idea as art.

That's great man, you stated your opinion a few times, and you have no interest in changing it. I'd like to discuss with people on the deeper bits of "Why does clicking an enemy 5 times excite you, or not?" People share their opinions, and everyone learns a little bit about everyone else. Maybe body part specific damage doesn't feel like it fits vanilla VS, and someone can explain their reasoning for it, and someone else can go 'Wow! I never considered that, what if instead...," and we end up having a productive conversation about things that we like, or don't like. If you're bringing up that you like that restaurant, someone asking why isn't always a debate to be had. Maybe it's an attempt to connect and find out a mutual interest. Do they have good fries? Are the napkins soft? Do they embrace an equal opportunity workplace environment? But you're just providing a dead end to the conversation. And now I'll never know why that restaurant is good, or why you like it. And I'll have to ask you to leave my car because I'm not sure if we're compatible or not. It's not you, or me. It's this brick wall you've built between us.

Why do you think there's an opportunity cost involved for a game that's still in development? Is a feature that's implemented in it's basest form considered feature complete the moment it's added in an update, and if they continue to work on it that means we'll never get in-depth shoemaking? "I don't think most players are coming to VS because they like riding elk. The vast majority of things in the game are meant to enhance the caving and underground experience. This isn't Barbie Horse Adventure, so I would expect the devs to keep adding more things to enhance caving." I don't think anyone is in this discussion desires VS to become a overdeveloped combat sim, so let's not try to imply that when someone suggests that a sword swing should behave differently from a club attack. When the game has you making farming decisions about soil based on how much nitrogen and potassium is left in it, I find it bothering that there are people who decry others who want that same level of granularity from other less-involved parts of the game. If you aren't willing to consider any other opinions in this discussion other than your own, then why contribute?

I would love to see some slightly more involved combat, as pretty much every fight in the game boils down to "click this guy 3/4/5 times while running backward". If there were AI improvements to enemy behavior that were more than just "move to player position and melee attack", it would immediately feel so much better without any other changes. Right now, that describes how drifters, shivers, wolves, bears, boars, and goats attack the player, with Bowtorns being the lone exception to do something different, if not that interesting. It's boring. And it doesn't feel very immersive to me, kiting around a pile of 10-15 drifters during a temporal storm, or even just a night of high rift activity. It makes every mob feel like a minecraft zombie. Sure, they're monsters, but I don't think I've ever interpreted them to be dumb horde fodder. This opens up the question, How should they act? I would love to see loose formations, or attempts to circle around the player without necessarily attacking, just to split your focus and let something get behind you. Which is absolutely something that wolves should do. I would love if enemies stayed at arm's reach/melee range instead of attempting to occupy the same space I'm standing in. I'd like to see shivers climb up and hang off of walls to jump at you, or only attack when they have backup. Maybe bowtorns should actively seek high ground, or Drifters should move in groups but attack one or two at a time rather than 20 (like the Batman Arkham games), or shivers always spawn in pairs and try to attack from above. What if the torch got weapon functionality, as a way to scare away wolves and bears during the early game? Some new mechanics? Enemies that do more than just deal damage. What if bowtorns fired much less frequently but their shots would leave a long trail of muscle sinew that would physically impede/slow the player unless you cut it with your falx? This turns the bowtorn into a kind of area denial enemy, which would be much more dangerous while in a cave than on the surface. It would also provide a way to track bowtorns down beyond the sound cue. What about an enemy that blurs your vision, or makes you drop your weapon? What if low-tier drifters were faster, and could tackle you to the ground so other drifters could get hits on you? The combat in VS is simple to the point of being boring. You have slow enemy, fast enemy, and ranged enemy; and each one of them also has the opportunity to be high damage enemy. But if they can all be the high damage enemy, then fundamentally the differences don't really matter. There is no sandbox. It just makes your only strategy into 'Don't get hit'. I don't even bother with shields because they don't add anything to the combat system besides rolling dice to take damage, even if you're holding it up. The most effective tactic to fight anything is running backwards or pillaring. I'd like it to be better, I'd like to feel like wearing full iron/steel plate armor allows me to stand my ground a bit, and not just give me more room for mistakes while I kite drifters. But that begins with changes to enemy behavior before anything systemic like damage types and dodge rolls.