Scenery's SUBURBIA

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which is better

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Author Topic: Scenery's SUBURBIA  (Read 126474 times)





Testing today was painful.




It seems really difficult to get weapons or food when no one is selling them. It's also really difficult to craft food because you usually have to go destroy other people's crops first, and that requires a weapon and crop detector which also have to be crafted. Capping mines is a little easier which allows weapons to be made, but at the end of the test, the god events (taser gators, meteors, etc) prevented me from leaving the spawn area.

I tried to become a priest to help lower the piety level but the pope was crooked and I wasn't able to get a weapon and find/kill the pope. Maybe there are easier ways to lower the piety level, but I don't know how. I didn't know how to fix piety even as pope.

I had a good time selling drugs to foreigners for lots of money though. No one ever attempted to destroy my drug farm because the pope was crooked and no one really cared to kill the pope until the god events started, and by then, the god events prevented anyone from doing anything.

It's difficult to get an interesting job because a player has to approve your application, which in my experience has rarely happened. I was never really able to go around doing cool police or priest jobs (destroying drugs, corpse processors, turning in criminals, etc). It might help if players could acquire jobs without other players having to approve their application. I think I became a police cadet at one point but I didn't get a baton and there wasn't enough money in the police department for weapons, tasers, vehicles, etc.

The mod is still really cool and I'd play it 24/7 if it weren't for school lol.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2017, 10:13:08 PM by Farad »

Missed it again :(

But am very excited for all the new changes. Hope to finally play soon.

I added some suggestions in the doc:
  • Have a few essential items in the shop without players having to craft and sell them (food 1’s, crop detector, bad weapon, maybe more). I had the worst time when I couldn't maintain my satiation because there was no food in the shop. If you want this to be fast paced, there needs to be a constant supply of weapons, crop detectors, food, etc.
  • Add a way to tell which mines you have ownership of in the gui. One of the coolest things is driving around capping the mines and killing. I need to know which mines to capture at all times. Also, the volcanium mine is located in a spot where you can't park a vehicle near it because there's a drop in the terrain. Maybe add a ramp at that point so we can park closer to the volcanium mine entrance and then get back to the main road.


let me know if you read this
« Last Edit: March 26, 2017, 10:45:24 PM by Farad »

I added some suggestions in the doc:
  • Have a few essential items in the shop without players having to craft and sell them (food 1’s, crop detector, bad weapon, maybe more). I had the worst time when I couldn't maintain my satiation because there was no food in the shop. If you want this to be fast paced, there needs to be a constant supply of weapons, crop detectors, food, etc.
we are working on changing the numbers around so we eventually hit the sweet spot of people fighting over crops/ores/ect without most people unarmed and starving to death. this test was a pretty radical decrease in production across the board because we've always had problems with surpluses and we expected to accidentally go too far down the hole. there won't ever be npc sold anything as that would completely forget the player economy up because now we'd have to balance the prices of them with player prices and it would really restrain the kind of price gouging we saw during this test. the goal is to get players to raid each other for resources but when npcs function to keep everyone alive and happy the incentive to raid drops significantly and we're already having trouble with players not killing each other. i believe the largest issue was there being too few mines that produced too little which disabled that sort of guns blazing gameplay and the forgety way resource/item dropping works which should be redone if i could figure out a system for it

  • Add a way to tell which mines you have ownership of in the gui. One of the coolest things is driving around capping the mines and killing. I need to know which mines to capture at all times. Also, the volcanium mine is located in a spot where you can't park a vehicle near it because there's a drop in the terrain. Maybe add a ramp at that point so we can park closer to the volcanium mine entrance and then get back to the main road.
large signs denoting mine location have been added before you even posted this and i'll talk to gyt about the gui thing. guis are the most time consuming thing to make according to gyt so we've been reluctant to add more after the initial necessary ones were done

also message to all testers if you feel you were confused/unprepared for a thing by the tutorial please please please please tell the staff. scenery hq has talked and theorized about how the mechanics work for over a year and know how just about everything that can go down but its obvious there is a gap between our knowledge and player knowledge. we aren't entirely sure how to rectify that because we don't know what the average player is missing so we need input desperately on how obscure or gimmicky some mechanics are

promising.
pushing the game to its limits is a necessary part of testing. everything gyt did could have been done by any other player and is thus fair play
« Last Edit: March 27, 2017, 02:30:11 AM by DestroyerOfBlocks »

also message to all testers if you feel you were confused/unprepared for a thing by the tutorial please please please please tell the staff.

I think the most important thing the tutorial is missing is exactly how players can prevent the bad god events, because the bad god events eventually prevented most gameplay at the end of each test session. I know priests can help by sacrificing bodies to the pit in the church and by destroying drugs, but it's not possible to do these things easily while there are meteors and taser alligators everywhere. It would be useful to know at exactly what piety level this stuff begins to happen, but this might not be possible if they are triggered manually by the pope.

Other things I'm confused about are how the new pope is selected if an old pope dies by natural causes (ie meteors or lava), same for other jobs like police chief, and how the economy and taxes work. During the testing there were two popes at once, but I think this was not a bug and just a manual override by a dev.

Also, be sure to introduce "Paco" as god in the tutorial. I didn't realize Paco was god's name until today so I didn't understand that when he talked in chat, a god event occurred. It's also difficult to interpret what Paco means when he announces a god event in chat, but maybe the messages are indirect on purpose.

i'll talk to gyt about the gui thing. guis are the most time consuming thing to make according to gyt so we've been reluctant to add more after the initial necessary ones were done

I'd be satisfied with a servercmd command like /mines that lists the 3 mines and who owns which
« Last Edit: March 27, 2017, 02:53:51 AM by Farad »

Also when the chat is busy it's almost impossible to make the things the tutorial guy is saying out from the rest of the chat.

Also when the chat is busy it's almost impossible to make the things the tutorial guy is saying out from the rest of the chat.

public chat will be disabled for players in the tutorial in the final version