Poll

which is better

85 (45.7%)
101 (54.3%)

Total Members Voted: 185

Author Topic: Scenery's SUBURBIA  (Read 126462 times)




oh, it's passworded.  i don't see a password in this thread.  i'm guessing this is closed alpha then?

oh, it's passworded.  i don't see a password in this thread.  i'm guessing this is closed alpha then?
Wake up



« Last Edit: April 02, 2018, 12:32:02 PM by Edd Eddington »


Un-password this server, whats the point? Public testing is much better for these kinds of things.

what the forget people are just now complaining about private testing


the private test today was less chaotic than usual but still very chaotic, as in death every minute or so.

ah forget I missed it didn't I?

   so we have discovered a few core assumptions the dev team held about what players will do in suburbia were proven wrong during testing, the most notable being players will go out of the way to interact with their surroundings and learn the systems in place, the systems being things like resource/money acquisition, jobs, government, and ect. from what we've seen, this is empirically wrong; most players felt no desire to do anything but play out their specific niche because, from what we gather, suburbia is ultimately a sandbox instead of a real "game". aquiring all that stuff and beating other players to the punch is just not something people are interested in doing unless its very clearly telegraphed or forced upon them. the result is stagnation as most players halfheartedly dedicate themselves to one of the many scattered tdm minigames if any.

   furthering that, the deathmatches we have in place just aren't good at all. quite a few of them were bad rips of other gamemodes that lacked all of the needed features of said gamemode to function. crops were base raiders but poorly done because lots anchor crops to one place and bricks are very easily fakekilled, causing planter wars to quickly kill every crop on the server and lead to endless revenge killings. mine capturing is a bad form of control points; mines are too spread out across the map and defending them is hideously boring as it is just endlessly waiting for someone to walk in the mine. furthermore, defending one mine heavily limits all other activities such as crafting, planting, running for office, policing, ect. mines share crops problem of "if you die stuffs gone" due to their isolation, how spawning works, and the size of the map. mine gameplay is characterized by endless revenge killing and backcapping until someone just gives up.

   this continual problem of endless cycles of griefing between players is clearly evident across the spectrum of activities presented. if a player kills someone else, it is quite likely the other player will try to kill him to regain lost resources, positions, or for revenge. because there is no real way to "win" aka reset the situation, an example being a team winning a tdm, players repeatedly try to murder each other forever, causing endless, frustrating cycles of revenge killings. without a goal to work to, there is no way to reset tensions and no real justification for killing someone because doing so doesn't let you "win" anything. all of this is caused by the sandbox nature and lack of overall goal.

   its likely suburbia will have to be heavily overhauled to fix all of this if that will ever happen. the "new" suburbia will differ significantly from what the testers have seen now as the suburbia devs have decided the best solution to all of this is to "gamify" suburbia. keep in mind this does not mean "gamify" in the city rpg way, a way shared with most mmos where the goal given is to grind up a ladder endlessly. (side note: this whole experience has been an eye opener when it came to things like mmos and explains why a lot of them have linear systems of progression and stuff.) expect less frequent testing and significant deviances from the city rpg formula which can potentially include removing lots entirely and adding a win condition.

hopefully gyt can put a save of the map up so everyone who built something other than a box (sylvanor) can keep their stuff