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I really like the new system.

127 (35%)

Better than before, but more needs to be done.

93 (25.6%)

It doesn't make a difference to me.

41 (11.3%)

The changes don't really address my issues.

6 (1.7%)

I don't like it at all.

35 (9.6%)

I have mixed feelings on the matter.

61 (16.8%)

Total Members Voted: 362

[slink]

Granted, my own opinions on this matter are not universal - games like Candyland still exist for a reason, and some people prefer pure randomness with basically no skill that lets everybody win some of the time because they aren't looking for a challenge.  (I'm looking at you, Mario Party...)

What it seems to me is that you're having a hard time believing that there exists a rather large proportion of gamers who enjoy neither high strategy nor utter chance.  Which is understandable; we all have trouble understanding how anyone could like what we don't.  But take our word for it, it exists even if you can't see it.

What part of "my own opinions are not universal" comes off as "I don't believe other people have different opinions"?

He didn't say you don't believe other people have other opinions.  He said there are people whose opinions fall in between your own position and the often ridiculing position you ascribe to those who disagree with you.  I have also been reading posts by you ascribing to me, not by name but by membership in categories which you have described, that assert opinions on my behalf which I do not hold.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 

And believe me, I know people who have gotten me to play Mario Party with them before. That wasn't an insult on people who play Mario Party, but it's a simple fact that the game is designed to do that - they determine the winner by how many stars a person collects, and give out bonus stars for completely random things like stepping on blue tiles the most or having the least stars. 

They didn't make something like 8 of those games because nobody liked it. 

However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part, then you're favoring a game closer to Mario Party than the sort of game I prefer.  And frankly, I remember a Penny Arcade that did not take this sort of randomness where skill was not rewarded in favor of chance very well. 

You can say "respect my gameplay" all you want, but I was telling you what mine was, and would ask you respect mine, as well.

Some people like to feel challenged and the ability to overcome difficult situations through skill, and feel like randomness cheats them of their ability to have that in a game.  Many of them aren't going to have taken the time to seriously organize and analyze their thoughts on the issue, and will simply be opposed to most any randomness they feel will "cheat" them of something they should be able to "earn" through skill alone in their preferred mode of gameplay. 

[Arkenstone]

I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 

The thing is, nobody plays Candyland.  You're trumping up the one aspect that isn't in games you enjoy, and figure that it's the main attractor.  But it isn't.

However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part...

Neither do I, but you keep on assuming I do just because I like some element of risk.  The games I prefer can only be one or lost on a single die roll if good/poor maneuvering has lined it up that way; it takes nothing less than a string of incredible and nigh-miraculous rolls to overturn skillful play.  Most games that I've seen are decided by the accumulation of smaller chance gains, the opportunities for which and impacts of are adjusted through skill.

The point is, the "somewhere in between" view which you seem to acknowledge only in passing is really where I and, I believe, most others on this forum reside.  The way that you keep emphasizing the extreme seems to me as if you are using a strawman, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this isn't your intent.


The argument has gone on to the point where I'm not exactly sure what is being argued anymore.

It seems to me almost as if we're trying to argue what 'people' like: a futile pursuit if ever there was one.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 

The thing is, nobody plays Candyland.  You're trumping up the one aspect that isn't in games you enjoy, and figure that it's the main attractor.  But it isn't.

However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part...

Neither do I, but you keep on assuming I do just because I like some element of risk.  The games I prefer can only be one or lost on a single die roll if good/poor maneuvering has lined it up that way; it takes nothing less than a string of incredible and nigh-miraculous rolls to overturn skillful play.  Most games that I've seen are decided by the accumulation of smaller chance gains, the opportunities for which and impacts of are adjusted through skill.

The point is, the "somewhere in between" view which you seem to acknowledge only in passing is really where I and, I believe, most others on this forum reside.  The way that you keep emphasizing the extreme seems to me as if you are using a strawman, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this isn't your intent.


The argument has gone on to the point where I'm not exactly sure what is being argued anymore.

It seems to me almost as if we're trying to argue what 'people' like: a futile pursuit if ever there was one.

It seems to me you are trying to argue to me that I meant something other than what I said and believe something other than what I believe. 

I am not trying to argue that all randomness is a bad thing, and dismissing that area in between pure and no randomness as irrelevant, my position is in that area between the two extremes, too. 

What I'm arguing is that you consider that "people like" different degrees of randomness and have different perspectives on the concept, and that isn't a waste of time if the next time you try to argue to someone who says they hate randomness and it makes them feel cheated that their views on randomness may not be the same as yours. 

Some people enjoy really dry, analytical games, and some people enjoy casual games, and no, there's nothing wrong with casual gamers in spite of the prevailing mood of forums like these.  Telling someone who hates randomness that they should just enjoy it, however, is the fruitless exercise, since they aren't going to listen to such an argument.

[Psieye]

And so this interesting discussion on personal tastes of how much luck should influence 'our fate' in games we play draws to a close. But this spawned from the concern of "those rare, small platinum/aluminium clusters". Now that multiple blocks per rock and bars per ore have been established and gems guaranteed 100% drop rate, nobody is that concerned about the fixed 25% drop chance from mining except in this specific case.

The way I see it, this is less an aversion of "what if I don't get anything from this rare cluster?" and more an aversion of "I don't know how many clusters I have on this embark". It's this desire to do away with luck^2 (I'll explain below) vs luck^1.

All the discussion I've seen so far have been on luck^1 - whatever our feelings on how comfortable we are letting luck influence our games, they have all been under the assumption that the probabilities themselves are deterministic. In D&D terms, you know you must roll "X or greater" or maybe "roll better than that other player". The latter is a more complex calculation but ultimately you can get out one percentage value that definitively expresses "this is your chance to succeed, be it very high, very low or inbetween".

Luck^2 is where even the probability of success is randomised and cannot be determined in advance. This is beyond the level of "roll better than someone else's dice roll". This is approaching "roll the dice and I will arbitrarily pull out a rulebook from this big heap to tell you if you succeed - oh btw I don't even know if there's a rulebook that will declare you to have succeeded for any given dice value. Like, this example rulebook says you need a 4, 7 or 17 and any other values fail".

The people who are uncomfortable with this 25% fixed drop rate with regards to platinum perceive this to be a luck^2 problem. The people who do care about mining platinum but aren't so worried perceive this to be a luck^1 problem. It's a matter of "I can/can't trust there's another platinum cluster on this map even if this one yields nothing". In D&D terms, it would be akin to "I don't know if this tough monster will, on death, immediately spawn a fresh copy of itself with full HP thereby continuing the fight when I really want some down time". If you could magically dowse for every platinum cluster on the map (and ONLY platinum - or aluminium), I don't think there'd be nearly this much resistance to the fixed mining drop rate.



Oh and since the infamous "primitive barbarian defeats battleship in fluke chance" of Sid Meyer's Civilisation games has come up: I understand the transition from civ4 to civ5 is like the transition from D&D 3.5th edition to D&D 4th edition: some fundamentally game changing tweaks to the game. To my understanding, "caveman beat sci-fi giant robot" cannot happen now because there are not enough dice rolls to make that string of flukes - combat is no longer to the death. Combined with "no stacking", it really shakes the game.

[NW_Kohaku]

Alternately, if someone feels they really need aluminum THAT badly, they're probably just going to savescum until they get it, anyway.

Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in, so I wouldn't worry too much about people actually freaking out to get EVERY aluminum boulder they could when aluminum isn't really useful for much besides value, and it's not like it's hard to make enough silver statues to make a room legendary as-is...

[ZzarkLinux]

Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in

You got another reply from me for this statement

I savescummed like hell to get my current RabbitHut in a nice terrifying reanimating area.
And it sure was worth it, I'm enjoying the payoff every bit

It's akin to how people used to play DnD OD&D / RedBox / etc ...
There were all sorts of rules for "weaponVSArmorType" and even the infamous "random h00ker chart" that were all official rules.
People ignored those rules in the official game, made it their own, and now there are many grognards who drone on about "how great the early DnD rules were"

Savescumming = houseruling
You will never stop people from doing it.
(as a side note, I only savescum to gen the world, haven't savescummed the actual huts)

[Arkenstone]

Well, if we're only worried about aluminium and platinum than I'd just like to point out they're both anachronistic metals.

Aluminum doesn't even have a native form, at least not outside a lab so far as I can tell.

And native platinum has other platinum-group elements in it (like Iridium) that make it unmalleable; apparently though it was alloyable with gold though.


Lastly, even if these metals were available to a pre-industrial culture I believe they would have been worth little.  Aluminum tarnishes too fast to be decorative, and would (presumably) not be common enough for industry.  Platinum may be as shiny as silver, but without chemical testing it would be thought merely a low grade of that metal, and the difficulty of utilizing it would decrease its value even more.

[Graknorke]

As far as I remember, aluminium was EXTREMELY valuable because of how hard it was to get it pure. Rich folks wold have special aluminium cutlery and dining sets to show off their wealth to visitors, because it was valuable.
Prettyness and utility aren't the only influences on value. Sometimes people want stuff just because it's hard to get.

[Arkenstone]

As far as I remember, aluminium was EXTREMELY valuable because of how hard it was to get it pure. Rich folks wold have special aluminium cutlery and dining sets to show off their wealth to visitors, because it was valuable.
Prettyness and utility aren't the only influences on value. Sometimes people want stuff just because it's hard to get.

The thing is, that's only because the culture was enamored by it.  So the demand was high and supply low, but in a medieval culture the demand will be much lower; if only because of the extreme improbability of a merchant ever having more than one potential buyer for the substance.  It's a "Buyer's Market" at this point, which drives the price down even further.

Sure, some people will want it because it's hard to get, but they'd be such a small minority that merchants will have to practically give it away just to get it off their hands.  Besides, without chemical testing how do you know it's some super-rare new metal and not just a new form or alloy of mundane ones, like tin or silver?

[Sadrice]

As I recall, native alluminum does exist in certain rare circumstances, such as within certain volcanoes.  Probably not really accesible though.  Alluminum cutlery was valuable (famously used by napoleon) during the 40 or so years in the 1800s between the discovery of alluminum and the invention of the process to (relatively) cheaply smelt it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in

You got another reply from me for this statement

I savescummed like hell to get my current RabbitHut in a nice terrifying reanimating area.
And it sure was worth it, I'm enjoying the payoff every bit

It's akin to how people used to play DnD OD&D / RedBox / etc ...
There were all sorts of rules for "weaponVSArmorType" and even the infamous "random h00ker chart" that were all official rules.
People ignored those rules in the official game, made it their own, and now there are many grognards who drone on about "how great the early DnD rules were"

Savescumming = houseruling
You will never stop people from doing it.
(as a side note, I only savescum to gen the world, haven't savescummed the actual huts)

Well, what I mean is that the actual act of savescumming isn't fun. 

I don't know what you mean by savescumming for your world, but I've certainly genned new worlds until I found histories I care for.  And I don't really consider it savescumming if I'm restarting the whole game from the initial point.

If you have to save, alt-control-delete (or equivalent for your OS) and force quit, reload, force quit, reload, force quit about three or four times per tile to get what you want, I seriously doubt all but the most compulsively obsessed player is going to actually want to do that for every boulder of rare materials.

[ZzarkLinux]

He who smelt it dealt it.

...

Aww shucks, NW you beat me by a hare. Oh well.

[King Mir]

As I recall, native alluminum does exist in certain rare circumstances, such as within certain volcanoes.  Probably not really accesible though.

Not to people, but to dwarves -- no problem.

[Sadrice]

Looked it up, native aluminum is found in mud volcanoes in azerbaijan, a few weird igneous intrusive pegmatite formations in Russia, similar places in another couple of former soviet countries, and at least one undersea cold seep off the coast of China.  Very small quantities in all of those sources.


It looks like this, scale bar 1 mm:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)