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[KittyTac]

Personally, my turn off list with DF (but it's free, so, who really cares):

*) Glacial development pace. I understand it's one coder and coding wasn't his former job, but even still. How many years has it been now, and the donations are easily a decent full time salary, so to trot out a few (to me, pretty lacklustre) features every few years, and leave existing, fairly game-breaking bugs scattered around, is annoying to me. Feels ... privileged, even if that's not the intention.

*) Non open source. More a peeve that I think it could be much better if other people were allowed to contribute. I don't personally think his vision is that spectacular that people need to sit back and watch for years while he realizes it. But, his call.

*) Finally, hearing random forumers and posters online when DF is mentioned wax lyrical about how it's 'the most complicated game ever!!!!' and 'truly anything is possible!!!!' etc etc. It doesn't strike me as anywhere near that level of praise, it's emergent properties are fairly rail-roaded. Maybe that will change but I get a bit sick of hearing that particular praise for some reason.

The first complaint is because there's a lot going on under the hood, even if you don't really immediately notice it. There's a lot of little features with each update.

The second is a matter of personal ethics. Toady is doing it because he can.

The third is caused by a sneakier form of memes. Extremely annoying, I agree. They usually shut up after being told to do so.

[Cathar]

*) Glacial development pace.

Bay12 has probably the most consumer friendly monetization model around so I'm not criticizing that too much,  ut I never understood why anyone would pay for something they can get for free.

*) Non open source.

Dear god, thanks it's not open source. I saw what happened in open source competitors and I'd like none of that in my DF.

*) Finally, hearing random forumers and posters online when DF is mentioned wax lyrical about how it's 'the most complicated game ever!!!!' and 'truly anything is possible!!!!'

It's relative to other games. DF has limitations like everything else, just less than other games in its category. Also it's an old meme, which started when DF was actually hard as balls. Difficulty decreased with time as it should, as it is leaving a niche market for a more mainstream one. Its cool and normal.

But yeah, my one irk :

• It's hard to get into. I can play the game just fine and have a lot of fun with it, but trying to share it with friends is...really hard. They just can't get into it. Not sure there is a solution in the immediate future, but being unable to spread the love outside of the bay12 community irks me a bit.

[KittyTac]

it is leaving a niche market for a more mainstream one. Its cool and normal.

Nope! It's as niche as before, it's just that the niche is getting larger as the community grows. But it's still niche.

[Cathar]

The bigger the niche, the lesss it is niche tho. Like the cheese's hole paradox

[KittyTac]

The bigger the niche, the lesss it is niche tho. Like the cheese's hole paradox

It still isn't mainstream. The game will become harder and more complex with the magic update, so that will put a stop to growth.

[vassock]

For me first and foremost is the fear that some bug will break the experience for me. Recently it happened when my Dwarfs stopped gathering wood and apparently the cause was that I breached the caverns since the second I sealed them off they started gathering wood again.

[Tinnucorch]

For me first and foremost is the fear that some bug will break the experience for me. Recently it happened when my Dwarfs stopped gathering wood and apparently the cause was that I breached the caverns since the second I sealed them off they started gathering wood again.

Could you have had automatic web collecting enabled? Maybe your dwarves were'nt collecting wood because they were collecting the webs. It's a little anoying that it is the dafault option, at least for me (I always forget turning it off).

And I share your fear. I started playing DF when the most recent version was 0.42 and once I learned that the justice system didn't work I lost interest for a while. Now with 0.44 I'm in again, but I think "what if next release breaks something again?". I would like to think that a completely broken feature would draw Toady's attention to fix it but since how some of the best known bugs have been around for years... 
And that reminds me of something else: I was really into settling in a evil biome until I learned that most creatures there who are supposed to attack your dwarves won't do it beacause of a bug 

I'm ok with the fact that there are a lot of placeholder mechanics and things waiting for developement, but for the broken ones just knowing that they will be replaced/overhauled/whatever in a (probably not near) future does not give much solace.

So, yeah, finding that something it's not gonna be that great not because the game is not that awesome (I do think it's awesome! ) but because things don't work as they should be working at a given time is, for me, a very big turn off.

[superbob]

Back when I was starting out, I actually enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to do things and build a fort that survives past the point initial food reserves perish. I really liked reading stuff on the wiki and trying new things, getting more efficient forts working, putting together interesting constructions like minecart systems, obsidian farms or elaborate traps. The only complaint I have about all that is it takes too much time to get anything substantial done, if micromanagement could be reduced it would help a lot. I also hated interruptions like liaisons or caravans showing up that would distract me from what I was doing at the time.

But that was back when I was relatively new to the game. Fast forward a few years, up to somewhere like 2016 since I haven't really played in a while, there were two major things that irked me as a more experienced player.

First, performance. I'd really like to be able to play on bigger embarks, there would be plenty of awesome things to do in a 16x16 embark with a 1000 dorfs, unfortunately the single-threaded nature of the game prohibits that. It also irks me how people pop up whenever that is mentioned claiming concurrency is super-near-impossible-hard or whatever. It really isn't, not 90% of the time anyways, with proper design and threading libraries it's only challenging if you're doing seriously advanced stuff, otherwise the reason it's hard is because you're doing it wrong. It would definitely require some serious design changes and would translate to a lot of work, but the sheer numbers required for larger embarks dictate the need for parallel processing.

Second thing is that once the initial learning curve has been defeated, the game becomes too easy, unless the player becomes careless or wants to mess it up on purpose. There's reanimating biomes, of course, but that essentially translates to more micromanagement and taking even longer to get anything done. Food production is too easy, wealth for trading is easy too once you know what to build, army training is mostly automatic and once setup will produce unstoppable killing machines in a few game years. Sieges can be defeated by traps or turtling. While this is fun for building megaprojects, it also means there's no real need for  fancy setups in fortress mode, a tiny, perfectly mundane fort can easily be happy, rich, and self sufficient, with little effort it will withstand any siege and beat the circus. Once I realized the game is 90% self-indulgence it bothered me even more than the performance limited population and build area.

[KittyTac]

Multithreading would cause an, at most, 10% increase in performance. Here's a solution for you: Don't do 16x16 embarks.

And DF is supposed to be a more-or-less simulation rather than a game. Challenge isn't strictly needed.

[MrWiggles]

ToadyOne when hes spoken about it, doesnt believe it will do much for the game.

[Saiko Kila]

Food production is too easy [...]

I think the reason it's too easy is it doesn't simulate many factors yet, present in real food production. Funny thing, showing how there is not much consistency with the development of food production, and that is not finished yet, is that the underground plants (growing in unchanging environment) are subject to seasonal limits, while aboveground plants (growing often in wildly changing environment) are not. So it's opposite what logic dictate it should be.

In a game based on earlier Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, there are changing weather conditions, blights and similar events which will make otherwise similar experience quite different, and can destroy food production for people, or for animals. Also RW's plants are more varied in their requirements, forcing the player to make significant choices, something what real farmers often have to do.

So overall I think it is under development still, and hopefully will change.

One thing which makes me angry is that the useless things which are sold to the caravans are apparently tracked. Personally I think that they should be wiped, or mostly wiped, both for performance and for sanity.

[KittyTac]

Food production is too easy [...]

I think the reason it's too easy is it doesn't simulate many factors yet, present in real food production. Funny thing, showing how there is not much consistency with the development of food production, and that is not finished yet, is that the underground plants (growing in unchanging environment) are subject to seasonal limits, while aboveground plants (growing often in wildly changing environment) are not. So it's opposite what logic dictate it should be.

In a game based on earlier Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, there are changing weather conditions, blights and similar events which will make otherwise similar experience quite different, and can destroy food production for people, or for animals. Also RW's plants are more varied in their requirements, forcing the player to make significant choices, something what real farmers often have to do.

So overall I think it is under development still, and hopefully will change.

One thing which makes me angry is that the useless things which are sold to the caravans are apparently tracked. Personally I think that they should be wiped, or mostly wiped, both for performance and for sanity.

The economy arc will need tracking even useless items. What's the point of removing a system only to readd it later?

ToadyOne when hes spoken about it, doesnt believe it will do much for the game.

Well, it's Toady's game. He knows what's good for it.

[Rockphed]

ToadyOne when hes spoken about it, doesnt believe it will do much for the game.

Well, it's Toady's game. He knows what's good for it.

I suspect that if Toady could split all the lists apart and process each in parallel that the game would experience less slowdown for having tons of objects.  I also suspect that the basic loop of the game is a horrible spaghetti-code mess that he doesn't want to try to pick apart to make things parallel.  I remember Toady once saying that he had an idea of how to do it, but it would take about a year of development and would add 0 features, which he doesn't want to do.  Frankly, I don't blame him.

[Saiko Kila]

One thing which makes me angry is that the useless things which are sold to the caravans are apparently tracked. Personally I think that they should be wiped, or mostly wiped, both for performance and for sanity.

The economy arc will need tracking even useless items. What's the point of removing a system only to readd it later?

Simple - to do it correctly. Economy was disabled because it was hopelessly broken. I doubt that tracking in current form will be still feasible for new economy. Actually, I'm sure it won't because of performance issues.

Also tracking thing like food stacks or arrows won't be really needed...

[malvado]

More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game?  We figure we are losing 90% of the players because of the UI and other barriers, and that doesn’t even count the ones scared away by the ASCII graphics.  Now, this doesn’t mean we are about abandon the rest of the game to start the presentation arc.  It is just as important to have endless monster attacks from the underground, and challenging sieges. 

What do you think is scaring people away?  The building placement?  Designations?  The embark screen?  Or maybe its finding the right tile sets and setting them up.  We are hoping at some point to build easier commands and tutorials to help bring in more players.  We have to identify the main culprits first.  So what is frustrating you the most about Dwarf Fortress?

My opinion :

1 : Performance issues, even with an ok 8 Core cpu you will get lower performance once the population and items reaches certain numbers. There's been improvements, but the added content and other things seems to also contribute again on lower performance.

2 : GUI , Personally I have problems with the ASCII interfase (graphics, how units looks etc etc ), mainly due to damage to parts of my brain so I need to have a more Graphical type of GUI and of course the visuals of the rest of the game.

3 : And to be honest it takes a bit too long between each updates, yes, a lot of good work is done, but when you are wandering around with a bug that stops your good experience you will just give up. If more time is spent on bug fixing making the game more playable between each release I'd bet more people would stay and donate.

So for me personally : Improve performance on all system and use the several cores of modern cpu's in a better way than just relying on 1 core, make the GUI and ingame graphics easier to choose and manage for new users and focus more on shorter time between releases and more bug fixing.