Asking for a refund on a donation is... I don't know. I'm kind of paralyzed by the audacity of that!
He may have a good reason for it. Unless he wants the donation back simply because he isn't satisfied with the game no more... in which case I'd have to wonder if he does the same thing to the Salvation Army Santa Clauses.
Him: "Here's 5 bucks."
Santa: "Thank you, this will go to helping others."
Him: "Wait, you mean I don't get anything out of it? Give it back!"
That aside, I wonder what the improvements to the adventure trading screen will be...
I mean, I never really did any trading in adventure mode... I always just salvaged stuff from lairs and camps. Then I'd die in the process.
I imagine though with the new cities, tombs, dungeons, and catacombs I'll probably spend a good bit in adventure mode this time. Though I am also looking forward to the dwarf mode stuff, like historical migrants and the better unit screen. Then there's the stuff that affects both modes, vampires, were-creatures, and necromancers. It may not change the game drastically, but there is certainly going to be enough to keep me busy for while.
You know what, EmeraldWind? You were right about the latter portion about me. It really is because I'm dissatisfied with the game, and yes, I'd ask for money back from the Salvation Army Santa if I found out that the "helping others" bit actually means spending 99% of the money on paying Salvation Army Santa paychecks and overhead, causing a total effect of 10% of that money trickling down to the needy. In fact, I'd either ask for my money back or I'd stand right next to him with my own bell and start yelling at people on the street to stop giving to them, or at the very least start yelling in a very loud and audible voice for them to change their ways.
I kind of feel like I was unfairly lured into this game and community, and my money was taken for a cause that didn't really exist. The more I look at the community, the more I'm starting to wonder if that cause seemed to exist more in a statistical calculation of the proportion of potential DF players that would have been tricked into donating before finding out that the game isn't even playable to them and 90% of the general public. I thought I was donating to a good cause, the creation of a game that is the answer to Valve's over-popular main-streamized releases, Minecraft's endlessly addictive grinding, and Angry Birds' coffee break gaming. What I eventually found out was that the game's getting rave reviews from people who don't seem to have any real interest in making the game more accessible to the general public, there's an endless amount of mindless grinding just to do anything, and you'd have to take Angry Birds breaks just to prevent yourself from ripping your hair out.
As much as I like a close-knit community that isn't composed of 8 year old children calling you "fagget" every 3 seconds, I'd still prefer Toady to hire someone to help him with making the game more playable to its users, rather than trying to add on new content that undoubtedly more than 90% of players will never see.
The more I look at the devlog, the more I'm concerned that the previous problems with the game such as the AI and menu grinding are going to interfere in a game-breaking way. Sure there's going to be more content to explore, but knowing Toady's track record, I'll have to come to expect not only new problems, but the old problems causing even more issues than before. I know it's probably redundant, and most of the users on this thread have already either voiced or formulated their concerns, thoughts, and praise from Toady's last post, but I'll summarize them anyway.
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[1]At first, I thought the first sentence of Toady's answer about customs indicated that he had completed the framework for procedurally generated cultures. This made perfect sense, since his brother's got a degree in history, and anyone that knows anything about history knows that cultures are based on any and all cultures that have interacted with them in their past or present. Knowing that Toady likes coding and things that interact with one another, it would seem like an obvious progression. Unfortunately, it just seems that cultural motifs are simply based on his writer, ThreeToe, and not on some sort of totally awesome history algorithm.
[2]I don't think that keeping a bare minimum playability and sensibility would really fly for those 90% that keep leaving the game. Somehow, I don't think that making villagers move around and work is a good idea at all, based on the AI from Fortress Mode. Of course, making villagers completely invincible and incapable of changing mood, hunger, thirst, or any other individual stat that's changeable in Fortress Mode would likely alleviate that, but I don't want to have anybody moving about and performing jobs if that's only going to make them do stupid things like swim around in the sewers and rivers, flood the entire town with lava, or have everyone in town congregate into a moshpit in a closet somewhere.
[3]It almost sounds like Toady's never really played his own game, which would go a long way to explain why he doesn't seem to really give a capybara's ass in regards to the problems that are scaring the majority of users away. Then again, that'd just be silly. He's undoubtedly played Dwarf Fortress before, and and probably doesn't give a damn about that statement he made two years ago about not wanting the community to get all elitist on him.
Come on now. I want people to play my game. When you guys get all exclusive, it's bad for me.
I'm starting to think he's intentionally making the game worse than what it should be in order to keep the exclusive nature of the community intact so he and the community don't have to deal with moderating a forum of newby jackasses all day long, which is understandable, but of course, that's a debate for another time.
[4]In the stance on attributes, I think that it's spot-on. Attributes shouldn't be the be-all, end-all of what determines a dwarf's output. Of course, it should have some sort of XP and job-related happiness modifier to make it more realistic, but then again, the game was never about realism, was it?
[5]It looks like Toady really, truly intended prisoner punishments to be death sentences, which would make the game all kinds of harder, and would make the game more enjoyable except for the fact that they're usually imprisoned for not reprioritizing their job orders to coincide with your baroness' mandates. Until the Job Prioritization portion of the devlog gets done, the whole of the punishment and justice system will remain broken and untenable
[6][7][13][14] I think that most of us can agree that war with the homeland is just one of a myriad of things that Toady really shouldn't be prioritizing, and won't make the game much better, even if he implements it in all of its full glory. Much to our chagrin, I'm sure he's going to end up working on this long before he fixes whatever problems with vendor pricing, vampires, or town generation he causes in the upcoming releases. I do believe that the answers to caknuck, King_of_the_weasles, and Cruxador are the only things that I have no real reservations about, which is kind of sad, in my opinion. They're the little details that make the game a little bit nicer if they work, and don't really matter at all if they don't work.
[8]I think that Toady is expecting kind of a lot from the player in regards to prisoner ethics. Then again, he's always expecting an excessive amount of contribution and devotion from the player in order to play his game, so I guess that point isn't really valid. Regardless, I find it odd that he expects the player to keep prisoners despite the fact that the only use they have is probably preventing more attacks from coming from their homeland. Hell, I'm not even sure that there even is a diplomatic disposition modification that takes place whenever you execute prisoners, but there is obviously no discernable incentive for keeping prisoners alive. You can't negotiate with the hostile nation, they can't be converted to the dwarven side, you can't even take them out of their cages without them trying to attack you like some wild animal. It's quite unreasonable to expect the player to treat them any differenely.
[9]I find it interesting that Toady's starting to get "time-sqeezed" working on all of these new additions. He won't hire anyone to fix the old, game-breaking problems, and he isn't willing to fix them himself, and now it seems that he can't even be bothered to handle issues regarding things that haven't even been released to the public yet. I'm starting to really fear for the future of DF if things like this keep up.
[10] The main issue about this is the fact that every time I find and kill a vampire, I'd have not only repeat the Burrow Dance in order to prevent my dwarves from contaminating my cistern, I'd have to also look around and check every single dwarf in the area to make sure they haven't hauled away a contaminated bucket or have to go into Dwarf Therapist and ensure that I've disabled every single job on every single dwarf in the hopes that 1 or 2 of them will consider Cleaning to be a more important job than No Job. Of course, more likely than not, out of a fortress of 235 dwarves, not a single one of them will consider Cleaning to be more important than No Job, so I'd probably have to do the DFHack Waltz whenever a vampire is killed to clean up all that contaminated blood. Of course, I'm sure you all are aware of the fact that though most of us would do all that, the overwhelming majority of players would probably do the Fuck This Game Tango and stop playing at that point.
[11]Is that really NOEMOTION I see? It makes me think that to identify vampires, all you have to do is just go into the unit's description screen and find that there's either no mention of what the dwarf was feeling lately, or that the description of their emotional state never changes. I'm quite worried with what Toady's admitted to in regards to the problems with vampires at this point. It's nice that he admits to releasing something that doesn't work right, but it'd be nicer if he admitted to more than just the occasional sentence. I'd like to know what problems to expect, rather than have to find them all on my own.
[12]The only thing I'm glad about is the fact that you won't have to do burrowing surgery in order to find a vampire, since it looks like just examining the unit description should be sufficient. Repeating mandatory blood testing and cleaning procedures would take hours to do for each and every migrant wave and might even make 95% of players leave instead of just 90%.
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I doubt that I was very comprehensive in this post, and I apologize in advance for the next part not meeting real analysis-type standards, either. It also seems that I butchered the point on [4]. I'll make sure to read over the information a few more times before posting on the next part.
[1] Neonivek
[2] Knight Otu
[3] Monk12
[4] Kogut
[5] Di
[6] Ganthan
[7] caknuck
[8] Rystic
[9] Shinotsa
[10] Dsarker
[11] Fieari
[12] Dae
[13] King_of_the_weasles
[14] Cruxador
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1205236 times)