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Remove watering schedules from agriculture

Discussion in 'Wishlist Requests' started by that_shawn_guy, Sep 2, 2021.

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  1. that_shawn_guy

    that_shawn_guy Bug Hunter

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    Reasoning:

    1) There is no other system currently in the game where wall clock (real) time schedules effect the outcome of user action. e.g. One missed watering is the different from cost (time & gold) recovery and loss

    2) Agriculture is one of the 3 main legs of the economy. (The others being gather ore/wood and gather of artifacts) Growing crops is the only one that has multiple day time sinks to production. What other economic system is there that has a multi-day repetition gate for gathering/farming?

    If #1 is addressed by removing the schedule, #2 at least becomes a passive activity.

    I'm not suggesting adjusting the count of buckets of water required for full harvest. We should be able to put those all in up front and not have to worry about schedule our life around water pixels.
     
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  2. Tahru

    Tahru Avatar

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    Or optionally, please add an indicator for the time until the next watering cycle. For me, it is not awesome to keep logging in to see if I need to water. I know I could use a player website to calculate these time, but going to a site and computing that, writing it down and all is a pain.
     
  3. Adam Crow

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    Maybe that should be what fertilizer is for? If you use it, you wouldn't have to worry about the schedule. If you don't use it, works the same as it does now
     
  4. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    :eek: You want to take away risk and reward from agriculture :confused:?
    I can't say "No" enough to this, I cannot disagree more with this, it's the deathnail of agriculture as a way of play.
    Should we make fighting dragons easier? <---<<< That's what you're really asking for here.

    Having to go through any difficulty to fit into your time schedual the amount of true effort and risk there is in agriculture is getting in your economic way.

    But hey, you're a hunter and have no interest in fleshing out agriculture that takes more time out of your busy hunting schedual, I get it, but driving out a way of play, full time play, in order to make your hunting day more economic and easy isn't good for our game.

    Maybe you will get what you want because hunters get what they want, being the ruling class of the majority of players.

    We address issues cutting from bottom when talking about our economy while all the while making things more easy for a hunter to get back to hunting instead of being bothered with the fact that it's in hunting that gold and value floods our economy causing inflation, not the other way around. That leads to "power creep" and power creep leads to inflation and also the need for more hunting instances and even more inflation which you will point downward to try and solve when it's the upward spiral of Power Creep that most negitively impacts our economy.

    We just went through pages of agriculture talk where hunters were saying that it was too easy to play the agriculture game and how somehow letus and tomatoes were causing our game inflation, and now here the sugestion is to make it easier so we can eleminate it as a way of full time play? Do you want to make fishing easier too? How about crafting, is crafting getting in your way to getting back to hunting up more to fuel inflation of eveything?

    I'm a very big
    "NO" on this idea.

    Making things easier sux because it takes away challenge, effort, risk and reward!

    Our agriculture time tables represent "RISK", and taking away risk from any game eleminates "GAME".
    "Risk" = "Game"

    No risk
    , no game, thus agriculture dies as a game within our game.
    [​IMG]
    The timing is the risk for the reward o_O...
    ~Time Lord~
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2021
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  5. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    Yes! Just add it to the tooltip. Something like "Next Water: 7 hours, 23 minutes".
     
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  6. Pifester

    Pifester Bug Hunter

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    Something I wrote well over a year ago (5/14/20 is when I uploaded it to my server so I wouldn't lose it) as a proposal...you can see how far it went. I had/still have some pretty in-depth looks at different crafting areas and how to adjust things. From what I can tell..not much ever happened. After the general feel of - thanks for your money, appreciate how much you love the game, but we got this, I stopped talking about my ideas. No point in wasting my time typing if its never going to go anywhere.

    But here is a quick view of some ideas for farming, obviously, the xp increased some since I made this, and the price / weight of water has changed, but not a whole lot else. Feel free to look it over, tear it apart and find different ways to improve it, or just let it sit.

    Farming

    Currently 5 steps to the agriculture process:
    (1) plant

    (2) water first time

    (3) water second time

    (4) water third time

    (5) Harvest

    You get 50 XP for planting something, that’s it, nothing else for step 2,3,4,5. At the minimum, you are babysitting plants in a greenhouse for 12 hours, or barely paying attention to some plants in a basement, but you are still putting in dedicated time to these plants. Change the XP to scale with the duration of the seed. You get (example) 150XP for a 24hr seed, 300xp for 48hr seed, 450xp for 72hr seed. BUT this XP is divided by 5, and you get that much XP each stage. If you plant (1) 24hr seed, you get 30xp for initial planting, another 30xp for first watering, and 30xp each time you interact with it as needed. If you miss a watering - you don’t get the XP, if a friend does - they get it. This benefits CO-OP farming, and gives you a little more XP for a tedious and painful process. Add an option on the plant bed for “anyone can water this”, but use the lot permissions for planting/harvesting. Also, make it so you cannot uproot the plant, this will prevent someone from abusing the system with a cheap seed, 1gp water for xx XP, uproot then repeat. Once planted, it’s in the pot for the duration of its growth period. If someone wants to abuse it, they better have a bunch of planting spots that are unusable for a day or so.


    6th possibility planting stage or addition to 5th: Go to seed. Adds another xx HR period to the growth process, reduces harvest by 75%-100%, but raises seed recovery (2x maybe 2.5x per plant - player gave up the harvest on a plant for xxx seeds)

    Example: pumpkin seed costs 6gold, 4 gold for all watering, 10 gold sunk into the plant. Give back 1 seed + random 1-2 extra. Return is a minimum of 12 gold with possibility of 18(cost of the seeds). These seeds would be the “new” seed type explained in the next paragraph

    Recovered/Harvested seeds are a "new" item - slightly higher harvest, significantly lowered seed recovery (don’t want them to spiral into massive stockpiles, but gives the possibility of resale to players, if that player is looking at a 1-time planting to get stuff for himself) These plants do not get the “Go to Seed” option, harvest only



    Rain in the town: small percentage chance of watering plant

    Spell soothing rain: shows a zone effect, waters plant and increases harvest & seed recovery by small percentage, maybe cut down "time" between watering. (spending regs to water plants - should get something for it)

    water elemental: same as rain - small chance of watering plant. The elemental has a random move pattern already - for an OCD waterer/planter it might be more annoying to have him wandering around randomly watering plants, but he could do it. Make the elemental only have a limited amount of "watering’s" (random based on elemental skill) to prevent someone from sitting in a field and with enough time to "randomly" water the whole field.



    "lock" a planter into a state (deco), after locking it, ability to re-arrange plants within the bed.1:1 swap position



    fertilizer - increase of harvest, slight increase of seed recovery (expensive)

    possibilities:

    worms - already getting worms when harvesting (small chance) use them to increase harvest/lower loss if missed watering

    fish (have fish entrails as a "item" when processing fish (butchering), use them as fertilizer to increase harvest

    animal bones: same as fish, but grind them up at carpentry table (similar to processing bone plates)


    lesser/regular/greater health potion: combine with xx water to make "health tonic" (use planting boxes as water qty recommendations, lesser potion and 4 buckets of water = 4 tonics, regular = 10, greater = 20) It gives you the ability to recover from missed watering cycle (side bonus - if you use this water for every cycle, 2x or 3x the harvest) reason - would be flipping expensive to water something with this, but less expansive to use 1x to recover a harvest


    lesser/regular/greater mana: combine with xx water to make "mana tonic" - waters plant, and cuts time interval in 1/2. Would be amazing in a greenhouse, but you would need to be seriously on top of your game to not screw up a watering cycle. Would be useful for those times where you are planting different crops, but want the same watering cycles. Would also be expensive, but one way to get rid of potions no one ever uses.


    Poison potions: combine with xx water to make "delay tonic" - waters plant, and doubles the time interval. Allows you to delay the maturing of the plant by 2x. Lets you plant multiple different types and water/harvest at the same time.


    ****** Change the hue of the plant once it "needs watering" to a slight red outline ******


    DONT FORGET about Elderberry seeds, and immortality plant seeds - those should give even more xp when planted (full amount for time period when planted - 1 week), but no possible way to get more seeds from it, water, tonic, fertilizer have no effect other than a possible faster growth period. But for the most part when someone is growing them – they plant, and forget till it’s ready - the seed/plant is immortal, so watering it doesn’t matter.
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2021
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  7. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    When games are easy then it's not a game.
    ~Time Lord~
     
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  8. Barugon

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    A timer in the tooltip would not diminish the game in any way.
     
  9. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    I differ from that view as it is a "tech solution" when we need an ingame desktop clock solution. If we are to place alarm clocks or calculators ingame then they should be devices to be made or purchased and not tech tool tips.
    TechTool Tips are very nice, yet it's not RP and RP isn't as easy as Tech and thus less game.

    Checking one's clock and waving a mouse are very differing in their levels of difficulty and challenge. A clock would need to be set by the player, while a tool tip would not.
    ~Time Lord~
     
  10. that_shawn_guy

    that_shawn_guy Bug Hunter

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    Sorry @Time Lord, I don't see "login every 4/8/16/24 hours to water" as a game skill.

    I'm specifically avoiding the economic discussion in my suggestion because this does not reduce either the gold cost or time to wait. My suggestion simply reduces the tedium/punishment for some players that would like to be farmers. Alarm clocks, tooltips, etc to some players, only serve as reminder as to why to avoid this game system altogether.

    If fertilizer ever makes it into the game, and it can be obtained without gold cost (e.g. fishing), then I would find that an acceptable solution to disable the schedule mechanic.
     
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  11. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    We can differ in our views here, not a shame in it, yet I contend that "within the timing is the risk".
    and there's skill to meet that timing!
    Life's Time Management = Skill

    ~TL~
     
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  12. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    @that_shawn_guy

    A relevent opposit view on the other side of the rehtoric...
    One thing that hasn't come up, which should in most all our community conversations on every aspect and segment of our sota play is that sota was always meant to be a classless game. It's our RP that many times takes us there, where there's an us and a them, yet both have the ability and should retain the ability to be involved in and enjoy all our game's content. This means, the idea of "being" for example, a fire mage or a melee knight, a pvp of pvm, a blacksmith or a tailor, all of that is mearly a product of our personal RP choices within them all.

    The Amputee or death in the family...
    What is cut off or cut out of content abilities does need to have it's other aspects expanded, or those engaging in that activity or RP of choice are assimilated out of existance or when expanded, assimilate into a wider range of possibilities more closely connected to the whole of our classless world.

    Without expansion, the arm which was cut off is missed. We have not had any expansion or deeper connectivity for our agriculture after it's variety was gutted. Like a death in the family. It's challenges, it's flavor in diversity have all gone with nothing to fill what is now missing.

    On my side of the rehtoric I'm not ready to accept agricultue's death or assimilation through loosing it's few challenging aspects, "timing being the most important one of them". If you water your plants at home as you are suggesting we do in our game, your plants will die.
    ~Time Lord~
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2021
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  13. Adam Crow

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    This isn't real life. It's a game and suppose to be fun. Using real life to justify whether or not game mechanics should exist or not isn't a very solid argument.
     
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  14. Adam Crow

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    Again... I'll ask, what was gutted? Didn't we already get to the conclusion that farming and selling cotton to npcs is still a viable way to double your gold? You're being a bit dramatic don't you think?
     
  15. Time Lord

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    Risk = Reward, not Eliminate Risk = Get Reward
    Real life has allot to do with immersion. Some people immerse in tech, some like me, it needs to resemble something similar to life.
    Why do we have legs on our characters, why do they walk or run the way they do, because it resembles life.

    ~TL~
     
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  16. Adam Crow

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    @Time Lord Yes but you add things you can't do in real life to a game so that its fun. That's why we play. Magic, dragons, immortality etc. If I wanted to just walk with my legs I would go outside. Farming timers aren't fun in my opinion.
     
  17. Time Lord

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    It's OK, I understand your opionion and one flavor never makes everyone happy.
    But if Dragons were easy to kill, then they wouldn't be as fun as they are.
    ~TL~
     
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  18. Time Lord

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    From development, something agriculture interesting that may or maynot change some lines of thinking here one way or the other...
     
  19. CrandalltheFoole

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    I am from the days of individual planting, watering, harvesting. Yes it was very tedious.
    I had to set alarm clocks for the watering schedules, and keep track of even more things when I tried the green houses.
    Then I discovered what works for me. I can put down about 5K plantings in a basement (and now in a dungeon).
    I then mark my calendar as to when the next watering cycle happens. No rush, (usually) no missed cycles.
    Good yields and much less scurrying about.

    Now if I could only have trot lines and fish and eel traps. We have nets and crab traps as deco.
     
  20. Tahru

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    I was going to use a basement as well, but the harvest time is only good if you don't need it or planned ahead. I don't use a greenhouse even though I have one because I feel pressured to keep up with them. I only use an single open air village lot. It's the perfect size to keep me from getting burnt out on farming. If only there was a better way to know when to water, it would be perfect for me.
     
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