Forum - [Stamina] Feedback on stamina changes

1 year ago

Gaia

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[Stamina] Feedback on stamina changes

The latest update has the community brewing with ideas and feedback for the announced plans. A lot of it is posted on the discord, and I am going to attempt to make some sort of.. consolidation. I will start with my own ideas that I already posted there. And feel free to add your ideas to this as well! I'd love for a discussion to take place here, because there's so many sides to this idea.

I think most people agree that the announced nerfs to existing raw and grey-rarity (common) food items is going to hurt everyone badly. It will hurt hard-core players who have worked blood, sweat and tears to build up their stores as their hoarded stamina value is going to be halved or even worse. It is going to hurt casual players because it is going to get a lot harder to get enough food to fill those stamina bars up.

That being said, I do think a lot of people agree that improving the complex recipes; making them worth a. the time to cook and b. using up ingredients (e.g. the outcome is worth significantly more than the separate ingredients) is a good thing.

So what are alternative ways to do the improving without it hurting the players?

(Ideas in the posts to come)

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1 year ago

Gaia

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Don't nerf existing food items

This is a very understandable sentiment, especially for those that have worked hard to get a stash of food ready to go.

However, I also think that some of the current food items are .. unbalanced. And another important factor is that stamina bars only go up to 100, so there's only so much room to make more complex recipe/high value food items.

If we assume nerfing is necessary, I can see 2 options (and yes, I am making some very wild ideas here)

1. Existing food items are nerfed, but all people are gifted new food items equal to the amount of stamina they lost out on due to the nerf. Is this possible? I don't know, but it would make the nerf hurt less. However, it would still leave the issue of keeping your stamina hoards filled on the long run. So other things that would very much need some serious additional balancing in order for this to work, such as better and easier rewards through things like hunting, farming and campaigning. (For example, moths are reduced from 15 to 5 stamina, means that encounters that usually dropped 1 moth should now drop 3, so that at the end of the day, the rewards in terms of stamina value remains equal). Another important sidenote is that this addiitional balancing needs to happen at the same time as the nerf, as to impact users as little as possible.

2. If existing food items are nerfed, and it is not possible to give out foods to keep the values of our stamina hoards the same and increase the rewards of current gameplay, another option is to also nerf the stamina usage. So if 'basic' grey-rarity raw food items are reduced from 5 to 2, that means that activities that generally use up 5 stamina should be reduced to 2. Professions which usually take up 25 should be reduced to 10, hunts (which use the entire stamina bar for some reason) should be reduced to 40, gauntlet to 20 etc. Make the amount of stamina you need to do things experience th same reduction as we'll see in the value of items so that at the end of the day, it doesn't hurt the casual player.

Introduce a foodpile instead of feeding food items per wolf

And if we don't nerf, how would that work? How can we still make the complex recipes worthwhile with this hard 100 stamina limit? Easy; instead of feeding food per wolf, food is converted to a food pile. Autofeeding draws from this pile. That way 1. you can have food items that exceed to 100 limit, 2. you don't waste as much stamina points whenever your wolves don't have a multiple of 5 in their stamina bar (e.g. having 4 stamina left, still uses 100 stamina to fill it up all the way now, but if you draw from a pile, you can use exactly 96 stamina to fill it up)

Complex recipes are hardly worth the effort

This is something that has been said since beta and EA. Cooking takes a long time, requires multiple ingredients in a very limited-size pot and sometimes requires the same amount of stamina input as the output (and in some rare but horrible cases more!)
9 out of 10 times just cooking simple recipes has the best stamina output in terms of effort and time. I understand wanting to make compelx recipes more worthwhile, but that doesn't require nerfing existing simple and raw foods.

Make pot size limit apply to amount of recipes in queue rather than individual ingredients required

Instead make the pot size limit apply to the recipes rather than the individual required ingredients. So instead of only being able to make, what is it, 4 or 5 pumpkin pies, because that's the amount of ingredients the pot can hold, allow us to make the recipe 20 times if our potsize is 20. The extra time and extra ingredients and higher level requires to successfully make it, are enough of a wall already to make the complex recipes 'complex'.

Increase stamina value of complex cooked items OR Lower required ingredients

Another thing to make complex recipes more worthwhile is either increasing the stamina value (so that it is a significant improvement to the separate ingredients) and/or lower the ingredient amount.

More than 1 item as output from complex recipes to bypass the hard 100 stamina limit per item

Another idea is that instead of going beyond the 100 stamina on an individual item (because of the stamina bar limit, and assuming we're not going to do the foodpile thing), instead of resulting in 1 item, you can get 2 items as a result. So for example, instead of the current ingredients for pumpkin pie giving 1 pie, it gives 2 pies to increase the value of the output without going beyond 100 stamina on a single item.

(Edited)

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1 year ago

Gaia

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1 year ago

Sim

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I think another good way to make complex recipes more worthwhile would be to lower the cooking times, i would much rather make a complex recipe if it didnt take an age to cook.

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1 year ago

Orgetzu

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Okay, I'm gonna dump some thoughts in this thread, sorry if they're a little chaotic, brain is tired and also running everywhere. I will try to condense them.

Okay, so there's multiple problems that I think need to be addressed, and I'll cover those first.

Nerfing: Nerfing existing food items without changing everything up, just flat out nerfing, is gonna be a bad idea. You already covered that pretty nicely. If they nerf how much stamina you get, they also need to nerf how much stamina things cost. To balance it out. So let's say how Campaign has exploring take 5 Stamina. Well, maybe all regular foods give 2 Stamina now, but Explore only takes 2 Stamina per action. Now instead of being able to Explore up to 20 times per food bar, you can explore 50. (I hope my quick math is right.) Therefore, the food items give fewer points, yes, but everything takes fewer points, so it equals to the same amount of food. Hunts only take 50, Arena Starts take 25, etc. The good part? Less stamina wasted. Same as a food pile. Since there's smaller than 5 Stamina foods to feed your wolves now, the site's auto-feed can't waste as much.

Nerfing Part Two: If they decide to nerf things flat out (without reducing stamina costs for activities), then they need to give more, also to balance. So let's say isopods only give 2 Stamina now. Well, if you get two or three of them per one you have now, and the encounters give 2-3 now, then it balances out. If moths give 5 Stamina, then you get three per encounter instead of one. To accomplish this and keep people from losing boatloads of stored stamina, they'd need to make a system that goes through and assesses what everyone has, and multiplies the numbers of currently owned foods by the appropriate amount to make it the same amount of Stamina. For example, let's say you have 24 luna moths, well now the system will change it so you have 72 in your inventory instead.

Food Piles/Stores: This is exactly what Flight Rising does, and it makes for a very good system. You convert Food Items into Food Points, and then feeding your dragons draws from the Food Points. The Food Items stay safely in your hoard, able to be sold or traded. It prevents overfeeding and wasted Food Points, allows you to see at a glance how much Stored Food Points you have available, and since you choose what to convert, the AutoFeed menu could be changed into AutoConvert, and you can click "Convert Food to Food Points" (or something) to convert any of the listed items into food points. Or... just go through and manually select what to convert and how much like how Flight Rising has it. You have some options. This also easily allows the system to have food of various point values without complicating the feeding system and 100 point-limited stamina bar. You can have base foods of 1-20 or anything else, and complex foods over 100 points, and it'll all work out.
And lore-wise, you could say they have a designated "You can eat this" food collection that wolves go and snack from when they're hungry. As a bonus point. You don't eat an entire turkey roast at once, either.

Cooking: I do really like the idea of Output Slots as opposed to Input Slots. You could even limit it so something like only the first four Output Slots can hold Meals, whereas the others can hold simple cooked things. Logistically and lore-wise, this also makes more sense. Because I can cook something in the oven, toaster, on the stove, and in the microwave, all at once. All separate dishes. And I can prep a salad on the counter besides. If I bake fifteen potatoes, I'm not suddenly unable to also cook a pot of mac and cheese on the stove, or make tea in the microwave. The downside, I guess, is that people can cook more high value items without as hard of a limit on it, but that's why maybe Meal Slots and regular cooking slots, or something. I don't know. There's options, anyway.

I think that's all I've got, I may wander back if I collect some other thoughts. Totally approve of them tweaking things, but I hope they look at all this feedback and what people like and figure out what's best from there. Given they changed the WW knucklebone and related hunt numbers a bit due to player feedback, I'm optimistic.

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1 year ago

Lycoris

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What the userbase witnessed a few days ago appeared to be an early release of the incoming changes. There were some recipe adjustments to use fewer ingredients, like the berry jams; this was a good thing. But uncooked and simple foods were nerfed pretty heavily, like moths got nerfed from 15 to 5 stamina and the cooked meat went to 10 stamina. The userbase reacted very negatively to this. Any kind of similar nerfs would not be received well, no matter when it's implemented.

In particular, I think the nerf to uncooked and simple cooked foods will hit new players and casuals hard. It's not an issue for me currently, but when I first started, I was relying on those waters (from a paid pack that I paid USD for, mind you) and cooked meat. I can only imagine it would be much harder for a f2p newb with nerfed cooked meat and 0 waters. It's not like you have good access to complicated recipes until much later on in the game

Also, you can only cook a few of the complicated recipes at a time, even with a maxed out cooking pot. This puts a severe damper on the 'cook 10' task, and all the other pebble tasks are time gated too.

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1 year ago

Reave

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A "food pile" of points for auto-feeding would be awesome, and would be a way to avoid this evergreen issue of food just randomly going back into the auto-feed list after any unannounced back-end changes to the individual items.

I have no idea why they think cooking is where they need to start with game balance changes, honestly... The suggestions forums are a desolate wasteland of un-acknowledged balance changes that players actually want to see, to professions that are far worse off than cooking and the stamina system of all things. Is the current system perfect, of course not-- but right now it's sustainable as a game loop, especially for new players, and feeds into itself and at least encourages interacting with one of the main components of the game.

Stamina use and generation should feed back into itself into a nice, sustainable little loop to keep people interested in continuing to play-- most professions on the site use stamina, but it is only replenished in a very limited set of ways.

The current proposed changes they want to implement honestly make some of the complex recipes even less worthwhile to cook even with the ingredient nerfs, which I didn't think was actually possible lol. Give us more crafted items per cook if you want to make complex recipes worth the cooking slots it takes to make them, that would actually be a useful overhaul of the cooking system. Making it possible to cook less items per slot taken by making recipes take ever more items is never going to make up for the time or slots it takes to cook the vast majority of them at 1 item per. Offering to sell the player more cooking slots doesn't really solve that problem. :P

Farming is also currently a mobile-game-esque nightmare of babysitting short timers, especially for new players, and solidly not worth investing the time in even with RL phone alarms. Tying it further into cooking in its current state just makes both professions measurably worse. We want people joining the game to have a good time and keep playing, right? Not get stuck in an unsustainable circle where they are just sitting around on their hands unable to interact with the site while they wait to scrounge up stamina. A lot of new players are not going to have the patience for that, and are going to play less or quit before they have the time to save up a burgeoning hoard of stamina generation items... Which sort of brings me to an aside, but related point:

Stop balancing the earlier parts of the game around the people that have been here the longest and have had time to accrue a bunch of resources. The newest crafting items are a great example of this-- they are a very early crafting recipe that takes something like 100? cotton to craft for a simple little accessory, compared to some of the released at launch crafting recipes like the scarves which take considerably less resources to craft. This isn't a suggestion to make the scarves take more resources. Recipe balance seems all out of wack for the levels they require to craft them, and erring on the side of being afraid that people who have been here long enough to have leveled crafting to 50+ will have an easy time crafting a low level recipe seems misguided & a bit silly.

(Edited)

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Link's Guide to upgrade costs

Expand Bigs & Tiny Food Options

1 year ago

Wisp

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im confused on where i'm supposed to read up on all this. i saw an enormous amount of discourse on the discord about it, too much to catch up on in one sitting, and maybe i haven't looked around enough, but i don't see a dev thread about this on the forums. the announcement sticky is the most info i've found. is there an official thread announcing the changes and what happened with feedback?

and now for my main concern

all this stamina nerfing and food make me suspicious that stamina is going to be monetized. archeage did something similar, in the beginning we had plenty of stamina to do whatever we wanted... then on official release, they capped it, adjusted all the numbers so there was less stamina to go around and more needed to do stuff, and monetized stamina by putting a stamina bottle in the cash shop.

if that happens here, i am out :x

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1 year ago

Gaia

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@Wisp, the most information available now is the community update on the front page, posted by Quiche yesterday.As far as I know the devs don't have a thread condensing what was discussed on the discord. I sort of tried to do that with this suggestion thread.

Long story short in terms of these plans (from what I've gathered); the staff was tinkering around with some stamina and cooking changes. Some of it accidentally pushed through to the live site, giving people an idea of what they are planning. Basically that boiled down to reducing the stamina value of a lot of raw/common items (Carrots becoming 5 instead of 20, I think some other common items were even reduced to just 2, cooked meat and fish being brought down from 20 to 10) and increasing the required ingredients for some of the easier complex recipes (cashew milk requiring 5 cashews, veggie platter requiring twice the amount of veggies, turnip salad requiring twice the amount of turnips, etc.), causing them to require more input (in terms of stamina) than they deliver in output.

The community update also goes into some additional changes that we didn't (accidentally) get to see, such as new simple 1:1 recipes that, as shown in the preview, don't actually yield more stamina, but serve purely as a way to level up cooking when you are low level..

I guess I didn't touch on that last part in this suggestion, but I did reply on the announcement thread saying that leveling up for the sake of levelling up is... not good gameplay.

But yeah the information is very scattered. I think in terms of dev announcements the community update is your best source, and I tried to compile a comprehensive overview here of the different arguments and ideas coined in the discord during the first hours after the update was posted. (Reading up on what happened during the night was too much for me as well)

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1 year ago

Wisp

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thank you @Gaia! i appreciate you taking the time/effort to put it all together. this is how i felt logging on and trying to sort things out LOL vvv

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