Citan's Gardening Limitations

Hi guys. So I have some bad news -- two of the big limitations talked about here are completely intentional and aren't likely to change: having to travel to get water, and having a limit on the number of plants of the same type. Other limitations are likely to get fixed up when the new GUI system eventually gives us some more powers -- and I'll talk about what's likely to get fixed up in a sec -- but those two limitations are important.

Here's why they're intentional.

First, the water limitation is in part to make sure that botting isn't trivial. Botting is a fact of life in PC gaming and you have to design game systems to be at least modestly anti-bottable. We can write all kinds of bot detectors, but at the end of the day, if the gameplay is as simple as "click this, now click this, now click this, get XP, repeat forever", it will be VERY hard to detect a player doing it versus a human doing it.

Gardening is supposed to be simple. No major time pressures. Somewhat relaxing. It's a different kind of gameplay than most of the rest of the game. It's not for everybody, and that's fine. But a simple mechanic like this is the kind that other players want to bot the most.

Making sure that you have to move between the fields and the water source is a very potent way of limiting botting. Because it's a LOT harder to write a bot that believably moves your character around than it is to make a bot that clicks some GUI buttons forever.

Beyond botting, I think that having to walk around a bit is an important part of the gardening "gameplay", such as it is. It keeps it from being too incredibly mindless.

(But having to move between places doesn't mean you'll also have to click a million times on the well -- we'll improve that part, see below.)

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The second big limitation talked about is the limit on seeds of various types. This solves a lot of problem behaviors that would make the skill useless until you leveled it to max. It keeps max-level gardeners from being able to "drown out" low-level gardeners by just being much faster than them. Gardening is slow, and requires patience, and that should be the case whatever level you are.

I guess the easiest way to explain the point is to give you some example scenarios:

Scenario 1: players decide this month that zucchini is the most important vegetable in the world. There's a new spell that needs zucchini and people are paying top dollar for it.

Zucchini is a mid-level gardening seed (let's say), so most dedicated gardeners should be able to make it. But if level 125 gardeners can make 500 zucchini an hour, and level 70 gardeners can only make 100, then they might as well not bother. The high-level gardeners will flood the market, reap all the profits, and the only thing those low-level gardeners can do is level up to compete some day -- yawn. That's stupid design: a low-level plant should be just as gardenable by a low-level farmer as a high-level farmer.

Scenario 2: max-level players end up needing a lot of a certain flower for something. They aren't gardeners, they think gardening is stupid and boring and they hate it, but they sure as hell aren't gonna pay other players for a flower! No -- they insist on doing every single thing themselves. So they grind their Gardening to level 125 as fast as humanly possible -- with a lot of money, that's probably not too hard, either. Potions, statues, whatever else gets added. And then finally they can grow 500 of the flower they need and call it a day. Never have to deal with other gardeners.

The problem with this scenario is not that players can "twink" their skill with money -- I don't mind at all, as long as it's appropriately expensive and tricky to do it. The problem is that gardening is FOR GARDENERS -- that small percentage of players who actually find the gameplay relaxing and enjoyable. They deserve to have a market for their efforts. They deserve to be able to sell their produce and flowers to other players.

In this scenario, the player who twinks his gardening to level 125 will still only be able to grow 3 flowers at a time, just like everybody else. So if they really hate gardening, why would they bother? They are better off buying flowers. And that's what I want.

Now, I know right now nobody buys flowers from other players. That's a separate problem and one I'm actively working on -- there will soon be more tools to make buying and selling things like this much easier.

But a core limit is that *time* is necessary to if you want to grow a ton of any one thing. If you don't want to spend that time, then you need to buy from others.

The current system still lets gardeners grow more and more stuff at once as they level, because it's fun to have a big garden full of stuff. But high-level gardeners can't, say, flood the potato market any faster than a brand new gardener can. It's important that if potatoes are useful, the newbie gardener will be approximately as good at growing them as a senior gardener.

That probably doesn't seem important right now, but it will be more obviously important in time, when there's a lot more players and activity happening.

Hm, ... I could go on with more scenarios but hopefully these give you a clue about the KIND of scenarios I was thinking of when I designed that limit. In a nutshell, it prevents people from feeling that the "RIGHT" way to garden is just to race to max level ASAP. Gardening is a slow journey and the game shouldn't overly reward players who can race to max level.

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So those two things are unlikely to change. But things that ARE likely to change include:

- Having to click a million times to fill all your water bottles -- we'll have some other mechanism to save your wrists eventually. It will still take time, and will require you to move between the garden and the water source, but you'll be able to click once and wait 20 seconds (or whatever) for all your water bottles to fill. That will happen when the new GUI is available.

- Gardening being too boring. This is a tricky one because it's supposed to be relaxing -- not too hard or stressful. But there's some room for improvement, and we'll explore that when the new GUI gives us some more tools for simple interactions.

Basically, the new GUI will let me easily add a bunch of buttons when you click a plant. So instead of just a "Water Plant" button, there might be several different things you can do, depending on the plant's condition. If it looks like your plant's got bugs, maybe you want to use some bug remover... or maybe you decide to risk it and just let it grow, saving some money. Very small choices like that.

And it's important that the timing stays slow. So my goal with any changes will just be to spice things up so that it's not completely mindless. There should be ways that you can garden slightly "better" than other gardeners if you're paying more attention than them. But it shouldn't be something crucial, because I don't want you to have to watch your plants constantly like a hawk, either.

- General bugs, like "my plants can't be picked if I get knocked offline" or "my plant is hidden under the dirt and I can't find it" or so on. Those will of course be fixed in time.

- Better ways to organize your little mini-garden. Right now plants are spawned randomly around you. We may tweak that in various ways, based on feedback. It's just the easiest thing to code, so it's what we're using right now.

Anyway, that's the general plan. Things can always change -- even the things I've said aren't likely to change -- but they aren't going to change soon. They'd only change if I get the other systems in place and see that it still just isn't coming together. Right now, I think that the major limitations aren't in the skill itself but in the lack of market tools and, well, customers.

http://projectgorgon.com/forum/support/1822-gardening-limitations?start=10#12703

Take the potato, for instance. Potatoes are low-level vegetables and newer players are likely to need far more potatoes than high-level players. There will never be intense monetary value in a potato because anyone can grow it. : But to the extent that a potato has value, it should be value that can be equally earned by newbie farmers as by anybody else. Why? Because the point of being a pretend gardener is to make pretend money for your pretend food, and you should be able to do that as soon as possible. Obviously high-level players shouldn't be pushed out of a market artificially, but they shouldn't be able to inherently out-produce newbies in the newbie market. It's not realistic, but it's more fun if everyone has a chance to make money. So that's the background that should always be in mind: what is going to be fun for the pretend-food-producer as they level up?

The worst-case scenario is, unfortunately, very common in MMO crafting: a mindset that the skill is completely worthless until you max it out. I very much want to avoid that, because maxing out skills is going to be very time-consuming and if the fun doesn't start before that, the game fails.

In my scenario #1 above, I was hypothesizing about an item fad. We've already seen these show up a lot, and I expect they will be a routine thing in the game post-ship. Every time there's a new update, people will be excited about it for a few months and want to level up the new skills, and then demand will drop off. But it's exciting (for crafters) while it happens, and everybody who's leveled up their skills enough to produce the item should get an equal cut of the money.

Higher-level players will naturally have MORE of these opportunities than low-level players, because they can produce more kinds of things. And that's enough of a reward for leveling. They shouldn't ALSO be able to take more advantage of the lowbies' opportunities, too. That results in it being more fun for high level players than for low-level players, and lowbies will naturally resent them. And, ultimately, they'll get into the mindset that they can't "really" sell stuff until they max out their skill. Not fun.

Another aspect of real-world markets that doesn't apply to MMOs is the idea of prices evening out to a reasonable level of profit. The problem is that games reward players in lots of different psychological ways, and some players are more than willing to forgo the reward of "making pretend money" for the reward of "earning pretend skill levels" or "dominating the pretend potato market" or whatever else. This is why in most MMOs with a global auction house, lower-level crafted goods almost instantly sell for well below cost. That's incredibly un-fun for the person who actually wants to be a pretend farmer.

While some level of competition is inherent in any market, which will slowly drive the prices down (and, for some things, drive them to below cost -- I expect potatoes will eventually be sold for next to nothing), we are taking some pains to minimize that effect for as long as possible. For instance, there's no plans for a universal auction house because that drives prices into the ground very quickly by making every producer compete with every other producer at once. It's pro-consumer, because they get the best prices possible, but not fun for crafters at all... unless they're strong enough to compete in the world market.

Instead we're going to try to straddle that line between features that are pro-consumer and pro-producer. It's a very tough job but some games have done it fairly well in the past and we can use those as models.

http://projectgorgon.com/forum/support/1822-gardening-limitations?start=10#12708