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LOL - rood here, yes! Born 12/19/2020 :)
Congratulations! :)
So, the scope of this game will always be to cater to the player who has exorbitant amount of free time and never the casual player?
I see 20 true professions in the skill tree at the moment. Do public servers or private servers retain the interest of 20 players consistently?
Edit: I have run servers before many times. I know how hard it is to keep player interest in a very grindy game like ARK, Empyrion, etc. It’s nearly impossible unless it’s heavily pvp. Eco is not like that which I truly appreciate. However, another thing players always want is logistics and not themselves doing it ALL the time without a goal of getting to the point of not doing it.
You say players like the menial jobs. Not in my experience running games similar to this. It is a rare person who enjoys that.
I unfortunately already disagree with this meaning we cater to players with exorbitant amount of free time. Eco is played in 30 days cycles and resembles society building, so playing daily is pretty much 'required' and is obvious for most people. A casual player for me is someone playing two hours after his work time. I know a lot of people of that kind that love doing what you call menial tasks through all that time and relax. Hell I know so many people that play a simulator game resembling their job (train, construction, bus, etc.) they did five minutes ago that even I question why that is - but they love it. I actually know myself very well as well and I do like digging without seeing the sunlight as well.
Official and community servers like White-Tiger do retain that interest - yes. And White-Tiger has been my former private server which did as well. It requires thought and active work by the administrators, of course. I'm hosting gaming communities and even clan-organi...
Read moreI don't see why though. The work were talking about is boring. With NPCs you'd still have to mine out a tunnel and prospect the ore you want to mine, you'd still have to at least plan and design the road to connect it, acquire vehicles, etc. The only thing you don't have to do is sit in front of a wall of iron and click on it. All the important planning work is still done by players.
It might be boring to you, but not for others ;) That's why everyone specializes in different things.
Read moreThis is my field (architecture - adaptive reuse). The quote I've shared is not something I made up, it's a common industry phrase. Consider this blurb from the National Park Service - "Historic buildings can be energy efficient. Per square foot, historic commercial properties rank among the best in terms of energy consumption. However, there is always room to improve a building’s energy performance."
There's a few factors that contribute to this. due to the inefficiency of early heating (and non existence of cooling), buildings were designed to maximize their efficiency for the time. the worst offenders are mid century buildings, but even modern buildings are often built to be totally reliant on their HVAC systems inside their sealed envelopes rather than existing with the environment like historic design did. solid masonry has much more thermal mass than modern buildings. The biggest issue is wood framed residential buildings - historic residential bldgs are typicall...
Not telling you you're wrong. I'm not from the US though and what I notice here is not following that.
it's the greenest building, that's looking from an energy efficiency standpoint. the labor already spent making the building, the labor demolishing it and shipping away waste, and the energy consumed manufacturing, shipping, and building a new building will almost never be overcome by the energy savings new construction technology will provide.
I cannot even agree to that. Old buildings are extremely energy inefficient with heating and that regularily goes as far that rebuilding it is better. It's also what is done if its not a historical landmark or just a 30 year old building you can make better with some foam around it - at least in my country. The stuff from the old building is then reprocessed for usage in new buildings. (And recycling is indeed missing from Eco, but will come)
"Is it too far fetched to have employees? Idk" - No. But those should be other players. Transporting business is big on some servers :)
I appreciate your ideas, but NPCs are simply out of scope. Everything people seem to suggest for NPCs to do is stuff we want players to figure out and do with other players. I know people that don't do anything else than building stuff for others, others love mining for other people in diggy diggy hole manner, some people love trucking around and others only deal with government all day. There is enough possibility for all this stuff being done by players - and that's what Eco is about and what we want people to experience when playing the game.
NPCs would take a lot away and go into the opposite direction of what we want. Work Parties and Labour were implemented so players need to help each other out, providing work for them. Contracts have the same purpose. And in a future update this will extend to schooling for learning skills.
... Read moreI 100% agree, but also worry about picking a time and how best to utilize. I have adhd and often find my 2-3 hours when unable to focus more closely resemble the productivity of someone more focused with 1-2 hours. Would hate to fnally get my focus train on the tracks only to get kicked. It does really suck as someone with a full time job getting lapped by another with a lot of free time. I think you just have to get lucky and find a private server of likeminded individuals. I for one would love a server where people out effort into realism and appearance in their builds instead of big box shaped minimal warehouses for everything, but it feels like an unfair rule to impose to make on a public server. I digress.
Such a rule even exists on one of our official servers, don't see it being any unfair.
I'd rather see a gameplay solution to this problem as arbitrary time constraints will probably never be perfect. Something that allows AFK players to progress in some meaningful way would be nice. In another thread someone mentioned NPCs. They seem like the perfect solution. Don't have time to mine? Hire a few NPCs while you go offline. Automate some crafts and voila you log in with a shop full of goods and some profit for yourself.
As has been mentioned before, that's against the design of Eco. Rather have some human do the work for you, wages are a thing :)
Sounds good, thanks for the info! I honestly think it might be something to look into especially if you are marketing to schools. Teachers might appreciate being able to cap how much their students can play outside the class.
Yep, we heard that, but it's rather something we'd then only offer for teachers via cloud worlds. It's a mechanic we don't really like to see used in Eco, but is possible via laws and player decision already. We just don't think limiting players by time is any good.
That is a shame because you are only encouraging players with lots of time on their hands to play on servers. Real life is more important than this game. I hope a mod dev will take the challenge.
However, you can still make NPCs part of the game without taking away from collaboration between players like the op said. Don’t let the NPCs do jobs. Make a whole new game mechanic for them. Increasing housing bonus if you marry or have kids etc. Have players fulfill requests like gifts. There is a lot you can do with NPCs especially with the government aspect which I never get into because I play with a small group of friends. But, if I had to manage a city of NPCs then I would explore that part of the game.
The creation of AI, which is what NPCs do is extremely time-consuming and difficult and given it's not even remotely linked to anything we envision for the game, using up the development time for this is simply not going to happen. It makes no sense.
Even for a marriage mechanic, we'd definately prefer players marrying other players ;) Government is the same thing. Eco is about governing human people. Learning how government works, how people react and being in place of those people often hate on - their government. NPCs cannot replace this.
Modders are of course free to give it a try, if they're interested in NPCs.