He's a big believer in reducing fun, too. Magazine hunting really isn't fun.
As for the jars, that was an easy fix without adding the dew collector. They were so worried about people crafting tons of empty jars, they didn't think about an obvious fix: Make them non-craftable. Make them a little rarer. Reduce the stack size. Boom. No more shoving a beach's-worth of sand into a forge and making unlimited jars. Now we'd have to think about how much inventory space to devote to bringing home empty jars, we couldn't craft infinite jars, and we'd still have to think about whether or not making drinks or glue was more important at any given moment.
I love the magazine hunting. It feels much more rewarding when digging through POI's for all the secrets and loot. Fun is totally subjective. You believe they're reducing fun and i believe they're increasing it. Honestly if you guys aren't having fun and you aren't changing the game to make it more fun, then that's your problem. It's never going to be perfect for everyone.
All the "fixes" to jars don't solve anything. Making them non-craftable and rare doesn't stop them from being re-used. If they vanish after drinking then there's no point to having the empty jar to begin with. Reducing stack size doesn't help anything or make sense. Reduce the stacks to 5 each and you can still bring in tons of water per trip (if the water block isn't already in your base.) Reduce it to a single jar, now it's the same "weight" of an engine/battery/vehicle. It'd be weird, inconsistent, and all to allow you to still refill indefinetly.
The only people who seem to want jars are ones who played the early alphas. They got way too comfortable with unlimited water in their "tough survival game." Then you get all the realism/immersion arguments and it's hard not to laugh. It was a silly and ancient mechanic that should've
been changed way earlier in development, and TFP are paying the price for ignoring it for so long.
And? What does players number have to do with a game beeing fun or not? There re no other games like this, except minecraft...
Tell me another game with zombies where I can buid bunkers. Sometimes I just want to build something cool and after that the game is already boring.
Without mods RIP this game
If a lot of people are playing a video game all the time... then it's probably fun. If a game has very few people playing it throughout the year, then it's likely not a good game. Do you really believe that player count has no merit to determine how fun a game is? If gamers are choosing this and not the hundreds of other choices, then that means a lot.
If this game is so special that there's literally nothing else like it, then just play and deal with it. Mod and change things to suit yourself. The devs have gone out of their way to make this game as customizable as possible. "Without mods RIP this game... in my opinion" is how that should've ended. I've played thousands of hours without a single mod because i enjoy the game and i know how to change settings to suit myself. If you are bored then you're boring.
And it's not even 1/100th of the issue people have with sandbox vs RPG elements that people seem to be generally upset with to begin with. It's like finding someone bleeding so you give them a band-aid, completely ignoring the fact there is a gaping hole in their chest. Jars is a microcosm of a much larger issue IMO.
The issue is making a multi-genre jack of all trades kind of game. When you have multiple genres, some aren't going to play well together. The gritty survival guys aren't going to like the RPG mechanics. When you grow in power that much, basic survival like food water and shelter becomes far less valuable. You got people who love to build and hate the horde nights that rip all their work to shreds. People who want to sit in their base and spam-craft like it's Runescape and hate that they have to explore to get resources. How many sandbox games exist that don't have some form of progression?
People need to see and understand this game for what it is: a hybrid of many things. Instead of putting all its points into one or two talent trees, it spreads them out across all the talent trees. If you want this game to be more in-depth in a specific thing, then you have to change it yourself. The devs aren't evil for wanting to appeal to a broad general audience.
Sure, ■■■■ flingers are around, esp on steam, but it's cozy here on the forums and in all of the creators' comment fields that I follow to any extent (GNS, Woodle, kage, capp etc .. )
