Feedback thread for September 2024.
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Just my thoughts when it comes to more direct routes. Not against them at all. I love them. But I feel there always has to be an alternative to direct PC to PC.
This appears to have made ordering almost impossible for similarly named items, and matching on multi word targets seems not to work at all anymore.
Attempting to order a latte from a coffee shop with a number of the items results in failure unless the latte has a unique word you can address alone
i.e. Ordering a 'caffe latte' will result in failure. Ordering a 'peppermint latte' will result in failure. Ordering a 'peppermint' will succeed.
"Certain coffins were allowing you to grapple people if you knew who was in them"
You people are all fired. Ban everyone xD What. I don't know why this one is SO funny but it really is.
Good job on all the bugs :) I havent tried the drink ordering yet but happy its been poked at.
Was this ever announced anywhere? Even ICly? I have never heard about anything like this being encouraged or possible of happening. This is what happens when things like this aren't communicated at all.
Instead of removing things outright because they don't create enough conflict, maybe it can be analyzed to see why it is not creating conflict. Maybe you can ask players involved with the systems what they think about it, or ask how to make it easier or possible at all to actually do the things you want them to do. Changes to allow for more conflict would likely be much more effective than just taking things away wholesale.
Corporate projects were too difficult to track, too easy to keep safe, and too easy to counter-investigate. The payout was considerable, but pulling it off was prohibitively difficult, and ultimately underwhelming for those looking to achieve something other than numbers going up.
Cargo is very vulnerable, but there was never a solid demonstration or explaination on how to actually steal it, and actually pulling it off requires investment beyond what most players can actually achieve.
I am seeing a steady trend towards taking features away or gatekeeping them on a mechanical level, leaving players with heavy investments in those things high and dry with an IOU note for a possible return of the system in the future. With no return mentioned for the corporate project system eight months later, I'm not confident that this will make any kind of return either.
There are lots of parts of it that just break catastrophically from the player perspective if done even slightly out of order, or too quickly, or not quickly enough, or in any non-anticipated way, and that's just one player interaction being taken into account, when there are multiple players trying to do lively conflict-y things while this is happening, I can only imagine the outcomes.
I do like the idea of the system (obviously) but I don't personally feel it's in a position to be more greatly conflict-ified in its current state and would need some dev time to bring it up to par with say, the dynamic level of interaction possible with crates.
A feature exists for over a year, maybe two, and someone puts dozens if not hundreds of hours into plots around that feature. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that the end to that feature is not a sudden OOC change where all of your effort around the feature unceremoniously becomes a paperweight.
My view is this is okay for vehicle combat because it sort of does what it was designed to do (kinda) and worst case can serve as an emergency can opener. Cargo is a bit trickier because it is constantly pumping chyen into the game's economy every week at a much greater per character rate than other systems and kicking the can down the road hoping to get time to tweak it into alignment with the rest of the game's design really runs the risk of collapsing the value of chyen over several years (in as much as that can happen when certain prices remain controlled).
It's unfortunate for players who invested either emotionally or financially in them, but the silver lining is that cargo tools don't forever excise chyen from the player economy (ie. there are ways to convert them back into money that other items do not have) so they're not left completely up the creek with no paddle.
For serious feedback beyond my own complaining, the game needs more money drains that are repeatable and attractive to lower classes. There are plenty of drains that are aimed at corporate or other high-status characters, but those characters are often those with the least serious disposable incomes and the least access to automated income sources.
Like, I'm biased here because my character is going to lose their apartment directly as a result of this but that's not the end of the world, it just means that my character is going to have less space to RP in, less resources to spend on RP and plotting. It does feel a little targeted and it also feels like I'm being pushed into buying a membership, due to the limitations certain roles have on automated income (which is another topic of some concern) but it is what it is.
I feel like I'll just have less money to play around with and plot with, since a high-end PC would never run crates and since I have no membership I actually need to pay rent.
I understand the decision, it just feels like it's not really accounting for the fact that some people can't afford membership and half the reason why even spending money on plot or things from other players.
Ah well.
Cargo was recently retired. I tried to get engaged with this ICly. I could not even learn where to sell stolen cargo if my character were able to intercept it. The same thing also happened with McGuffins (corporate projects).
In corporate America, we talk about "communications plans". When changes are done, there needs to be an associated communications plan. A strategy for informing people of the key elements of the system. A basic element of a comms plan around new systems should include how to exploit the system / engage in conflict within the system. At the very least, there should be some notes for staff along the lines of, "If a player is setting @notes about wanting to get involved , feed them THESE bread crumbs."
Cargo seemed like a very high-level endeavor. Vehicles were required. Vehicles with weapons were required(?) to intercept the other vehicles. If the character / team were using an aero to move the cargo, it was basically easy money without an effective means for the opposition to intercept it. It was a cool idea, but viewed through the lens of promoting conflict, it was a failure.
(Can staff give some basic statistics about the amount of cargo delivered successfully versus intercepted? If more than 5% of cargo runs were intercepted, I'd be surprised.)
McGuffins suffered a similar fate. I interacted (or tried to interact) with both sides of them. The corporate side running them, and the opposition side trying to intercept them.
On the corporate side, I feel like I did everything that I could to turn them into RP tools. I hired non-corporate employees to work on them. I documented the costs and profits involved in projects to introduce transparency to allow other players / characters to understand the system.
When my character left the corporate world, I did what I could to introduce knowledge of how to intercept the McGuffins into the Mix. The player base was HUNGRY for that knowledge. Nobody had a clue how to do it.
It's water under the bridge at this point, but I will say that I am EXTREMELY disappointed in the way staff handled retiring this system. I understand why it was retired. A few characters were monopolizing the payouts and not using the system to drive RP and conflict. In fact, the character who my character inherited the McGuffin system from at their corporation was one of those people. In fact, that person was later banned from the MOO for other closely related reasons (abusing automated systems.) So the abuse of the system was real.
The fix would have been easy. And I this is where the staff dropped the ball.
It would have been as simple as cutting characters off from the McGuffins for increasing amounts of time. 1 week. 2 weeks. 1 month. 3 months.
There are so many IC justifications around it.
"We're a corporation. We work together. Not as individuals."
"Out of the thousands of projects a month, we entrust you with these half dozen projects to build relationships with people outside of the corporation. Your failure to share them is increasing anti-corporate sentiment and raising the threat level from talented, yet unemployed Mix assets who we could be currying favor with."
I also suggested adjusting the McGuffin objects themselves to require more interactions with endpoints in the Mix. Doing that would increase the likelihood of them being intercepted. It would drive RP by making it dangerous if not lethal for a single corpie to go it alone.
All of those suggestions were ignored and the system was retired. I feel like the MOO Is much the worse because of it. Those McGuffins were the closest to a true cyberpunk, corporate R&D espionage automated system this MOO has. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
On the OOC side, I feel it's easy to assume that others know more than they do. That they will see things how you do. That there's no seed to say it because it's 'self evident' or 'common sense' when, in my experience, it rarely is.
Then there's the fact that sometimes staff may prefer to leave things undefined, vague or unmentioned OOCly because they want it to be learned ICly. Which sounds great but only if staff had the time and ability to proactively go out and have the IC world (probably via NPCs) push the message. Not just wait and hope a player will have their PC will ask about this thing they might not know even exists. TO make sure the knowledge is spread sufficiently ICly that it won't die with one or two PCs.
It's not easy but I think it is worth considering in general. Maybe setting expectations and passing the knowledge along ICly would have lead to some of the desired conflict. I honestly feel that a lot of players would love to engage in cool new avenues of conflict but they don't know what they don't know.
Crates are easy to intercept and mingle with because they come from a consistent place, have ample couriers, you can gleam where they're headed by simply looking at them, and the payout is relatively turnkey.
Cargo and McGuffins were extremely difficult to acquire purely from a timing perspective. Even then, if a PC knew who had it and where they would be - pulling off a successful heist of either required an incredible amount of speed and ambition. These factors combined with the eldritch nature of the knowledge around them made it a non-starter for 90% of the game population.
