Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Notenome]

Hello there,

I have over 100 hours logged into the RPS (rock paper shotgun) server of LiF:YO. Whilst overall I think the game is shaping up nicely to be a spiritual successor to Wurm, I do think there are some very questionable overall design decisions.

-A particular concern, and something that makes no sense to me, is that YO seems to be planned to be gimped version of the MMO. Why not include minigames in YO? Or guilds? I can't think of a single good reason to do this. Not only would it help to test and balance these systems for the MMO, but it would make YO much more appealing (and thus lead to more sales).

-Second, the game has started to show a great disregard for the player's time. For example, recently we decided to build a Windmill. A windmill requires 20 linen cloth. 20 linen cloth requires (25x20) 500 hanks of linen. 500 hanks of linen require 2500 flax fibers. 2500 flax fibers require, if we say an average yield of 4 flax per plot, 625 farming cycles and 250 hours of tanning tub usage. This is absurd. I could also site the flux grind, but that's already a very common complaint.

World of Warcraft (I know, I know) became the most successful MMO in history because it allowed players to log in and feel like they accomplished something even if they were playing casually. Right now LiF:YO is failing to understand this lesson, which should be even easier considering the strong crafting/building element of the game. This leads to player fatigue and disinterest. A week ago the server had 12 people playing regularly. Now this has fallen to about 6, and many are already expressing discontent.

I talked to the RPS journalist that wrote an article on the site about his first impressions of LiF:YO. Whilst his experience was plagued by technical issues (crashes + long load times), he was also exasperated that it took him 14 minutes to mine out a hole. If players feel the game is a gigantic grind with no creative payoff, they will stop playing. Modular building will, of course, help this a lot, but I feel there is a deeper underlying design decision here which might unfortunately doom the game in the long run.

Thanks for your time.

EDIT: Another thing (which may already exist and I may be ignorant of) is having a clear roadmap of intended updates. Space Engineers, another successful early access game, has regular updates every Wednesday and that helps to keep interest in the game etc. I'm not saying that the game should have a weekly update schedule, but I do think that regular communication combined with constant updating creates a sense of dynamism in the game which helps foster and maintain communities.

[EdmundGrell]

Outstanding post. I'm shocked this hasn't been brought up more. I have to just laugh when people ask me to make them padded armor.

We're currently pulling between 700-1200 Flax from our field roughly every 27-30 hours, AT BEST. Kitting out a peasant with padded armor is essentially having them walk around equipped with a large field's worth of flax and two days of work.

Leather working suffers the same issue, with an hour of drying time added on top of the tanning tub hour. To make one suit of Novice Leather Armor, I need to take 8 Furs and dry them on drying frames for one hour of real time, then take the dried hides and put them in tanning tubs for another hour of real time. Also, this does not factor in the infrastructure of chicken/hare coops and hunting that go into actually getting Furs and Hides as the raw material, equivalent to raw ore for Forging and Armorsmithing.

To make the metal-based suit of Novice Armor requires 64 Iron Ore smelted into Bars. That is a trivial amount of mining and smelting compared to two hours of material preparation for leather. Adding insult to injury, I can recycle metal weapons, armors and tools and get back 80% of the raw iron, which makes Forging/Armorsmithing skill grinding laughably easy compared to Tailoring.

The realworld time bottlenecks that plague the entire Farming skill tree just make it absurdly more difficult and tedious compared to Forging and Armorsmithing (and all other professions, to some extent). I think this is one of the primary reasons it's so hard to find and keep players in the Farming role in the communities I've been in.

TL,DR Badly Needed Changes: Linen and leather items need their crafting requirements reduced by an order of magnitude, at minimum. Leather and linen also need another fractional tier of material like Leather and Linen Strips added (akin to the Ingots/Bars/Lumps system of Forging). Finally, leather and linen items need to be recycleable into Leather/Linen Scraps with a building like the Bloomery (Tailor Shop?).

Regardless of the current imbalances, longterm, I don't think some professions being dependent on realworld timers and some being excluded from this time bottleneck is a system that is going to work.

[VindicteMortis]

I like that things take a long time and team work is needed.

If you start reducing it then you'll take away what makes LiF interesting and unique.

[EdmundGrell]

My point is not at all that things shouldn't take teamwork or a long time to accomplish. I too like the vanilla LiF server settings. My point is that there is currently a vast difference in time investment required between much of the Farming skill tree and Forging/Armorsmithing, or practically any other activity in game. This would not even be all that bad if the skill gain curve wasn't identical between skill trees, but it currently is, and is based on production cycles, not time required to accomplish those cycles.

For example, the typical Armorsmithing grind item is Light Chainmail Gauntlets. This takes 1 Common Bar, or in mining terms, 4 Copper/Iron Ore. This is less than the amount you get (on default Terraform settings) from a single mining cycle.

In contrast, the typical Tailoring grind item is Novice/Regular (Thin/Thick, whatever you are producing more of) Leather Gloves, which takes 1 Thin/Thick Leather. To produce this, you must either kill and skin a moose or wolf (Big Hide/Wolf Hide), or maintain a group of hare coops (which mature over the course of approx half a real day, giving you Fur when you slaughter a Hare). Once you have a Big Hide or Fur, it must go onto a Drying Frame for ONE REAL HOUR. This produces Dried Hides, which must go into a Tanning Tub for *another* real life hour. Only then do you get one Thin/Thick Leather.

The two activities outlined above are supposed to be equivalent. They both give the exact same skill gain. One activity takes 10-12 seconds. The other activity takes at minimum, two hours, assuming we completely discount the process of trapping small animals, maintaining stocked coops, or travelling the game world hunting moose.

This is the problem I have with the system. Not that it takes awhile, but that it takes one profession a week to do something equivalent to what another profession does in 30 minutes.

[Fluffypinkbunny]

everybody keeps forgetting the time it takes to cultivate the trees, for the wood needed to burn, and if you're doing it correctly, then you're also counting the time to not only make a kiln, (which is alot of clay harvesting) but also the time to make the charcoal. Oh lets say somebody cut's all the trees down of an area, BAMN we're out of fuel, what's that? you have water that replenishes it self from the OCEAN!?

There is always a give an take, I agree that it's "faster" to make metal armor, but in the long run, it's cost effective to make leathers.

[Nernums]

as far as your argument about trees goes, it's very easy to get a large amount of hardwood for charcoal to smelt iron with

the smelting is the only part of crafting metal that takes any time at all.

You can ignite a forge with a single piece of charcoal and make a couple dozen items while you have the smelters and kiln going across from it
Typically we smelt 80 ore at a time with 20 charcoal inside, since an ingot uses 20 ore each, and all this takes far less time than a typical hunt.


Should also be noted that even if you were in an area void of trees and had to go elsewhere for them, that you have only yourself to blame for not having sprouts planted and growing, since they can be placed down and ignored.

Rabbits die if you ignore them, and hunting is a long winded expedition on it's own, not to mention possibly dangerous since wolves seem to have titanium teeth and wear plate armor given their ability to heavily wound the members of my hunting party.

long story short:

Spoiler

trees dont kill people for trying to find them