2h ago
Gave it another honest chance.
So im a 2,200 hour veteran who stopped playing with the release of "maint" feeling the update was wildly untested and unbalanced and getting only " play by yourself if you wanna change settings" from dennis the unhelpful troll. i flat out quit the game for a Very long time. well i came back to give it an honest chance and...
the server i was on died. quite early. we had just unlocked lumber, but that was only because 2 people took on 16 jobs between them.
Maint: lets start with the obvious. things break too quickly. i mean WAY too quickly. 58 hours is what you get from a windmill before it needs to be entirely replaced. hilarious considering windmills still standing in abandoned fields turn with years of neglect.
and tools "integrity" degrades so fast its insane. makes zero sense.' ohh did you sharpen your axe? thats like..20% of a tool you cant get back' most players use it till it breaks, and then make a new one. ( not entirely bad idea, but once again you shoe-horned this 'feature' to try and force players to use obsolete jobs beyond their usefulness. so its not implemented well at all. instead of a simulated wear and tear youve got things like the magical 58 hour windmill that make No sense.) and players wind up taking their windmill down when not in use to avoid the stupid tax. which is Super unrealistic.
Upgrades: upgrade modules are entirely ruined as a concept now. none of us even bothered to waste resources on them. 5% off? when you think an single iron shovel needs 12 bars and 8 pieces of leather? jfc (feels like you use high costs to try and shoe-horn players into repairing them more, but they still just make new. so now youve got unrealistic costs and an ignored repair system)
Towns: forming a town requires people to settle directly next to each other, which is counter to how anyone actually plays the game. we couldnt form a town before the population got so small it was impossible to form one.
one of the reasons pop dropped so fast was farmers unable to claim fields, miners unable to claim mines, and industry having to be setup at their own homestead cause they couldnt claim anything else. so i didnt get to test any new govt features at all. (feels like towns were shoe-horned to force players together, but it didnt work)
Garbage: not.. entirely a bad idea. but in traditional eco fashion it was shoe-horned into the game to force players to behave a certain way. instead of implemented as a proper simulation that players should solve. why exactly can i not hand sort wood scrap from biowaste? why do i need industrial equipment to sort garbage at all? (because you wanted to force players to "deal" with garbage. but only in your very linear wildly unrealistic ways.) why doesnt making a landfill work? -_-
Information: the game has VERY poor information given on how it works, and because the player count is so low, the internet doesnt help. the only posts are 6+years old, because thats when people still played.
Example. Tailings. the in game wiki says " dont bury them! it wont help anymore! they need to be properly contained!" what does that mean? who knows. there is ZERO further information on what "containment" might mean. and trying to google it gets you ancient posts that just say " bury them ofc" i was told by someone on server the new method is " put them on a mountain peak away from all water and people" but ofc you cant Claim a second property so you either live in the filth or leave it unclaimed and hope no one screws you by taking ladders or ramps away on a whim.
Food: spoilage was a bad idea. and continues to be a bad idea. once again not simulated its simply shoe-horned in to force farmers to keep farming, and a punish stockpiling food as it turns to pollution (when in reality its compost? lmfao? should be helping plants..)
the problem lies in your misunderstanding of how fast things should spoil. the apple on my counter irl, been there 10 days. still crisp. the pineapple in your game? 24 hours its rotten.
And dennis, spare me the " you can adjust settings" no dennis. no i cant. because i dont play alone. and im not hosting the server. stop telling everyone the same thing when they RIGHTFULLY criticize the default eco experience. Balance your game. stop trying to force me to balance it for you.
Pending