Hello, I started having a discussion with cuycuycharles on Steam about the latest update that disabled the loss of skills and character saves on servers by default.
I wanted to bring this discussion here, cause in my opinion it damages the Blood Moon, Library, Character Jobs features. Also by disabling Character saves by default on servers, couldn’t this have legal implications on the Unturned Gold DLC? That describes that Character saves are available both on singleplayer and multiplayer, now that servers have them disabled by default, isn’t it announcing something that the DLC mostly isn’t going to provide?
Me and cuycuycharles are arguing from both sides, and I think it’s a really healthy discussion about what the vanilla experience should go from now towards the future.
I wasn’t aware that the gold upgrade enabled character saves, I don’t think many people will worry about losing that part of it though. The character customization or just supporting the game are the big reasons for people to buy it.
I don’t know if character jobs were ever relevant for people to use, but I’ve tended to play on servers without experience loss just because I didn’t like the system that much. It felt annoying to me since there wasn’t an option to automatically restore your skills on death if you had the experience for them.
The library will still have a use for sharing experience with someone completely new to a server, or if the NPCs on the map use experience as currency. I wonder how many people actually used it though.
If anything it makes the library MORE valuable since you retain more XP that way if you die. Also the character jobs feature is still worth using anyway since it makes some skills cheaper to level.
Thanks for starting the discussion about it here! I’m definitely curious to see more conversation around these changes.
Re the DLC description: When first starting work on 3.0 I primarily imagined the character slots as being very useful for roleplay. For example, this is why each character has its own name separate from your Steam name - so that you could have multiple names without annoying all your Steam friends. If I recall correctly that was part of the original idea behind character specialities as well. I personally believe that even without the per-character savedata in multiplayer it’s still a valuable benefit in being able to change between appearances, clothing, name, group, etc. I’ve always been very hesitant to change the gold upgrade benefits, so if there is a wide concern among existing customers I will listen. That said, I do think there are some cases where a change is important, like removing the old “gold” difficulty level which was questionably p2w - allowing everyone to fully customize the difficulty like we can now is much better.
I don’t want to try and sway anyone too much in either direction, instead encouraging debate, but I do think it’s relevant to mention that a skills revamp was voted high priority. Personally, I like how skill progression works in the Souls games - I hadn’t played them until Sekiro a few years ago. You lose all of your unspent experience but not the progress you’ve used your experience on, and the cost of skills increases exponentially. I’d probably be leaning toward experience working this way.
One thing I would suggest is I would recommend something to prevent people from resetting to get around the map or just doing it to reset hunger/thirst/immunity. Somebody who has all their XP invested in skills and barely any “loose” xp on hand has no reason not to just reset to refill their hunger/thirst/immunity currently.
About per character saves, I can agree with you guys, as I already agreed with cuycuycharles that said it was a way to abuse and store items out of reach. I think disabling this feature is a nice step to revamp vanilla. I just liked the feature, but i’m not the only one who plays the game.
But on the Skill/EXP side, I think we can do a better job of finding/discussing one or a couple of more fun and refreshing solutions to enhance the system and vanilla.
I think the main problem we have is that people don’t like to regrind to get to full skill, because is a very long and tedious proccess. But I don’t think a little bit of regrind is too bad, I think it slows down the pace of the game, when it comes to items, we can always get lucky on finding good guns anytime, but skills always takes a fixed time to max out, and I think could lead to more interesting scenarios than having everybody pvping always with max skills.
So instead of just removing the regrind, I think we could find a way less painful for players that already got to max skills. We could have use for example, of some sort of reactivation system for skills, where if you already bought a skill level, if you die and lose that level it would only cost small symbolic value to reenable it, that way fully storage libraries could maybe buy your full skills again, or even if you lost 50% of your EXP, you can still max out some PvP skills to get a second chance onto the action. Screenshot_1|690x485
That way, we can have some sort of progression save like Nelson mentioned with Sekiro/Souls Games, and also not stagnate the EXP economy after max out skills on a map. There’s a good video on Game Makers Toolkit explaining this on game design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrf1cou_yVo
I think we could think as EXP/Skills and skill levels as an economy system, and for an economy system, we need to think of ways to players to win/use/lose this type of currency and not just lock it at whatever point. I really think this could be very interesting.
