Twilight Forums

I'd just like to suggest that instead of the underwater equipment rentals being taken at rollover, they simply last for a set amount of time. The clock/time mechanic is already a large portion of the setting and interface, so I doubt it would be difficult, and it seems to make more sense narratively as well.

As it stands now, the potential is for rentals to be available for longer or shorter periods of time depending on real life time to play or when in real life you can play. If you just say "you can have this rental for X hours" and get a little event notification, that standardizes everything.

This would also seem to help if other rentals (cars, equipment, outfits/costumes, etc.) were introduced to the game.

Just keeps everything reliant on in-game time, versus meta-game time.

Right, but if you were running the rental shop, you would be foolish to say "Hey, sure, you've got these items for 120 minutes", figuring folks would bring them back in two hours. What if they use them for 5 minutes today, 0 minutes in the next week, and then finally over a week later, use the other 115 minutes.

From the standpoint of the guy running the dive shop, it makes much more sense to have them all returned at rollover (id est, the next day), than to stick a timer on them. Poor guy may never see them again if that player decides not to play for a while. This way he stays in business.

Won't someone think of the dive shop guy here?

_________________
The Devirginizer #90

I think that you have your idea of game time all wrong. If the player doesn't play for a week, and then plays 2 hours worth of turns, in effect, only 2 hours have past - the owner of the dive shop has not been waiting a week for his his equipment, he has only been waiting two hours.


I think the way it would work, (as long as there weren't to many rental items), is that where the buffs are, it would also say the rentals and how many minutes you have left. Upon expiration of those "buffs", the rental items would be returned. This sort of action upon the termination of a buff mechanic is already in place with mangled data plates. If, on the other hand, there were enough rental items implemented that it filled up the character pane easily, then the rental items and the times left could be listed on either the character page, or maybe somewhere in you hideout - possibly your journal. The journal could have a page where you keep track of what you are renting in order to return things on time.


Of course, this would require the game to limit each person to one rental of each item at a time, otherwise the game would have to keep track of specific items. As far as I know, from experience with Jick in KoL, that is something that is way to taxing on the database. While normally each item takes up only one row, even if you have 500 of that item, items that are individually tracked each take up a row. (That's the extent of my knowledge on that subject.)

Clearly the counter wouldn't advance solely when you were using the rentals, that'd just be totally unrealistic. The game rental place doesn't care if you actually play Spanky's Quest, just have it back on time.

The real reason for this change being to eliminate the meta-gamey aspects of rentals as they stand now.


And yeah, neocamp22, that's sort of the way i thought it could work as well.

I don't have a personal opinion on this issue, but what you're saying isn't quite right. The days still change.

Personally, I just skip the whole rental thing altogether...

_________________

The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

I can't imagine this would cause a significant change in rental strategy for most people? And the chip count is small enough to not worry if you have to do it twice IMO.

I'm not really sure I follow this particular aspect of the argument. Rollover is always taking you from one morning morning to the next evening, and there's all kinds of real-life rental places that say "have it in by the end of the day." Or, in the case of this all-night dive shop, "have it in first thing in the morning, so we can rent it to the day-shift divers." If anything, I'd argue that's LESS metagamey than "you've been swimming around underwater for 120 minutes, and even though you're not done, your equipment just disappeared because it's a rental."

Also, with three pieces to rent, you'd have three separate timers filling up your effects section, and that kind of seems like a waste of space to me.

Wow, I completely forgot half of the game when I wrote my previous post in this thread. Ignore it.

Well, i guess this is sort of where the game time breaks down. Because it seems like time does and doesn't advance. I mean, it goes to the next morning, but you keep some time from that night on your clock and other counters don't advance. (I should be able to set my computer to decrypt during work, and have it be done after rollover, right?)

The real meta-game time i'm talking about is the real-life time to play. Having them reset on rollover gives an advantage (usually a small one) to people who have more time in a day to play. For example, lately I've had limited time to play, and mostly just before rollover. Since i'm working on the underwater stuff, I need to get the rentals. But since I have limited real-life time to play, I can't sit down and crank out the quest in one shot. So my play compared to someone who can, is going to be "sub-optimal" and that is completely a result of factors outside of gameplay.



Maybe that's an inelegant solution, but there would seem to be other options as well.

You leave your computer running all day while you're at work? Do you not care about the environment at all? What's your superhero name? "Wastes electricity man"?

As for time building up from night to night, think of it this way - if you stay up until 10pm tonight instead of 5 am, you'll be well rested tomorrow, and then tomorrow night you'll be able to stay up even later. It works the same way for heroes. When they push themselves to the limit night after night, they don't get much of a chance to rest, and then can only go out for a minimum amount of time. However, if they turn in early once in a while (banking turns) the next night they feel refreshed and in addition to their usual amount of sleep (rollover turns), they managed to get some more rest.




I really fail to see the problem with this. It's not progress quest. Logging in daily and actively playing daily should give you an advantage over people who don't. It may be an advantage of resources, turns, stats, or convenience, but there will generally be a reason to log in to a game and play it if you want to gain something within the game.

_________________
The Devirginizer #90

Person A is able to log on for 2 hours sometime during the day. They rent the equipment once, and get to use it for all 2 hours.
Person B logs in an hour before rollover. They rent the equipment once. It disappears at rollover. After rollover, they play another hour, possibly renting again.

They both deticated the same amount of time to the game, but person A has an (yes, very small) advantage.

And there are real-life rentals that are done by time. But I guess that still doesn't work if every rollover is a new day. I personally see no satisfying solution to the problem at this time.

_________________
<==
Well, I've got a hat!

I think the satisfying solution is for each person to decide whether they have enough time to make use of the rentals, and if they feel they won't have enough time to get their arbitrary-length-of-time's worth out of it, they won't rent the stuff.

Or, you know, they will, and hopefully maybe learn from their mistakes.

_________________
out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Well, if i've going to have it be running something that both takes a long time and apparently utilizes 100% of the computers power.. then yeah, i'm definitely going to have it running when i'm not there.

Do active effects run out through rollover? I mean, now you get into different types of buffs, equipment ones legitimately would likely stay active, but if this is the answer, then do physical effects expire while you're at work? I ask because I honestly don't know how it's working in the game.



I really fail to see a reason for arguing against it, except that it's the current status quo. What is the gameplay advantage of having rentals be vanish over rollover instead of a set amount of game time? ie, How would having a set time for rentals screw over anyone? Just set it for a sufficiently long enough time, and it wouldn't matter, except that it would eliminate the potential screwage i've talked about.




Well, maybe this was a bad assumption, but my impression is that with these types of games, you generally want to eliminate that sort of advantage whenever possible. Which is part of the whole point of having "turns" in the first place.



First of all, am I just really missing something about the underwater quest where you don't need rentals? because as of right now, i'm not seeing how rentals are optional if you want to finish quests, and several people have mentioned just ignoring rentals. I guess maybe the stuff drops in a zone i haven't fully explored yet...
Secondly, this "satisfying solution" is not at all satisfying for anyone under real-life-imposed game time restrictions, and it's rather presumptuous of you to assume that it's a "mistake."

At this point, I get that I'm apparently beating a dead horse, so I'll leave off. I'm still not convinced though.

I think this is where I step in and say "all right already." Both sides are pretty clear, and I can see that either perspective has advantages and disadvantages. However:
1) The current option already exists and works reasonably well
2) Picking the other option would be much more of a pain to program for, PLUS
3) it would leave the other half of the crowd feeling as put out as the first half does now, PLUS
4) I kinda like it the way it is.

Thus, it's not likely to change. I'm not unsympathetic, I just think it's one of those things that could go either way, and I don't see that there'd be a global benefit from the changes. Lots of work to still leave half the people unsatisfied just isn't worth the effort, as far as I see it. That's one of my general philosophies.

On the bright side, when the server isn't a mess, you'll be able to burn 5 times as many turns as you can now, meaning you'll be able to get that much more use out of the rental. So that's good, yeah?

I've just come across an item that does indeed make rentals optional. It wouldn't surprise me if a class or two didn't need items to adventure underwater, but being a gadgeteer, I do need at least the one item.