Musing on the Building System

[quicklite]

@gb, I like your idea, but I feel like it's a completely different take on building. So, I'll just go over both our things in detail, in a pros-and-cons-ish fashion. Because hey, that'll help put things in perspective, and we might be able to draw some sorta compromise from that.

For the record, I'm gonna try not to be biased towards myself, but if I am, please call me out.

My idea

Pros

-Encourages co-operation: As stuff is such a pain in the ass to create, you need to work together to make what you want.

-Satisfactory rewards: After piecing together a facility, you get visible, awesome-looking, directly useful rewards which you can actively enjoy a heck of a lot more than a series of de-buffs, thus avoiding the 'grey goo' problem.

-Fits perfectly with the item system: Since starting, finishing, and then upgrading facilities is all tied in with the current dropabble item system, it will help tie building and construction into finding items, trading, and the item marketplace.

Nice sense of progress: Since you are crafting together pretty friggin big facilities, you get the feeling that you are helping with a massive project, giving you a sense of accomplishment as you piece the facility together.

Cons

Tedious as hell: Although you are technically supposed to work together to achieve this, and you are technically working on different pieces, there's a high chance that it'll just boil down to a fancier-looking version of the current facilities: Takes a while, and you really don't wanna bother when you can just dump them elsewhere for faster results.

What about gridshards?: This one is simple: if gridshards are lost on death, and you need items and gridshards to effectively build, then what do you do if you have the gridshards, but not the items? Drop everything and begrudgingly put your hard work into something else? Make an alt to save your gridshards? Try not to die? Jeez, these are sounding stupider by the minute

Encourages selfish behaviour: "So, you 20 guys seem to be working hard on this facility, eh? Oh, what's that? You need an item to finish it off? Just like the one I have here? Well, I should be a helpful player and help finish this, but since I do own the item...one of you guys better hack up 70 coins :3." <--This could happen. It might not happen, especially with the current community, but it definitely could.

Disrupts the flow of the game: There are 2 main problems with the current facility system: 1) The results from building facilities are there, but barely visible, not that much fun, and not experience-enhancing by any means. Although this idea covers 1) pretty well, it falls behind on 2): In a game like this, where you can do what you want, at your own pace and time, with a feeling of constant movement and progression, you do not want to spend your time dumping stuff into sockets. Which is why people prefer to just dump their shards into the single city center socket, rather than 10-20 facility sockets. Although sockets would be tougher to fill here, there would still be a walk to your chosen facility, and then the wait to choose what sockets to work on, and then the wait after that as your tank does the dumping. Although it isn't that long a wait, it definitely leaves a significant dent in the experience.

GingerBear's idea

Pros

Fast: There is a build mode button in the city. All you need to do is click on that button, click on your facilities of choice, deposit your licenses, and then watch as the results of your efforts appear all around you. It doesn't 'disrupt the flow' like my idea, doesn't involve any tedious movement or dumping processes, it just happens.

Makes you feel real important: The ability to just press a few buttons and cover a good chunk of town with colorful facilities makes you feel like you are generally contributing to the success of the whole server, and that you are really changing things, and that I can appreciate.

Easy Customization: Since you have everything in display and at your mercy, you can really pick out the exact facilities you want to build, and the exact ones you want to aim for, giving you a nice short/mid-term, in-game 'plan' build-wise.

Still some room for impressive facilities: Especially with the upgrading and progression system of facilities, you can still craft up some really game-changing facilities if you wanted, so this change doesn't necessarily mean 'no cool, big ones'.

Cons

Building big, cool, facilities will be no less tedious: Okay, so you can spit out legions of little facility things. This encounters the 'grey goo' problem addressed by amit and rob. But you can also customize and build and upgrade for bigger ones, but I still feel like this will be pretty annoying. If you're gonna give people choice, give them all the choice. Don't say 'Hey sure, you can build this...as long as you build 100 of these first, no matter if you actually like what they do'. I mean, once you're done perfecting your tree, cranking out the necessary small ones for said tree, finally getting the more complicated ones, then getting the materials for that (let alone upgrade it to a status of 'game-changing' usefulness), you would have spent a lot of time, and you would still have a grand total of...1 cool facility, as well as a large swarm of other, smaller, de-buffy ones which you may or may not have wanted.

Almost no co-operation involved: You can't help people here, nor can you really team up with people to build a group project. Everything is dictated by yourself, and there is really no room for compromise (facilities of different types damages that ideal tree of yours, not to mention taking up precious facility space) which would not only contradict the 'teamwork' style of grid, but it would also lead to the headbutting of players whose ideas collide, simply due to the fact that they can't fit together 99% of the time, because everybody is forced to do their own thing.

Items aren't really involved: Okay, building licenses are picked up often, but they can't be melded, traded, swapped, stashed, or really used in any other way than spent. As rob asked that he'd like any building features to be tied into the item system at least somewhat, I think there should be something that connects building licenses to the item system, at least somewhat.

Not much room for innovation: Since everything has to be tied to the same old de-buffs, it would be hard to really break off and do something completely original, and even if this was done, it would involve a lot of stages and a lot of tediousness, both on the part of the devs and the actual players. I think that if someone wants to do simple, they can go ahead, and that crazy should be harder, but I also think that if someone wants to go crazy, if someone sees something really cool and unique and thinks 'dang, I wanna make one of those!', they should be able to do so right off the bat, given the quick, easy, convienient, flow-like style of this idea.


Well, that's my thoughts, anyhow. If a few of the cons were mis-guided, feel free to point out how. Anyways, my idea would to be to try and make some sort of combination of the 2: Not sure how that would work, but I think it could work, and it would be fun to capture the best of both worlds.

[gingerbear]

WALL OF TEXT ALERT. Scroll down to the separator line for the idea, if you feel like tldr.

@ql:

Just a minor correction: I didn't say that structures should be limited to the current system tech&type mechanics, there has been many examples of other kind of buildings by many participants, I took it for granted that an innovation of sorts will take place. I left it out of the last post because currently we are discussing how should be buildings built instead of what kind of buildings built (and whether they are tied into a tech-tree might be also irrelevant at this point).

Nevertheless, what to build on the limited amount of slots could be a question indeed. Since no-one really bothers now I don't think it would pose a problem... unless, of course, building stuff will become the best thing in the game.

Leveling cities only makes sense if we get "more" with the leveling, which also means that it has to be limited by default. Since as you said this would lead to collision, that's why I suggested to have a fixed set of choices: you won't argue which thing to build up because you can build up each of them, by participating in the construction of whichever you feel like. True, this might have a feeling of "building stuff next to each other" instead of "building together", but if people pool their resources to upgrade the same thing then it's kind of the same, no?

Oh, by upgrading I also meant the same building. So it's not "cracking out a tons of minis" to be able to get to the end of the tech-tree, but upgrading the same building which gives better and better benefits, unlocks new types of buildings or addons. So teching up will remain root-like, linear, instead of being a pyramid. So it won't be 1 cool + lot of crap, but one line of cool buildings that work towards the same goal.

I disagree with "giving them all the choices". There won't be a sense of progression. Why would I build something inferior when I can build the best already?

As to the item system, you are right again. I think the building system is not really fitting there: right now all your equipment is to your only benefit. The cost is that you need storage space to hold them, to meld them. Whereas buildings are a global benefit. Would you feel it as a cool feature if you had to store / meld / use them the same way as other items, or would you just say "meh, this just takes up space, let the others bother with it." Wouldn't it be the same like clearing, but only item-wise?

The problem of merching building pieces can be easily solved: make it invisible for the market. This would of course limit the "team play" aspect, since everyone will have to collect it by themselves.

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A solution to this could be the "City Center Melding Station", dedicated to "building items". Let's give each city a building part storage, for example 3 slots + current city level, with the ability to automeld already included items. This way the city level will roundaboutly limit the building levels since you can't make a module too high in there. And at this point you can feel yourself important: no-one would stop you melding things privately in your tank storage, only to be able to chuck it into a city later on (resulting in cool high level buildings even though the city itself is low).

However, if this melding area is public, then other people will be able to use your hard earned piece at their will, so I think this melding area should be available for personal use only, with the option to be able to "give" individual items for others to use. Due to the automelding system the "public" list of building pieces would always stay relatively short. This public list could be melded further together but would remain in the public section, so you can't cherry pick high public items to build your own projects privately. However, you could use these items for building directly, so there is no need to steal anyway.

This is just a more-less idea, as I feel the whole concept of melding / storing things for building kind of clunky, even though that would fit the current game well. I'm positive I could come up with a better idea later on, so expect another wall of text sometime.