View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0007465 | Valley 1 | Suggestion - Multiplayer | May 3, 2012 4:45 am | May 3, 2012 9:51 am | |
| Reporter | Tobias | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Summary | 0007465: Persistent progress over different servers. | ||||
| Description | I believe having an import-export character system to enable drop in / drop out multiplayer would encourage people to try it more often. This of course would make things like the way resources work need to be addressed, but the thing is, although this game has reportedly sold fairly well and is quite well liked by a reasonable number of people, there are a grand total of like four people playing multiplayer at this particular instant, and only one of those is in a server with more then one person in it. Here's my thought process, being semi-new to the game and wanting to play the multiplayer. I load up the server browser, join one in my region with one other player on it, go to the spell altar and spend like 20 minutes reading through all the stuff I now have to choose from, then go outside and get murdered by the first enemy I come across as I apparently didn't upgrade enough because it didn't tell me how much of the resources I have to spend from the crafting menu. I then decide to not bother with the multiplayer, because any progress I make in it will not count in my "main" "home" offline game. Progress is important. Playing the game is sort of fun, boss fights are cool, but the main incentive that makes the game so addicting is learning new spells and enchants and becoming more powerful over time. Being able to take your singleplayer character with all their enchant, spell, and unlock progress, go and screw around in the multiplayer for a bit with friends or randoms, then keep what progress you've made when you go back to your homeworld would greatly increase the incentive to do so more frequently. Continent count would be a balance issue, as it would be a progress ruining feature to be instantly given a whole bunch of stuff on joining a random server on continent 58 while you're playing at home on the first continent. The thing is that it would effectively be like playing on a higher difficulty, which is something some people like to do. Some of the most fun I had in Terraria was joining a hardmode/lategame server with my relatively new character and trying to survive in the insanely hostile environment. Seeing as continent count is already shown on the server browser, players would be able to look though and decide which one they want to tackle. Now, building resources. I believe the best solution is have spells and enchants, as well as the materials used to make spells, be stored on the character file, while resources used to build structures be stored on the world/server file. This would be similar to what is already done, with each player involved picking up "copies" of things like mission/boss loot, just removing the handouts to new players who join later. Allow the server operator to specify who gets to spend the settlement resources, I imagine dedicated servers would set it to all, while more personally run and hosted servers, say someone who turned his homeworld into a server so a friend could join for some co op, would only allow the world owner to use them. As for unlocks, this would easily be another character-side bit of data, working the same way as achievement progress does. Overall I think this would give the game a much more enjoyable and worthwhile multiplayer experience. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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What you're describing is a completely different game from the ground up. All the focus in this game is on the world itself, and pulling a character out of a world doesn't work on any level when most of their progress is inextricably tied to the world. Sorry... |
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I was just outlining how I would choose to do it. The underlying problem is still something I think needs to be discussed and hopefully fixed: not only is there no incentive to use the multiplayer, there is active reason to avoid it - you cannot gain anything from it that you can really keep, therefore it is a waste of time. |
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I disagree, sorry -- it's not something that's a problem or something that's even possible to address without redoing the whole game. Here's the thing: your character means nothing. All that stuff that you do in a world, contributes to the world as a whole. And resource you pick up, everybody can use. Any enchants that you gain, make everyone get better enchants the next time you get an enchant of that sort. And so on. So when you join a multiplayer world, you come in with everything that anyone else on that world has. It's not the stuff you had on another server or on your own local world, sure; however you're very much current on things with that server. Yes, you'll be a bit behind on number of enchants held. However, you do get some catch-up ones and you'll be getting ones of the same quality tiers as everyone else in that world. In terms of spells, you aren't behind at all; because each player can spend a copy of each spell ingredient that is found in the world. In all that context, bringing characters between worlds makes no sense. You could bring your enchants, I suppose -- but that would be incredibly exploitable and would also wreck the difficulty curve for you in any lower-continent worlds. You could bring your spell inventory, but it wouldn't function in the new world until you unlocked those spells, same as when you bring old inventory to a new continent. You could bring upgrade stones and wooden platforms I suppose, but those aren't exactly hard to come by. You could bring your character's graphic and name, but that's about it that really comes over in a context-free environment. Each character is so bound up in the world that they exist in that most of the attributes that make them them are literally attached to the world (and/or continent) rather than the character themselves. That's why this can't work. I think you probably did not know that progress in multiplayer is as shared as it is: all those crafting ingredients are shared between all players (not in a pool that we each pull from, but in a pool that we each get our own copy of, which is way more powerful). That really makes the need for character shifting not a thing. It's true that you won't be able to duplicate character X easily from world to world, but that's not really a goal of mine; the goal is more that you have interesting and world-appropriate characters wherever you go, without having to play 10 hours of catch-up with the other folks on the server. By the by: "I apparently didn't upgrade enough because it didn't tell me how much of the resources I have to spend from the crafting menu." Simply hovering over any resource in the crafting menu will show you exactly what you have available to spend. Also, if you just hit the V key (I think; or maybe it's C; I do it from touch memory) then it pops up the settlement stockpile with all the stuff you have access to. Feel free to spend any of it, other players on the server already have. Hope that helps clear things up! |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 3, 2012 4:45 am | Tobias | New Issue | |
| May 3, 2012 4:47 am | Tobias | Description Updated | |
| May 3, 2012 8:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| May 3, 2012 8:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0023344 | |
| May 3, 2012 8:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| May 3, 2012 8:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 3, 2012 8:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| May 3, 2012 9:13 am | Tobias | Note Added: 0023345 | |
| May 3, 2012 9:46 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0023346 |
