- Joined
- Sep 9, 2020
- Messages
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Recently, there's been a lot of complaining about a certain category of plot, known as Skymines. For those who have been living at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, Skyminers are basically just low-quality prison servers. Yeah.
In my opinion, the complaints are justified, seeing as how these plots take little to no effort, and the devs seem to be supporting this category of plot, as they've recently made block-breaking related actions free. However, complaining about it isn't going to do anything about it, so how do we fix it?
Let's start by going over why these skymines are such a popular game, both in the context of making games and playing them. Skymine plots are, for both of these categories:
-easy to learn
-simple, easy to get into
-popular
Skymines are easy to learn because they focus on the concept of, well, mining. That's really all they are. Because they're so simple to get into, they get significantly more popular than other games, no matter how much effort went into these games. However, this is a fundamental problem with DF as a whole, rather than a problem with skymines. No matter how much effort you put into a plot, it won't get as much attention as something that's much simpler to get into.
In my opinion, the idea of skymines being simple to make isn't a problem. They're a great learning experience for newer developers. The problem, however, is when those developers decide that they don't want to make any more games, and instead just want to keep farming CP from their skyminers.
So how do we fix it?
From a regular player's perspective, there's only one thing we can do, which is fairly simple: Make more games. Like, a LOT more games. If developers keep making more games, there will be more games for new players to gravitate towards. On a higher level, the devs are perfectly capable of tweaking the way CP works. Maybe it could be changed to implement diminishing returns over a period of time, or scale CP decay based on the amount of CP you currently have. The possibilities are endless.
At the end of the day, we're arguing over a block game. It doesn't really matter in the end, but if you care that much about people doing the block game the way they choose, then get out there and make more games. If you don't want to do that, then I don't really know what to tell you.
-DogWithHats, AKA big crazy
In my opinion, the complaints are justified, seeing as how these plots take little to no effort, and the devs seem to be supporting this category of plot, as they've recently made block-breaking related actions free. However, complaining about it isn't going to do anything about it, so how do we fix it?
Let's start by going over why these skymines are such a popular game, both in the context of making games and playing them. Skymine plots are, for both of these categories:
-easy to learn
-simple, easy to get into
-popular
Skymines are easy to learn because they focus on the concept of, well, mining. That's really all they are. Because they're so simple to get into, they get significantly more popular than other games, no matter how much effort went into these games. However, this is a fundamental problem with DF as a whole, rather than a problem with skymines. No matter how much effort you put into a plot, it won't get as much attention as something that's much simpler to get into.
In my opinion, the idea of skymines being simple to make isn't a problem. They're a great learning experience for newer developers. The problem, however, is when those developers decide that they don't want to make any more games, and instead just want to keep farming CP from their skyminers.
So how do we fix it?
From a regular player's perspective, there's only one thing we can do, which is fairly simple: Make more games. Like, a LOT more games. If developers keep making more games, there will be more games for new players to gravitate towards. On a higher level, the devs are perfectly capable of tweaking the way CP works. Maybe it could be changed to implement diminishing returns over a period of time, or scale CP decay based on the amount of CP you currently have. The possibilities are endless.
At the end of the day, we're arguing over a block game. It doesn't really matter in the end, but if you care that much about people doing the block game the way they choose, then get out there and make more games. If you don't want to do that, then I don't really know what to tell you.
-DogWithHats, AKA big crazy
