Topic

Reduce tedious clicking: harvest and crafting

It occurs to me that if there's one thing that will drive me from Glitch, it's the amount of pure busywork there is to do.  People are already posting auto-miners, and frankly it wouldn't be hard to build (TOS-violating, but invisible) harvest-bots and craft-bots.  I think they're inevitable.  And the solution is to do what eBay did about auction-snipers: build it into the game.

The reasoning here is manifold.  

First: tedious click-click-click isn't actually fun, and it consumes all the attention we might spend in the game.

Second: I do think bots are inevitable, so if it's not in the rules, there will be cheating, and all the acrimony that comes with it.

Third: it distracts from the social nature of the game.  When you're doing effective mining, you really cannot be interrupted for that 90 seconds, and it makes it hard to participate in global chat, much less have any kind of social anything going on.

I'd propose either: 

* an interface change that allows for larger-scale actions: mine rock away, massage&milk, make a Fecundity Powder (crushing and experimenting as necessary and possible).  The only improvement would be over the human delay of going between interface.  Energy and time demanded by the tasks themselves would be the same.
or
* a tool that could be added to the economy for different kinds of automation.  A jackhammer that is a fancy-pick-until-done, for instance.  This has a precedence in e.g. meat collectors.

Posted 15 months ago by Yarrow Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Although it's very tricky to balance these types of things (and prepare for an epic, epic whinestorm), i agree wholeheartedly. If this were a morr competitive game, i could see it as a shortcoming, but in Glitch it will just give me morr reason to come back and chatchatchat sounds GREAT!
    Posted 15 months ago by FlirtyvonSexenhaven Subscriber! | Permalink
  • How about a familiar that allows you to mine/harvest/whatever at a lower rate than manually clicking while you are away? You could make familiars subscriber only and sell accessories that augment stats on the familiar's skills doing different tasks. 
    Posted 15 months ago by Meebleforp Subscriber! | Permalink