There are ways to balance it out. Like I suggested, we could have a "overcrowding" dynamic that would make trees sick and die if there were too many trees on a street. For example, if a street's "sweet spot" was 7 trees and somehow Glitches planted 10, perhaps 1/2 of the street's trees would die. That would leave 5/7 potential tree spots, encouraging lower level players to plant new trees and starting the cycle anew.
I don't understand why people have to attack every new idea with "it won't work." There are lots of ways to make different ideas work, and that's what brainstorming is good for. It'd be more productive to suggest totally wacky and off the wall ideas -- not to mention more fun to read and participate in conversations.
I would love to be able to add new patches, because I would hate to poison a tree just so I could plant another--which is why I've only planted one tree so far (I've only come across one empty patch).
Berry Goode -- Have you seen http://glitch.alwaysdata.net/? It shows you where there are open patches. Right now there are only 5 in all of Ur, but I found it helpful when I have had quests where I needed to plant beans.
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Another reason I would love to add a new tree patch -- my housing block doesn't have any trees at all, and it's a pain to have to hand feed all of the piggies living there.
The ecology of the larger world has to be controlled from 'the top' so to speak. The highest level of design in world building is not for we mere mortals. Our role is more that of the toilers who do the grunt work. Perhaps some sort of mechanism for us to petition to a god could be put into place. But it would be blasphemous for us to be able to 'add a tree patch' willy-nilly. People would put it to uses that our Gods probably would not approve of.
I respectfully disagree. The Giants (and TS) create a framework in which we can rollick and create an interesting game experience. Posting suggestions and ideas for gameplay just help the Giants imagine up new and interesting things for everyone.
Well, certainly your petition here on the forum is appropriate. It's also appropriate for others to post why they disagree. We are all theologians here and the God stuff is open for interpretation.
One Man's blasphemy may be another man's creative suggestion. It's up to the Gods to determine which suggestions are pious and which are an insult to the Gods. Any of us can be smitten for out-of-line suggestions at any time. But the Gods are benevolent for the most part.
@Knitomaton yes I have seen it, but with patches so few and far between I always feel pretty sure someone will have planted them before I can get there!
If there's a max number of patch per street (and there would have to be), probably every street would have the max number of patches on it the same game day the feature rolled.
Edit: it fascinates me how almost no users who replied here actually read the content of the post, but instead replied with comments that were clearly entirely inaccurate to the suggestion offered.
Limit the number of patches each player can plant outside their home??
Have the magic rock teleport the player to a spot to plant a tree for the quests?? Random places your teleported to...Whereever it is that tree would be gone by the time the user was teleported there and the spot would depend on the type of tree the player wants to plant.
I did. I think perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying.
Knitomoton's idea, including the later revision several posts down, deals with trees dying if too many are planted. There is nothing there about tree patches being removed once they are created. Unless you are intending patches to die along with the tree.
If there is no mechanism for removing patches, the maximum amount of patches will be created soon after the skill goes live. It doesn't matter how many trees are planted in them.
@ ✦ SHI∇IΔΠ ✦:
I don't know what thread you thought you were posting on. Actually, your post could have been tacked onto any thread, since you added nothing whatsoever that had to do with the topic.
Tree patches are placed by the level designer. You only have to look at the notes you find lying around, then realize that 99% of them have already been picked up before you encounter them, to know how littered with trees Ur would be with this 'add a tree patch' option. There aren't enough streets in Ur for the people who would feel entitled to 'add a tree patch.' It's that simple.
Demyx - Sure, why not have a state where the tree patch "dries up" or otherwise becomes unusable and disappears? My basic suggestion is to follow the kind of balance of nature that can be seen in animal populations all over the world.
The goal is to introduce a fun new idea, skill, and user action to the world and to create checks and balances to the game dynamics so that it is sustainable over time.
It would be fun and interesting if trees had a limited lifespan. The tree would die after a certain number of harvests, and the patch disappear. To create a new tree a player would have to create the patch and plant a seasoned bean. An existing tree could be poisoned and replace without recreating the patch. There would have to be a limit on how many patches a street could support.
Call me a bad person, but I think it would be kinda neat if it were possible for some species to go extinct. Just to see if we'd let it happen. I don't know the bean-seasoning recipes so maybe it is possible, but I'm guessing it's very unlikely today as most trees are pretty useful. But what if there were one that were just pretty or sang to us and maybe had growth issues like wood trees or some other fragility? Evolving music based on the local flora would be magical.
Yes, I know, that was all totally non-responsive to the OP.
On-topic, I think it would be interesting to have more patches in the game or to have trees die more so we could have more interactions with them than pet/water/harvest and poison. Dying often wouldn't be very realistic, but if there patches were denser it wouldn't be a huge impact on resource availability to have some dying and some patches and some saplings. I guess I'd combine Lucille's idea with Knito's, or Lucille's idea with more patches in some streets. It's okay now, but I noticed one review talking about how the flora could change daily in this game, and I don't think that's true unless you poison, and poisoning may anger other players who liked the trees that were there before.
I do like some of the ideas here. does get a bit boring when trees are always in the same spots on every zone. maybe when a tree died, the patch could die too, and a new patch would appear somewhere else on that map. then at least tree killers would only succeed in half their objective, and would have to go looking for the other patch.
maps would then "evolve" as players killed and replanted.
I do wish that all residential streets came with at least one or two tree patches. Unfortunately they do not, so it becomes a daily chore to feed the community piggie(s).