Topic

Baqala/Choru not as fun as they could be

I didn't enjoy the new time-limited zones very much the past couple tests, and here's why. You only have a short time in them, during which you have to run around like crazy trying to find Stuff. You want to spend as little time in each street as possible -- this is bad in and of itself, because it means while I'm in these zones, I'm waiting for streets to load a lot more than I am actually playing the game!  Worse, Stuff comes from blue flags. Blue flags are removed when any player touches them, and take a long time to respawn, relative to the amount of time you can spend in the zone. Therefore, it is strategic to avoid other players. My experience was that if there was even one other player on a street, it wasn't worth checking that street for blue flags, I should just turn around and go try another street.  But  an awful lot of the fun of this game comes from interacting with other players.  If I'm avoiding everyone else I'm not having a good time.  It does not help that my take seems to be no more than five blue flags per 10-minute window, of which only one or two is an item with interesting uses outside the time-limited area (my best ever run scored two seeds).

Street construction is more fun in this area (for me, whose Glitch still lacks a lot of the high-level skills) because the time limit and cooldown means I'm more likely to find a project where the things I can do aren't already done.  But there's only so much construction that can happen before the zone is full, and as the time-limited area gets bigger, it gets harder to get to a project with enough time left to actually do something.  (I have not yet learned Teleportation IV and don't expect to do so anytime soon.)

I think the area could be made a lot more fun with a little bit of tuning: specifically, I suggest that blue flags should be instanced (so whether I see any is independent of whether other Glitches in the zone see any) and rather than respawning on a timer, the game should flip an unfair coin for each potential flag in a street when you enter, with per-flag probability somewhere in the ballpark of 1/3 (the streets seem to have three or four flag locations each, so you'd average one flag per street).  This could then be tweaked up or down as game balance requires.

Posted 18 months ago by zwol Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Try using the hairball herb to go faster and the rube weed herb for better drops.
    Posted 18 months ago by zeeberk Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Heh. I love these zones for all the reasons you dislike them. I love running randomly through Baqala & Choru and only occasionally stumbling upon the blue flags. I've also taken my time and just wandered through. I love trying to mess with the jujus (you can, kind of, if there's a tunnel). Which leads to my rather unpopular opinion in that there are not nearly enough jujus ;) Of course, going slowly and messing around with jujus may be a less than optimal way to go through the areas, but sometimes I enjoy being non-optimal.

    I can see & interact with folks in all the other areas.
    Posted 18 months ago by Vera Strange Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I was thinking yesterday about the projects in Baqala/Choru and whether or not I liked them more or less than in other areas.  [Sheepy & I were in a car for 11.5 hours. We talk a lot about Glitch anyway, let alone when in a car with nothing else to do except read & construct responses to Glitch forum posts.]  I ended up deciding I liked them just fine, but for different reasons.

    I like (ok, love) project work in general because more often than not, it's a good burst of community and community-building (both meanings intended!). When you have New Streets and the local chat open, and people are donating resources and work, and updating fellow Glitches near and far, it's just...fun.  Heartening. Even when new people wander by and wonder what's going on, and ask the same questions over and over (hey, they're new, it's cool), and we're all complaining about fireflies and those goshdarned crystals (and auction markups) and so on...it's a community. I like setting up my blockmaker for others to use when I run out of loam. I like when people refuel it and others use it.  I like the sharing. [Purposefully ignoring the instances in which people have had their blockmakers stolen; let's just go with the good stuff for now.] We do a phase, maybe we hang out in or around the neighborhood for the 20 minutes between phases, and upon completion hey! we've all built something. At the end, we get a teleportation script to bring us back to the spot even if it's not terribly difficult to get back there at any given time.

    In Baqala/Choru, the imposed time limit and waiting-period-if-you-don't-get-out-in-time necessarily makes the ability to create a community much more difficult.  Then again, the projects are shorter and tend to be of the dump-resources-and-run variety...even if it's to run off and get even more green elements by mining and crushing because boy howdy, who has 65K greens on them to dump and run? So my approach to the projects there is different. It's more of a...game? People don't (can't) hang out in B/C and give project reports like we can in other areas, so you have to go in, do your duty (or not, if you don't play the game in a way where projects == duty, and that's totally cool, of course), get out, and either strategically make your way back in (or teleport) after relying on friends/New Streets to give accurate updates, and so on.  

    At first, I hated that. I felt like I couldn't contribute and my community wasn't there, and...etc.  But then I realized that I liked the challenge of it...especially when even the smallest donation to a project got you a teleportation script back to what could be a far-flung place.  Teleporting to that far-flung place (free of charge) and walking back to Kajuu could more often than not get you at least a couple items and some super-XP/energy/mood quoins, and if it didn't, or a bandit stole your stuff (I've lost two orbs to those jerks), well, then that's the game.

    For me, and of course everyone's MMV, that makes the B/C region not as meh as I originally thought it might be.  Although I do like the suggestions I've seen in other posts about buffer zones (e.g. not having two time-limited places next to each other).

    @zwol, I like your idea of instancing the little dohickeys rather than have them operate on the same respawn rules, though that does shift the paradigm of things (including quoins) respawning based on time. But hey, not everything has to be the same.
    Posted 18 months ago by Gloopy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • you might as well instance the entire region.
    Posted 18 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • An instance the size of an entire region seems against the spirit of the game. I do think there should be some unique rewards though. With the added risk of the jujus and the time limit from the nostalgia, there's not really any incentive to explore the region.

    And I do agree with zeeberk that there there aren't enough jujus. Baqala and Choru should be a "dangerous" region, but with that added danger comes added reward.
    Posted 18 months ago by Tofu Casserole Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There are unique rewards. Have you seen the size of the quoins? Holy smokes, who needs to exploit auctions when you can make a mint off the quoins? The drop bonuses are equally awesome. I like the hit/run projects because they are a nice break from the others. Outrunning jujus is fun, too. The more I play, the more I am drawn back to the badlands. With my herbs in tow.
    Posted 18 months ago by zeeberk Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I do like how relatively small contributions of basic items reward you with teleportation scripts that allow you to explore further-flung areas before the timeout.

    People don't (can't) hang out in B/C and give project reports like we can in other areas

    To me, that's a feature, not a bug. It's a rough-and-ready projecteering that suits the landscape of the area. Definitely more Mario-like, but being able to alternate time in other areas with B/C runs creates a nice texture to gameplay.
    Posted 18 months ago by Holgate Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I do like the large pay-off quoins and the random presents from the blue flag thingies. I am also highly amused by the jujus, and wish there were alot more of them (seeing 0 to 2 or 3 jujus per 10 minute visit is not even close to enough--they're easy to outrun and jump over, so why make them so infrequent?) I love the projects, although I like the regular projects better because I can spend more time on them and cooperate with people. 

    However: The projects were down to none at the end of last test, and even while there were some near the beginning, they were only in Choru, and it seemed unnecessary to visit Baqala at all. Without any projects to work on, the only goals are trying to grab quoins and stuff from the blue flags, which in my opinion is not worth the trip. The areas look cool at first because they are so different from the rest of the Glitchian world, but after the original novelty wears off it's just a bunch of the same drab (empty) landscape over and over again. The number of times I visited the areas dwindled slowly to none last test. I visited it once to bring a newbie friend along because I was excited to show him the cool features like nostalgia and jujus, but alas, we didn't see a single juju while we were there.

    There needs to be more to do there. I suggest having unique resources that can be gathered in that area and nowhere else (like prickly pears or something). Adding more dangerous elements would make it even more appealing (like an occasional black licorice juju that does more than just steal from you... maybe he teleports you to his underground cavern that you have to go through a puzzle or maze to find your way out of, picking up cool treasure or rare items along the way). It could also potentially lead to a new, dark area with Rook nests, where you are required to traverse through Baqala/Choru to get there (no teleports allowed). Without more stuff to do, there is little draw for players to repeatedly return.
    Posted 18 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @shepherdmoon +1 to the juju-leading-to-puzzle idea
    Posted 18 months ago by Gloopy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • -1 to any "whisking away to solve a problem"  I've played games like that and there is nothing more frustrating than wasting an hour trying to get out of some stupid trap you were teleported to. 
    Posted 18 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Worst part about these areas = No trophies given for street projects. They are the only reason I do street building.. I've gotten top 3 on like 10 roads in these areas all for naught :( I agree with OP though.
    Posted 18 months ago by Taylor Swift Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I agree with all the positive comments about the areas - texture, speed, everything is different in B/C.  

    I also suspect that there are going to be different things going on in those areas in the future, so I'm not so much worried about the "more stuff to do" issue.  Perhaps there will be a unique, un-teleport-able area beyond them so you have to run through them to get to it.  

    Also, if I could remember which B/C street I was #1 contributor on, I would link to it here....  Being the possessor of 2 pieces of different street trophies, I'm not so excited about those.
    Posted 18 months ago by jasbo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @WindBorn agreed, that is unfun & annoying. But Glitch already uses that "do you want to leave this place" option that ensure that folks who are in some stupid trap (or, say, had some "difficulties" with rook'related challenges at first...like myself, who is sometimes lame) can get out. And other puzzles/challenges to date (in the Tower, for instance) haven't been difficult, just different...enough to be interesting.  So I would imagine that they'd follow the same lines if ever they did something like that. Maybe. I hope. :)
    Posted 18 months ago by Gloopy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I missed the community aspect of street building when working in these areas. My only real "team building" experience was when I was lucky enough to be doing some work with @Jasbo. She showed up right after I did and we rocked out what we could with the help of one other lovely Glitchette whose name I cannot recall at the moment. 

    The hardest part about these builds is that no one can easily give updates on what is needed and what work remains. If we continue with these limited in zone builds, it would be nice to have a page view that shows the active projects and what is currently needed on them. Or a ticker of some sort. To go to the region to find out what's needed because no one is reporting it and then go grab what is needed is very counterproductive and likely results in getting stuff that is no longer needed by the time you can get back to the project.
    Posted 18 months ago by g33kgurrl Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm so +1 on B/C - I had such a good time with g33k....
    Posted 18 months ago by jasbo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Idea: two or more jujus at once, they could sandwich you or double team you to make it harder to get away. I swear to god I'm not trying to make this sound dirty.
    Posted 18 months ago by Tofu Casserole Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Awww @jasbo -- I <3 the close teamwork as well.

    @Guillermo - You don't have to try. You did without effort. :D
    Posted 18 months ago by g33kgurrl Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Hee, g33k - it was a great piece of teamwork.

    Also Guillermo, the jujus have done this to me.  They are definitely working smarter.
    Posted 18 months ago by jasbo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "you might as well instance the entire region. "

    This is hilarious, as I thought the same thing as I was sprinting through these areas on more than one occasion. The only clue that someone had been there within recent history was the fact that there were no blue question marks around. I find no compelling reasons to go these areas, depsite having 6 or more scripts as a result of giving quantity (1) to each project...which is a joke in itself. I only attribute the fact that I have 6 to curiosity...I do not expect a 7th.

    The project structure is horrible (no community aspect...AT ALL), and I'd rather have a project method to build on to my house than a street that I can visit for 10 seconds at a time.

    What happens to these areas when there are no projects left? Unless they are areas that completely separate from the other areas and are totally inaccessible by subway or other transportation methods, they seem to be a flash in the pan.

    I give an "A" for effort and "D-" for implementation. At least the way things are now.
    Posted 18 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm more confused that distraught here..... What are those underground tunnels there for? Besides the quoins, I mean. Is there some future use for them?
    Posted 18 months ago by KitkatCat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Ditto on instancing. When I am that severely time limited, I do not waste my time typing to other people.  I ended up only going in there three times because most of the traps I came across had recently been tripped, and then I'd find projects moments before I had to get teleported out of the area.  At that point I was too annoyed to wait on the timer to teleport back in.
    Posted 18 months ago by mirth Subscriber! | Permalink