Topic

Feedback on cooking changes.

This isn't intended to be a rah-rah you ran over my dog I hate you type of player feedback, just wanted to voice my perspective on the cap to exp on cooking, which hit me hard. :(

Now instead of spreading money around when buying batches of stuff on auction to cook, I do my few dishes 100+ times and then it feels like wasted effort. While I understood the changes to making noodles @ uncle friendly after launch, this seems like a sweeping change that's going to hurt the "player economy" in both the short and long-term. I'm certainly going to be buying much much less, making it harder for the new characters selling cherries/spice/etc. to get a nest egg going.

Not to mention, it's what I like doing. I'm curious if you're going to institue other limits? Mining? Can only grind X amount per day? Petting/Harvesting? I just think there has to be a more creative soloution than this one.

I learned mining after a week because everyone said it's the way to go, and while the money was nice, it's rather boring, and I find myself avoiding if possible. Cooking can help you scratch out a living, moreso if you go harvesting yourself, but for me the fun was in finding creative ways to take what I had sitting on my floor, mix it with whatever I could find on the auction, and make food to level up. With any luck I'd break even, or maybe even make a small profit after selling it in IX.

So that's it. Just wanted to voice one glitches opinion, and a desire for you to re-examine the situation. If I want to sit in my house gardening/nibbling/cooking all day, well by golly, I should still get exp for it! Some days, grinding is what I find relaxing. Now it feels like a daily quest.

Posted 14 months ago by XD Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I don't do much cooking, so I haven't run into the XP cap.  However, I'm inclined to agree with XD about this.  In another post, I've noted that "one person's boring is another person's bliss."  I understand XP caps on things like sno cones to disallow exploits such as buying and eating 25 sno cones all in one go to level up.  However, I don't understand why cooking the 200th meal should be treated any differently than cooking the 10th meal.  If Glitch is going to have anything resembling a real economy, people need to be able to specialize in offering specific products while getting XP comparable to those who prefer to engage in a more eclectic set of activities -- as both involve the use of an individual's real time.
    Posted 14 months ago by Splendora Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes. The XP caps on cooking, make no sense and have me reduced in how much I cook. And you're right; why put caps on cooking, but not mining or harvesting? And if we Glitchen chefs are going to be throttled, why not make the whole thing a lot more interesting and allow us to come up with our own recipes or give us a slew of new ones?
    Posted 14 months ago by Jarhaven Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I personally don't care about the experience cap. I don't cook for experience, but rather for food for myself or to sell (or give away). In fact, overall I care very little about experience: why rush to the level 60 cap? What am I going to do when I get there if leveling up is all I care about? Stop playing the game, I suppose. I seem to be leveling up just fine without even trying, so it's not a big deal for me.
    Posted 14 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Add me to the list of people perplexed by the xp max. I LOVE Glitch cooking (and bean seasoning). I HATE mining. Hate it. I get bored after one or two rocks. Since there is no reward to fry more than 2 batches of eggs or a batch of sauce, or seasoning more than 10 beans, I find myself spending less time on Glitch because harvesting goes only so far, and I dislike mining. I also agree about closing exploits like sno cones, etc. But activities that people like to do? Seriously? What is the point of playing if we are able to do only some activities without limit AND what is to be gained by forcing us all to be skill generalists?

    I should add, it's not about leveling up or not, it's about the seemingly random restrictions and dev desire to select the activities we "should" be doing by saying "ok, you've made 40 mild sauces, move along now to other things"
    Posted 14 months ago by Eureka Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yea, I don't care about it either. I'm going to cook as much as I want, despite getting XP for it or not. I like cooking, and I will cook a lot.
    Posted 14 months ago by Little Miss Giggles Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, while I guess I can understand that leveling is important to some people, it seems far less relevant in this game than in your typical MMO. The only thing level noticeably affects is your overall Energy pool, which means very little on its own since it only effects how often you eat, not how much.

    While leveling generally tends to be one of my primary forms of enjoyment in MMOs, I only do it incidentally in Glitch. Mostly, I just wander around harvesting whatever happens to be nearby while visiting streets I haven't been to before.

    Given that skills are learned real time and levels are largely decorative, focusing on the standard MMO tropes seems like it would be a losing battle for players. It's primarily a time/energy management sim with social elements.

    All of that said, the experience caps don't make a great deal of sense to me. On the surface, they seem like a Developer tool for encouraging diversity on the auction house ("You get 0 xp for this, so cook something else!"). While I suppose the idea has some merit in that it prevents everyone from just grinding the most experience-efficient food forever (effectively filling the market with nothing but devalued sammiches), it does sort of fly in the face of the "this is a sandbox, so do what you enjoy" approach of the game.
    Posted 14 months ago by Eleni Ivanova Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The difference between Cooking/Seasoning and Gathering/Mining is that, with enough currants, Cooking/Seasoning could allow you to generate an insane amount of XP from the comfort of your own home.

    Gathering/mining, while free, take a large investment of time to gain any significant amount of XP from. At level 29 I need over 60,000xp to gain a level and I can only get 20xp or so max per tree, thanks in part to my Gardening V. So, that's 3,000 trees of harvesting, petting and watering before I can gain that level. Even at just ten seconds per tree for petting/watering/harvesting, including transportation between trees, that's an entire 8 hours of real-world time, so the idea that gathering is an effective way to level-up seems somewhat unrealistic for anyone who doesn't have their whole day to devote to the game. If you turn the profit from your gathers into Sno Cones, that helps a bit, but still the rate of XP gain isn't all that substantial.

    Compare that to bean seasoning. At one point I was seasoning 40 Bean Tree Beans at a time, in about a minute's time, for over 2,000xp. If I had the resources, I could easily grind through that level in a half-hour just producing beans. Those beans sell back to a tool vendor for 120 currants per, and low prices on the base materials at auction (beans, spice, vapour and cherries) would put me at a production cost of about 110 currants per bean, meaning my bean production would pay for itself. Buying food for the sake of sustaining the necessary energy would likely leave me at a slight loss, but assuming you already had a small fortune amassed (50k+ liquid currants), the losses would be negligible in comparison to the sheer amount of XP generated. In other words, as long as the resources are on the market someone could level up very, very quickly. This likely explains in part why players have already managed to surpass level 50.

    Either way, Eleni is right - levels aren't really all that significant from a gameplay standpoint. Perhaps if there were more quests, then being low-level would serve as some sort of a barrier, but right now that's truthfully not the case. At the moment, the most quick and reliable source of XP appears to be donating to the giants - I can throw 30 or so Bean Tree Beans at a shrine and be rewarded with several thousand XP for just a few minutes of my time, not to mention over 1,000 favor. Perhaps you cooks should consider turning your products into donations to ensure you're getting the most bang for your buck.
    Posted 14 months ago by Alex The Gingerlion Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Though I don't agree with the XP caps on cooking, I'd have to say Alex hit it on the head in the last paragraph.  Now that I don't really need excessive amounts of money, all my awesome stews end up getting fed to the shrines, essentially recovering any lost XP since I tend to make 100 stews at a time.
    Posted 14 months ago by Mogen Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think Alex hit the nail on the head. The potential XP-to-time ratio of cooking is phenomenal, significantly better than any gathering profession (tree, crop, herb harvesting/mining) and presumably better than powder-making or engineering as well. If the other production professions start reaching the XP-to-time ratio of cooking/seasoning, they'll probably get caps as well.
    Posted 14 months ago by Weschelslas Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Would it be possible to code it so it was self-correcting? If ANY activity was generating "too much" xp or xp/hr or whatever, that it would then generate less xp automatically. Then you wouldn't have to arbitrarily nerf/cap certain things and get people mad.

    Presumably the whole idea of "experience" is that the more you do something, the more experienced you get at it, so caps certainly seem artificial, but it also seems a stretch to say that you learn as much the 1000th time you do something as you learned the 1st or 2nd time you do something. IRL, there are diminishing returns on practicing, but practicing does make better.

    A simple fix would be to just count the number of times a glitch does an action (which it seems the game already does) and have the xp reward be calculated by an equation with diminishing returns - some variation of square root seems simple enough to me, but I am not a computer scientist. :)

    This seems the fairest and the most like the way things really work, IMO.
    Posted 14 months ago by Paddy Pablo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm just hoping that they'll finally get tired of going after the farming/cooking/bartending skills and start picking on some of the other skills for a change.
    Posted 14 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink