Topic

Player interaction is a good thing

And it's too hard.  Right now, it's easy enough to chat with people and splank them.

But it's horribly difficult to set tasks for other players.  TS says that the biggest overall problems with Glitch are new players figuring out the game and old players getting bored.

I've been a longtime proponent of buy orders in the auction house (or something like) partially because of this.  If I could log in and see that, say, Bricks were in demand, I know that I should make bricks today, instead of just harvesting meat and dropping it into the auction house or tool vendor.  Even just knowing that I was making meat for a particular player would be better than dropping my product into a currant generating black hole.

But every time I look for a way to do something like this, there are roadblocks.  Trades: you have to be online at the same time.  Mail? One good at a time, and a surcharge.  Auction house?  Prices driven (only down) by supply, never by demand.  

Playing by myself?  All kinds of easy there.  Skills depend on each other such that I might as well do everything myself.  I don't have to wait on me to produce whatever.  And I've got a house!  A whole private domain where I can set up my plans and do things by myself.  Oh, but now I'm one of the bored older players.

In some ways, I see the Sandbox group as an underscore on this front: people are making up things to do with Glitch, because there's nothing better to do.  

How player interaction would help new players is less immediately clear.  I suppose that if I could hire employees or set up purchase stations, then some of the elementary tasks would be obvious for new players to do - and there'd be a demand for starting players since they'd be cheap - remember when 500c was a fortune?

Posted 13 months ago by Yarrow Subscriber! | Permalink