In the category of being stress rather than slack

[brynndragon]

So, A Tale in the Desert is not a game you can play if you're not willing to put in at least an hour or three a day. I hadn't been able to play during the week and came back to find that everything I had gained and made since the game began had degraded into being either inaccessible or unusable. That medium stone I got for spending two hours on a dig for research? That onion seed I got from a neighbor? My one jug for water? Can't get to them at all. A nice Catch 22: I could get to learning the skill needed to repair those things if I could get to/use the things.

That's plenty enough to make me uninterested in playing anymore. I'm going to stick to Rune Factory, which doesn't punish me for having to do homework and see patients.

Comments

[randysmith]

FWIW (which you probably already know) you're in much much better position once you can build a building and put a cornerstone in it. But yes, to get to that point you really need to put some time in (though I didn't remember really needing to store materials to put the time in; everything I needed to keep, I just left in my pockets).

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Turns out when you start on day one there are no cornerstones to be had. I figured I'd need to get myself Structure Maintenance and Repair soon, but not *that* soon.

[nchanter.livejournal.com]

You have to pay to have a cornerstone. Yes, Teppy penalizes casual players. The thing is, he doesn't *realize* he does this. Which is part of why there are only about 1000 paid accounts on the 2 different server clusters, and part of why the game is dying.

ATITD is not a casual play game, and has too many bugs/too little polish for most hard-core "I want to spend half my life in a game" gamers. I still play 'cause of the community and commitment I have made to people, not 'cause of the gameplay (not to say there aren't things I like about the gameplay, but it's the people that make the game for most of us "really active" people.)

[randysmith]

Do either of you know if EVE Online penalizes casual players? It's the other game that sounds very economic/building things oriented (I've heard it described as a Massively Multiplayer Online Spreadsheet :-}), but it also sounds a little intimidating, and I know there's a strong combat mechanic in which I have no interest, so I haven't looked into it. But you're right, this penalization of casual gameplay is one of the main things that eventually turned me off ATITD. Hmmm. Good to know, I guess :-J.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Damn. I have stopped playing games for that very reason...it is very easy for someone to out-free-time me. And you're nearly as much of a multi-classer. ;)

I'm'a'gonna steal this incident for WWG, of course. (There's already some thoughts along this line in there, in the early going.)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

But this isn't even about other people. This is the game itself punishing me for not spending enough time with it, indicating that it was designed to filter out people who are insufficiently addicted at the very beginning (it gets more forgiving as the game gets out of the initial growth phase - a single item would have prevented my problem entirely, an item I had been simply given upon finishing a task I did on the first day [ETA: the previous time I played this game]). I guess they only want the out-and-out extroverts who had a ton of free time on their hands first the first phase of the game. I wish they'd fucking told me that before I paid them.

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of games trying to brainwash me.

Too bad about TitD, I was curious to see what game you ended up with to clear out the mental cobwebs.