Very angry post about custom game

[Whisper]

1. I set the high probability of the appearance of the Aurora and I see it for the first two nights in a row - of course, this is too often and I put a medium - in four days no Aurora at all.
2. Recovery while sleeping is "low" - no treatment at all (!) This does not differ in any way from the parameter "none".
3. The high density of things in a non-empty box means their absence and vice versa. WTF?

I'm very angry because to find out this, you have to start new game every time - is this a beta test?  To understand how any option really works, you need to start the new game, and if it comes to fighting with a wolf more than once!

Make it so that some of the settings can be changed during the game to understand their values or make a table where everything is indicated with the use of numbers. 

Is it so hard?

Edited December 11, 2017 by Whisper

[Troxism]

Aurora is always pretty random so a few days sample size isn't really conclusive of anything.

The reason you are getting no condition recovery at 'low' is likely because you are only sleeping 1-2 hours at a time, and it depends on the bed type. Condition recovery is not linear, and you get more condition for every consecutive hour of sleep; you get way way way more condition back for sleeping 10 hours in one go then 1 hour at a time 10 times in a row (this was actually a method I used to nerf condition from sleep previously to make the game harder). Also sleeping in a bedroll gives less condition then in a bed (and trappers bed is magic and gives even more).

Note that the game does keep track of fractional condition. But for example, sleeping in a bedroll on 'low' condition regain from sleep for only 1 hour will only give you 0.25% condition back, so even doing so a few times in a row may not actually tip you over to 1% higher. A bed would give you 0.5% for 1 hour on 'Low', but around 19% for sleeping 11 hours in a row, assuming you don't dehydrate first (depends on your thirst settings if you actually can do that even with a full thirst bad).

Either way I can confirm (since that is the setting I have played on almost exlusively since the update) that 'Low' condition regain functions properly, and appears to be about half of what 'Medium' is; which is what Interloper is/was by Default. High is doubled again from Medium. So it's basically something like 64/32/16% for 10 hours of consecutive sleep in a bed, but those exact values may be off (and like I said, depend on the specific bed used as well) and obviously if thirst is set to very high you will dehydrate before 10 hours of sleep pass and lose condition from that instead of gaining it.

Edited December 11, 2017 by Troxism

[LucidFugue]

Until the community does some documentation about what the impact of each option is, the best you have to go on are the presets for the existing experience modes to determine what none/low/medium/high/very high means. 

Changing settings on the fly is probably pretty destabilising. I get that it's frustrating to have to re-roll and spend a few hours seeing what the effects are, but this is what building an experience mode requires. It's probably why the team were so reluctant to release custom options until after the game was out. It's a lot of work to make sure the experience is challenging and interesting, and balance is hard to get right. 

[Whisper]

Troxism, do you realy think  I am newbie? Of course I know about nonlinearity.

I slept for hours 12 for example (without thirst and hunger) and did not receive any treatment. To Aurora dropped out twice in a row, you need a probability 50% per day, for example, not 10%  because otherwise I'm very lucky and knocked out an event whose probability is 1%. Why on earth would this be "high" if "medium" Aurora happens once a week? 

All these are bugs and that's why I'm angry. As far as I remember, treatment on low worked at 1.16 and stopped working at 1.17

LucidFugue, a bunch of parameters are just numbers in the simplest formulas: such things how much take away your health or add do not depend on anything other than a predetermined constants and some simple conditions. If there was a console open and there were debugging commands that allow to change them on the fly there would be no posts at all.

 

Edited December 12, 2017 by Whisper

[Troxism]

In that case there is an issue with your specific game, or some other setting is interfering with it as 'Low condition regain' works perfectly for me in both 1.16 and in 1.17.

I simply proposed a possibility as to why you were experiencing the problem. In my experience on this forum, often the solution is something simple. I am sorry if it seemed patronising.

[Whisper]

 

Yes, the only thing that comes to my mind is that if this works for you, then probably you should not take a lowered intake of water and that's why I can sleep for 12 hours in a row. Although I already sent a bug-report I hope this post will be read by the developers too.

And they will be able to explain to me how density of objects = "high" means that they do not exist usually: I killed about five new games on this and a bunch of hours of time.

 

[velonews]

The problem I see with being able to change settings mid-game is that players will inevitably - given the chance - change the settings when they are in a tight spot. Similar to in minecraft where you could change the difficulty to peaceful right when you were about to die... It detracts from the game, particularly in a permadeath game like TLD. "If I get attacked by a wolf one more time, I'll loose my 500 day run, so I'll just change to pilgrim settings for a while."

[Whisper]

Cease me angry: I can not set up more difficult conditions, because the game still contains bugs and a lot. 

 

[Carbon]

 Unfortunately all things are relative, yet you argue as though you know what "high" and "medium" actually mean. If this were a bug or series of bugs, the forums would be rattling with complaints; this is a very passionate and vocal community, for good and bad. That it is  - or seems to be - only you that has these issues, I would suspect that it gets back to my opening statement: you seem to think you know what these vague terms mean concretely.

  "Very high", "high", "medium" and "low" are probabilities of probabilities; with sliders things get meta quickly and I for one have noticed clear differences between the settings. Yes, it requires experimentation, but who would have thought otherwise with such ambiguity and likelihoods playing off one another? I have started 7 new games in the last week, each of a couple of hours in order to learn the ropes, as it were and I suspect I will be doing this for a few more 'false starts'. I think it is quite reasonable that with the introduction of sliders, the learning curve is now more fluid and this will take some time to figure out.

 I thus believe that the things you describe aren't bugs at all and that you adjust your personal definitions and expectations of what the setting terminology means and how such differences may manifest in game. Not trying to upset or attack you at all in this, just trying to be objective.

[Mroz4k]

Fair warning - I am not going to be nice in what I wrote here. But you really should expect that, considering you came here to rant about a week old update that hasnt been yet properly tested by the community, and you made bogus claims, acting like you knew exactly what you were talking about even though you were writing complete nonsense.

So, you make an angry comment about an update that wasn't out for a whole week. You rant about some things not working, yet there is nobody in here but you, doing that. You claim certain settings don't work but nobody else reported this, in fact, several other people claim to see the differences.

5 hours ago, Whisper said:

To Aurora dropped out twice in a row, you need a probability 50% per day, for example, not 10%  because otherwise I'm very lucky and knocked out an event whose probability is 1%. Why on earth would this be "high" if "medium" Aurora happens once a week? 

 

What does THAT even mean?

if two auroras happened in 4 days - that would mean there is a 50% chance of Aurora happening per 1 day, not 1 aurora happening twice in 1 day, that would be 200% chance. If it happened twice in a row, it would mean there is 100% chance of aurora happening every day - meaning each night would be an aurora night. 

BUT

All of that is bullshit. You cannot make a statement of aurora frequency based on observing 2 auroras happening - you will need to see and record 50 auroras AT BARE minimum. If you knew how statistics work - observing a phenomenon 100 times gives you roughly 70% chance to precisely guess its percentage chance. If you saw it 1000 times, the percentage would be about 91%. So, if you saw 1000 auroras, you could say with 91% certainty that you know how big the percentage is. For example, if it took 4000 days to see 1000 auroras, it means you are 91% sure that the Aurora frequency setting is 4000/1000 = 1/4 = 25%. By the way, observing 2 phenomenons gives you about 3% chance of guessing it correctly.

BUT

None of that matters anyway because of something called "gamblers fallacy" - which in a nutshell means that just because something has a 10% chance of happening, it means you are guaranteed to see it happen once in 10 tries. You cannot "count together" percentages. The chance of it happening with always be 10%, no matter how many tries you try. Which means you can keep trying till the end of days and if you are extremely unlucky, you will never see it happen.

Do not rely on statistics.

@Carbon is right, you clearly think that you know what the values mean, but it seems to me that you really don't have a clue. 

11 hours ago, Whisper said:

Make it so that some of the settings can be changed during the game

 

This is clearly impossible to do considering how the game works, and if you really were such an expert on TLD like you appear to be, you would know that. The world is not being constantly refreshed. It was once generated and stays permanently unchanged since then. Only very rarely, when a new update comes out, the world can be slightly reloaded, and things like rose hips will grow up again. The world once generated cannot be altered. Besides, being able to alter your difficulty would make permadeath irrelevant.

If you have SUCH a huge problem with the way custom works, don't play it. But if you are going to set your settings to lowest levels which is too much for you to handle, don't come here and accuse devs of having bugs in it just because you couldn't handle it. 

Or, you could be smart about learning the custom game modes, and start by setting up games that are similar to the preset games, at first, and gradually making it more difficult.

People have posted lists that document the difficulties of the preset modes already. Should be easy to figure out how things changed compared to modes we are all familiar with.

[Mixxut]

29 minutes ago, Mroz4k said:

Fair warning - I am not going to be nice in what I wrote here. But you really should expect that, considering you came here to rant about a week old update that hasnt been yet properly tested by the community, and you made bogus claims, acting like you knew exactly what you were talking about even though you were writing complete nonsense.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

So, you make an angry comment about an update that wasn't out for a whole week. You rant about some things not working, yet there is nobody in here but you, doing that. You claim certain settings don't work but nobody else reported this, in fact, several other people claim to see the differences.

What does THAT even mean?

if two auroras happened in 4 days - that would mean there is a 50% chance of Aurora happening per 1 day, not 1 aurora happening twice in 1 day, that would be 200% chance. If it happened twice in a row, it would mean there is 100% chance of aurora happening every day - meaning each night would be an aurora night. 

BUT

All of that is bullshit. You cannot make a statement of aurora frequency based on observing 2 auroras happening - you will need to see and record 50 auroras AT BARE minimum. If you knew how statistics work - observing a phenomenon 100 times gives you roughly 70% chance to precisely guess its percentage chance. If you saw it 1000 times, the percentage would be about 91%. So, if you saw 1000 auroras, you could say with 91% certainty that you know how big the percentage is. For example, if it took 4000 days to see 1000 auroras, it means you are 91% sure that the Aurora frequency setting is 4000/1000 = 1/4 = 25%. By the way, observing 2 phenomenons gives you about 3% chance of guessing it correctly.

BUT

None of that matters anyway because of something called "gamblers fallacy" - which in a nutshell means that just because something has a 10% chance of happening, it means you are guaranteed to see it happen once in 10 tries. You cannot "count together" percentages. The chance of it happening with always be 10%, no matter how many tries you try. Which means you can keep trying till the end of days and if you are extremely unlucky, you will never see it happen.

Do not rely on statistics.

@Carbon is right, you clearly think that you know what the values mean, but it seems to me that you really don't have a clue. 

This is clearly impossible to do considering how the game works, and if you really were such an expert on TLD like you appear to be, you would know that. The world is not being constantly refreshed. It was once generated and stays permanently unchanged since then. Only very rarely, when a new update comes out, the world can be slightly reloaded, and things like rose hips will grow up again. The world once generated cannot be altered. Besides, being able to alter your difficulty would make permadeath irrelevant.

If you have SUCH a huge problem with the way custom works, don't play it. But if you are going to set your settings to lowest levels which is too much for you to handle, don't come here and accuse devs of having bugs in it just because you couldn't handle it. 

Or, you could be smart about learning the custom game modes, and start by setting up games that are similar to the preset games, at first, and gradually making it more difficult.

People have posted lists that document the difficulties of the preset modes already. Should be easy to figure out how things changed compared to modes we are all familiar with.

 

Usually i'm not really into these kinda posts, but now i couldn't agree more. 

[ingrobny]

4 hours ago, velonews said:

The problem I see with being able to change settings mid-game is that players will inevitably - given the chance - change the settings when they are in a tight spot. Similar to in minecraft where you could change the difficulty to peaceful right when you were about to die... It detracts from the game, particularly in a permadeath game like TLD. "If I get attacked by a wolf one more time, I'll loose my 500 day run, so I'll just change to pilgrim settings for a while."

Agree and it make sense as well, one survival game will last for 30 min or less to over 300 days like i have now, while getting to 300 days i have unlocked many badges, but i can't equip them in my current game, makes me a bit sad, but i also make sense, you have to do with what you have in current survival game, if we want to change something or add badges, we have to start a new game, the survivial mode would be easier if we could add/change badges mid game or change conditions and Hinterland don't want The Long Dark survival mode to be too easy and that's understandable .

We on consoles don't have this update yet, but i haven no plans ending my survival game just to try the custom settings or add badges, i have to do with what i have .

[Hotzn]

*gets a cool and unexpected new addition to a game for free*

*tries it out*

*runs to the forums for a rant, those developers, how dare they*

[codfish107]

Isn't one of the core concepts of this game to explore and take risks? How is exploring the game options for a few in game days any different than having a string of bad starts/runs or exploring new areas? 

[cekivi]

Hey Folks,

Don't be too hard on @Whisper. While we may have differences of opinion regarding the update that doesn't mean their personal experience is invalid. Conversation and disagreement are good (I for one am enjoying custom difficulty as is). Direct character criticisms are not.  

[hozz1235]

On 12/11/2017 at 10:15 PM, velonews said:

The problem I see with being able to change settings mid-game is that players will inevitably - given the chance - change the settings when they are in a tight spot. Similar to in minecraft where you could change the difficulty to peaceful right when you were about to die... It detracts from the game, particularly in a permadeath game like TLD. "If I get attacked by a wolf one more time, I'll loose my 500 day run, so I'll just change to pilgrim settings for a while."

They're already giving us custom difficulty - what difference does it make whether it is at the start or during the game?  I see no problem with players being able to adjust the settings on the fly (most games work this way).  I'm guessing they didn't do this due to the unforeseen impact it could have on other aspects of the game.

Like I always say, it's a game, let the player get the maximum enjoyment from it.

Edited December 14, 2017 by hozz1235

[Damzen]

2. Recovery settings from what i have found so far are as follows for x2 day: 

 (awake) settings are as followed from multiple save tests i did for recovery of condition:

Low = ~1% recovery per 3 hours.

Medium = 1% recovery per 1 hour

High = Not yet tested.

very high = Not yet tested.

 

Recovery at rest (sleep) are as followings for condition recovery:

Low = 1% per 2 hours

Medium =1% per hour

High = 3% per hour

Very high = Not yet tested.

 

 

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by Damzen