Unlock relocked?

[lightswitch]

So I haven't played in about 4 days, the last time I was on being Sunday evening. I just logged in only to discover that once again, I cannot use any of the tools. This is strange considering that it doesn't even look like the base has changed since Sunday, much less the server reset. This will be the third time I'll have had to go through the process of unlocking all the tokens. It's really getting irritating.

Honestly, I don't really see how this "feature" adds anything to the game. It's incredibly cumbersome when I'm trying to explain to new players how to play or, as a I was doing Sunday, trying to show a friend the game with him using my friend account. It really made it difficult and awkward, honestly. I repeatedly told him to grab a tool only to realize that he couldn't. I think the whole experience left him with the impression that Love is mostly broken and doesn't actually function properly.

At the very least the basic tools should ALWAYS be available: swim gear, blaster, binoculars, smooth edit. That's my basic load out and I find it difficult to navigate the world without them. There's no point whatsoever in preventing players from using them. All well, I guess I'll go try to route some power or something until I'm allowed to use things again...

[lightswitch]

I would like to add that my inability to use the reflector token and take advantage of some AI power routes that end in nothing in the middle of the base is severely hampering my ability to make things operational. What do I have to do to unlock everything? It's been almost an hour since I started playing, and I haven't even unlocked all the grey tokens yet.

One other thing. It's completely beyond me how all this effort can go into programming a feature which doesn't make sense (let's make the game more accessible by denying access to essential tools? what da' huh?), when we can't get a simple voice client built into the game. There's this guy on right now who clearly doesn't know what to do, and isn't responding to my chat messages. All I would need to get him on his way is voice chat, but no, instead, he probably can't use any of the tools, probably doesn't know why, and wouldn't know what to do with them if he could. Chances are low he'll ever come back.

This bothers the hell out of me because it DIRECTLY affects my enjoyment of the game. Love was clearly built as a social game for multiple players, but I spend 90% of my time playing ALONE. Another 8% is spent playing with players who aren't on the TS and 2% with players who are. I have no problem showing the ropes to newer players, and have even done so in our long tutorial sessions over the text chat (painstakingly difficult and time consuming btw). I guarantee with a voice client we could retain at least 10% (very conservative estimate) of the players who log in once, don't know what to do, and never come back. While one benefit of this would be more money for Eskil, what I'm more concerned with is that it would make the game a lot more fun because I might not be trying to do everything by myself all the time.

Indeed, for a social cooperative game like this, you would think the FIRST feature would be a voice chat feature. Furthermore, new players don't want to be bothered with having to set up TeamSpeak, especially if they're not already familiar with it. Also keep in mind that the people who are always on the TeamSpeak server AREN'T playing Love 90% of the time. I remember when I was new, I had never used TS before. Regardless, I went through all the trouble of downloading, setting it up, figuring out how to connect, only to discover when I got on that everyone on there was playing some other game. It really made the whole thing pointless.

So in summary, Unlock might have seemed like a good idea but isn't; and PLEASE, PLEASE give Love a built in voice client. Eskil, if you read this, it is the #1 thing you can do to make your game more accessible to new players, increase your player base, and make Love the social game it was meant to be.

[ChicOrtiz]

Hi Lightswitch!

I really don't know what to say, where to begin...

I think the community elected Teamspeak because it's cross platform

Unfortunately it's not open source which is my favorite taste...

But we have the option to create a separate room inside the "official" Love channel and to add a description into it. I think this is a very powerfull tool!

About the lock / unlock I confess I went mad at first, but then Rawr and Debri put me on the right way, they kind of live inside there (Team Speak) XD.

I also noticed that if you move at the direction of active tokens at the tab menu it unlock another tokens. I believe that Eskil added this feature to prevent hurried newbies to completely mess with the settlement, but this is just my point of view I don't represent him, I'm just another player like you.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make another log about the game but I surely had a lot of fun with the settle from last week, and watching how much it evolved! It keeps eroding on the cliff in front of us (<Dawn! I put hours on leveling it only to see it destroyed, lol) . On the other hand the plateau on our back is now completely leveled. And the huge stair is no more. The turret protected the settlement and killed dozens of enemy AI. There was a huge battle with reds in the opposite cliff of ours... I was lucky to be to there and hit the bastards with rockets and the rifle.

Thank you for all your efforts. Now I kind of fell guilt, I fell that I have being stealing your fun somehow... :I

Yours,

Ortiz

[paul1290]

The unlocks got reset when the server got reset just recently to deal with a crashing problem. The world wasn't reseeded in the process so the same settlement is still there.

The unlocks go on a timer as long as the game doesn't think you are "idle". Grabbing tokens and collecting resources every once in a while seems to be the best way to help this along, as doing these gets the timer going and while it's going the tokens unlock very quickly.
I managed to get most if not all of my unlocks back within ten minutes of logging back in and I managed to help get a new players basic tools working within a similar time frame.
However, I do think your right that basic tools should always be available and I'll try to remember to bring that up next time Eskil is on the server.



We have suggested adding voice chat to the game, but unfortunately it's something that seems to get pushed back a lot in favor of other things.
Admittedly this has been a chronic problem with Love. Changes that aid in bringing in new players and making the game more accessible do come up, but it seems that almost always something more directly related to gameplay will also come along at the same time and the latter almost always ends up getting priority.

Again, I'll try to remember to bring this up next time on the Teamspeak. Maybe after Eskil gets done re-working the AI Director (which apparently has been sucking up a lot of his time right now) he can finally get around to putting in the pointers, requests, and tutorial stuff that's sitting around on "to-do" for a while now.

[lightswitch]

Rarely having other people to cooperate with in a cooperative game is a gameplay issue.

[ChicOrtiz]

Originally Posted by lightswitch

Rarely having other people to cooperate with in a cooperative game is a gameplay issue.

And... With what you want to cooperate?

[paul1290]

Originally Posted by lightswitch

Rarely having other people to cooperate with in a cooperative game is a gameplay issue.

Yes it definitely is, but it's not the only one being worked on right now.

I'm not saying it's being ignored, it is important and something that will be addressed at some point.

It's just that Eskil's the only one who can work on the game and he can only tackle so many things at once. From what he's said so far he wants to work on getting more of the major AI improvements in before working on communications related things.

That being said, if you want have any suggestions you definitely want him to hear then don't be afraid to e-mail him. He's been rather busy lately and doesn't check these forums that often so aside from catching him on Teamspeak, e-mail is the best way to reach him.

Originally Posted by ChicOrtiz

And... With what you want to cooperate?

Ok I did not quite understand what you were trying to say here.

Could you re-word this?

[yakri]

So, anyone want to actually explain how the balls to unlock shit? Because I just started playing again for the first time since the early beta and this new unlocking crap is confusing.


Maybe stick some info on this in the wiki, something?

[paul1290]

The tokens unlock on a timer, whenever 3 minutes are up a token unlocks the moment you do something. Editing land, killing an AI, collecting a token, collecting a resource, or configuring anything all count as doing something. It usually only takes a few hours of normal play to go through most of them.

It has been fixed recently so you won't have to do this again after going through once.

[yakri]

Well that's not too bad, though it's still irritating to not have many of the tokens you want still after you've got the hang of the game(again, in my case).

And maybe there should be a note about exactly how it works in the in-game tutorial/tooltips.