Police Officer job is frustrating

[Minias]

I keep showing up on time to the police officer job and still either barely passing the minimum or not passing at all and getting reprimanded. How are you supposed to fill the bar and raise social standing in the same shift? It doesn't seem like there's enough time in the shift to do everything that you need to do. It's very frustrating because every other aspect of this game is delightful so far.

[Josjimal]

Originally posted by MaxOrlovUA:

Understood. But don't be late. You have 12 hours and you must combine tasks. In the police - I sat down at my desk, went on patrol and went on repeat, but I end it all literally at 0 second

Hey man I have no reputation and I was fired so basically I HAVE TO get the minimum and even if do Paperwork all day with full mood and with full food I don't get it. Any recommendation?

[французский двой]

dont be late at work , work hard at the desk , try fill the bar but not full if you can for the next time , and eat fat sandwich , drink cola ect

[Asmodan]

You get problems for 2 days in a row under the minimum. Use your 1st Day for maximize socializing by the end of the shift, you probably wont reach minimum on that day. Each day after that start with socializing to make it max, then do 2 Patrols. Socialize again to max it again. Then another Patrol and Paperwork until shift end. Every time socializing drops under the green bar stop what you doing and bring it back up. This got me through the Officer Job and also Micks Gym.

Edit: And of course you should have enough food on you so you can spend the whole time working without stoping.

[Falcone]

Originally posted by Yo:

For training, only do training. Don't do the things where you kick or punch in a group. And for police, only do paperwork, don't do patrolling. And keep conversation and social status high, or else i think the effectiveness of doing actions will drop off. And ofc use Bobo's hp and energy foods (they're the best price-per-point), don't waste any time on sleeping / cooking. Also make sure your mood is close to max before you begin the training/police shift. Don't use silver's gym cuz it wastes too much IRL time to train with silver for mood gain, instead buy sweet sticks from the noodle shop to keep ur mood up. Between training payment, police shift payment, your work job and pro league payments, you should have plenty of money to never have to sleep / cook / train in silver's gym for mood. Also the joke software increases ur mood daily, so make sure to read those jokes!

bro pls help me, I manage to reach the minimum goal but even so I get a warning and I'm fired...why? I reached the minimum goal, it doesn't make sense

[r.wardy]

Hey man I have no reputation and I was fired so basically I HAVE TO get the minimum and even if do Paperwork all day with full mood and with full food I don't get it. Any recommendation?

It might not be the answer you are looking for, but you do not need to restart your game just because you got kicked out of the police. It is absolutely possible to finish the game without ever doing one shift successfully.

If you do still want to get back into the police line, try asking the sergeant and you will get another chance. I don't think that is a one time only thing, therefor in your first shift make sure you end it with max reputation with colleagues and possibly with some paperwork already done. Then the next time go on two patrols, boost your stats back up with food, socialize to nearly full - you can skip out of it at 95+ - and the rest is paperwork. Unless the progress resets between getting fired - which is something i do not know - this will do the trick. From there, a good plan is:

1. Come to work as early as possible with filled bars and your lunch bag from Bobo's, two sandwiches and one jug of juice, you can buy sodas in the police station for happiness if needed.
2. Socialize with the colleagues unless that bar is nearly full, otherwise skip to step 3.
3. two patrols back to back
4. refill your bars and socialize again to nearly full
5. do paperwork
6. when the shift comes to an end, and you can see that you won't get the bonus money bar full - that's not possible until you got skills that improve the points -, skip out of the paperwork with some progress already made. It will carry over to the next time you do a shift. Socialize to full or as much as you can with the remaining time.

If you maxed out your social standing and have enough paperwork for the next shift done and still have time ... just do something else, like training.
After you did 3 successful shifts, you get the opportunity to become better at paperwork. Now you can focus on paperwork and colleagues to always finish with the bare minimum.

[Collectorhubs]

https://youtu.be/wFbp2CRDj0o

[r.wardy]

Originally posted by Captainchico:

https://youtu.be/wFbp2CRDj0o

That YouTuber said three patrols and one paperwork, but it was in total 4 patrols and one paperwork.
But this shows that you can actually manage to get the minimum work done with zero social standing with your colleagues.

[Function]

The guides we currently have can only tell people which buttons to press in which order, like it's a glorious paper clip.
Instead, how about the devs gives us actual information so we could learn how to make plans ourselves and understand why it would work.

Social standing:
* How much does social standing matters?
* What bonus do you get when it's green. What sort of debuff do you get when it's red?
* What does this vague buff/debuff is applied to? There's a bunch of variables in the police work
* Is the color the only thing that matters? Is it 3 stages or does each point matters by itself?
* How long does each iteration of socializing take?
* How much each action of socializing would change your meter?
* At which points does the meter changes colors?

Paperwork:
* Exactly how long does each iteration of work takes?
* How much does each iteration fills the paperwork progress bar?
* Each time the paperwork progress bar is filled, how much would that fill the work day progress bar?
* What kind of buffs are applied to each progress bar movement?

Patrol:
* The ONE thing we can easily know. it takes exactly 2 hours to complete.
* How much would each patrol fill the progress bar?
* How much would buffs affect the patrol? If patrol takes exactly 2 hours, then things that makes your task-progress-bar move faster would affect paperwork but not patrols. But anything that makes each completion of a job fill the day-progress-bar would affect them both

No one can even make a plan. We can, at most, throw stuff at the wall until we find a combination of button presses that actually work.

And it's fine if you just want to win and get this over with.
But not if you want to play like a manager in a management game.

[Collectorhubs]

Originally posted by r.wardy:

Originally posted by Captainchico:

https://youtu.be/wFbp2CRDj0o

That YouTuber said three patrols and one paperwork, but it was in total 4 patrols and one paperwork.
But this shows that you can actually manage to get the minimum work done with zero social standing with your colleagues.

Yes, but he also show second example with the social green star which increased the efficiency by abit

[r.wardy]

Originally posted by Function:

The guides we currently have can only tell people which buttons to press in which order, like it's a glorious paper clip.
Instead, how about the devs gives us actual information so we could learn how to make plans ourselves and understand why it would work.

Social standing:
* How much does social standing matters?
* What bonus do you get when it's green. What sort of debuff do you get when it's red?
* What does this vague buff/debuff is applied to? There's a bunch of variables in the police work
* Is the color the only thing that matters? Is it 3 stages or does each point matters by itself?
* How long does each iteration of socializing take?
* How much each action of socializing would change your meter?
* At which points does the meter changes colors?

Paperwork:
* Exactly how long does each iteration of work takes?
* How much does each iteration fills the paperwork progress bar?
* Each time the paperwork progress bar is filled, how much would that fill the work day progress bar?
* What kind of buffs are applied to each progress bar movement?

Patrol:
* The ONE thing we can easily know. it takes exactly 2 hours to complete.
* How much would each patrol fill the progress bar?
* How much would buffs affect the patrol? If patrol takes exactly 2 hours, then things that makes your task-progress-bar move faster would affect paperwork but not patrols. But anything that makes each completion of a job fill the day-progress-bar would affect them both

No one can even make a plan. We can, at most, throw stuff at the wall until we find a combination of button presses that actually work.

And it's fine if you just want to win and get this over with.
But not if you want to play like a manager in a management game.

That's right, the game doesn't give you the exact numbers most of the time, but you do have a progress bar at the bottom of the screen. I would not say it's just throwing stuff at the wall, more like trying and observing and then trying something else until you figured out a way that works for you.
Hmmm ... now that i read it, that's basically the definition of "throwing stuff at the wall".
Anyway, people gave functional step-by-step instruction in this very post, which could be called a plan, kind of, sort of. Your argument that no one can make a plan doesn't hold, however "no one can make a plan the first time" would. The developers might have calculated that in, seeing how your first try is a freebie.
If you did have the numbers from the start, you would just do the math once the first time and then repeat it. In the long run it becomes a grind, a loop, a repetition of the same sequence of button clicks/presses. Does it really matter where your information came from, Numbers, progress bars, or a guide?

[Function]

Originally posted by r.wardy:

Originally posted by Function:

The guides we currently have can only tell people which buttons to press in which order, like it's a glorious paper clip.
Instead, how about the devs gives us actual information so we could learn how to make plans ourselves and understand why it would work.

Social standing:
* How much does social standing matters?
* What bonus do you get when it's green. What sort of debuff do you get when it's red?
* What does this vague buff/debuff is applied to? There's a bunch of variables in the police work
* Is the color the only thing that matters? Is it 3 stages or does each point matters by itself?
* How long does each iteration of socializing take?
* How much each action of socializing would change your meter?
* At which points does the meter changes colors?

Paperwork:
* Exactly how long does each iteration of work takes?
* How much does each iteration fills the paperwork progress bar?
* Each time the paperwork progress bar is filled, how much would that fill the work day progress bar?
* What kind of buffs are applied to each progress bar movement?

Patrol:
* The ONE thing we can easily know. it takes exactly 2 hours to complete.
* How much would each patrol fill the progress bar?
* How much would buffs affect the patrol? If patrol takes exactly 2 hours, then things that makes your task-progress-bar move faster would affect paperwork but not patrols. But anything that makes each completion of a job fill the day-progress-bar would affect them both

No one can even make a plan. We can, at most, throw stuff at the wall until we find a combination of button presses that actually work.

And it's fine if you just want to win and get this over with.
But not if you want to play like a manager in a management game.

That's right, the game doesn't give you the exact numbers most of the time, but you do have a progress bar at the bottom of the screen. I would not say it's just throwing stuff at the wall, more like trying and observing and then trying something else until you figured out a way that works for you.
Hmmm ... now that i read it, that's basically the definition of "throwing stuff at the wall".
Anyway, people gave functional step-by-step instruction in this very post, which could be called a plan, kind of, sort of. Your argument that no one can make a plan doesn't hold, however "no one can make a plan the first time" would. The developers might have calculated that in, seeing how your first try is a freebie.
If you did have the numbers from the start, you would just do the math once the first time and then repeat it. In the long run it becomes a grind, a loop, a repetition of the same sequence of button clicks/presses. Does it really matter where your information came from, Numbers, progress bars, or a guide?

I think that it does matter.

Making better decisions:
Not just better as in "more optimised". I mean decisions that matters.
Would you rather have decisions that reads as "You can spend a little time to get a certain bonus", or "You can spend 20 minutes to get +10% bonus to filling the workday-progress-bar for the next 3 hours"?

One is a meaningless choice. It's impossible to weight "a litte" against "a certain". You can take it or leave it but it's 100% guess. And if you have a dosen or so choices like that in a row, it's impossible for you to tell which choice in the chain contributed to the end result, and by how much.
The second choice is an actual choice. You can visualize the numbers and make an educated guess.
And the choices don't have to be hard constant numbers. You can have choices like "For the cost of 15 minutes, You have 20% chance to get +50 points in the progress bar". That's a calculated risk that you can either take or leave, but it's calculated.

Making these kind of decisions is what management games are about. It's about weighting your resources against each other as you're making choices.

Progress bars vs hard numbers:
Progress bars are an amazing UI tool. They can give you a general idea of a number in a quick glance.
But the thing is, it's a "genreal idea". Not an actual number. It's very hard to see a "+10% bonus" on a bar that just filled 22% of the way instead of 20% of the way. Even if that +10% could have been a game changer.
When you don't need hard numbers, progress bars are fantastic. But when you do need to make actual decisions, you need numbers.

We had that in Punch Club 1!
You could hover over a bar, and it would tell you the exact percentage in a tooltip. That was perfect! When you needed a general idea (most of the time) you got it easily. And when you wanted some hard numbers (every once in a while) you could do something to get it.
I wish we could have something more like that with the progress bars in Punch Club 2

People still struggle:
And it's unreasoable to expect players to not struggle.
That's the main issue. I was lucky, I got it right the first time. But it was just that, luck.

When someone fails, they don't just get frustrated because they failed. They get frustrated because they don't know why.
"Just do something else" is fine and all, but it doesn't help much. A person who failed doesn't know why they failed. They can't begin to make an educated guess.
"Go to the forum and ask for a step-by-step guide" is also not a good expected user experience.

If this was a game about failing over and over again until you find some cryptic series of decisions that would work, than fine. People would know what they are getting into. But this is one job in a larger game. And this is not how the experience in the rest of the game goes.

Devs might learn the wrong lesson:
That's an actual danger to the game. Sometimes when devs find that users struggle with a specific section of the game, they think to themselves "we made that section too hard" and just make it easier.
This is not the case with the police work. The problem, the reason people struggle, isn't that it's too hard. It's that it's not well explained.
A better solution would be to give you better information.
If they end up just lowering the difficulty so every person who makes random uneducated decisions would win, then you effectively took all the decision away entirely.

[r.wardy]

Originally posted by Function:

I think that it does matter.

Making better decisions:
Not just better as in "more optimised". I mean decisions that matters.
Would you rather have decisions that reads as "You can spend a little time to get a certain bonus", or "You can spend 20 minutes to get +10% bonus to filling the workday-progress-bar for the next 3 hours"?

One is a meaningless choice. It's impossible to weight "a litte" against "a certain". You can take it or leave it but it's 100% guess. And if you have a dosen or so choices like that in a row, it's impossible for you to tell which choice in the chain contributed to the end result, and by how much.
The second choice is an actual choice. You can visualize the numbers and make an educated guess.
And the choices don't have to be hard constant numbers. You can have choices like "For the cost of 15 minutes, You have 20% chance to get +50 points in the progress bar". That's a calculated risk that you can either take or leave, but it's calculated.

Making these kind of decisions is what management games are about. It's about weighting your resources against each other as you're making choices.

Progress bars vs hard numbers:
Progress bars are an amazing UI tool. They can give you a general idea of a number in a quick glance.
But the thing is, it's a "genreal idea". Not an actual number. It's very hard to see a "+10% bonus" on a bar that just filled 22% of the way instead of 20% of the way. Even if that +10% could have been a game changer.
When you don't need hard numbers, progress bars are fantastic. But when you do need to make actual decisions, you need numbers.

We had that in Punch Club 1!
You could hover over a bar, and it would tell you the exact percentage in a tooltip. That was perfect! When you needed a general idea (most of the time) you got it easily. And when you wanted some hard numbers (every once in a while) you could do something to get it.
I wish we could have something more like that with the progress bars in Punch Club 2

People still struggle:
And it's unreasoable to expect players to not struggle.
That's the main issue. I was lucky, I got it right the first time. But it was just that, luck.

When someone fails, they don't just get frustrated because they failed. They get frustrated because they don't know why.
"Just do something else" is fine and all, but it doesn't help much. A person who failed doesn't know why they failed. They can't begin to make an educated guess.
"Go to the forum and ask for a step-by-step guide" is also not a good expected user experience.

If this was a game about failing over and over again until you find some cryptic series of decisions that would work, than fine. People would know what they are getting into. But this is one job in a larger game. And this is not how the experience in the rest of the game goes.

Devs might learn the wrong lesson:
That's an actual danger to the game. Sometimes when devs find that users struggle with a specific section of the game, they think to themselves "we made that section too hard" and just make it easier.
This is not the case with the police work. The problem, the reason people struggle, isn't that it's too hard. It's that it's not well explained.
A better solution would be to give you better information.
If they end up just lowering the difficulty so every person who makes random uneducated decisions would win, then you effectively took all the decision away entirely.

That's a lot to compute and trust me i am not trying to pick up a dispute. It's more a philosophical thing. We are talking about game design, right?

You're correct in that "a little" doesn't tell you much of anything, but you miss the fact that you see an end goal, a threshold if you will.

You do see how much a single paperwork round adds to reaching that threshold, you also see how much time that takes and both of these are certain, there is no randomness nor chance. Now you know how many times you have to repeat this and in what amount of time. It is absolutely possible to eyeball if you are going to reach the goal with paperwork alone or not.

The patrol part is even easier to calculate, because that task ends by itself. The game is also so considerate as it doesn't allow you to go on patrol if you're not able to finish in the time remaining, not always a given in management games.

With other words, you can totally make an educated guess on the information the game presents you. It is not enough to get a perfect result right away, but also not too little to be unfair.

For the bonus parts, well that's just what they are, an extra, not required but nice to have, which leads us to the social standing. The YouTube video above clearly shows that it is entirely feasible to reach the minimum requirement without spending time with the colleagues. That is, i admit, an information you wouldn't have when confronted with the job the first time, but is something you have some information on. The sergeant gives you a rundown on your duties in which he clearly says you shouldn't neglect it and it helps. In what way? No idea, but the way it is introduced to you makes it clear it is not a necessity. Why? Because the social standing doesn't add to the progress of your daily duty or contribute to reaching the threshold for the day directly, and you're right again, you can't really see a difference in the paperwork or the patrol tasks. The information is not on the nose, granted, but it's there.

Is it frustrating to lose? Yes, yes it is. That being said, every Dark Souls player will tell you how great that feeling is when you overcome an obstacle after a few failures. This game is all about getting on your knees or falling to the ground - in the ring quite literally - and getting back up.

Providing just enough information forces players to experiment and improvise. Eventually, they will not only figure out how to fulfill the lowest requirements, but also how to cut corners and even cheese the game a little. That feeling is short-lived, though, as the game will throw the next challenge at you right away.

For me, that blurred information approach is perfectly in accordance with the theme of the game. Either you have to figure your opponent in the ring out or your tasks at a dull workplace. If the game gave you hard numbers, it would be less exciting, in my opinion. It would only come down to number crunching.

[Winterson]

How the hell I´m supposed to do police work AND managing my gym + fighting in leage?
This went overwhelming pretty quickly (I didn´t wanted to go to police station, but I had to becuse of the ohter quest).
Ugh!

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by Winterson:

How the hell I´m supposed to do police work AND managing my gym + fighting in leage?
This went overwhelming pretty quickly (I didn´t wanted to go to police station, but I had to becuse of the ohter quest).
Ugh!

You can skip attending the police/gym jobs. Also you get fired if you skip it too much, which might be useful

[Winterson]

Originally posted by Sorroh:

Originally posted by Winterson:

How the hell I´m supposed to do police work AND managing my gym + fighting in leage?
This went overwhelming pretty quickly (I didn´t wanted to go to police station, but I had to becuse of the ohter quest).
Ugh!

You can skip attending the police/gym jobs. Also you get fired if you skip it too much, which might be useful

Yes, that´s is indeed usefull! Thanks!