Interesting discussion on difficulty and 'game intuition'

[Reda-Ou]

It's very interesting, fascinating even, to see the comments from people. I found the game to be very easy (I had all my potions ready for the first test by day 5), and it would have been easy without any rare material RNG (all the basic ones were enough for me). But that is coming from someone with a lot of experience in games and gaming, and thus a great intuition for the 'grammar of gaming', I recognise quickly what I need to do and how when I play games, even if they give me sparse information.

Show Minecraft to a non-gamer and they'll ask:

"How do I move?" -- oh... use WASD, W is forward... etc.

"I can't get over this fence, how do I jump?" -- oh well, a lot of games use space and this game does too... so press space and you will jump.

"I pressed space and I didn't jump over the fence" -- well you have to hold forward so that you're moving forward while jumping and your jump will go forward, just press space makes you jump on the spot.

"Ok I'm holding forward and jumping but I can't get over the fence" -- well... it's because you're right up against the fence and jumping while right up against it is just going to bounce you into it. You need to be back a bit and jump at a point where the peak will coincide with the fence so you can clear it...

A real conversation, by the way. The person wasn't dumb, they were intelligent even, they just never played video games. Now they're great at jumping around in Minecraft.

Gamers take a lot of this 'intuition', this 'grammar of video games', for granted and beyond the simple case of jumping and WASD, ALL game mechanics are subject to this kind of learned intuition that builds up over time.

So, getting back to Potionomics:

I don't think, overall, the game is balanced badly. Maybe it would be good to weaken Roxanne or extend the timeline? I don't know. Maybe an easy mode would be good for people too, I'm pro-difficulty settings or easier ways of engaging with the game. But I don't think that is the core problem here. I certainly found the game to be tuned far towards the easier side.

But, reflecting on my experience with the game, there were a lot of things I figured out straight away, but not because the game told me... but rather because I'm observant and experienced in the 'grammar of gaming', I have good gaming intuition. I don't mean this as a brag but rather it's simply the case that games come with a lot of built in assumptions that generalise across games and having a lot of experience in games means being able to hit the ground running basically no matter what a new game throws at you.

Someone who isn't as hardcore a gamer as I would probably not instantly grok the subtleties of the mechanics just by playing with them once or twice and I think that is where most of the consternation is coming from.

The big issue I see for Potionomics is: There are a lot of systems that are explained once, or not at all, and although you can understand them through experience, exploration, or intuition, a lot of people who aren't intuitively able to pick up the systems will be confused and likely engage with the systems in a very suboptimal way, making the game very hard for them.

So I think that Potionomics can be primarily helped by better explaining and better communicating with the player. I see a lot of people who don't know how to rank up their potions, who don't understand it's the magic energy not the ingredients that matters (the game does say, but it's not like it reminds you if you missed it or forgot). The game doesn't often prompt you to not waste time. It also doesn't do enough to tell you "don't worry *too* much about the debt, it will be solved by winning the competitions" so I see some players worried about making money (outside of what benefits reinvestment will get you). It also doesn't give you handy info like how long your brew is while you're travelling (in case you forgot) among other things.

There are also lots of REALLY bad cards, even at the higher ranks. Someone with a lot of gaming experience will intuitively notice how bad those cards are and not slot them, but someone with less experience might think higher rank = good and throw them in, artificially increasing the difficulty of haggling.

In a similar vein the Custom Order deals are often TERRIBLE. It's way better for me to make awesome potions in my 1 (hopefully 2 soon) cauldrons than dedicate 3 whole brews to get a minor of each mana/health/fire for 200 gold. They're only good if you already have the stuff to hand in for it left over from other things.

These things can be hard for less experienced gamers to pick up on which adds a lot of needless extra difficulty to the game for those people.

Basically, I think the difficulty is fine (easy even...) but only when set against a player who is exploiting the game mechanics relatively well. A lot of players seem to be struggling to come to terms with how to exploit the game mechanics, and so they're falling behind the difficulty curve. So it would be good to tutorialise more aspects of the game, or be a bit more hand-holdy, or put more tooltip information in the players hands (etc) to help those players stay above the curve.

[Igorious]

Hi!
Maybe you help me to understand, how time of potion brewing is calculated? I've seen that some takes 2 days, but some can taken even 7 days. Is here some logic?

[Myth Alric]

Well lets be honest, there are a ton of serious gamers that play an action rpg, and play the entire game and never learn how to parry. Some "game intuition" does help, especially if you play this specific genre a lot, though even if you do it is easy to miss stuff. I do think there are a few minor bugs that make things work weirdly in some situations as well, that might cause some confusion.

Originally posted by Igorious:

Hi!
Maybe you help me to understand, how time of potion brewing is calculated? I've seen that some takes 2 days, but some can taken even 7 days. Is here some logic?

I believe each type just have their own time. I don't think there is any specific logic to it, other than you try them and you will see how long it takes for that specific one.

[Shadowanbu]

I whole heartily agree.

Although my 'gamer intuition' helped me figure things out relatively quickly before they got out of hand, I feel like either I missed something important or the learning process is made unnecessarily difficult by poor explanation of the mechanics. This taught to start reading absolutely everything instead of assuming the game taught it to me.

Examples based on my experience:

- I learnt number of ingredients = number of potion and Magamins = quality by mousing over the ui. I had assume the magamin number on the ui = cauldron capacity but that was not the case.

- It took me several ingame days to understand how travel time work. Because of the '-1' on the UI button, I thought time was lost the moment you leave, not the moment you came back. It made reading the clock difficult as I did not understand the seemingly erratic progression of time (made worst because of that weird time bug that apparently involves loading saves). It took experimenting to understand time was not lost moving from person to person.

- I don't recall Guild expedition (Baptise) being explained. I had assume the percentage to destroy environment was a progress bar, not the chance of the event occurring. It took burning the forest (1st basic level) for 3 days straight for me to intuit what had happened.

- During haggling i did not realise that patience runs out faster (linearly) as the turns go on. The owl vaguely said that patience runs thinner but it was harder to understand that mechanically when the customer also occasionally makes you lose an extra patience. So from my first experience, all I saw was that turn end button went from (-1 -> -3 -> -3). 'Why the hell is the thing running out so fast?' was my reaction and took observation to understand it.

- I did not know how the competition day was going to play out and made the mistake of assuming you had to attend the event and brew my potion to obtain it in the morning. The game did not say I needed to have the potion in my bag before day 9 ended so I had to repeat the day to do it properly. (Honestly I should have not assumed what I did considering I played Recetear before. I was probably influenced by games such as Monster Rancher)

- During the competition, I didn't know about the haggling system so I presented a potion that I knew would definitely lose. I was forced to haggle for a losing potion and built so much stress that haggling the next one was impossible. You can't even end the haggling session without a closer card. It is better to offer the wrong potion and let them win by default.

- Luna's Marketing say lasts 2 days but clearly only occurred on the next day. Did not realise because the event was buried when more then 3 event occur at once. Then I learnt about little event icon in the UI.

- Bought Ageing barrel upgrade before I even had the ageing barrel. Made things way confusing till it was explained to me in this forum (Thanks djheat).

Gamer intuition also allowed me to quickly recognize the bugs when they happened. Honestly didn't expect to enter a game with bugs that I had to circumnavigate.
I didn't realise that people found Roxanne so hard that the devs are looking into it.
I won on my first attempt (after redoing the screw-ups explained above) and If people thought Roxanne was hard, I think the way tutorial is handled played a huge role in it as you said.
The first few days were tutorials, RNG determines what ingredients you could get, juggling potions for sale vs potions for heroes with the one cauldron till Saffron appears. I can imagine it being incredibly overwhelming for someone new to the genre (especially when quite a bit of people thought they were in for an easier time).

I get why people make fun of those who miss out on information on the screen and don't like being hand-held too much. However, I think it's important the player fully understand what they're doing in a game that is all about management. The last few days before the first competition were stressful having wasted too much time figuring things out (burning the forest 3 days straight didn't help either ahahaha)

[khetrak]

1) everything in the brew menu will tell what you need if hover the mouse over, for ex if you hover on the X amount it will say it increase for every 2 ingredients
2) i agree this one could have being said better, in my case i notice when i left that house that time didn't pass and when i keep clicking between 2 shops it also didn't pass, but i agree this could have be said better.
3) i think the % would imply a chance to occurring but i can see how someone would think its a complete %.
4) On their side there is a infinity debuff that does it, its there from the tutorial and you can read the effect by hovering over.
5) i think the owl tell you around 6 times that you can't make potions on the day and you need to be ready before, i don't know what else you can ask for.
6 )didn't know about this.
7) Luna UI is really weird for me and need to change, it says it last 2 days but on the bottom of the shop it explain that it only starts on the next day, but the buff itself only last 1 day, this one need to be changed to explain better.
8) didn't see this, if its a bug then its probably will be fixed

in general i think most people problem are not really gaming related but stuff like not reading and looking around. i agree that having a more efficient mindset is necessary but at the same time we have posts asking what is the ABCDE on the ingredients.

[djheat]

I take your point, but it was somewhat jarring to hear you call the game easy and then mention you haven't opened a second cauldron yet. Has it occurred to you it may get more difficult as you continue on?

[khetrak]

i would say the first week is the hardest part by far, if he passed week one he shouldn't be having any more difficult

[djheat]

I actually had a pretty easy time with week one, week two and three I cut it much closer to running out of time to make decent potions

[khetrak]

week 3 you unlock slimes and they are probable the most broken system in the game. as long as you use then well you shouldn't have any problem with the rest of the game.

[CarelessOpossum]

As a reference point, I am at the start of day 16 in my game. For the first competition, I had my potions ready on Day 6, and won the competition instantly with more valuable potions (it seems like there is negotiating involved if they arent?) I already have the next 3 competition potions ready for round 20, and they are a full tier (Grand? or something) higher than the recommended, so I am assuming no issues going in.

I have 3 cauldrons (all better than base), 6 selling slots, and my deck is good enough that I win most negotiations by maxing out the customers interest meter. I have around 8 hours of playtime, which seems like a lot for this point in the game. I am playing on a steam deck and struggle with the trackpads a bit - and have likely laid the thing down from time to time to do something else. But, the turns do take some time to get through if you are trying to hit all the stops each day.

So, I had the game wishlisted at some point - probably saw a trailer or "upcoming indie games" video in the past. I received the e-mail that the game released, read the description on the store page, liked what I saw, and purchased. I went in not really knowing what to expect.

By the end of the first in-game day, I thought "so this is basically a euro-style board game with a deckbuilder on the side". I'm quite familiar with both of those things, so I'm off and running.

Like a euro-style board game - generally speaking, your options and what you can accomplish in a turn are very limited on turn 1. As you use those actions to unlock more options, upgrade existing options, gain resources , etc , the amount of choices and what you can accomplish with each given turn snowballs going forward.

Then I get to the deck-building aspect. I've played a lot of those. After the tutorial "fights", I already had an idea of which cards were dead weight and needed to be rotated out first.

I had an advantage going into the game compared to someone who was unfamiliar with these things, without a doubt.

However, I did not immediately understand the concept the first time I played a euro-style board game, or a deck builder, and I lost terribly. I would expect a similar outcome for anyone jumping into this game with no background. But, something should "click" with you at some point during that failed run, you gain some understanding, and do much better the next time around.

Not winning the first time should not be seen as a "problem" with the game that needs addressing. There may well be balance issues, UI elements, or tutorial/explanations that need some attention. It has been fine for me, but I am not seeing it through the same eyes as others.

As far as some of the complaints I've seen about the game:

"Too hard at the start" I do not believe it is, but it appears they are looking at tuning it down regardless. I have made many mistakes, or assumed things that were not correct, and I feel like I am doing well - the game is not tuned tightly enough that every tiny decision matters. I have forgotten to buy fuel while I was out, went to upgrade a cauldron that was sitting in my house still, assumed I could only feed 1 ingredient a day to the vendor for a long while, or misjudged my clock management.

"Doesn't inform you" Probably valid from a tutorial standpoint. But, it seems like most of the information you need is there if you look for it. I'm pretty sure the game hammered the fact that your competition potions need to be ready to go at the start of day 10 repeatedly, and people seem to constantly miss that somehow. Or that your potions need to be at a certain tier/rank to have a chance to win.

"RNG". Some randomness, but I will argue the fact that RNG does not drive the game in any meaningful way early on. I have not used any of the super rare ingredients for crafing my potions. And the small amounts of randomness can be mitigated by good choices and setups.

"I've tried Competition 1 "X" amount of times and keep failing". Either you overlooked something, did not change your strategy up, or were merely attempting to roll back a day or two on the save and try again with an already doomed setup. A lot of these people have way too few hours played to have given multiple genuine attempts at even the first competition it seems.



Now, I do have some concerns about balance. Not in the "too hard" sense, but in the viability of choices in the game.

The game throws a lot at you, very quickly. 15 days in, there is already an overwhelming amount of npcs, relationships, ways to get resources, ways to spend resources, adventurers, enchantments, advertising.

I have focused on - getting as many resources as I can, making money through brewing and selling, expanding the number/quality of my cauldrons and displays, and prepping for contests.

I have ignored advertising, enchantment, pirates, and special orders (other than one with an unlock). My relationship building has been minimal - gifts when I could, spending time with someone when I needed to kill an hour. Enough to get a few new cards for the deck.

These all seem fun, but ultimately not a good use of early time/money. Which might be a problem if the fun things are truly distractions and less viable for success.

Also as others have mentioned at this point, aggro seems to be the most viable deck strategy - any strat that takes multiple turns seems counter intuitive thanks to the growing impatience of the customers.


Anyways, some things I try to do:

Plan the day out somewhat around your brew cycles. Use fuel to have the cook times match what you want to do. I will often unload what cooked overnight. Re-load with a 2h cook time and open shop. Empty cauldrons and reload with a 1h cook time, travel/visit/shop/spend your money. Return to the shop, and decide on another 2h session with selling or an overnight cook.

If I can't afford to send adventurers (money, potions) to a more risky biome, I still send them through the starter forest for low level mats to brew for money. My warrior can do this for 25ish gold and the lowest tier mana potion at this point.

Always try to have something brewing, even if its low level potions to sell or use for adventurers.

Utilize the two free hours of cooking while you sleep.

Always aim for balanced ingredients to get the two free stars.

Always try to get enough mats in to get 3 potions per brew. When I cooked my potions for the day 20 contest, it made 3 of each and the extras netted somewhere around 1,300 gold.

First time you get a new material, turn it in to the vendor so you can buy more.

[Shadowanbu]

I do agree that the information is indeed there if you look for it. I learned to look at the whole screen for UI elements after realising how easy I could miss something. Honestly I felt stupid when I failed to take the safe route regarding brewing a day early because even though I recognize what the Owl said like 5 times, I barely made the competition from the skin of my teeth and was force to understand last day, last moment.
For me it was a case of 'How should I interpret what the owl said?'.
Similar to when other games explain parry mechanics with 'press block just as the attack is about to hit you' I would ask 'What does that mean? like press the block frame 1? or do I get leeway? (which made elder ring parry hard to learn since the window happens few frames later and changes depending on the shield)

I also agree that failure is not a bad thing. All the kinks I worked out through experimentation and I beat the first week first try whilst letting all my mistakes ride out (only reloading for the soft locks and brewing too late; which btw is one of the triggers for the time progression bug supposedly since I had to reload often because I kept accidently soft locking).
That's why when I read that the devs are looking into Roxanne's difficulty, I was surprised since I made it with all my screw ups and plus the haggling system means you don't have to exactly meet the requirement in order to beat her.

However I argue that the information needs more clarity because it's easy to miss/forget/misinterpret and made the game more frustrating then it needs to. The game doesn't have a sort of codex that i'm aware of that lets you review tutorial.

Some examples:

- Although people asking what the 'ABCDE' mean seems dumb, i believe the explanation in game was along the lines 'Ingredients are seperated into colour and letters'.
On first reading, I thought this meant they are two different categories and only upon seeing it did I understood them as basically colour blind options. I can see how people miss that.

- The patience system is something I picked up on based on pattern recognition and seeing the UI below the customer. However this is a mechanic that was not intuitive for me to recognize for me initially (It didn't help that I had to question everything as to whether it was a bug or not).
Because It was a universal mechanic, it did not occur to me that it was a permanent customer buff. The buff/debuff is tucked into the corner. I had thought it was a quirk of the customer (Like maybe a busy customer had that buff) but no it was applied to all customers. Another reason this wasn't intuitive for me was not only did other deckbuilder games not do anything similar, but the first new card you get from Quinn completely goes against this design. When I realise how the patience system works I thought 'Why would they design a system that makes turn counters worst when they put in cards that benefits from stalling?'

- Upon seeing the guild expedition window, I thought 'percentage to destroy environment...What does that mean? What happens? does it get worst when it gets higher? something bad happens when it reaches 100%?
I learnt my lesson the hard way but honestly it was just really bad luck ahahaha. Burnt the forest with high percentage, then a random event burnt it down right after and then burnt it down on 20% chance (which is when I caught on to how the percentage worked). Having my forest ingredients being double the price for 3 of the final 5 days was rough to say the least.

I still love the game. I really FEEL like a capitalist getting greedier for money as the weeks go on and I dig the management aspect (which i understand if people didn't sign up for).

Also:

Originally posted by CarelessOpossum:

I have forgotten to buy fuel while I was out, went to upgrade a cauldron that was sitting in my house still, assumed I could only feed 1 ingredient a day to the vendor for a long while, or misjudged my clock management.

...you telling me you CAN feed more then one a day to a vendor?

[doomleika]

This game is full of blindside and false choices, a.k.a. Noob trap.

Can you not expending Quinn’s shop? Yes but you only handicap yourself
Can you not send people to adventure? Yes and you send the game into fail state
Can you not upgrade relationships? Yes and good luck winning those haggle war at checkpoint.
Can you arrange your day randomly instead of the optional 4-2 split?

Game presents those as optional when they are mandatory and hide those information, they also made simple thing behind multiple menu and dialogs, I have to put down this game multiple times to play against the storm(which is also a number heavy game!,!)

[Soken]

Originally posted by doomleika:

This game is full of blindside and false choices, a.k.a. Noob trap.

Can you not expending Quinn’s shop? Yes but you only handicap yourself
Can you not send people to adventure? Yes and you send the game into fail state
Can you not upgrade relationships? Yes and good luck winning those haggle war at checkpoint.
Can you arrange your day randomly instead of the optional 4-2 split?

Game presents those as optional when they are mandatory and hide those information, they also made simple thing behind multiple menu and dialogs, I have to put down this game multiple times to play against the storm(which is also a number heavy game!,!)

I only went on adventures 2 or 3 times total and realized they were a waste of resources lol. Getting new cards from relationships is needed but the rest are def optional. I only expanded items like twice when i needed alot of something in particular.

[Kyle]

honestly most of the time i was just spamming mints interest cards, i don't think i made a remotely good deck, i feel like default is more or less good enough

i personally felt the game got a lot easier after week 1, the only reason i had multiple cauldrons was for convenience, i ended up with 3 cauldrons, 2 barrels and 2 shelves by the end of the game

[Reda-Ou]

I'm really glad to see a lot of great discussion here.

[Reda-Ou]

As an aside, despite the patience mechanic, Quinn's first card is still amazing. I guess my tip to add to the other tips here is: Assess cards on patience efficiency, or patience efficiency potential and how easy it is to play it.

Quinn's card is 8 damage for 1 patience, which is better than most early cards by a huge amount. If you get to turn 2 it's 16 for 1... 3 is 24 for 1... No idea if later cards get better than that but that is already insane. It's pretty easy to get a couple turns on this card, especially with Baptite's captivate.

Muktuk's big damage card is 16 for 3 patience, with Sympathy and the +50% Muktuk buff it turns into a 30 damage monster card, 30 for 3, that is the same as 10 for 1. Which Quinn's card on its own is almost as good as. In fact with Sympathy Quinn's card is 10 for 1 on the first turn and then 20, potentially 30 over the next two turns for ONE patience.

So far I've seen the Druid girl's cards are really really bad. They're undertuned because the devs don't want to mess with the long term stress grind. They should reduce way more stress but 'only for this haggle' so it doesn't mess with the longer term stress grind.

The Owl's cards are really bad so far too, primarily because we discard+redraw every turn, we can't save cards for when they're good to use. The Owl's 3 draw for 2 patience card is not really good, because the 2 patience turn gives you a 4 draw... so it's better to end turn than to play the card unless you just so happen to draw into a Muktuk combo or something.

In fact Sylvia's 1 draw for 1 card might actually be better just because it's 1 cost so it's more flexible. You can hardly spend 2 patience on a gamble. Quinn's 5 damage + 1 draw for 1 is good though -- 5 damage for 1 patience is my 'par' for a card's power so far.

The Owl duplicate card would be OK if it duplicated directly into your hand but it duplicates into your deck... so you need to pull the duplicate with the good card you want to dupe but then you don't even get it unless you randomly draw it later -- terrible because it's too hard to use.

Quinn's shock card is also terrible unless it's the last card you play before closing, which you can't really control and it's a dead card otherwise.

Sylvia's default cards are all terrible (intentionally) except for the closer and only because the closer effectively costs 0 and only because it is superior to closing normally.