Food timers.

[stretch]

Suck.
Yeah I know you can make some with slightly longer timers. Yes I have done a few but in general the best I get is around 18 minutes. That's 3 types of food every 20 minutes or 9 per hour. That's just simply too much for a game that in general is this friggin slow to play.
Almost every second time I get to do an encounter in a realm I have to eat again and it's always stealth dropping leaving me knackered for a fight.

It needs to be 3 hours minimum and 6 hours would be better and last through death.
Yes they can over-complicate the $hit out of the recipe and make it cost lots of raw materials. That's fine just stop with the absolutely abominably short duration.
It's a joke and tedious beyond measure as it is now.

[Foxglovez]

And your three bars look the same so if you don't notice your food has run out, well, thar ya go. You may think your stam is 120 but nope, its 40. Some parts of this game are just goofy. The bars need real numbers to at all useful. Not just numbers when things are moving in one direction or another. Just another usual option these devs didn't think about or bother with. And wt, why isn't that with the bars so you always know where you are.

Regarding your option for food, it should last a day. Eat your 3 foods in the morning and it lasts till night. Course game says it's pitch dark at 10am so maybe not so easy.

[Amayeha]

Originally posted by stretch:

Suck.
Yeah I know you can make some with slightly longer timers. Yes I have done a few but in general the best I get is around 18 minutes. That's 3 types of food every 20 minutes or 9 per hour. That's just simply too much for a game that in general is this friggin slow to play.
Almost every second time I get to do an encounter in a realm I have to eat again and it's always stealth dropping leaving me knackered for a fight.

It needs to be 3 hours minimum and 6 hours would be better and last through death.
Yes they can over-complicate the $hit out of the recipe and make it cost lots of raw materials. That's fine just stop with the absolutely abominably short duration.
It's a joke and tedious beyond measure as it is now.

Yes, very annoying! It is the reason we are not playing this game at the moment.

[Jaden Bunny]

Food buffs should be temp so you have to think about it as part of your mechanic - when you are exploring you can rely on base line, just stave off hunger. When going into combat, give yourself suitable snacks for better health/stealth or other buffs for what you face like poison resist. When climbing munch on some veggies for more oomph getting up that rock face. If buffs lasted too long you end up stacking too much and cheezing it.

Totally agree about the confusion around the hungry bar. How it affects Stamina should be clearer so you know when you should be munching rather than relying on those groans.

[stretch]

Originally posted by Jaden Bunny:

Food buffs should be temp so you have to think about it as part of your mechanic - when you are exploring you can rely on base line, just stave off hunger. When going into combat, give yourself suitable snacks for better health/stealth or other buffs for what you face like poison resist. When climbing munch on some veggies for more oomph getting up that rock face. If buffs lasted too long you end up stacking too much and cheezing it.

Wrong and I don't need it explained as to how it works thanks. The arrogance of assuming everyone doesn't know how it plays now and what we should be doing is astounding.
It's nonsense like this that forgives and then actually lauds abysmally stupid design decisions that ensures 99% of us have to put up with this trash because it's easier for the devs to take this sort of comment as correct and fix nothing.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried... and I think you might be trying... pretty sad.
Thanks for ensuring they never address this garbage.
Well done.

Honestly.. whose metabolism burns meals this fast? Who wants to spend all day preparing food that lasts one decent encounter? Who the heck wants to have to rebuff every 15 minutes? Who enjoys constantly having to monitor this nutty design decision?

They could simply add an auto-consume option which would do almost the same thing.

It's currently truly awful and the speed it burns up adds nothing to the game at all. It's tedious.
No game should include features players find an annoyance.
Does it encourage ANYONE to play the game? Is it a design choice that makes anything more interesting or fun? When you ask these kinds of questions and you constantly come up with NO for an answer you need to revisit the mechanic.
I am 100% behind making the longer buff time foods harder to make and/or require some sort of investment of resources or effort to activate. It doesn't need to be entirely free. It's quite honestly easier to use food just to alleviate hunger and never use it for buffs because it's such a chore to monitor. Sad but true. Waste of a game mechanic because it's so much bother and unreliable as is. Unreliable because of normal human failings sure and maybe there are people out there who are so perfect they would never allow themselves to be caught short but a lot of people are not that perfect.

[Tsi Aileron]

I haven't even bothered with paying attention to buffs. I just eat food to get the meter up and keep going.

[Jaden Bunny]

Annoyance is an aspect of engagement - issues to solve, value to progress being hard to achieve, reminding toxic postees their own attempt at a counterargument is itself proof of the point they are attempting to destroy :3
All part of the rich tapestry of the gaming life.
More complexity please, always! get frustrated, walk away, come back - magically solve whatever it was and feel great - move on.

[GrailQuest]

Originally posted by Jaden Bunny:

Annoyance is an aspect of engagement - issues to solve

Too much annoyance and people stop playing and spend their time more productively looking for another more fun game to play.

[Foxglovez]

The real problem with food timers is that you never get to a point where your character stays fed for long enough. Never. I don't mind food buffs, lots of games have them. This game just makes it tedious and bothersome. Making food is like everything else, boring and ineffective then you can't even track the buffs because the timer set up is trash.

Games can't just have one great idea to make them successful. That great idea has to be supported by all of the little things that make a game fun to play, balance is crucial for a large audience. That's just how our world works. That's what EA is for. But I worry that what we are going to get is just some more dumb boss fights which noone really asked for instead of more engaging gameplay and fixes to crafting, UI, etc. We shall see next week. Trying to keep my expectations low and hope they overperform.

[stretch]

Originally posted by Jaden Bunny:

Annoyance is an aspect of engagement - issues to solve, value to progress being hard to achieve, reminding toxic postees their own attempt at a counterargument is itself proof of the point they are attempting to destroy :3
All part of the rich tapestry of the gaming life.
More complexity please, always! get frustrated, walk away, come back - magically solve whatever it was and feel great - move on.

You are a very unique individual and I doubt very much you are speaking for the majority of gamers. People get annoyed and then those people move on. Very simple. Where on earth you get hose magical middle steps from has me stumped. Quite often they never come back because their last impressions of the game are negative. Games that wish to succeed should strive to avoid annoyance and not deliberately inject it into basic game mechanics. I totally disagree with almost everything you have said. Complexity does NOT equal annoyance. I really struggle to even begin to comprehend how you equate the two things. So weird.

[Foxglovez]

That is the big difference between current new crop of gamers and how games were designed and developed in the olden days (20-30 yrs ago). Complexity and difficulty were everywhere, surviving, achieving difficult goals were badges of honor. Of course that was when only adults played computer games and kids played outside and went to school.

Those days are gone now and adults work 24 hours a day, kids play all manner of platforms and most folks have the attention spans of crickets. I'd say ants but that would be insulting them. Everyone wants everything for no effort, a badge for doing nothing, nothing gated or limited and expect a nice pat on the head for doing a poor job, using every available exploit and cheat they can find. You may not have noticed but games as we know them are about done. It's a festering swamp out there. Sad times indeed.

[stretch]

Originally posted by Foxglovez:

That is the big difference between current new crop of gamers and how games were designed and developed in the olden days (20-30 yrs ago). Complexity and difficulty were everywhere, surviving, achieving difficult goals were badges of honor. Of course that was when only adults played computer games and kids played outside and went to school.

Those days are gone now and adults work 24 hours a day, kids play all manner of platforms and most folks have the attention spans of crickets. I'd say ants but that would be insulting them. Everyone wants everything for no effort, a badge for doing nothing, nothing gated or limited and expect a nice pat on the head for doing a poor job, using every available exploit and cheat they can find. You may not have noticed but games as we know them are about done. It's a festering swamp out there. Sad times indeed.

I don't mind complex and I don't mind difficult. I have said above a few times that better food duration could be earned. Don't give it for free but give the option with an investment to make it longer. Difficult is fine, complex is fine, tedious is not fine.
Games usually start off with poor performance in many character aspects but most of those are overcome with time invested and character development and after a while you get stronger and better. That's how games that don't expect you to actually fork out real cash money for those things actually work. Here food timers start bad, are bad in the middle and end bad. There is no development. There is no way to get better. It simply needs a way to improve it through something like more complex recipes, higher tier components or skills you earn. Just handing it out for free sometimes happens when people moan about this sort of thing but that's pretty lame and falls within the scope of the quoted comment. I don't suggest or ask for that.

The thing with this game is that if you are out in a realm you can be doing a few things and not constantly in combat. When you are ambushed into combat sometimes you don't get any viable warning so you don't really get time to buff with food. Other times you might be collecting resources which takes time and not need food but you do a PoI you come across and you feel the need to buff because it's got combat. It's the mismatch between the often slow pace of the game and the fast timer of your food buffs that sucks. Constantly getting caught short and regularly having it drop mid encounter just ensures I don't bother with it for anything but staving off hunger. It's not something I can count on so best to get used to just never having it. I think that's a poorly implemented system - when people actively do not want to use it. Needs a rethink.

I come from the days of original EQ and recall how beloved KEI was because of it's duration and how extended duration KEI was in super high demand. Why? For anyone too young to know it was a mana regen buff that lasted for hours and although class specific it could be cast on others (with the right skills) and had a base duration (IIRC) of 2.5 hours extended with more skills out to ??? 6 hours was it? Pretty long time since I played EQ so maybe a little off with the numbers there but you get the gist. Long lasting = extremely popular and that was well over 20 years ago. I don't see that ethos having changed in the intervening years. KEI started single target yeah? Then group target, then extended timer, it developed and got better with effort invested. It was an improvement over the older very short duration mana regen spell and while it isn't food it is an example of the growth of a game mechanic over time that this current food system needs to embrace.

[wildbill]

So far I haven't even used (on purpose) the food buffs. Too tedious and complicated for my tastes. I'll do something complicated if it has a permanent payoff. But not over and over again. I'll just change the setting to easier if possible (like in single player) than go through all the hoops to get a slight boost in some stat.