Why wait times more than 24h are stupid.

[maestro]

If you absolutely must have a long wait timer, could we please get rid of the ones that are more than 24 hours?

It seems that the range is 23 to 28 hours and that's really not fair to those of us who have jobs. Let's consider this scenario:

Joe Schmoe works an 8 hour per day job, let's say, 9-5. He gets home at 5:30, and has to take care of chores, getting supper, and that kind of thing, so let's say he's ready to sit down and do some gaming at about 7PM.

Let's say No Man's Sky is what he wants to do, and he starts the Starbirth quest, and at about 8PM he gets to the Stem quest and it wants a 25h wait time.

This means that said quest will not be ready until 9PM the next day. So the next day, he gets on to do his gaming and from 7 to 9 he's waiting so he does other games first and at 9PM he gets on and gets the next quest in the series. Let's say it takes him an hour to find the coordinates.

So, at 10PM he finds the heart. It wants a 26h wait. This means that the next day, he won't be able to progress the quest until Midnight. Keep in mind he has to work at 9AM the next day. So next day, he gets on at 7, and has to play other games for 5 hours waiting for the quest to be back up, and finally at Midnight he's able to get the next quest, and it again takes him an hour.

This time, it wants a 28 hour wait.

It's 1AM and the quest won't be ready until 4AM the next day.

There's no way he's going to be able to do this quest the next day, and thus he has to skip an entire day.

The wait timers should really be reduced. IMO, they should be 18-22h. This allows gamers to push the quest timer back into their daily gaming routine, and allows for some time in the coordinates chasing.

I myself? I did the quest yesterday at 2:30PM. It wants a 28h wait. This pushes it until well after 6PM (after accounting for the time it will take to do the next coordinate hunting, blah blah).

Problem: I work nightshift tonight, and I need a 6-9:30PM sleep. So I won't even be able to touch the quest until the following morning, which is lame.

[RustyNail]

Originally posted by Bad Wolf:

The main take away is that if timegating doesn't serve a real purpose then it isn't exactly the best game design. It will annoy a lot of people.

Exactly. My money is betting they did it this way because it was easy and cheaper than putting real effort into a good quest design; and the long delays make some view the quest as being more "substantial" than it is.

NMS has great graphics engine but when it comes to making it into a really deep/interesting game - they kinda fall flat.

[bernardb]

The waiting makes the reward so much more satisfying. If one just gets everything instantly, where is the game, where is the challenge? I'm really enjoying the whole process, and besides, while I am waiting I have so much more that I am doing - tweaking my base, exploring, making my electrical system awesome...a lot to do

[Malkav0]

Originally posted by bernardb:

The waiting makes the reward so much more satisfying. If one just gets everything instantly, where is the game, where is the challenge? I'm really enjoying the whole process, and besides, while I am waiting I have so much more that I am doing - tweaking my base, exploring, making my electrical system awesome...a lot to do

I guess you didn't read the part where people were asking for tasks instead of a waiting time, which leads to greater satisfaction. Oh well.

[Decagon]

Maybe all responsibilities should be removed instead?

[Viking]

if waiting is a problem, start Steam without net conection, adjust the time on your pc/ consol, start NMS in offline with the "new" time, get your Living ship, logg out restart steam with net conection have fun with your Living ship.

[Anzaman]

Originally posted by bernardb:

The waiting makes the reward so much more satisfying. If one just gets everything instantly, where is the game, where is the challenge?

Personally I'm fine with waiting. Just that I don't like the current over 24 hour waits since they mess up with the schedule.

Normally I could log in after days work, do my daily missions etc and have new timer start ticking towards next objective. But when objective timer is 28 hours, it forces me to wait basically two days instead of single one since I have other things to do during my days than playing NMS.

I'm glad they are changing it on experimental, but I feel like they should've spent a bit more thinking the timer over, and hopefully they learnt from this.

[RustyNail]

Originally posted by bernardb:

The waiting makes the reward so much more satisfying. If one just gets everything instantly, where is the game, where is the challenge? I'm really enjoying the whole process, and besides, while I am waiting I have so much more that I am doing - tweaking my base, exploring, making my electrical system awesome...a lot to do

"Waiting" 22, 25, 2X hours is not a challenge - it's an annoyance.

I have higher expectations of a modern game. NMS has great 3D graphics, but their quest designs are a big step backwards from even the early DOS days. Heck, even the quests in the old (as in the first ever created) Zork games that were all 100% text based- were FAR more engaging and entertaining.

[maestro]

Originally posted by Bad Wolf:

The main take away is that if timegating doesn't serve a real purpose then it isn't exactly the best game design. It will annoy a lot of people. ............ It makes sense in an mmo or a subscription/microtransaction-based experience. But not in something like this).

The main reason it is done in MMOs, is to give everybody as much of level playing field as possible in terms of time.

If there were no time-gates, then the teenagers and jobless people would completely destroy any competition for those who have jobs, because they can play 24/7 and the people with jobs can only play a few hours a day.

Said people who have RL obligations would have no hope of ever keeping up with the jobless people.

That, and I suppose there is a small amount of "keeping people subbed longer" but yet if you make people wait too much, then they will quickly lose interest and find something else to do. If people are paying, they want to be playing. The time-gating is usually only done on things that people would actually compete for things that actually affect progression in character power and/or raid bosses.

But yeah, it has no place in a mostly singleplayer experience with little-to-no competition.

[Gun Cuddler]

I'm so glad there is a mod that skips these annoying timers. Waiting is neither a gameplay feature nor a challenge or reward. It's just a boring wait instead of actually playing the game and enjoying the questline.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

In support of the Devs, it must be frustrating to work for months and months on a major update and see people complaining and wanting more stuff within 48 hours of release. I can verify that has happened on every release they made so far.

Being a very small development team, I can understand them trying to build in some pacing so it takes a week or so for the new flood of requests to start again.

Plus, it is a laid back game and there is tons to do besides sit on your hands and wait. People have become so instant-gratification oriented it is sad.

[maestro]

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

In support of the Devs, it must be frustrating to work for months and months on a major update and see people complaining and wanting more stuff within 48 hours of release. I can verify that has happened on every release they made so far.

I don't think rational people are doing this, there's a bunch of people that are happy for new content. They are not, however, happy that they are being barred from seeing this content because of nothing other than a timer they have to wait for. If there were questing, gathering resources, doing actual stuff in-game that barred them from the end-goal, I doubt we'd be complaining. We'd be, you know, doing. But there's nothing you can, you know, DO about a timer that's thrown in your face other than turn the game off and wait.

Being a very small development team, I can understand them trying to build in some pacing so it takes a week or so for the new flood of requests to start again.

See, that's the thing, though. People want to *play* the game, not be told to turn it off and come back tomorrow after playing an hour.

Plus, it is a laid back game and there is tons to do besides sit on your hands and wait. People have become so instant-gratification oriented it is sad.

1). As mentioned previously in the thread by me and others, it isn't too terribly hard to achieve most of your goals and be left with very little else to do. Once you've got millions of units to your name, A or S-class ship that you're happy with, a nice base built, your equipment upgraded... you start running out of things to do.

2). Again, as previously mentioned, I am *NOT* asking for instant gratification. If there were actual things to do to make progress during those 24 hour waits, I'd be fine. However there isn't. It's literally "turn the game off and wait until tomorrow". If there was "Hey you need to do 24 hours worth of questing" then I'd be "sure, I'll go at it for 3-4 hours here, 3-4 hours there and eventually reach my goal. I'm fine with that.

[Humble]

I do understand waiting because of "living" ship so it's grew up, it's don't make sence living ship baby to adult in one second, but as gamer and making a living in real world, that's I do understand why waiting time isn't good, but should be lot to do, but I think option of sort should be there, like one hours (for those who too busy in real life, I work as 5 day :(, used to be 3 or 4 day) waiting to whatever they set as waiting as normal as designed (for those who had too much freetime, lucky them!).

[maestro]

Originally posted by Humble:

I do understand waiting because of "living" ship so it's grew up, it's don't make sence living ship baby to adult in one second, but as gamer and making a living in real world, that's I do understand why waiting time isn't good, but should be lot to do, but I think option of sort should be there, like one hours (for those who too busy in real life, I work as 5 day :(, used to be 3 or 4 day) waiting to whatever they set as waiting as normal as designed (for those who had too much freetime, lucky them!).

As much as I don't like time-gates in singleplayer games, I wouldn't have anywhere near as much complaints if it were <24h because if they simply must make us wait for several hours, they should give us the ability to simply do part of the quest once per day or something.

But hearing that the experimental did indeed slash the wait times a bit, it seems like they already realized how cruddy this is for people who have jobs and other RL obligations.

Hopefully they made it something like 12-18h or something more reasonable like that. That way, most players could consistently do the quest at the same time every day if they happen to have schedules like that.