Something must be done about dynamite

[4rchibald]

Hi there,
I had a break from the game and recently was trying to play a little bit but I found that impossible. All the servers are password protected and I couldn't really understand why. I know that some people just want to play by themselves and with their friends but all the game hosts? I managed to guess a password to few games in the last few days and they usually were fine with me staying, when asked about the reason why, dynamite was always mentioned.

I got over 100 hours in this game and I really haven't seen password protecting at this big scale, almost every game is protected now. There were just few that I managed to luckily join, one of them was destroyed in just few seconds by two players who joined the game and started spamming dynamite while everyone was busy doing their job on sub. This seems to be just too much. I know there will be always problem with trolls but in this case they're not just annoying or causing some problems by attacking civilizations when the rest of team is not ready which can make things hard but is still manageable, we're talking about tool that they can start with and use it to literally destroy even the most experienced players in the blink of an eye. I'm always supporter of making things hard but this is just a game breaking mechanic. I know it was a cool idea on the paper but it can't work and must be dealt with.
Removing negative effects won't work, that's not a way to go with it because this weapon will be overpowered even with lower damage. Two solutions I see is either removing it from game for good or removing it from the list of items you can start with making it obtainable only from caves, hermit, shops, that should be enough to stop the guys who just join the server to ruin someones game. Maybe there are some other solutions for that, those 2 things are what came to my mind.

I hope it will reach to devs and they will take it seriously. Also don't tell me about finding a team on discord or whatever people are using these days, because that's not a solution at all. Just like with every game you don't have a community of people who are super seriously focused on this single title, there's a lot of more casual players who just want to launch the game for time to time and play with others. Do we really want to make things harder for them? I'm pretty sure that's a majority of players in every game. Similar thing actually concerns all the new players, who just bought the game and can return it if they don't like it. And how could they like it if they had 2 hours to decide and every time they wanted to play there was no one to play with, no matter what part of day it was or even worse if they started to play and suddenly game was over because someone joined in and started throwing dynamite and they didn't even understood what happened.
And I must add that the best runs I had were done with absolutely random people, when nobody knew nobody, when every single person had different experience, was from different country and we somehow made it work. Maybe I'm a weird guy but I enjoyed it much more than playing with people I played before, they were cool, we did everything correctly and there were no communication problems but it got boring very fast. It's a much different game when you start and everything is a bit rough and chaotic, when you must figure it all out with people and it's much more exciting and satisfying to see that you suddenly got very deep, that everything is going very smooth, everyone knows what to do. It's sad to think that this part of the game is basically dead.

[Anikyte]

While I agree that dynamite is a huge issue and really safer dynamite should be the default, there are a few things you can do at the moment.

1. There is an exploit where if you enable a custom game, check the "safe dynamite" and/or "start with backpacks" option, then turn off custom game, it will register in-game without the issues of a custom game. Do spread that information.
(also devs if you read this just make safe dynamite be default)
2. Host your own games. Just as people like you look for games there won't be any if no one hosts them.

[Pigeon Man]

I agree that dynamite is an issue, but honestly in my near 300 hours of playing I haven’t found many trolls, I’d say less than 10 in all my times. Perhaps I haven’t been finding the correct games though.
A solution could be to remove dynamite from everyone’s account (and refund the gold hopefully) and then people must have the rank to buy it just like those who played the game after the rank update

[4rchibald]

Yes, custom game is an option but most people avoid them since you won't gain exp from them (not sure about coins) and setting only safe dynamite may be kinda dishonest if you don't change more things or point it in game name so they will know what they're getting into (That's actually another issue, it would be good if there was information if the game is in custom mode on game list).
I did host a lot of games before, recently my pc died on me, I'm using very old one, that was actually the reason of my break, I didn't even know that I can run this game on it but apparently I do. But I got trouble with hosting, people often complain about lags and freezes and they get even worse since the longer we play the hotter and slower my pc gets. But that aside, it still doesn't solve the problem of someone just joining and killing me and others in seconds

[Anikyte]

Turns out i'm an idiot and forgot to put the last part of the exploit where it activates safe dynamite / backpacks without penelty.

[Jordan Farr]

This was a really well thought-out post! So I'm seeing two problems here, not fully separate but not fully related either. Let's see what we can detach and fix individually.

So problem 1 is dynamite trolls. These are folks who already had the dynamite, who didn't have to rank up to unlock it, and come in to wreck servers. They push more people to password protect their games and work to deplete open games. Some of the solutions I saw above look pretty good!

Locking dynamite down again for everyone who didn't already meet the rank requirement (and refunding gold if it was unlocked) was a pretty nifty suggestion, and I like that a lot. The same could be said with the chemistry kit if we're on that track. We did try to reserve troll-prone items for higher ranks when we developed them Stil, eventually trolls may invest the time in to unlock these items. It's not excruciatingly difficult.

Another option is to strengthen the host's (or crew's) ability to kick players. We are still looking at options on this because we REALLY REALLY REALLY want to avoid growing a game culture where noobs get kicked. That is absolutely the last thing we want and will, nearly guaranteed, cause far more player turnover than dynamite trolls or password-protected servers.

Problem 2, as I see it, is the lack of open lobbies. For various reasons, the game has managed to disincentivize playing with random people. It sounds to me like we should aim to incentivize open lobby hosting, and possibly even joining. This could come in the form of an XP bonus (or soft multiplier like 150%) at the end of the run in open games, or show up as extra gold. Typically we don't have much more to incentivize with than those two. An argument could be made that playing with random people is harder than playing with people you know, so some kind of difficulty modulation could be done, but I suspect many would cry foul when it's easier to get a good leaderboard entry by hosting open games.

Another tractible problem with open games is that of reserving slots for friends. Random people can join in before your friends get in and then, ope, you're SOL. One workaround is to set up the game such that players cannot replace bots, then drop a bot right as a friend tries to get in. But that's kind of a terrible solution. What do you think a good solution to that might look like? Would having a toggle to "hide" your lobby from the server list be useful? Perhaps you could hide your lobby until your friends get in, then un-hide it, with no password necessary?

Let me know what you guys think. We want this game to be awesome and expect growing pains even this far in early access.

[Anikyte]

I think there should that the invite button should be on slots, not overall, so that way you can say, "hey i wanna reserve this slot for this invite"

I don't know if that's possible but maybe it is.

As well, I would really like to see more player slots. I want to have a 6 or 7 person crew, or maybe a 20 person crew becuase why not? I have a powerful computer and good internet, why not have the option for it. Maybe dedicated servers could be a thing. I have a home server that I'd love to set up like that.

[Jordan Farr]

Games beyond 4 players are still a long ways out, but eventually we'd like to support it. We built the whole game mechanically for 4 so I can tell you there are a LOT of hard-coded "4"s sitting around in the codebase. The networking tools we use are also shockingly inflexible on this, so it takes a little finagling to avoid what UNet calls a "CRC Mismatch' (and subsequent auto-disconnect). Nevertheless, handling things on a slot by slot basis is an interesting premise. So all slots are automatically closed and then we open one up and assign it to "invite", "bot", or "open"?