We didn't HAVE to throw in anything. Since I was doing the cocoa trees (that we had promised a few months back), I decided to add a few more plants while at it. This has already been answered before, and in the FOF, there was no time planned in the schedule for gardening. What you would like to see would take way more time than what our very busy schedule currently allows.
You're right. You didn't have to put ANYTHING at all in. My question would be this: Why bother putting in a substandard system instead of putting in a vibrant rich system?
Why make the decision to keep the new plants from having colors, where clearly there ARE people who not only enjoy the colors, but also use them regularly. I mean, basically, you've decided, "Well, I don't like the colors, so tough."
Extremely considering that would not do what you were hoping for. Again, as stated in the FOF, it's not just a matter of copy pasting and tweaking a few numbers.
Actually, I find that
extremely difficult to believe. At very least, you had a solid code-base to begin working from. Now, if it's as poorly documented as I suspect most legacy UO code is, perhaps it would have been difficult to work from, but I don't believe for a minute that you didn't have a beginning system that you could have worked from.
You say just tweaking a few numbers wouldn't have worked, and I'll be honest with you, that's a very scary state for UO's codebase to be in. There should be some sort of consistency to the code base, and frankly, I can't think of a coding language where I couldn't take a function or a codeset, make a copy of it, and modify it to do something else that is basically the same thing but producing slightly different results.
As you appropriately put in bold it WAS a design decision not to allow the new plants to produce seeds. And I stand by that decision, even more now in view of the general reaction to the new plants. Some players have individually grown over 200 plants in the first week. By the time the plants stop producing seeds, each of these players will have in excess of 1600 seeds sitting on their plants to be harvested whenever. Why even bother hunting for the seeds anymore?
It's an interesting question, and to answer it, I'll simply respond with "Given your implementation of the system, there would be no reason to." Which is to say, you decided cross-polination was not something to put into the system, and so there's no reason to have any base seeds.
I think you'll find that most people in the current gardening system don't bother growing their base seeds, but instead worry about the higher-up plants.
I think you'll ALSO find that much like every other gardening system, once the shine and polish has worn off, it's only going to be the gardeners even growing the things, and you've simply made a design decision to make things more difficult for very little return.
To this, some of you will reply "I'm a crafter, I shouldn't have to hunt for this". And again I disagree. Don't you have to hunt to get barbed leather? Peerless ingredients? Serpent & dragon scales? Bones? Why shouldn't gardeners also have a portion of the plants they can produce require a certain amount of hunting? My scribe cannot pump out a billion scrappers a day because I need to do peerless bosses and hope they will drop the ingredients I'm missing. Or I can just go buy them from someone else and hope the scrappers I make will have the mods I needed so I can resell for a profit instead of a loss. It's part of the risk any merchant needs to deal with.
So, uh... decoration is the equivalent of providing weaponry and spellbooks?
So gods forbid something exist in UO that didn't require combat to perform? I mean, let's go with a comparable example if we're going to get silly, and I realize that in the process, you'll probably go code something just to get your point across, but if I decide to be a tailor, I can go to the Yew farms, sheer some sheep, go turn that into yarn, and then full-blown bolts of cloth. That cloth then becomes clothing, and voila.
I can also get BODs without ever setting foot into danger -- maybe I sell leather BODs and keep only the cloth ones.
But the point remains that I can be a self-sufficient tailor without ever setting foot into a dungeon.
Now, I'll throw one back in your direction, Regine...
What other component of the game requires you to watch over and tend to something consistently and continuously for a seven day period?
See, in your hurry to keep danger involved in the game, I think you've forgotten the fact that the gardening subgame is already complex and requires a great deal of time commitment.
To use your Scrapper's example, does it take you seven days to create one? If your answer is, "It could, depending on how fast I gather the components," then you've only succeeded in showing that the two activities can be equally time consuming.
I understand some of you are not pleased with this decision, but it will not change. The peculiar seeds WILL NOT produce seeds.
Nothing like taking the, "I'm the developer who did this, and my word is final" stance on it. It's good to know you're open to improving a weak system that was rushed into the game with more of a "Here's a bone we can throw" rather than "Hey, I know gardeners would like something new, let's see how I can at least give them a second system that's as equally robust as the first."
It's a shame, Regine, that you had an opportunity to put something truly expansive into the game, and you chose to put the minimal investment into making it passable. I know this comes off as thankless, but frankly, my design and release process for my job has always been one of, "Even if it's something you're putting in on the side that no one asked you to do, you do it fully, completely, and you anticipate what people will expect it to do." And if that doesn't happen in delivery, you gather feedback, and you adjust the system to make it better.
Now, I design web-based training and ordering systems for my company, so that may not seem like much, but I assure you, I spend a lot of my time catering to my userbase because ultimately it is they who use and enjoy it.
I challenge you to sit back and look at your own decisions objectively, and to reconsider your decisions on the many levels that you made them. It's very easy to say, "Of course my decisions were right." But look at what already existed before you implemented this system, look at community expectations since the original gardening system was initially implemented, and then ask yourself a single, powerful question:
"Is what I delivered at least as fleshed out as the original gardening system?"
Any answer short of "yes" means you should sit down and see how you can adapt this "new" system to be at least as vibrant as the old.
Now, I understand you are all immensely busy with other stuff, but frankly, there should ALWAYS be time to implement some of the interesting stuff to keep the game moving forward while the longer term stuff is in development.
Unfortunately the thread is taking a bad turn again so I'm going to bow out and go pay my vendors.
