Reply To: Give enough information to make decisions

[Denjanjeau]

Holy.Death wrote:

Here is an answer directly from the developer directly on subject of being able to see character’s traits.

Spot on! This link supports your impression of what the devs said they wanted to achieve and also explains the flimsy logic behind your argument in this thread as your argument is in line with the devs argument in that thread. Or at least the argument he refers to:

as for seeing quirks of mercs for hire….then why have any bad perks? why have good ones at that matter. if you let everyone see what they are buying, they will just chose the good one and there will just be leftovers that will cycle out in time. to me that would make the individuality of each merc pointless. at that rate the game and army’s will get very cookie cutter. in my opinion that ruins the idea that the devs originally had. now im not saying they cant change it or even shouldn’t. but if they do, they will lose a large amount of fan base from people who actually like this idea. to be honest it don’t even make any sens logically. the fact you say you save scum is not in tune with the heart of the game. again, im not attacking you, its your right to do that. but the nature of the game is to get a random chr, and deal with it. he will die or live depending on how you play. or live forever if you save scum. but the thing is, with the idea of reveling everything to the player kinda destroys the nature of the game. no randomness is not bb. its some other game. again if the devs want to do this thats fine. i already donated my money to them. but i would not do it any more due to the game going in the complete opposite direction of what they originally stated it would go in. i like this game because it reminds me of a cool rendition of dwarf fortress, but take away those element and i got nothing to like besides a nice artwork.

Although I totally respect and understand anyone who like gamble and uninformed decisions and being forced to live with that result, I always get a hiccup when someone strongly argues for reaching a goal and then not realizing they are buying tools that won’t lead them there.
Let me repeat why this is so (although evident in this thread):
A) The goal is to be forced to use characters with bad traits to assimilate them to the squad (or use them as cannonfother and recruit new ones).
B) As long as there is a save/load the practice of hidden skills will create the absolute opposite (because of the nature of the bad traits the characters can have) as most gamers typically save/reload to avoid this. Now it’s argued in the quote that this ruins the nature of the game. On the contrary, the game is created in a way to give incentive to save/reload because of this.
C) The only way to offer diversity in characters is to have no load/save for all (non-option), or diversify the bad traits so they aren’t just bad, or to make the bad traits lower recruitment cost (which basically is the same as making them not all bad, although it would still make them cannon fother).
Another disappointing (for me) answer in that illuminating thread is:
Question:
*In the recruitment screen, it would be good to be able to see what each background does, stat-wise, by hovering the mouse over the icon(much like it’s already done in the Roster screen).
Dev answer:

That’s probably not something we want to do. You have to realize that stats are a tiny part of what makes up a background. They also influence heavily the traits a character can get and will have a huge impact on the coming event system. Sure, a Tailor may seem somewhat useless now and a Swordmaster a must-have just based on their stats, but things will become much less clear-cut as we add complexity to characters over the coming year

Although I think the answer is intelligently put and correct in that the background is so much more than +5 x and -10 y as planned. It makes little sense to listing those bonus/penalties as it just forces people that care about it to go to a wiki or record it for themselves.
To me this is a very strange attitude. You cannot force people to play a game exactly the way you want when it goes against the nature of people. It doesn’t make sense. If you want people to not care about things you need to address it in another way. Not tell anything at all or not have any -/+ like they have now, but instead all those “soft” effects from being a tailor or rat catcher only. In that case the feeling of the background is the key. But if you give “hard” bonuses like today… OF COURSE everyone will care about them. Why add something relevant that all know, and then think people won’t care about it and record it? Won’t work :)
Anyhow. Thanks for clearing up where your view of devs intentions came from and (indirectly) why your argument was firm but inconsistent. I see now that you were right in your impression of what the devs said they would do. Very disappointing to me that they would create a game that gives massive incentive to the use of save/load button. Personally I will do my best to only use that to override the nonsensical uninformed decisions and never to reroll battles (as that takes away the fun for me).
I am looking forward to a dev explaining the thought behind incentives to save/reload. One cannot “hide” behind a vision for the game that the dynamics don’t give you incentive to live up to :)