Passed Seasons

[master warrior]

Title: Seasons

Proposal

Instead of the current single never-ending season, the game can rotate through "real" earthly seasons every few weeks or month, shown on the map by different tile sets for each season, with the seasonal jobs and quests.

Details

At any given time, The West would be experiencing one of the 2 seasons. Each season would last perhaps 2-4 weeks. During a season, several new job selections would appear to fit that season, and the map tile-set would reflect the weather of that season.

This would make game play more dynamic. The shortness of the in-game seasons would prevent players from getting too frustrated if they needed to do a seasonal job but missed it during a previous season; that season would come around again in a matter of weeks and they could do the seasonal job then.

New jobs could be created to fill in the various seasons. There could also be more seasonal quests like the Christmas ones, but with the seasons cycling more often, they would come around more often than the real Christmas season.

Possible suggest jobs geared toward classes but anyone could do the jobs:

(Provided clip art is not the actual icon we are suggesting but a close representation)


Winter jobs:
Dog sledding - Adventurer

Hunting Deer - Dueler

Stone Chiseler - Solider
Clean Chimney/build fireplace - Worker





Summer jobs
Journalist - Adventurer
Medic - Solider
Bull-whacker/wagon-master - Dueler

Building log cabins - worker

When a season ended, that season's jobs for visual sake would be replaced by the next seasons job.

The rest of the jobs would remain, and be available year-round.

Abuse Prevention

This would be mostly a cosmetic change, along with a job selection rotation; no significant change to the mechanics of game play would occur.

Negative:
1. Certain things, like important quests, might need more immediate access, so this could require some additional planning/balancing. Example if done every 2/4 weeks, then it needs to be planned out so that winter does indeed happen during the Actual U.S. Christmas season.

2. When jobs deactivate and a user is still doing the job, or if a user has walked to a job that was active , that is not now. For this reason we suggest the labor point requirements and skill sets need to be the same for the above 8 seasonal jobs.

3. Depending on the visual effects users may oppose the all white look to the map. Graphics have to be done to add fun to the game, without losing the characteristics that currently remain.

Visual Aids

Here is how we suggest the map looks if done through the 4 seasons... though we have refined the idea to be only 2 seasons. Win and Summer. Summer is how we see the map now. Winter would show the map with sparse white. As to not blind the user with pure white snow during the time of the winter season.

Here is how it would be in the winter vs summer time:





Summary

This divides the game play into seasons to add more jobs and more visual diversity on the map.




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[shotokando]

I like that idea. It would give more job opportunities too!

[Denisero]

Hmmm, I find it interesting. They do holiday quests to why not seasonal quests/jobs.

[Elmyr]

I do kind of like the idea, just to break up some of the monotony, but I think it would be hard to implement. There's also the time issue. As it is now, it's not an RTS, but it's basically real time. 2 hours work in game takes two hours. You sleep 8 hours a night. If you kept the 1:1 ratio, three month seasons would just be weird. Most people wouldn't even play for 4 full seasons. If you shortened them greatly, there would be a drastic conflict with the day to day timing. Would a season be a week long? A month?

[master warrior]

i thought i would be like it is right now 6 months a year say summer april to september and october to march

or do you want shorter ones as i think that they would not work IMO

[Elmyr]

The shorter the seasons the bigger the time conflict, the longer the seasons, the less people would see every season once, let alone twice. The right balance might be good from Inno's standpoint as far as keeping people playing goes, wanting to see the differences in the seasons.

[master warrior]

ok so 4 seasons or 2 then so i can think up something i say 2 as it is less ahssle for dev and would be easier to think things up.

[Luap Nor]

I think short seasons could be fine. I mean it's one season (an all-inclusive one) all year round right now, and nobody's whining about that. So, why not? Each season could be, say, 1 week long if we're doing 4 seasons, or 2 weeks if it's 2 seasons.

The real problem I can see with this would be the added amount of new jobs and/or balancing out of jobs that come/go from one season to the next. It'd add a bunch of headache for somebody to try to balance all that out so each season was relatively the same degree of playable, and for all 4 classes. Just adding a new tileset, or even 3, probably wouldn't be a huge burden for a gaming company, and this wouldn't directly impact any other aspects of game play that I can think of.

On a related note, they could have diurnal cycles, where it got dark at night, and you had things like burglary become available at night and field work during the day, but again, the balancing act associated with doing that would be a pain. It's a thought though.

[master warrior]

as ulthor use to say make the devs work

i think if it is short seasons 1 moth long for 1 season if there are 2

if it is long 4 months if it is 2 seasons


i see what you mean but onyl some would have to chan ge and some would just have to be added in there place

and im siure they made the game to have a challenge like this.

[Denisero]

See MW, its not you we were picking on in the other thread, it was your idea. This one is much better. Even if they aren't necessarily seasonal quests maybe monthly jobs/quests. New stuff available only for that month. Then it would change every 4 weeks.