User:Rabble/T5mining

Please note that all of these comments refer to a very early version of T5 mining. We don't know how the final version of T5 mining will work.

Overview of T5 Mining

T5 mining is very different from T4 mining. I didn't take any screen shots of a T5 mine but there is one image at http://ve3d.ign.com/images/67329/PC/A-Tale-in-the-Desert/Screenshots/May-6.

The mine is the little cave like structure in the middle of the picture. When you work the mine, it spawns rock formations in front of the cave. There are 9 rocks in the linked image. Different types of mines (Copper, Iron, Tin, etc) have different numbers of formations. Some of the higher end metals have 16+ formations.

Each rock formation has several properties.

• The rock shapes can vary

The linked image shows rocks that are "bowl shaped" with a hollowed out center. But some mine types have rocks that are pear shaped, egg shaped, flat, or have other irregular, hard to describe shapes.

• The color of the patterns on the rock can vary

The linked image shows rocks that have colored star-burst patterns on them. I'm very colorblind but I think some of the patterns are yellowish and others red or green. The type of pattern varies with different metal types. Some metals show star-bursts while others have wavy lines, circles, etc.

• The base of the rock can vary

Some of the rocks in the linked image have flat washer-shaped bases while other bases are made of groups of smaller rocks. There are additional base types for other metals.

• The crystals on top of the rock can vary

The rocks in the linked image all have sets of small crystals on top of them. Different mines can have crystals that are short and stubby, long and pointy, squarish or show other patterns.

Working a T5 mine

You work a T5 mine by clicking on the cave and choosing whether to use the mine in "Normal Mode" or "Colorblind Mode". Both modes spawn the same number of rocks but colorblind mode no longer displays different colored patterns on the rocks. Instead, some other aspect of the rock (such as base or crystal) changes.

Once the rocks spawn, you examine them and find three or more rocks where the rock shape, pattern color, rock base and crystal shape all match. Or you can find three or more rocks where the shape, color, base or crystals all differ from each other.

After finding and selecting the appropriate rocks, you choose to harvest the workload. If you picked the correct rocks, you get 120+ ore. Otherwise, you get no ore. The rocks, however, remain in place and you can continue to try to find other matching sets of rocks. If you find 7 sets of matching rocks in one rock formation, you can then "Crumble" the rocks in order to get 20 gems. If you can't find 7 sets, you have to click on the cave and ask for a new set of rock formations.

Problems with T5 system

Size

• If the mine is near a cliff, how will it work? Will the rocks spawn inside the cliff? Or will some rocks be at the base of the cliff while others are at the top?

• If the mine is near other mines, will the rocks overlap each other? If T5 mines can be built as close together as T4 mines, then the rocks from one mine will overlap other mines. With a T4 tin blob, for example, the center mine in the blob would have rocks that overlap the mines on either side *and* the mines in front of it.

• If a mine is on a hill, how will it work? This is similar to the cliff problem but slightly different. Many things in ATiTD get built on hills and wind up "digging into" the hill to such a degree that it's difficult to see all side of the item you built. The ATiTD camera controls are limited. Rotating the camera near hills frequently causes the viewpoint to jerk sharply upward or downward. The T5 mines have crystal formations that often require looking at them from several angles. This could make hill-based mines very difficult to use due to camera problems.

• If the mine is near a river or lake, how will it work? Will the rocks spawn on top of the water and seem to float? Or will they spawn under the water where we can't see all of them?

• If the mine is near other objects, how will it work? Will the rocks spawn inside of guild halls or overlapping trees or inside warehouses?

• The rock formations are large. The higher end metals have such large rock formations that you can't actually click on all the rocks at once. You need to run to different sides of the formation to choose different rocks which makes even picking a single workload time consuming.

• If the size is decreased, how will it work? I already had problem picking out matching rocks as the rock shapes and crystal shapes aren't always easy to see. I frequently had to zoom in my camera to examine them closely or rotate the camera to examine them from several angles. If the rocks are moved closer together or decreased in size, this will make picking the right crystals even harder.

Colorblind Mode

In colorblind mode, the colored patterns on the rocks are replaced by changing some other feature of the rock such as rock shape, base shape, or crystal shape.

• The T4 colorblind mode doesn't work well past iron mining. In some types of mines, such as Tungsten, it actually reports incorrect results. How will the T5 colorblind mode be balanced for all 15 metal types?

• Some of the iron mines I used in colorblind mode didn't have a single solution. I couldn't even harvest a single workload. The copper mines worked ok in colorblind mode. Is it normal not to get even one solution from an iron mine? Even after many uses of iron mines, I couldn't get a single rock formation to produce 7 solutions and therefore I got no gems.

• Why is colorblind mode even needed? If Teppy realizes the normal mining mode has flaws that require colorblind mining, then why not just change the normal mode? ATiTD developer time is severely limited. Unbalanced content is often never balanced. So why introduce 2 separate mining modes for each of the 15 metal types which equals 30 different possible mining systems which might not work. Why not just get rid of the two modes and change normal mining so that it doesn't require good color perception? You could do this by making the colored patterns very differ both in color and pattern (green stars vs red circles, etc) and using base colors which can be differentiated via brightness (dark red vs bright blue, etc).

Crystal Shapes

The crystals are on top of the rocks and they are the smallest part of each rock. Yet some of the crystal patterns are hard to pick out.

• The square crystals and flat crystals are tough to spot unless you zoom in close. Overall, the crystals need to be larger and more easily distinguishable.

• Sometimes crystals spawn mostly on one side of a rock. Since you need to examine all the rocks to spot different crystals, this can require a lot of camera panning and camera zooming in order to differentiate crystals. It would be much better if the crystals spawned evenly on all sides of the rock.

Complexity of Mini-Game

• Any mini-game, even the best most enjoyable mini-game, gets old quickly. If you have to do the mini-game over and over and over, it stops being fun and becomes annoying. More complex mini-games become annoying faster since they require more effort to learn and play. The T5 mining game would be fun if I only had to do it a few times or few dozen times. It will be awful when I have to do it thousands and thousands of times since it sometimes takes a while just to find one solution.

• Every metal type in T5 has it's own mini-game. Some metals require you to match rock shapes and bases. Others require you to match patterns and crystals. Some of the higher metals may require matching more than 3 crystals or more than 2 items per crystal. Why do they all have to be different games? I use the same mini-game regardless of which alloy I'm making. I use the same procedure no matter what marble I quarry. 15 different mini-games means some of them are bound to work poorly.

• Why does the mini-game allow multiple people to use the same workload? Mining has never been a group operation before. People always mine solo. This option might sound good on paper but will actually be rarely used and just adds to the overall complexity and possible bugs with the system.

Gems

• I only get 20 gems if I crumble the rocks after seven workloads. After several dozen iron mine rock formations, I was unable to get even one crumble option when using colorblind mode. Is colorblind mode balanced to allow gem pulls? Is the crumble option supposed to be this rare?

• How will sand mines work? Many people use sand mines to find gems. Some gems like opals and diamonds and sapphires are rare enough that it's very difficult to find a metal mine that produces those gems. Most opal blocks, for example, do not contain any metal types. If we need to rely on metal mines to produce gems, gems will be even rarer than they are now -- and huge gems are already one of the costlier items in the game.

Conclusion

ATiTD requires a lot of basic materials over the course of a tale. I need to collect wood, clay, slate, etc over and over and over again. Adding a mini-game to a basic resource like metals is a bad idea. No matter the game, some people will always be unable to it and be effectively blocked from gathering that resource. We lost many players early in T4 simply because they couldn't do the mining system. Only widespread macroing allowed us to avoid a complete disaster.

The T5 mining system is more sophisticated and more interesting than the T4 system but it still requires us to do a mini-game and there will still be people who wind up leaving as a result. If we are forced to play this T5 mining game, it should be as simple and easy as possible so that is as quick and painless as possible. Otherwise, the sheer repetitiveness of using a mildly difficult system will drive away customers.