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Plants dying when your not there.

AuthorMessage
Delver
Sep 18, 2009
258
Sometimes if you dont play for a day or 2 your plants die or are about to. I think that if you dont play for a day the plantts would stop getting affected. Anyone agree.

Explorer
Jul 17, 2009
61
I have to agree on this one. Sometimes I just can't get on every day or even every few days. Sorry KI but real life does have to take priority over a game eventhough this is an awesome game and I love it. I do wish the powers that be had kinda taken that into consideration when programming some aspects of the game.

A+ Student
Jan 05, 2009
1706
Most of us can predict when life will keep us away from the game, so plan planting around it. There are many plants that take days, but by now they have been discussed over on Wizard 101 Central, so none of us can say we got caught with our pants down.

On the other hand, in a real emergency, they gave us the revive spell...for free.

Defender
Jan 25, 2010
177
I have never like these type of activity aspects of a game. First of all, I have always considered it a critical health issue to the player because it induces a lot of anxiety and fear into the player. I don't like that.

Secondly, it is a form of psychological control of ones daily life because the player can no longer log in when they choose to or play when is convenient for them because this or these aspects of a game literally set a deadline for them to log in because not doing so is accompanied by punishment.

I refer to that as conditioning because it removes freedom from the player and forces them to set a schedule to play the game because the player informs themselves of the grow time, disease time, watering time and must totally readjust their lives around that which is why I consider it to be an adverse form of control. The game is suddenly in control of the players real world schedule.

This actually ruins any fun derived from gardening. Those who can play all the time are rewarded but those who must work or go to school or both are punished.

Look at the length of the school day and the work day and look at the gardening time limits compared to not being able to play this game on a school, library or employer computer because the executable game files need to be installed on the computer and school/library/employer users are restricted from that because program installation activities are reserved for computer administrators.

Other games load solely from a server and can be played on any computer which explains their galactic popularity statistics. If a part of it had to be installed that game would not have astronomical game rating popularity.

All of this can be wiped away by timing the gardening process to only be active during actual game play. For students, workers or those who spend much more day or night time playing, the same time limits would apply equally to all those players and is based upon actual play time.

Gardening can be set up like this because my health and mana refills are scheduled to only be functional during log in time even if I log out in the path of a mana trail right? Right. Plus hatching is scheduled to because if get a 1 hour hatch time pet, log out, come back in an hour and there's your pet.

Dungeon exits are scheduled too because coming and going sets, starts and resets the clock.

The games are also scheduled.

The gardening timer is running non-stop for its duration so to prevent the horrible issues mentioned above and I think the the timer on gardening should only be in progress during actual game play time.

Thanks to other games that have similar activities I know these things in advance so what do I do? I have not yet done any gardening though I have been stocking up on all supplies and spells along the way from combat and picking up reagents.

Hero
Aug 23, 2009
723
I don't think it is a form of "psychological control" or "adverse to one's health" for the gardening system to stay as it is. It is totally optional, similar to crafting-yes I said optional even taking into account the tea set quest in CL-if you want to do it and work within the structure given by KI and the game then you are free to do so. Otherwise you don't have to be "controlled" by the game. Any optional/side ventures introduced into the game must have some level of structure that is more generous than only being active when you are logged in due to cooldown/havest/etc times; if it weren't it would take way too long to accomplish anything related to those systems. Plus with the independent time factor instead of subjective, it allows for higher leveled players to catch up at a reasonable speed rather than how newer players who are able to incorporate it in from the beginning.

Besides I have not logged in for a couple of days before and my plants may not have been happy, but were still alive and just needed a little TLC to keep growing healthy.

Survivor
May 03, 2010
15
I agree with jaronuts that the current system makes you go online more often than you want to, and it gets annoying that I need to remember an extra thing on my daily schedule - and for miniscule amounts of profits, too! Gardening should really be done in your leisure; even if you can't or don't want to get online everyday, you should still be able to do gardening.

Though, it seems to me a game-time based system has its flaws, too. You'd need to require much less growing time than weeks, and so I'm sure some students will start to do this:
*put Wizard away while doing homework*
*press a key every 10 minutes so you don't auto log out*

which is not optimal for their health and puts extra load on the servers.

Compare another game with gardening as a popular feature: Plants vs. Zombies. There plants essentially don't wilt, you could water your garden anytime and they grow, and it worked out fine.

While having the plants wilt away and die is fine, right now they do so in 2-3 days, and I believe the time pressure is unnecessary to the whole experience. I suggest moving the time scales a bit toward the gardening in PvZ: the plants die only when left unattended for about a week. It seems like this will only make the system better, with no downsides.

Honestly the rewards from gardening aren't even that great; some players can get to Grandmaster by the time the first twenty plants finish their life cycles. Let the players feel like they can do gardening at their own pace.