Growing Plants, what’s the point?

[Ranson]

silk

[Fable]

Farming is never grinding. When one farms, their touch can be seen everywhere and it’s easy to read the environment react to our actions; thus giving us the choice to navigate into that best result in the most immersive way possible. When one grinds, there’s almost nothing else than overcomplex RNGesus, a huge arena with monsters and couple npcs dictating time sink.

Even if some players didn’t feel the need to farm, choosing seemingly mindless grind instead, at least there’s the choice to do so. It’s not like it’s supposed to compete with efficiency. Just provide a purpose for those who want believable diversity (an alternative path to the same result basically). If it becomes the new norm, that’s okay too.

[WhatMightHaveBeen]

@Shadoza

When one farms, their touch can be seen everywhere and it’s easy to read the environment react to our actions; thus giving us the choice to navigate into that best result in the most immersive way possible.

This sentence does not make sense to me, please explain using different words and relating it to the game.

thank you…sometime simple is better.

Kind of your point as well. Making grwoing plants overly complex and grindy would just make most people ignore it even more.

[Fable]

Farming means that there’s an objective absence of undesirable tasks. Each task is necessary to make the land bare fruit and to bare specific fruit et cetera (full circle; rock, paper, scissors) in an acceptably believable way. Being absolute in its necessity means less grind; coz we can supervise the whole process line and influence the pace exactly the ways we want to form exactly what should become. The more mere RNGesus, pseudo-randomness variables, a feature has or involves, the more grind there is. Grind in my book is bloatware when it’s done in a sloppy enough (inexperienced) way, but stands as farming when it’s done the right way. A mere simple time sink that takes advantage solely from a chance and can’t be affected in any other way is a grinder.

[Minnion]

@Born2bAlive

ther things you mentioned are not designed to be rare and powerful, they aren’t. All things you mentioned you need large quantities of them, wich is not true for ALL plants.

Well if the Devs want to make some plants rare so you must go out to farm them, why not just split plant types so some produce seeds and some don’t… (So we can grow an infinite supply of stuff like Aloe, Berries, Generic Fiber Plants, Hops, Leavening agent, but not so much with rare plants like Grey Lotus…)

[Fable]

@Shadoza

I do not understand why you are referencing the Random Number Generator and what it has to do with growing plants.

It might be that I simply do not understand your meaning because of your word choices.

Good to know. Let me try it this way…

Based on my past experience with games and game design, the RNG is in the core of grinding. Mainly because it’s the easiest behaviour variable that can be utilised to stretch the gameplay beyond its otherwise healthy lifespan. It is this otherwise healthy lifespan that I regard as farming. Grinding is the result of stretching the gameplay while farming is just the necessity of gameplay without stretching.

There exists different forms of stretching, but RNG is always in the core of them.

@Shadoza

Grind, to me, means I have to gain a resource that is needed but is not fun to gather.

Exactly. Good observation. What makes this a bad experience to you is because you’re experiencing a stretched feature. It has the necessity variable, but there are also unnecessary variables connected to it; therefore bloating your gameplay. This is why I also referred that RNG can also be utilised for good. It’s just not always used for that. It’s mainly used to abuse customers to invest unnecessary amounts of time to the products instead.