Accepted Suggestion: Adjustment to Vitals (Hunger, thirst, health)

[Goofbelly]

Hunger, thirst, and healing are currently too easy to recover from, diminishing their importance in gameplay.

I propose increasing the rates of hunger and thirst to make food and water more essential. This adjustment would not only add depth to survival aspects but also enhance roleplaying, encouraging players to seek more than just rations to maintain their well-being.

The rate of passive health recovery should also be significantly slowed down.
Currently, players passively heal so quickly that during medical roleplay, half the time they end up fully healed before a script is even applied, rendering the procedure largely unnecessary. This can lead to a disconnect for newer roleplayers who may take this as encouragement to ignore the effects of damage. To address this, I propose slowing down passive healing, reducing the effectiveness of easily accessible medical items, such as basic bandages, and potentially even imposing a cap on passive healing - a comfortable midpoint where passive healing would cease to increase player health. Through this, players would be required to seek treatment or use healing scripts to return to full health, giving the CMRU and rebel medics more of a purpose, rather than a process to be ignored.

The key focus of these suggestions is to promote active engagement with existing scripts for healing, eating, and drinking - I believe doing so will enhance the immersive experience of the game for everyone.

 

[Kappatalist]

Massively agree with passive healing and the medical side of things, I'd say get rid of passive healing entirely imo. But with food and water in my experience this doesn't really lead to more roleplay, and if anything takes away from it as instead of actually roleplaying you're just hunting down scripts and it becomes far more of an annoyance than anything positive, interrupting RP rather than encouraging it.

 

[boots]

When I first started playing a couple of years ago, back on Terminal map, I constantly had to seek interaction with others, finding a chef or somebody who would sell me cooked food with whatever little scraps of money I could scrape together. I think back on it as my fondest memories, having to plan my day and find ways to survive as a poor slummer, with almost nobody giving free handouts.

I think times now are a lot different, but it was a lot of fun and moreso like an RPG rather than just a chatroom simulator.

We could all benefit from trying out increased hunger and thirst values for a little while, I think. At least for a test run.

 

[DillonVentures]

But with food and water in my experience this doesn't really lead to more roleplay, and if anything takes away from it as instead of actually roleplaying you're just hunting down scripts and it becomes far more of an annoyance than anything positive, interrupting RP rather than encouraging it.

couldn’t have said it better myself
it’s already hard enough to keep the hunger and thirst bars high (from my experience at least), why make it even more hard?

 

[Malic]

Might take some dedicated dev time, but something akin to the Hunt Showdown HP chunks system could simulate more permanent injuries that require medical assistance to bounce back from.

As for food and water, I think that's fine to just play up IC when relevant. Realistically your character, if they do go get rations, is out there waiting in line and doing nondescript day to day stuff when you aren't playing. So just missing a ration cycle thanks to odd hours can really just suggest full on starvation or not. I definitely recall hunger being brought up plenty during longer stretches a ration center closure, usually enticing otherwise loyalist routed characters to go to the slums looking for food, but that'll probably differ from player to player pretty drastically.

The real problem I think with starvation and dehydration is that there's next to no way to really implement it without it being a genuine nuisance, mostly because those aspects of life are so obnoxious we've spent the last 200,000 years trying to metagame them out of existence.

 

[Inspector Orlok]

Personally the issue isn’t the food/thirst system, or their decrease rate, it’s just the accessibility for food and produce. It’s way too easy for both sides to obtain cheap and filling food.

There should be debuffs and major disadvantages to eating raw and dirty food. Take leeches, head crabs and Antlion meat for example, if not properly cooked, they should provide a debuff

 

[Goulashnikov]

Personally the issue isn’t the food/thirst system, or their decrease rate, it’s just the accessibility for food and produce. It’s way too easy for both sides to obtain cheap and filling food.

There should be debuffs and major disadvantages to eating raw and dirty food. Take leeches, head crabs and Antlion meat for example, if not properly cooked, they should provide a debuff

This. Breen Water already gives you a debuff. Regular civi ration slop should as well. Encourage players to seek out or prepare better food instead of just spamming leeches or waiting 2 hours for your liquid-meal out of the RDT.

 

[nora]

This. Breen Water already gives you a debuff. Regular civi ration slop should as well. Encourage players to seek out or prepare better food instead of just spamming leeches or waiting 2 hours for your liquid-meal out of the RDT.

speaking on the topic of breen water, i feel like debuffs that come from food should be entirely hidden before consumption. instead, the user who ate said food can get a message that indicates so but isn't precise, something along the lines of "you feel confused..."

 

[Komchan]

Just like the fatigue system, making food/drink scarce does not assist roleplay much if at all.

Making it an extremely annoying thing to deal with has in literally every instance it has been tried on hl2rp servers outside of small, close-knit communities, resulted in people getting annoyed, it interrupting other kinds of rp, etc. It forces people to script-hunt even more, and encourages them to disconnect.

Oh, they COULD walk about and do stuff but they're low on food and hunger and the debuff is awful, and there isn't any nearby, so for now they'll just disconnect and head on later when there's more people. As a result, there'll be fewer people on during earlier hours, which has a knock-on effect of making the server look less active, so fewer people join, and can kill a server if it goes far enough.

If they're healing mid-way through medrp that's a bit weird? I don't think I've ever actually experienced that at all, unless you mean someone has been severely injured and has slowly walked to the UM across the entirety of the map and is now on a quarter health or something, which is a bit weird.

Here's an idea on how to replace passive healing: Have some sort of 'warmth/comfort' stat but ridiculously simple. If you're next to like a fire, you slowly passively heal - Encourages campfire stuff, too. Requiring scripts for any healing at all doesn't really encourage rp and is really annoying, I can only imagine how offputting it'd be for any new players.

HP Damage also includes any form of damage. Oh, you've gotten beaten by cops? uhm acktually the medical staff won't heal you and since passive healing was removed ur gonna be stuck with a grey screen forever LOL

If a new player was confronted with that, they'd probably just quit the server outright.

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I agree with the idea of making various items give debuffs, but there should be a guaranteed method of getting 'renewable' food sources on server, at great risk or via farms. Eg, antlions spawning continuously somewhere, or headcrabs. Maybe a part of the map continuously spawns a couple headcrabs every hour, or something. Relying on staff for it is only going to add to the staff /help-queue + they might not want to.

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Having all debuff info hidden would be quite annoying BUT provide some interesting immersion/rp aspects, make it feel less gamey so I think that's quite a cool idea.

Maybe provide a method for 'testing' said drinks/food-stuffs, to find out the stat-penalties that would be caused. Like, it says 'This seems to numb the mind (-2 INT) and the senses (-2 PER)'

There should absolutely be an equivalent to something that 'washes your system of debuffs', though. Various 'versions' of it, that come with downsides.

One version that just has you puke out all of your food/water, so only safe if you have some food/other stuff with you. Maybe some rebel-drug that flushes some of the negatives from your system as well as the positives, and some really-expensive CAB-level drug that flushes all the negative debuffs, while keeping the positives.

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tl;dr:
1) Make passive-healing occur by a fire/campfire/stove or while sat down. Goes hand-in-hand with fatigue mechanics.
2) Have more food/drink items give debuffs.
3) Make debuffs hidden, requiring 'inspection' (Eg, reason for scientists/testing) or guesswork
4) Ability to purge your system of toxins (Puke it out at cost of your food/water, rebel-drug that flushes system of all, CAB-level-drug that flushes only negative debuffs).
5) Dangerous but reliable food source (Headcrabs or antlions) spawning on the map continuously, even during dead hours.

 

[boots]

I agree with the idea of making various items give debuffs, but there should be a guaranteed method of getting 'renewable' food sources on server

You can get leeches from a water spigot using a bottle, which you can cook on a fire

 

[Komchan]

You can get leeches from a water spigot using a bottle, which you can cook on a fire

Eh, still too inefficient / is kind of bizzare as a food source? Would be more interesting for it to be a bit risky via fighting etc

 

[MazuzaM]

In a good world people do not require OOC and developed mechanics to incentive good roleplay, sadly we are not in such good world

 

[Komchan]

In a good world people do not require OOC and developed mechanics to incentive good roleplay, sadly we are not in such good world

In such a world Willard and rp would barely exist outside of forums and discord.

If you don't need mechanics or any of that, you would simply do it via text.

 

[Muho]

I somewhat agree. IMO people don't care much about the RP side of eating. Imagine your slummer/rebel char eating leeches and drinking water for weeks. Would be cool if we nerfed the leeches and make people get more hungry. This would animate some of the slummers to actually get some good food in the shops. As a frequent shop RPer, its kind of sad to see that no one really buys food. Most of the Loyalists have filling food that lasts until the next ration etc. Then you got slummers who can get some leeches and whatnot with little effort... Maybe even a nerf on the Rations would be an Idea or general the food overall. Or the interval between rations wouldn't keep someone sated, would also be an option.

Well, anything that gives us the feeling of actually trying to survive would be nice. Imagine Tier-3 etc. getting into workshifts to earn some credits so they can sate their hunger and thirst.

 

[Komchan]

I somewhat agree. IMO people don't care much about the RP side of eating. Imagine your slummer/rebel char eating leeches and drinking water for weeks. Would be cool if we nerfed the leeches and make people get more hungry. This would animate some of the slummers to actually get some good food in the shops. As a frequent shop RPer, its kind of sad to see that no one really buys food. Most of the Loyalists have filling food that lasts until the next ration etc. Then you got slummers who can get some leeches and whatnot with little effort... Maybe even a nerf on the Rations would be an Idea or general the food overall. Or the interval between rations wouldn't keep someone sated, would also be an option.

Well, anything that gives us the feeling of actually trying to survive would be nice. Imagine Tier-3 etc. getting into workshifts to earn some credits so they can sate their hunger and thirst.

All it will do is make it far more annoying to play for people and decrease interest in the server.

There defo should be debuffs to basic food-stuffs.

Food expires quite quickly, maybe have the ability to put it in like a fridge or something?

And making it "more gritty/survivally" just kills any other forms of rp.

Workshifts tend to be quite varying and being forced to afk nearby it in order to guarantee yourself one of the few slots (usually max of 4 people) is very harmful to rp generally.

 

[HalfLife2CitizenMale09]

In a good world people do not require OOC and developed mechanics to incentive good roleplay, sadly we are not in such good world

To be fair does the hunger bar being low really incentivize people to RP it regardless, I assume if they tried people would just…not roleplay being hungry anyway.

 

[Otizem]

If we are going to have debuffs from raw food like leeches and crabs as well as antlions, could we also finally have the option to drink unboiled water also, that will also give debuffs but will save you in a pinch?

 

[Kwasior]

Surely we would also have access to raw water with the debuffs

 

[Goulashnikov]

Agreed with above for drinking raw water. Debuffs and raising toxicity.

 

[Lost Coast Chanties]

In such a world Willard and rp would barely exist outside of forums and discord.

If you don't need mechanics or any of that, you would simply do it via text.

Ironically it would lead to less roleplay. Nobody can keep a perfectly accurate track of their fictional person's hunger if there isn't at least some form of a way to show it in lieu of real-life feelings of peckishness. How can you tell that you're hungry if your stomach isn't there to nag about it?