No ideas on this one yet, I just like the Vibe Tee Em.


Bingo Balance Update?

This one warrants explanation. Infinite coli bingo was my reaction to hating grinding in the coli, but recognizing it as an important part of FR. Thus, add some fun to it!

This hinged on the belief that people wouldn't coli for plants. They'd grind exactly as much as usual, but with a little more dopamine to show for it, because plants aren't a motivator in and of themselves.

People care more about this tool than I ever could have hoped for (thank you <3), but I've found myself wondering if that doesn't mean I've made things worse. My big issue with the coli is that it's this endless, dull Skinner box where you trade time and stimulation and wrist health for the chance at rewards. Endless coli bingo in a world where people care about getting plants is that exactly, but now the rewards are "better", so there's incentive to spend more time with it. And I don't want people feeling like they "have to" use the coli to get the full experience with this tool. Equally important though, if people want to participate in the coli as part of using the tool, I want them to have the best experience possible!



I want to be clear--I have no interest in making things worse for everyone else just to better align with "intent". I have ideas, but they're not necessarily the best ones. So I'm going to lean heavily on the rest of you to help me with this, and I'd like to get it done as a sort of two-step process.

For at least this week, I'd like to discuss and refine a few possible changes here in the thread. There's no poll, because polls favor an initial set of ideas as-is. If you're anxious about participating, please feel free to DM me ideas and I'll propose them as being "from a community member". Also, I know I don't have to ask this because y'all're literally the coolest people on FR, but for the sake of anyone who'd usually not participate in a "Suggestion" discussion, this is going to be us as a community vs. the problem of making coli bingo balance feel as good as possible. We're all on the same side! :)

Once we've hashed out a plan, then we can open it up for a poll. This is to ensure we can get feedback from folks who can't participate in a forum discussion (due to availability, anxiety, language barriers, etc). Obviously though, the poll will be heavily skewed towards the ideas from the first round, and depending on how solid we get things, could be a simple "this looks fair!"/"delay for refinement, I want to participate and bring up X concern"

This might seem like overkill, and it probably is! Fact is, a high proportion of people who use the tool don't participate in the thread, and the last thing I want is a situation where something changes out from under them in a way that feels unfair. Of course, I also really want to honor those of y'all who've been chiming in and helping this tool all along the way; I view you as its experts :D Hence the two-step thing with the delayed poll for a [checks hand] ...balance update on a psuedo-adoptable RNG shop on a gay dragon browser capitalism simulator.



Here's just a few rebalance ideas to get the ball rolling. It's not one or the other (or any), these could easily be combined, so please talk in terms of which changes would be good/bad for your own playstyle, why, and what other changes you'd want to see happen. Please don't restrict yourself based on perceived difficulty of coding or on assumption the below are "planned" either! They're just strawmen for a few aspects of a rebalance.


Add an additional "endless" board

Pros: Since coli is currently the only way to get infinite plants (besides the to-do list, which has a dropoff baked in), introducing a second endless board could massively decrease the pressure on coli. Since this wouldn't require any change to the coli boards at all, it's purely an "upgrade".

Cons: Picking a board topic! Coli's not exactly the peak of accessibility, but picking something else that can be done "endlessly" and is accessible to a wide variety of people isn't easy. It can't be self-care (I do not want to turn nice little rituals into something mechanical). Exercise is possible (rather than difficulties, it'd be checkboxes for categories like low-impact, beginner cardio, advanced cardio, etc, with the board being generated from all selected categories), but I'd want to consult with someone who knows a lot more about the human body than I do. A "walking scavenger hunt" could be fun, like you generate the board, go for a walk, and try to spot things like "a flock of birds", "an airplane", "a species of plant you recognize", "a house you haven't seen before", but people's environments vary massively, and it's not safe for everyone to wander around.


Coli bingo becomes a daily

1 board of each size/difficulty is generated per day, for a total of 12 boards.

Pros: It's no longer infinite! Trivially solves the issue of there being no satisfying "end point". Harder difficulties are incentivized without requiring nerfs to easier ones, and in fact we could buff the board rewards. Lends itself well to challenges. Incentivizes people to use the to-do list and self-care stuff.

Cons: Drastic change, and may not have the effect I'd hope, since it could introduce new pressure (like "oh, coli bingo is a limited resource, I need to make sure I get it every day!"). Also, the higher difficulties (looking at you, Pain) could result in someone spending ages in the coli anyways. Unless I removed Pain and took it to 9 boards per day? Does anyone even use Pain???


Coli's nerfed, other stuff's buffed

Nerfs
The number of plants handed out could be bound to board difficulty; easy will be nerfed, medium around the same, hard and pain buffed. They could also be more normalized; currently you get more plants near the start of the board for...reasons?, which would be changed in favor of handing them out at a more constant rate. A countdown 'til the next plant (and possibly the plant itself) could be displayed, because if it's a big number and meh plant, that's far less "motivating" than the seemingly-random awarding of a Mystery Plant. A number of trivial challenges (get 1 green thing) could be reworked by taking advantage of the opportunities for longer text in the hint display (get 3 different green things; venturing to other venues is fine!) so that spamming Easy is less of a meh experience, and the overall difficulty goes up a bit.

Buffs
Plants awarded by the self-care board will be massively increased, I'm talking first square revealed gets you one, probably like +25-50% more plants overall. The to-do list's "pick what you like from a selection of plants" mode will be extended from the first 10 to 15 (or 20?) lines, and I may introduce a random chance of getting an extra ~mystery plant~ if there's interest. Really it's just open season here, suggest Whatever.

Pros: Now that I understand just how many plants people want to collect (to be clear, my forecast was a max collection size of like...500?), buffing the daily stuff feels right. And nerfs and buffs are standards for balancing for a reason! Nothing new to learn, it's all the familiar tooling, just a bit more/less rewarding in a way that hopefully feels fair.

Cons: But does it feel fair? I don't know if there's any coli nerf out there that both feels fair AND overcomes the massive advantage of being literally endless.


Overhaul "plant rarity" which, weirdly, might reduce reliance on the coli

You may have noticed that different difficulties of bingo board give different plants and different colors. That's due to the EG rarity system, which is wildly opaque. In short, common plants and colors are more "natural" (green grass), rarer ones are bigger, stranger, and more wildly colored (giant eyeburner crystals).

Rarity is divorced from how people use the tool, because gardens don't work like other RNG collectables. Common/commons can be the most desirable if you're going for a more "normal" garden, and coli bingo's by far the most straightforward way of getting that.

If rarity was reworked (or removed entirely), it would remove the need to rely on the coli for plant control. In my mind, that involves doing away with common/uncommon/rare, replacing them with actual categories (succulent/tree/inorganic/etc for bases, natural/unusual/fantastical for colors), having all tools pull from all categories by default, and adding a sibling to the plant mixer that lets you sacrifice X seeds for something in the categor(ies) of your choice. Specifying exactly one category of base and one category of color would be the most expensive by far (like 7 seeds), and as you specify more (or none) the price can go as low as 2 seeds. Obviously this is a pretty involved possibility and is a less-direct answer to the coli thing, but...

Pros: it would, depending on how people use the tool, act as a pure "upgrade". Rarity is, in my mind, a bad and confusing system. Coli bingo being the main way of interacting with it's also bad. Having to guess what I even consider rarities to be? Bad. This would fit cleanly with any mode of rebalance (though it might require a bit more of a nerf to Easy and a bit more of a buff to Hard since Easy could now give any plant) and introduce a new seed sink that, unlike the seed swap, is functionally endless.

Cons: The "sacrifice seeds to get one to your liking" thing skirts pretty close to gambling. I could make it slightly less gambly by showing 3 plants and only letting the user pick 1 before showing the seed, but I don't want to add a feature like this without SERIOUS buy-in from folks. Also, it might encourage more coli grinding, since you might want more meh plants to juice.

*By the way, if the rarity overhaul's desired, I would plan to show it in the plant analysis thing on the utils page. That way if you get a base you like and aren't sure what category it belongs in, you could check