even though its fun as hell, it does take up a lot of time, I spent hours upon hours on the game getting use to everything and grinding.....well whenever you are back on the servers i'll wave to you from the throne haha

slj does have a point, aprone we all do love the game, but we can all agree it is very time consuming, to reach within the top ten score wise......I don't even have any suggestions on how to cut down time, but that 78k that I got I put in so much hours into getting that score like a part time job lol.....I definitely can't do that every week, but I still want to be able to stay competitive by putting in 3hrs a day in the game.....again i'm not even sure how to make this possible but that is a problem a lot of CA2 players are going through

I am in agreement with most of what people have been saying lately.  Castaways 2, "in practice", has turned out a bit different than it worked "on paper".  To anyone unfamiliar with what I mean by that, it means that when I planned out the game I predicted how I thought the game would feel and work out.  Now that it is built and we can all actually sit down and play it, I see that my predictions were not correct.

I believe the biggest complaint people have made (on forum, in game, and privately) is that the reset makes people feel like they have wasted their time.  I didn't predict it would feel quite this way, but it appears it does.  That is not good. 

I have spent the better part of a week now, sketching and planning out different approaches to the game in an effort to fix this.  Some of the plans even required a complete redesigning of how the game functions, almost turning it into a completely different game!  While these drastic ideas would have required probably months worth of additional work, I am desperate to salvage the months that have already gone into the game.  It does little good to release a game that most people won't want to play (for long).  I wish I had better news, but so far each and every one of those "plans" boiled down to the same problems that caused me to choose the game's current design.

If we could ask the fault cube for the perfect solution, I believe what we all want is for the game to continue on endlessly, without everyone getting bored because they have everything.  We would also want new/casual players not to be crushed under the toes of the players who might have a 6 month head start on new lands, resources, and army size.  These are major major hurdles, and even the mainstream world avoids endless strategy games for these reasons.

I am open to ideas!  I've racked my brain and am coming up short, but do keep in mind that often times people throw out "perfect solutions" that absolutely would not work, so we should keep in mind that an idea might sound good, but technical reasons could be what makes it unusable.  As long as we can all have a civil discussion, I welcome everyone's concerns and ideas for fixing the game.  We might even start with someone adding to my "dream list", or making a new list that is easier to achieve but also fixes the game for the players.

Because I find myself stuck at the moment, the last public beta server has been put back online.  I have moved it to a separate machine so I'm not stuck hosting it on my laptop.  Unless some reason pops up for me to take it offline, I believe I will keep the server running from week to week.  Players are welcome to play on there while ideas are hashed out here.  I'll continue to work on the game with my smaller testing team, and if we're lucky, a better game will come out of this.

Added: Keep in mind that the server runs from Sunday morning to Sunday morning, so anyone jumping on now (saturday) will be reset at midnight.

key has some good suggestions, only thing I would really add is, any path you choose to take in the game will give you the same amount of points. for example, selling gold gives you 5k, making desserts for the kingdom 5k, building a city 5k, catching horses for a big race 5k, deploying knights to battle rival cities 5k. the theme here is that players get tired of doing the same thing over and over to reach top status, but if we are choosing our own path and still recieveing the same amount of points it brings depth and variety to the game which means no player would really be doing the same thing to reach top 10, so players could switch it up from time to time and never get bored with the game while remaining competitive.

as we all know a main issue is players still feeling like they have a fair chance at top 10 even though they might not invest the same amount of time in the game as bob. I think you can do a system similar to what you have now just tweek it a bit. like if bob is in first place, and he chooses to sell gold back to the kingdom, instead of him getting 5k points he gets 2k points, to where as the players beneath him still gets the 5k if they sell the goal back, once those bottom players rise in the standings, then when they sell gold back, it will no longer be worth 5k. I think this system gives bottom players a fiar chance to stay within the loop, so basically the higher you are the harder it will be for you to get points which allows bottom players to catch up without investing hours into the game. or you can do a system where players can steal points from other players which should also give bottom players a fair chance. for example bob gives a fried snapper to the king for a feast, now a challenge pops up to where if zack can bring a better fish dish to the king, he would steal those points that bob earned. now bob can choose to make an even better fish dinner to steal his points back, or just move on to another task which would end that little battle. I think something like either one of these systems will always keep players at an even playing field.

I agree with what's been said in the last few posts. I simply don't have the time to invest in online play as it is now, and I too felt that all my hard work would have been for nothing, thus why I stopped playing in the middle of the week and didn't get very far during the last public beta.

Personally, this game always had a much stronger appeal as an offline game for me. it appears that i'm in the minority with this view, but I would really love to see the offline version get expanded before the online one. It just seems more fun to play this particular style of game completely alone, since that is basically how you start out with your civilization. however, as I said, I understand that the online version is going to take precedence, just because so many people do love the competitive nature of it. I'll definitely keep my eye on this topic and see what changes have been implemented in both modes, but for now, I'm content to wait for something cool to happen with the offline version.

Aprone,
How about after a week you die and all your resources are split up equally, willed to your four designated children.
Or part given to a charity. You would control these new characters but they would have to be located in four different parts of the land.

it writes me: wrong protocol or procedure call.

I like offline mode, wish sure, offline mode is added new abilitys.

Progress (timing) on single player is definitely slow, but that's mainly because it's using the timing meant for multiplayer.  When I start working on single player, I'll try to adjust everything to fit.

Well you can't build a city till Friday so that's not really an issue, the mine thing is strange though.

Hi.
I have a suggestion, but I'm not sure if this is possible because of how the game works:
What about skipping the PVP in the game so players can't attack each other, but instead have to hunt some enemies which will attack the players if they aren't kept away? Resources which is needed to progress could be found out in the wilderness. It might just be me, but I really don't care who's the best player. I just wanna play and have fun, and don't like to be nearly destroyed by other players, but enemies which all the players can work together to hold back, so we defend each other.

I think that is a good suggestion by slj, I don't think we should take out the pvp though, but I do like the idea of us fighting together to fight off gobblins on each other plots and other players.

and speaking of the gobblins I think they should have some type of power to steal our coins, food, and destroy our buildings so we would be forced to fight them away, because truthfully I don't even worry about them since they just take up spaces on my plot I have yet to kill a single one lol