Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Crate hoarding alleviation, free Quill Bundle upgrade
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-10-18 14:45:51 [Permalink]
Hey folks, remember my last MotD mentioning hey maybe let other folk get some crates instead of hoarding tens of thousands in your inventory, well you know what happened? You know what fucking happened?

What fucking happened is on me. I've been doing this for fifteen bloody years and there is absolutely no excuse for me not seeing this coming:

"Hey everyone, try to leave some crates on the map 'cause we're kinda running out here."
"We're..." *putting on hat* "running out, you say?"
"Yeah it's a whole thing, there are a quarter of a million crates in people's inventories, folk are walking around with thousands or even tens of thousands of crates in their backpacks and they're still picking up more."
"What, they're picking up more?" *grabbing keys* "Like, actively right now?"
"Haha yeah weird right"
"So..." *picking up Crate Opening Crowbar and lacing up running shoes* "crates are becoming rare, is what you're saying."
"Yeah, in fact at this rate we'll run out completely later on today, and anyone who doesn't have one will just be basically shit outta luck. Uh, where you going with that crowbar?"
"Nowhere BYE"

Yeah I've got no excuse, sorry. To anyone who's spent more than ten minutes around other humans, never mind someone who runs an online game, it was forehead-slappingly obvious what'd go down there. Chalk it up to my advancing age.

Anyway, there are some changes to the map pickup routines - you can't pick things up with no stamina, or with too many crates in your backpack. This doesn't remove crates from people's inventories, but it should at least stop the problem from getting worse. Banter had some good ideas about the funniest ways to reimplement crates in the future, and things like "Giving crates little metal legs" have been discussed and are in my notes folder.

(I mean, that'd be cool, right? If crates loved people but hated other crates. If a crate got lonely and had the chance to move once per midnight, it could move away from deep water areas where nobody wants to go for example, and it could even sneak out of the backpacks of players who have 43,876 other crates.)

Anyway, speaking of arbitrarily thieving shit out of your Inventory like the total bastard that I am, I'm in the process of retheming the Hunter's Lodge into the much funnier and more user-friendly Super Fancy Fun Club, and part of that process involves removing obsolete Lodge items. Older, crappier versions of our Quill bundles (which give you Special Comments, which you can use to post chat without your name attached for special effects) have been upgraded to the more recent, more generous versions, so that I can finally remove the old definition files from the game and quit tripping over them trying to support two different versions of Quills.

Folk who had an old-style 4-pack of Quills have been given a new style 5-pack.
Folk who had an old-style 25-pack have been given a 50 pack.
Lucky bastards who had an old-style 60-pack have been given a 500 pack.

The version 2 Quill bundles are functionally identical to the old ones, the only difference is the amount you get (and the old graphic was a bit crap).

Have fun!

~CMJ

MoTD Archives: