Edit war on Kingdom Come Deliverance YMMV page

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Super_Weegee Since: Feb, 2019

9th Jan, 2022 02:04:59 PM

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Edit war on Kingdom Come Deliverance YMMV page Videogame

On December 22nd, Troper The Living Drawing removed these tropes from Kingdom Come Deliverance's YMMV page with the edit reason of "Removed several examples that, while potentially valid, are very complainy. Have not played the game and have little knowledge on it so if you have, please feel free to rewrite the removed examples to me more neutral.":

Folder for length

* Fake Difficulty: A nasty combination of bad technical aspects, obsessive denial of informations to player and Checkpoint Starvation (along with Save-Game Limits), all served in a sauce of bugs that very well might undermine the last hour or three of progress by crashing to desktop or not loading Event Flag. The game isn't even subtle about certain mechanics being added for the sake of pretending how difficult everything is.

Archery is probably the fakest of all "difficult" things in the game. There is no aiming dot visible, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. In fact, the game simply turns off the aiming dot when bows are drawn with a crudely written script. There is absolutely nothing preventing players from simply marking or memorizing the dot on display and then have perfect aim, regardless of skill, bow type or distance. The absurd sway of bows for first five levels of the skill only adds to how fake it really is, because if the aiming dot is marked (or displayed with a console command), the aim remains perfect despite displaying sway all over the screen.
The game never really informs how to train, so if natural progress is applied with the plot progression, Henry is going to be constantly and heavily under skilled. However, spending just 30 minutes with Captain Bernhard and whacking him with random Button Mashing is enough to train Henry into formidable fighter, raising half of his stats and generally turning the whole game into a cakewalk with most of enemies unable to even hit back.
Each and every camp full of bandits can be cleared with ease during night-time, by carefully picking them one by one. Not only does it allow the player to skip otherwise tough (or outright impossible) encounters, it's considerably easier to do than just trying to face few brigands on your own in a sword fight. Of course the game never informs about how stealth or stealth kills work, so unless player figures it out by applying common sense, good luck with all those encounters when trying to face bandits in straight-out combat.
The entire barter system relies on Henry's relationship with the vendor: he has to lower his bids for a long time to gain enough favour to get better prices (and better bids) in the future. Cue miller Peshek, who via finishing his quest line gains 100% favour. And since he's miller, he buys stolen goods. His merchant list is also scripted to pay premium for a lot of things regardless of favour. And if one particular vendor is constantly fed new items, their cash reserve increases during restocking. Eventually Peshek can easily carry 50 thousand groschen, buying whatever and offering decent prices at that. Just don't expect the game explaining any of this at any point.

Fake Longevity: The game has few very blatant cases of intentionally making certain trival tasks take extra time. It is so widespread, numerous reviewers pointed this as an outright trick to claim "100 hours of gameplay", despite 20 or so is going to be filled with tedium.
- All the copious, lengthy and unskippable animations. They add absolutely nothing to the game, aside few extra seconds every time certain action is taken. Haggle and horse (dis)mounting is probably most guilty of this and also some of the most repeated actions.
- Fast travel on map can only be done over pre-planned paths and only toward handful of pre-made points of interest. In practice, this leads to Henry taking in-game hours to circle back and forth over particularly twisted path over a hillside or taking a detour over half of the map. And it doesn't matter if he's on foot or riding - the speed of fast travel is exactly the same, so once a mount is acquired, it's considerably faster to just ride manually rather than use the "fast" travel option.
  - Additionally with horses, they move much slower on roads than off them. Most of the time, it's better to ride close to the road to keep track of where you're going, but not so close that the horse automatically attempts to get on it.
- Henry can't swim. Period. He can't ford rivers even when on horseback. Said rivers aren't deep and lack rapids of any sorts. Still, it takes to find what the game considers as a ford (where the water tends to be ankle-deep) or a bridge, which means a lot of back-and-forth travel toward nearest pass over river.
Misaimed "Realism": The game was heavily marketed under "super-realism" flag, but this backfires badly at certain game mechanics, especially since how uneven the application of said "realism" is, breaking the immersion entirely rather than enhancing it.
- Probably the most glaring is just about anything related with inventory management. You can carry around few tonnes of equipment and the only downside will be being forced into the walking pace of movement. Get yourself on horseback and even that no longer applies. Oh, and saddle bags on your horse come with a teleport, since you can move in and out items regardless of where the horse is, unless ongoing quest intentionally disables that option (which only ever happens twice).
  - Said saddle bags have a limited load they can carry, but there is nothing preventing Henry from overloading himself and then simply get on horseback.
- The weapons seem to be made out of foil and raw copper, that's how quickly they wear out. They also never really break down, just reach the state of "disrepair", meaning a simple debuff to damage. And you would grind any given blade into nothingness when using grindstone so often as Henry does.
That One Level: Needle in A Haystack. Working with the Neuhof bandits, Henry is tasked with infiltrating a monastery in order to track a straggler down, kill him and bring proof to the bandits that the target is dead. What follows is allegedly the most annoying quest in the whole game according to fans. First of all, it's a No-Gear Level, so you can't bring your weapons inside to kill the target. Second, since you're a novice, you're at the bottom of the monk hierarchy, meaning that you live under the authority of the hated Circators, monks who are supposed to keep order in the monastery and punish monks who break the rules. However, since you are being tasked with killing someone in the monastery, you WILL have to break many rules with your time in there, specially if you choose to do the sidequests that the monastery offer, which involves ludicrous amounts of lockpicking and pickpocketing, sneaking in and out of the monastery constantly, missing out on your schedule (and getting punished for that), getting lost and much more. Oh, and did we mention that all of this is done without a single Savior Schnapps in your inventory?
- Thankfully, the quest can be skipped, but it'll give you its "bad ending". There is an ornamental dagger hidden under a paving stone on the balcony next to the dormitory. If you don't mind a bit of collateral damage you can murder all the novices in their sleep, grab the spare set of keys from the pantry and escape within five minutes of the first night without needing any preplanning - apart from needing the Stealth Kill perk. Yes, it skips the whole quest and yes, it gives you a bad ending for it, but admit it, it's smart and it's understandable to do it.
- However, should Henry be a competent thief-type, the entire quest goes from That One Level to the best part of the entire game, as the main obstacle - lack of gear - is meaningless when all doors can be opened and circators avoided with stealth. It still requires overcoming various challenges, but in engaging and simply fun way.

No less than 30 minutes later, troper Stanisz added all of them back and commented them out with the reason "If you expect people to correct the tone, how about leaving them content to correct, rather than just cutting it?" Around a week later, troper C Dan Red removed the commenting symbol and made the FakeDifficulty entry public with no edit reason.

Seeing Stanisz's reason, I decided to take a look at it myself and edited the entries, with my own edit reason being "Grammar fixes, removed some entries (Miller seems more like Game-Breaker, Stealth is explained in the codex, and others are not that bad or seem to just be complaining), and tried to adjust the tone a tad to be more neutral." One of those removed entries was this, since most of it seemed to be unsalvageable complaining and one-sided:

Fake Longevity: The game has few very blatant cases of intentionally making certain trival tasks take extra time. It is so widespread, numerous reviewers pointed this as an outright trick to claim "100 hours of gameplay", despite 20 or so is going to be filled with tedium.
- All the copious, lengthy and unskippable animations. They add absolutely nothing to the game, aside few extra seconds every time certain action is taken. Haggle and horse (dis)mounting is probably most guilty of this and also some of the most repeated actions.
- Fast travel on map can only be done over pre-planned paths and only toward handful of pre-made points of interest. In practice, this leads to Henry taking in-game hours to circle back and forth over particularly twisted path over a hillside or taking a detour over half of the map. And it doesn't matter if he's on foot or riding - the speed of fast travel is exactly the same, so once a mount is acquired, it's considerably faster to just ride manually rather than use the "fast" travel option.
  - Additionally with horses, they move much slower on roads than off them. Most of the time, it's better to ride close to the road to keep track of where you're going, but not so close that the horse automatically attempts to get on it.
- Henry can't swim. Period. He can't ford rivers even when on horseback. Said rivers aren't deep and lack rapids of any sorts. Still, it takes to find what the game considers as a ford (where the water tends to be ankle-deep) or a bridge, which means a lot of back-and-forth travel toward nearest pass over river.

Hours later, Stanisz added the above entry back with the reason of "Come on, mate..."

Edited by Super_Weegee

WarJay77 (Troper Knight)

9th Jan, 2022 02:13:55 PM

They didn't even do the commenting correctly. You need to comment out every subbullet individually, not just the main bullet.

I should also note that this is not the first issue Stanisz has had in general with people removing entries. See here and here. I don't think it's a wonk or anything, but it is a pattern of behavior to at least be aware of.

Edited by WarJay77 Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

homogenized Since: Oct, 2009

9th Jan, 2022 02:20:06 PM

^ The second link doesn't work.

WarJay77 (Troper Knight)

9th Jan, 2022 02:20:47 PM

Derp, I'll fix it.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Arctimon Since: Nov, 2009

9th Jan, 2022 02:24:21 PM

So Stanisz added it back twice, so they're edit warring.

Also, you can just go back into the history to find the deleted stuff if they want to put it back up to change it. They had to do that to restore the entry so I'm not sure why they're raising a fuss about it.

And "Come on, mate" doesn't help anything, because it's borderline rude and it doesn't solve any of the issues that are on the page.

PCD Since: May, 2021

9th Jan, 2022 02:36:27 PM

Deleted duplicate.

Edited by PCD

PCD Since: May, 2021

9th Jan, 2022 02:36:48 PM

While I don't know the game, the entries read more like a critique, and the tone is not neutral. Some also seem to offer tips for easier game play, but perhaps that is normal in gane reviews (which this isn't)?

Super_Weegee Since: Feb, 2019

9th Jan, 2022 03:11:54 PM

^ Yeah, it looks that way.

The only thing I agree with in the Fake Difficulty entry is the archery one, as the lack of an aiming dot is the only reason why using a bow is harder than it should be. The part about training with Captain Bernard, I'm not too sure on. Is it saying the difficulty is fake because the game gets easier after Henry raises his stats? Pretty sure that's the opposite of how Fake Difficulty works, but I tried salvaging it regardless.

I can see the fast travel entry being possibly salvageable as well, since I found out that it's not just one person complaining about it. According to them, the fast travel takes longer than just riding to your destination manually, Henry will still get hungry and tired as he normally would as time still passes normally, and you can get a random encounter in the middle of fast traveling since you don't just teleport there. In the case of a hostile encounter, there's a chance you can fail to avoid or scout an attack and thus be taken out of fast travel to deal with it and possibly bite the dust, especially in the early game.

Edited by Super_Weegee

WarJay77 (Troper Knight)

9th Jan, 2022 03:13:26 PM

Not to mention the example they readded is badly formatted with a stray natter bullet.

Edited by WarJay77 Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Arctimon Since: Nov, 2009

9th Jan, 2022 03:29:13 PM

I sent Stanisz a PM to come here.

Stanisz Since: Jul, 2021

9th Jan, 2022 03:40:56 PM

.... aaaaaand I'm here.

Ok, so the short version is that all of the entries under the Fake Longevity are for their complain aspect valid, and I care more about their validity than how they are formatted. If the formatting is off, we (I?) can work on that with no issues.

Yes, I do have a thing for removing YMMV entries, especially without a comment, especially when a valid thing is being removed. And it gets an overkill bonus when a valid YMMV entry gets axed without a commentary. Like in this case, where the commentary covers everything but Fake Longevity, which got axed. And hence my inappropriate commentary when reinstating it back. Would it be commented, I would ask Tropers/Super_Weegee with a PM. There was none, hence reinstatement. If that's a wrong course of action? Probably. But removing YMMV without a comment on it isn't "kosher" either.

I'd also like to point it's almost 1 AM here and I'm drunk at the moment, so I would rather not do this right here and now.

Edit No. 2 in case we are still doing this:

So if drunk me in a middle of the night can easily find people calling for blood and/or making mods to circumnavigate around game's notorious animation and stretching issues, this is more than just me insisting. Especially given I'm just putting back entry that someone else put there first.

Edit No. 3

I'd like to call it a night. We can return to this discussion once I'm at least sober, and preferably also awake

Edited by Stanisz

Arctimon Since: Nov, 2009

9th Jan, 2022 04:54:34 PM

^But you added it back twice. You're edit warring, regardless of how right you think you are. Someone doing the wrong thing doesn't mean you also get to do the wrong thing.

And nobody forced you to come to this topic now.

WarJay77 (Troper Knight)

9th Jan, 2022 04:57:22 PM

I should also add that we don't just comment out problematic examples and hope someone fixes them, we only do that with Zero-Context Examples. We cut things if they need to be fixed. I think maybe this could've been moved to the discussion page to inform people, but putting it back is not the right option here, especially since nothing was actually fixed.

This is subjective, but in my experience it's way easier to just rewrite something from scratch than to rewrite a pre-existing example/description/etc. So cutting it has the benefit of cleaning the slate.

Edited by WarJay77 Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Synchronicity MOD (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)

9th Jan, 2022 05:22:12 PM

Stanisz can talk it out further with us in EB.

Super_Weegee Since: Feb, 2019

9th Jan, 2022 06:41:34 PM

Well, that happened.

To address the linked parts:

Animations - It only mentions picking up herbs animation. While it is a little annoying and the short 3 seconds do add up the more you do it, someone in that Steam thread pointed out that the higher your herbalism skill, the more plants you'll be able to grab in one go. For that last link, what haggling animation? If you mean the dialogue when it comes to haggling, you can press a button once or twice to skip it. The mod only addresses the head bobbing.

Swimming - A member of the QA team actually answered a question about this on the subreddit, saying that there's too few places with deep enough water to justify adding swimming.

Fast Travel - The first link is someone complaining about a bug related to fast travel. Got around to testing it myself and your speed remains the same regardless if you're on foot or horseback (six hours in-game and around a minute in real time to get from Rattay to Skalitz, the farthest two settlements and assuming you don't get stopped), but it is still faster than manually riding somewhere. You can't cancel it outside of the random encounters, however. The other parts I mentioned about the encounters and Henry getting hungry or tired still apply.

So with that said, would anybody mind if I cut the majority of the entries under Fake Difficulty and Fake Longevity except the archery and maybe fast travel ones?

Edited by Super_Weegee

AegisP Since: Oct, 2014

9th Jan, 2022 11:26:27 PM

OOPS NEVERMIND.

Edited by AegisP Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

Super_Weegee Since: Feb, 2019

13th Jan, 2022 04:16:37 PM

Bump

Arctimon Since: Nov, 2009

13th Jan, 2022 08:01:53 PM

I mean, at this point in time, you're just going to have to wait for the other party to come back from EB.

For the record, I agree that the entry as is reads as very complainy, and it was justified in its deletion. So unless it can get rewritten, I don't think it should stay.

laserviking42 Since: Oct, 2015

13th Jan, 2022 08:10:19 PM

Perhaps you should take it to the Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki thread.

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openEdit war on Kingdom Come Deliverance YMMV page Videogame

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Edit war on Kingdom Come Deliverance YMMV page Videogame