Getting bored when inside is unrealistic

[Josko]

I noticed for a very long time now that when I'm inside a building my character starts to slowly get bored right away, it dosn't matter if Im killing zombies, looting, running, walking, or reading, my character still gets bored when inside. But the moment I step outside boredom goes away.

This is ridiculous! I was in the Mall fighting tons of zombies, looting, walking, running and my character got extremely bored. This is just wrong, you wouldn't get bored like that in a zombie apocalypse fighting zombies, moving around, looting or doing some other activity inside.

I would suggest to make so Boredom only starts if a character stays completely still and does nothing for 10 seconds.

Anyone feel the same?

[BoogieMan]

I've never felt the boredom mechanic worked right either. It doesn't seem to take into account what is really going on and as a result it feels arbitrary.

 

Everyone is different and some people love to stay indoors. But the simple fact that indoors equals safety, what with there being flesh eating zombies about, would probably make most people pretty stoked about the time they get to spend in relative safety. As for tasks, that's relative as well. Some people love to organize, some people love to cook, some people love to build things, some people love to read.

 

What may work better is designing it to take into account is how long you've been doing the same general type of task, and take your skills and traits into account to determine how much that character enjoys that type of activity. 

 

Other things that could affect it:

 

-Having dead zombies in your field of view often, making you a bit sad.

-Nearly all food should reduce boredom and sadness.

-Barren surroundings, mostly empty rooms.

-Long drives

-Not doing anything for extended periods of time.

-Sleeping should reset boredom and sadness that didn't get to a high level, and if it was high, it should lower it.

[Josko]

49 minutes ago, BoogieMan said:

I've never felt the boredom mechanic worked right either. It doesn't seem to take into account what is really going on and as a result it feels arbitrary.

 

Everyone is different and some people love to stay indoors. But the simple fact that indoors equals safety, what with there being flesh eating zombies about, would probably make most people pretty stoked about the time they get to spend in relative safety. As for tasks, that's relative as well. Some people love to organize, some people love to cook, some people love to build things, some people love to read.

 

What may work better is designing it to take into account is how long you've been doing the same general type of task, and take your skills and traits into account to determine how much that character enjoys that type of activity. 

 

Other things that could affect it:

 

-Having dead zombies in your field of view often, making you a bit sad.

-Nearly all food should reduce boredom and sadness.

-Barren surroundings, mostly empty rooms.

-Long drives

-Not doing anything for extended periods of time.

-Sleeping should reset boredom and sadness that didn't get to a high level, and if it was high, it should lower it.

Exactly. Boredom needs a rework. Hopefully they will get to that sometime

[Liva98989]

Not to mention in multiplayer, when you write with people or rp, the mood will jump up as well, even if you are doing activities with players, so it doesn't really take into account the rping aspects either. 

 

Felt like that was worth mentioning as well, especially in long car drives etc. or just sitting still in a house, if there's a discussion happening or something it doesn't necessarily = the character being bored, if that makes sense.

[feral_donkey]

If you play Veteran and have desensitized it's harder to lose boredom iirc.      Normally fighting or seeing zeds would lose the trait.    I think..

[Loskene]

You can stand outside doing absolutely nothing and boredom will go away. Seriously. I guess it's never boring standing on your front porch in a zombie apocalypse, but as soon as you step inside it's snoozetown. I've taken to building small balconies outside windows in my safe houses just to give chars a safe place to idle without being struck with boredom while reading a book or something. Maybe they should just get rid of boredom entirely tbh, I can't think off the top of my head of any kind of implementation that doesn't have jarring edge cases to deal with for no real gameplay benefit.

[Josko]

Yeah. Boredom is just annoying. They should really just get rid of boredom entirely I agree.

It dosn't add anything to the game, just frustration.

[WrittenInBlood]

As I see this, boredom in current state totally needs rework, but dropping it completely takes away one important thing - grind restriction. 

 

I think boredom should rise every time player repeats a task, this way it will be very inconvenient to, e.g., clear a patch of trees, water large arae of garden in a single day, or dismantle 50 TVs in a row to grind Electrics skill.

 

And current "static" boredom increase could tied to interior furnishings, so that living in a large storage filled with same and same crates will get on character nerves faster than comfy, nicely decorated apartment. Math could look roughly like [room area + instances of a single object inside / number of unbarricaded windows], with possible modifiactors from pretty, but otherwise useless objects like potted plants, posters and pictures. 

[Arsenal26]

Whenever my character gets "bored" I start disliking their attitude ... I mean here you are directing them to do what's best in the interests of their survival, and all you get in return is.... "Waaaaaaa..... I'm Bored!!!!"

 

Perhaps a "Well disciplined" vs. "Spoiled Brat" trait set is needed to counter this..

[ZombiesLoveBrainiacs]

Huh...I played Zomboid for 300 hours and never realized this is how boredom works. I thought it was caused by inactivity, which makes sense.

 

Btw: I generally ignore boredom & depression anyway, because the penalty doesn't matter most of the time. But one time, I was at maximum boredom & depression for days - and suddenly I started losing health and didn't know why. Can depression cause health loss after all?

[explorator]

I have never been THAT bored because it is so easy to remove by standing outside, or getting close to a zombie.

 

I think when they eventually rework Boredom, they should make Books, Magazines, and Newspapers remove a random amount, because not every book is equaly entertaining.

[DresdenBBQ]

15 minutes ago, explorator said:

I have never been THAT bored because it is so easy to remove by standing outside, or getting close to a zombie.

 

I think when they eventually rework Boredom, they should make Books, Magazines, and Newspapers remove a random amount, because not every book is equaly entertaining.

Eh well it's subjective. Two people will have different reactions to the same book. For example, I'd be stoked to read about plant identification as well as the basics of carpentry but you'd have a mighty difficult time keeping my attention in a book about electrical engineering while I have a friend who's the opposite. He'd struggle through a plant identification book but he'd absolutely tear through an electrical engineering one. There's no socially universal idea on what's 'boring' so it's kinda difficult to balance in that regard without implementing an entire enjoyment feature and adding more customability to your actual character. Which, I don't think is too far out the window seeing at how intricate the insulation system they want to add is, so they're not afraid to go in depth but I doubt it's high up on their priority list if they had thought about it much. 

[explorator]

4 hours ago, DresdenBBQ said:

Eh well it's subjective. Two people will have different reactions to the same book. For example, I'd be stoked to read about plant identification as well as the basics of carpentry but you'd have a mighty difficult time keeping my attention in a book about electrical engineering while I have a friend who's the opposite. He'd struggle through a plant identification book but he'd absolutely tear through an electrical engineering one. There's no socially universal idea on what's 'boring' so it's kinda difficult to balance in that regard without implementing an entire enjoyment feature and adding more customability to your actual character. Which, I don't think is too far out the window seeing at how intricate the insulation system they want to add is, so they're not afraid to go in depth but I doubt it's high up on their priority list if they had thought about it much. 

Yeah, it should be random per book, magazine, and/or newspaper per player.  Some should be very interesting, others barely so.

[DresdenBBQ]

 It'd be nice if you could determine your own character's personality but that'd have to wait for NPC's and all that to make a venture like that worth while. 

[Guest]

Only point of boredom is to get you to leave your house. So, in that sense, it's doing it's job even if it doesn't feel very realistic or personalized to the character.

 

Just explaining why it might feel so off to everyone, if you're looking for it to behave in a specific way right at this moment. I'd happily see it changed myself (and I imagine it will be when we have more time).

[Josko]

I just noticed with the debug tool, boredom increases the moment you go inside a car and goes down the moment you go out just as if you were inside. I had no idea being in a car gave boredom lul!

[ohgodspidersno]

My issue with it is that it doesn't seem to notice that you're cooking. Cooking isn't all that boring!

[Josko]

3 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Only point of boredom is to get you to leave your house.

Really?

I think real actual boredom ( The players boredom ) is what would make you leave your house, that and exploring, looting and so on.

I highly doubt that everyone would just stay home 24/7 if boredom was removed or reworked when being inside.

Also you can't stay inside forever ( Food and water would eventually run out ) And then you are also usually in a small and confined space when inside where escape routes are few. But you can bypass all this by just being outside and build huge logwalls then. I just think Boredom only brings frustration.

The Mall has the biggest problem with boredom, it's very big so all of it is considered inside ofcourse and no matter what you do in the mall, killing zombies, running, looting, you will eventually be extremely bored and severly depressed as a result Pretty unfair in my opinion.

Maybe the devs could make somehow so when you are inside the mall you wouldn't get boredom?

[Josko]

3 minutes ago, ohgodspidersno said:

My issue with it is that it doesn't seem to notice that you're cooking. Cooking isn't all that boring!

It dosn't matter what you do when inside, you will still get bored eventually, because the boredom meter keeps ticking, so you can be cooking, reading, building something, looting, running, killing zombies and yet you will eventually get bored. The apocalypse must be very boring when inside indeed ^^

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Josko said:

Really?

I think real actual boredom ( The players boredom ) is what would make you leave your house, that and exploring, looting and so on.

I highly doubt that everyone would just stay home 24/7 if boredom was removed or reworked when being inside.

Also you can't stay inside forever ( Food and water would eventually run out ) And then you are also usually in a small and confined space when inside where escape routes are few. But you can bypass all this by just being outside and build huge logwalls then. I just think Boredom only brings frustration.

The Mall has the biggest problem with boredom, it's very big so all of it is considered inside ofcourse and no matter what you do in the mall, killing zombies, running, looting, you will eventually be extremely bored and severly depressed as a result Pretty unfair in my opinion.

Maybe the devs could make somehow so when you are inside the mall you wouldn't get boredom?

 

Yes, really. It'd been a big problem -- people setting themselves up in their little skyfort and just avoiding the whole game.   Boredom was probably a poor choice to describe what amounts to cabin fever, in retrospect, and the system doesn't really "work" as intended regardless so it does need to be changed eventually.

 

Interesting thoughts on the mall; I'd not considered it. You'd certainly not expect to get bored there unless the situation got rather extreme. 

[Josko]

7 minutes ago, EnigmaGrey said:

 

Yes, really. It'd been a big problem -- people setting themselves up in their little skyfort and just avoiding the whole game.

Well that is strange, when I'm building a base I usually create logwalls around my base, and just stand outside and completely bypass that boredom system and my character dosn't get unhappy either!

Best spot is that cabin near the small lake just north of West point, build logwalls around it, the lake will be a natural impassable shield and then if you have some skill in foraging, you just forage all day long xD

When winter comes, you eat your non-perishable foods and start forage again at April.

Forage is pretty op really lol.

[Magic Mark]

Maybe boredom should be renamed to stir-crazy to better explain this? This seems acceptable, because players can understand that this is because they haven't left the house in hours and also haven't done anything fun to counteract that. If it is poorly explained, it could come off as if the game is underhandedly punishing you for having a moment of relief. 

[ohgodspidersno]

On 11/6/2019 at 11:23 AM, Loskene said:

You can stand outside doing absolutely nothing and boredom will go away. Seriously. I guess it's never boring standing on your front porch in a zombie apocalypse, but as soon as you step inside it's snoozetown. I've taken to building small balconies outside windows in my safe houses just to give chars a safe place to idle without being struck with boredom while reading a book or something. Maybe they should just get rid of boredom entirely tbh, I can't think off the top of my head of any kind of implementation that doesn't have jarring edge cases to deal with for no real gameplay benefit.

This is especially ironic since being outside is, in many ways, safer than being indoors. You're more likely to see a zombie outside but you're much less likely to be surprised or killed by one.

[Loskene]

I'd be fine with changing boredom to cabin fever or stir craziness. One that's counteracted by doing things, in case you end up getting trapped inside for a while with no choice but to stay. If you want to prevent endless grinding just make every task require some stamina, so a day of carpentry, gardening, research and tinkering etc would leave your char physically and mentally exhausted by bedtime.

 

I think the biggest annoyance with the boredom mechanic right now, trivial as it is overall, is just that it happens too quickly. Can't leave my char reading a book by the fireplace in the lap of luxury to go make a cup of (real) tea without them getting bored. If it took like 3 days of confinement before they started wanting to chew the scenery I bet there'd be no comments about it at all. Even if it took into account the size of building you're living in. I like to choose safehouses that I know I wouldn't get tired of living in if I could take them over IRL. If you clear and board up the entire mall you deserve to live inside it indefinitely with no penalty imo.

[ZAMNPlayerD]

What does the boredom debuff even do? I mean, I've played the game for almost 200 hours and I've never seen or felt that boredom actually affects anything as a debuff.