Game Mechanics The Problem With NPC Happiness

Would you get rid of happiness-based price increases?


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I think it would be interesting if you could choose as an option on world creation whether you wanted to use the 1.4 system with NPC happiness and Pylons or the pre-1.4 system without. The former option adds more complexity for more potential rewards (price discounts and map-wide teleportation). The other allows you to build giant strongholds.

But we all know what the devs would say: Too much time and energy to implement, hours of bug fixing, etc. etc. So it's probably not happening.
 
NPCs do not affect your building, unless your only reason to build ever was NPCs in the first place. This disincentivizes having all NPCs in same location, nothing more and nothing less. You can still build cities and castles, just put your NPCs elsewhere. The "you force me not to build same way" factor seems like one of silliest complaints, since it only affects people who build just the NPC housing and nothing else (in regards to building), and in that case, the incentive to adapt to other biomes stylistically is only improvement in my book.
I'm one of those people who generally only ever builds things for the sake of NPC housing. I set up my big wooden gulag apartment block, and that's it, because building isn't an aspect of the game that interests me at all. (Even if it did, I'd never build anything complicated unless it was in Journey mode with mob spawns disabled, because otherwise trying to build in any sort of vaguely-hazardous biome is painful.) I want them all handy so I can access whoever I need instantly, and that's how I've always played the game. I don't mind not having access to Pylons if I don't bother paying attention to NPC happiness, because that's something new added on, and I can get by the same as I always have by running around my world. If it gets too annoying I'll just wire up a few teleporters, since I have full control over those. But having a massive financial penalty slapped on out of nowhere for the same building I've always done just sucks.

And stepping back for a moment, from a design aspect it makes no sense to me that all of the NPCs are suddenly completely anti-social. Maybe one or two outliers I can see, but why do all of them have such an issue with living near more than a few people? Especially the Party Girl...she should want to hang out with everyone!
 
I'm one of those people who generally only ever builds things for the sake of NPC housing. I set up my big wooden gulag apartment block, and that's it, because building isn't an aspect of the game that interests me at all. (Even if it did, I'd never build anything complicated unless it was in Journey mode with mob spawns disabled, because otherwise trying to build in any sort of vaguely-hazardous biome is painful.) I want them all handy so I can access whoever I need instantly, and that's how I've always played the game. I don't mind not having access to Pylons if I don't bother paying attention to NPC happiness, because that's something new added on, and I can get by the same as I always have by running around my world. If it gets too annoying I'll just wire up a few teleporters, since I have full control over those. But having a massive financial penalty slapped on out of nowhere for the same building I've always done just sucks.

And stepping back for a moment, from a design aspect it makes no sense to me that all of the NPCs are suddenly completely anti-social. Maybe one or two outliers I can see, but why do all of them have such an issue with living near more than a few people? Especially the Party Girl...she should want to hang out with everyone!
Personally, I think the NPC crowding limit should be increased by around two (lower in some specific cases, like Tax Collector) and the Party Girl's should be double that. Eventually you're going to run into issues anyway, when you start housing NPCs that despise each other. This basically forces you to split them up.
 
I find it odd that the response in late April to the NPC happiness changes to seemed so overwhelmingly positive, and now with the whole torch luck debacle people are talking about NPC happiness as if it were some newly-uncovered thing that is deserving of further outrage, and further evidence of the team's "mistakes". (Although maybe there was prior protest and I just didn't see it.)

This may be pedantic, but technically torch luck was NPC happiness all over again (but worse). We can't say these changes weren't publicly known for weeks in advance.

That said, I do believe that people should be able to play the game the way they want, and shouldn't be shoehorned into a specific playstyle, so maybe if there's enough demand they'll remove negative price adjustments or add an option to disable it. Gigantic strongholds should be a valid option!

Well, for me personally, I was fairly neutral on the whole thing. I figured it wouldn't affect me, and I could go on building as I wished. Instead, I got blindsided by price hikes, which soured me on the NPC happiness mechanic. And as I thought about it more, the more I disliked it as I considered what it could have been.
 
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Most pylons, with the exception of the Universal Pylon, appear in NPC inventories when the following conditions apply:

  • The NPC is a "vendor" that normally sells items, other than the Traveling Merchant and Skeleton Merchant.
  • The NPC must be happy. The simplest way to ensure this is to house them in the biome that they like, either alone or with an NPC they love or like. The table below indicates which NPCs can be housed in the biome appropriate to the pylon (at a distance from other NPCs) to ensure that one of them is happy enough to sell the pylon. (One of the NPCs may be happy enough to sell the pylon if housed alone, but a second NPC needs to be housed nearby to operate the pylon.)
  • The player is not in an evil biome (Corruption or Crimson).
you can only buy them from a happy npc
 
Well, for me personally, I was fairly neutral on the whole thing. I figured it wouldn't affect me, and I could go on building as I wished. Instead, I got blindsided by price hikes, which soured me on the NPC happiness mechanic. And as I thought about it more, the more I disliked it as I considered what it could have been.
Now that I think about it, the only part of the original post that mentioned "price" was one easily-overlooked line. And it said happiness "affected" price without necessarily specifying in what manner.

I really feel the best solution is to have NPC happiness be optional per-world (in fact, luck could be made optional in the same way). But unfortunately, that may not be realistic.
 
you can only buy them from a happy npc

But you don't have to keep them happy. You make them happy, buy the Pylon, and stick them wherever you please. If you take out happiness, then it's simply put them in the right biome, buy the Pylon, and stick them wherever you please. You could make Pylons no different from how certain NPCs only sell certain things in certain biomes.

in fact, luck could be made optional in the same way

This is kind of off topic, but why would you want to take luck out of the game? Now that it's no longer "I'm getting harmed in a way I'm unaware of, by a mechanic I didn't know existed, due to something that used to be cosmetic," I don't see the point of getting rid of it. Yes, it needs to be made a lot more clear than it currently is, but it could easily just be an additional factor in building the right arena for an encounter.

Indeed, once you know it exists and how it works, you can use it to your advantage. For example, you can wait a day after killing Skeletron before dungeon diving, so that you get the luck bonus from the Skeletron kill.
 
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This is kind of off topic, but why would you want to take luck out of the game? Now that it's no longer "I'm getting harmed in a way I'm unaware of, by a mechanic I didn't know existed, due to something that used to be cosmetic," I don't see the point of getting rid of it. Yes, it needs to be made a lot more clear than it currently is, but it could easily just be an additional factor in building the right arena for an encounter.
I wondered if maybe people should have a choice, given that there are people complaining about having to carry extra torches or being compelled to place gnomes in their boss arenas to get optimum critical hits. But on second thought, you can't please everyone. Making luck optional would cause needless complexity, and in the long run it'll probably end up enriching the game.

But this is really off-topic.
 
I find it odd that the response in late April to the NPC happiness changes to seemed so overwhelmingly positive, and now with the whole torch luck debacle people are talking about NPC happiness as if it were some newly-uncovered thing that is deserving of further outrage, and further evidence of the team's "mistakes". (Although maybe there was prior protest and I just didn't see it.)
There were. Check the reveal thread, plenty of people voiced their concern. Red wasn't helping either by saying something akin to "complain more and I will make it worse."

And stepping back for a moment, from a design aspect it makes no sense to me that all of the NPCs are suddenly completely anti-social. Maybe one or two outliers I can see, but why do all of them have such an issue with living near more than a few people? Especially the Party Girl...she should want to hang out with everyone!
Pretty much. 1.3 they walked around, playing rock paper scissors and chat with one another just fine. Now they apparently hate everyone else? Makes zero sense. Now they are even more like vending machines with limited interactions.
 
And stepping back for a moment, from a design aspect it makes no sense to me that all of the NPCs are suddenly completely anti-social. Maybe one or two outliers I can see, but why do all of them have such an issue with living near more than a few people? Especially the Party Girl...she should want to hang out with everyone!

It doesn't make sense because you're thinking of NPC happiness as a "mechanic to allow NPCs to express some aspect of their character." But if you look at the very reveal post, it's very clear the intended purpose of the mechanic:

During Journey's End development, we conducted a focus group with all of the Terraria NPCs. Outside of some very strange requests (no, Guide, we cannot 'remove all doors at night'), their feedback was very clear: they are tired of being shoved into tiny cubicles or L shaped tubes and they want you to know this!

This is the first thing the developers said to us about the mechanic. It is the first impression of it that they wanted to give us: to stop putting NPCs into "tiny cubicles or L shaped tubes".

If you think of happiness from the perspective of NPC characterization, it's nonsense. But if you think of happiness as a mechanism to get players to stop building large stacks of housing, then it's doing its job well.
 
This is the first thing the developers said to us about the mechanic. It is the first impression of it that they wanted to give us: to stop putting NPCs into "tiny cubicles or L shaped tubes".

If you think of happiness from the perspective of NPC characterization, it's nonsense. But if you think of happiness as a mechanism to get players to stop building large stacks of housing, then it's doing its job well.
But here's the bottom line: why should the devs even care whether or not players build large stacks of housing? Terraria is a sandbox game. Its driving principle is that the player is free to explore and conquer their world in whatever way they choose, and they're given a massive array of tools with which to do so. Some people use that freedom to build amazingly-complex works of two-dimensional art. Me, I use that freedom to stick my NPCs in wooden boxes so that I can get to the parts of the game I do enjoy: exploration and fighting monsters. Neither approach is more or less correct than the other. Between this and the thankfully-patched torch issue, it almost feels like at least one person on the dev team intended parts of this update to deliver a message of, "No, you're playing the game wrong, so now I'm going to force you to play it the right way." That may not be a fair assessment, but it's my gut reaction nonetheless.
 
But here's the bottom line: why should the devs even care whether or not players build large stacks of housing? Terraria is a sandbox game. Its driving principle is that the player is free to explore and conquer their world in whatever way they choose, and they're given a massive array of tools with which to do so.

People keep saying that, but it's not exactly true. Terraria has plenty of mechanics that you have to abide by or else suffer the consequences.

For example, if you don't want to build NPC housing at all, then you're going to miss out on a bunch of NPC-based content. You can't even fight the Wall of Flesh more than once if you don't have a house for the Guide to respawn in. So regardless of how you build that housing, you are expected to build some kind of housing.

Because Terraria has progression, it does have things it expects you to do if you want certain content. It's not a pure "sandbox game".

Now, that doesn't justify this happiness nonsense. But the mechanic isn't bad because "Terraria is a sandbox game"; it's bad because it's a bad mechanic. It encourages players to play the game in a way that gets increasingly tedious as the game progresses, and punishes players who play in a way that is most convenient for them.
 
People keep saying that, but it's not exactly true. Terraria has plenty of mechanics that you have to abide by or else suffer the consequences.

For example, if you don't want to build NPC housing at all, then you're going to miss out on a bunch of NPC-based content. You can't even fight the Wall of Flesh more than once if you don't have a house for the Guide to respawn in. So regardless of how you build that housing, you are expected to build some kind of housing.

Because Terraria has progression, it does have things it expects you to do if you want certain content. It's not a pure "sandbox game".

Now, that doesn't justify this happiness nonsense. But the mechanic isn't bad because "Terraria is a sandbox game"; it's bad because it's a bad mechanic. It encourages players to play the game in a way that gets increasingly tedious as the game progresses, and punishes players who play in a way that is most convenient for them.
Yeah, I agree that it's bad because it makes the game more tedious to play.

Edit: fixed grammar
 
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To all the people who support happiness-based price increases, can you think of any positives gameplay-wise in keeping that aspect of the happiness system? I genuinely want to know if there's something I'm not thinking of.
 
I personally think the happiness system is just fine as-is.

I wouldn't remove the price increases because it completely detaches the system from the game.
Also, money isn't really that hard to come by (just grind a boss a few times and you'll have 1 platinum), so the price increases don't really affect the game that much anyway.

The pylons completely remove the need to have all your NPCs in one place. If you design your different bases well, you can access all the NPCs almost as quickly as you could before.
(I actually think the pylon system is faster.)

Finally, NPCs aren't hard to move around. If you want to swap two NPCs, just cancel one's house by right-clicking on their flag and place the other in that house. Then go to the other's original house and place the first NPC there.
 
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To all the people who support happiness-based price increases, can you think of any positives gameplay-wise in keeping that aspect of the happiness system? I genuinely want to know if there's something I'm not thinking of.

Games are all about challenge. NPC happiness is a challenge you, as a player, needs to overcome.

If we remove any impact happiness has on the core game. It ceases to have any real meaning, and the average player will just ignore it. This will also remove any reward for overcoming the challenge of making all your NPCs happy.

At their core, games need to make the player feel like their actions have consequences, both good and bad. Removing any consequences from any system in the game will effectively remove that system from the game entirely.
 
People keep saying that, but it's not exactly true. Terraria has plenty of mechanics that you have to abide by or else suffer the consequences.

For example, if you don't want to build NPC housing at all, then you're going to miss out on a bunch of NPC-based content. You can't even fight the Wall of Flesh more than once if you don't have a house for the Guide to respawn in. So regardless of how you build that housing, you are expected to build some kind of housing.

Because Terraria has progression, it does have things it expects you to do if you want certain content. It's not a pure "sandbox game".

Now, that doesn't justify this happiness nonsense. But the mechanic isn't bad because "Terraria is a sandbox game"; it's bad because it's a bad mechanic. It encourages players to play the game in a way that gets increasingly tedious as the game progresses, and punishes players who play in a way that is most convenient for them.
Yes, of course much of the game's content is gated behind specific requirements. You can't explore the Dungeon and get its loot without first beating Skeletron, and you're locked off from a sizeable majority of the item progression until you defeat the Wall of Flesh and enter Hardmode. But the same is true for many games of this type (outside of pure creative modes like Minecraft's). I don't have a problem with gating the appearance of NPCs behind having to build some sort of housing, because it only makes sense that they'd need somewhere to actually set up shop, plus it's a mechanic that's been in the game since the get-go. But actively punishing the player because they decide to build in a specific way feels like a few steps too far into straight-up railroading. It'd be as if someone said, "Okay, you can't hurt the Wall of Flesh unless you're using melee weapons...oh, and they have to be swords."
 
Games are all about challenge. NPC happiness is a challenge you, as a player, needs to overcome.

If we remove any impact happiness has on the core game. It ceases to have any real meaning, and the average player will just ignore it. This will also remove any reward for overcoming the challenge of making all your NPCs happy.

At their core, games need to make the player feel like their actions have consequences, both good and bad. Removing any consequences from any system in the game will effectively remove that system from the game entirely.
I don't see how having to build in a certain way under the threat of punishment is a challenge. It's more like an inconvenience because once you know how to do it (which is easy), there's no challenge. Besides, Terraria was already plenty challenging without the happiness system, especially now with the addition of Master Mode.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't want happiness to be removed. I want the punishments associated with it (mostly the price increases) to be removed. Positive consequences are still consequences. In all likelihood, players would still account for it due to the discounts and pylons.

Edit: improved my point
 
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