*[Meta] My New Player Experience and Perspective

[Pat]

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NOTE: I understand that it is a new sim so there will be a lot of unanswered questions and speculations. This part is mostly opinion, so don't feel like I'm lobbying for these changes be made.

In essentially every game in existence, powergaming exists, so I'm sure it exists here. It is my opinion and personal philosophy that the powergamers of any given game are the ones that the game should be balanced around, as they are the ones most likely to break / solve its systems. Thus, all balance concerns, etc. should be done with them at the forefront of consideration.

My experiments with the player builder seems to show that essentially any given position and archetype needs roughly ~1200 TPE to fully max out its stats and grab all traits. The balancing act of setting the base and caps of each attribute seems pretty well done.

I would think that for the majority of [active] players, they wish to make a character that will see as much success as the sim and their TPE gaining efforts allow. However, it is very difficult to do so with a closed-box view of the simulation. Given that most of us (?) do not have access to the game, the people involved with simming (or people who own the game) potentially have an incredible edge, as they have the opportunity to gain insight as to how certain stats perform for certain positions, and so on.

The best way to alleviate this, I feel, would be to keep a "Behind The Sim" page or section somewhere in the Rookie Guide, which shares as much knowledge as possible on how the sim works under the hood. This would include things like certain stat breakpoints (71 endurance?), importance of stats per position, relevant analytical data, and so on. I'm aware that the "Simmer's Corner" section of the forum exists, but much of its information looks outdated, and the information that does exist is extremely vague. Last posts were made in 2018?

Sorry it wasn't really thrown out anywhere in a Rookie Guide (I believe that's being updated) but when the new Sim testing and balancing was being finalized we did put together a special section of the forum dedicated to information about it. Unfortunately it got relegated to being a subforum of Announcements, so it wasn't exactly easy to see. A few threads that might be helpful for you as a new user are:


List of Attributes and What They Do

List of Traits and their Effects

A Post Detailing Certain Quirks of the Sim that no longer exist