CleverRaven
Remove focus from all default sidebars
Summary
Interface "Remove focus from all default sidebars"
Purpose of change
All of our sidebars have a "Focus" number.
It occupies valuable sidebar space. It must be important because it's on the sidebar. And worst of all: IT GO DOWN! NUMBER GO DOWN WHEN LEARN! "NUMBER GO DOWN BAD!"
Number going down is actually good, that means the focus is being spent and regenerating faster. But the number on the sidebar doesn't, and can't, convey that.
Its presence on the sidebar also suggests that the player should pay attention to it, or interact with it in some way. That they must do something.
In fact, there is no way to interact with focus. There are only indirect ways (by adjusting the character's mood) and that only changes the equilibrium. So its presence on the sidebar is a vicious noob trap, spawning hundreds of questions and confusing people ever since it was added.
(The above is basically a summary of a conversation I've had several times before, e.g. : )
Describe the solution
But, focus is doing basically what we want it to, so...
Simply remove it from the default display.
Focus is still there, doing its job. It's just not shoved in your face like it's important that you know the number. Because it's not.
Also updated the status screen --> morale display to more clearly explain what the number is telling you:
(Switched from raw number to displaying it as a percent, added a parenthesis explanation for what the heck Focus even is)
Describe alternatives you've considered
Testing
I went through every one of the default sidebars and confirmed that Focus is not displayed anymore.
The layouts seem okay after the removal though for example the ZenFS sidebar's very information dense display has a small hole in the center now, which might not be 100% aesthetic.
Some of the alternate windows/that can be toggled on might still have focus displays, but I wasn't going to run down every single instance. It's definitely still available in custom.
Additional context
As always an effort was made to preserve sidebar widget IDs, even if they are now inaccurate. Should only be 1 or 2 like that though
Isn't low focus a sign that you're getting XP slower and that you should take a break from whatever long activity to let it get back up so that you can optimise your XP gain?
Yes, my understanding is that low focus means you should perform non focus depleting tasks while it replenishes before engaging if focus depleting ones if you want to maximize skill/proficiency gains (XP is not a base game core thing, as far as I know). That is, however, largely futile given that focus tanks very rapidly anyway, so you may at best gain 15 minutes of slightly faster learning before it stablizes at a low level (and there are conditions where that level is low enough that you're not really gaining anything).
I am, however, opposed to efforts to simulate reality by penalizing players for not micro managing task switching, so an effort to address that (rather than just hiding it to let you guess) would be welcome.
It can also be noted that getting into the trap of asking for training as a quest reward when the focus is low can be very bad, as you can get locked into a VERY lenghty training activity (with thirst being a real risk) for many, many hours only to get an extremely small skill gain. It's like a book reading session at high levels, but taking a lot longer.
I don't think removing is good. As Fris0uman mentioned, low focus is sign to player change activity. Also in magic mods and especially in MoM focus influence casting success chance. Maibe instead add in "morale and learning" section advice about shifting activity between hight focus and low focus one if you want be more effecient.
Hiding information from the player, especially when it is an xp multiplier for both skills and proficiency is bad. Proficiency xp gain doesn't drain focus but it is multiplied by it, so this is actually a really valuable piece of information.
And yeah, the player can't directly impact focus, at least not since we already lost the ability to disable skill learning progress. Hiding the information will make learning proficiencies considerably harder to manage.
Why not just get rid of it altogether and use mood as the multiplier, since the player can directly impact that?
Not a fan of this. As mentioned, magic mods use the focus number in a direct, understandable formula, and focus rate is an important element of feedback for how much the player can expect to learn.
If players aren't understanding focus, it's not because it's too complicated and thus should be hidden (while still working the same way) but rather we should do a better job of explaining it in game. Really it is quite simple. As you learn, your rate of learning slows down, and it recovers while you aren't learning. That is simple and comprehendable and there's nothing wrong with showing a numerical representation of it.
Hiding information from the player, especially when it is an xp multiplier for both skills and proficiency is bad. Proficiency xp gain doesn't drain focus but it is multiplied by it, so this is actually a really valuable piece of information.
Proficiency gain does actually drain focus, at a rate of 1% of current focus per training, per proficiency.
My suggestion is to replace the sidebar focus with the % substitute directly. Sidebar real-estate is not relevant to this game mechanic, and can be hidden anyway, if desired.
Proficiency xp gain doesn't drain focus but it is multiplied by it, so this is actually a really valuable piece of information.
You are not the first person to claim this. But if so, it is obviously a bug.
Hiding the information will make learning proficiencies considerably harder to manage.
The only "managing" you should be doing is whether or not you are learning or doing some other productive activity.
Anything that ends up being "Read for 5 minutes then do push ups then start a craft then start singing a fire dance for morale buff" is something that the system is supposed to actively discourage, even punish.
I read discord discussion about this RP. And I'm even more sure that hiding the focus will make things worse. Without focus shown at all, players will lock themselves in their cabins for weeks, grinding skills non-stop, not understanding why their progress is so slow. If hide focus from sidebar but not morale screen it not sovle problem, just make players use more inputs to see focus. Focus as a mechanic was created to counteract long session of skill grinding and encourage to go outside. Low focus mean that you better to switch activity. In current state this will lead to such cases of behavior.
- Trying micromange exp per time by constantly canceling activity to regenerate focus and by this increase exp gain. In reality it's at best same/barely better than just seat and learn ignoring focus. I belive Renech try by this PR remove such harmful behavior( in cases player time and actual character exp gains). If best way to learn fast is ignore focus number, so better remove focus display, right? But there other cases that interact with focus i find interesting and meaningfull.
- Trying micromanage overal time spent. You get up in morning, you need to learn skill and cook jerky. Jerky cooking is long activity that not consume focus, so it better spent some time learning skill, cancel activity, do jerky cooking, and then return to learning, than learning skil until it level up then do cooking.
- Trying micromanage resource spent. Usually there plenty of resousces, but not always, maibe this particular resource rare, or you simply wounded and it's too risky to go outside to gather more. For that you need do exactly same thing as first case, do practice/craft for couple minutes, cancel, do something else until focus hight, repeat. In this case outcome is clearly significant, so micromanage is justified.
I think is better, besides reworking focus, to rewrite morale and learning focus section of help, make it more clear that greater the difference between current and normal focus, than higher focus regeneration and than higher speed of skill learning. Therefore, to increase the experience gained per unit of time, you should not wait for the focus to recover, but increase the upper limit of focus, for example, by increasing morale.
Anything that ends up being "Read for 5 minutes then do push ups then start a craft then start singing a fire dance for morale buff" is something that the system is supposed to actively discourage, even punish.
That can be alleviated with better messaging, not less. Give messages encouraging the player to do actual non-focus-consuming productive tasks instead of "singing a fire dance for morale buff".
Anything that ends up being "Read for 5 minutes then do push ups then start a craft then start singing a fire dance for morale buff" is something that the system is supposed to actively discourage, even punish.
It's not like doing that is really feasible. I've done those things (at least in the "stacking focus" sense) before, and the morale/focus gains from that were really minuscule that I'd rather get my char to sleep then continue working.
The only "managing" you should be doing is whether or not you are learning
When I am reading a book, many variables go into whether I gain skill quickly or slowly. If you remove the focus indicator, then you're asking me to memorize how fast my character read a particular book yesterday and mentally compare that to how fast I'm reading the same book today to figure out if they need to take a break or not. And if it's a different book, or a different skill level, then I can't even do that.
At 20% focus I'll still learn something, but it's a huge waste of time to keep reading.
At the very least, if this is removed, then we need new intermittent messages as part of focus-affected actions, like the ones for getting tired. Maybe some variations on "You're having trouble concentrating, maybe you should take a break."
Put a toggle. Magiclysm has "requires concentration" which means you basically cant cast a spell with that tag if you have focus 0.
Alternatively, make it work like HP and self aware (some representation like |||| and then the actual number with this new trait, idk "mental acuity" or whatnot). You could totally say in real life "I feel 50% focused rn".
People should stop simply removing things without first adding any way to retain the mechanics that exist around the thing they removed.
@kholat Do not come into someone else's workplace and tell them that you want them to do things in X, Y, or Z way. You are being extremely rude. If something is removed, it's removed for a reason. That's what pull requests are all about. It involves a person contributing, and a merger reviewing, and a whole period for public arguments for or against.
Changes do not happen at random. They happen when the people doing the work are sufficiently convinced that the PR request improves the game.
Complaining that nobody agrees with you is unwelcome. If you want people to agree with you, make a good argument. Suggesting toggles is a terrible argument, one that's been defeated time and time again because it doesn't work.
I'm not an enormous fan of this change: I don't think there's some large maintenance cost of keeping Focus visible to the player or any benefit to be gained and - given the tutorial on Focus in the Help menu, which explains most of what you listed in the "Purpose of change" section - most players' confusion could be addressed by a quick read instead.
I think a better solution would be toggling it off by default in most sidebars rather than entirely removing the option without every player manually re-adding it via JSON. If it's confusing to newer players, then they won't see it unless they specifically dig for it. (a big reason why most world options were switched to externals iirc) The people who want to see it can easily put it back onto their UI. Unless this PR's what that already does, in which case disregard this comment entirely.
I like the direction you're intending here, but I also agree this probably isn't the way to do it. I kind of disagree with the core premise that focus does what it's supposed to do, to begin with, but in its current model the effect is too strong and too swingy to not be player-facing. I'd love to move focus to be more of a background mechanic, but if we're to do that, we need to make it so that focus doesn't immediately affect player choices. Currently it very much does. It is not that focus is something you do a lot of active management of, but rather, focus dictates when you should be sitting and studying vs when you should be doing something else.
A lower-grade version of this I be OK with in the interim would be to dramatically reduce how granular we give information on focus, eg. to "high", "low", and "average", where if focus is <50%, the sidebar reads "distracted", if 50-75% it reads "focused" in white, and >75% it reads "focused!" in blue or green, so that players can still make decisions but don't fret the difference between a few points. (could also add a red distracted if <25% if desired)
A lower-grade version of this I be OK with in the interim would be to dramatically reduce how granular we give information on focus, eg. to "high", "low", and "average", where if focus is <50%, the sidebar reads "distracted", if 50-75% it reads "focused" in white, and >75% it reads "focused!" in blue or green, so that players can still make decisions but don't fret the difference between a few points. (could also add a red distracted if <25% if desired)
That would be a good stopgap solution while we wait for some sort of a rework
thinking on it, the bit of data better to drop might be to not distinguish between medium and high focus, and only flag when player is getting distracted. The goal is to reduce the urge to micromanage at high levels but still allow players to make a rational decision not to study when distracted.