Trouble Brewing Improvements

[past robin]

I recently played Trouble Brewing extensively for my clog run, and I have a few suggestions to make the minigame a bit more enjoyable and useful. The mechanics are actually pretty good once you get it down but the incentive isn't there. To that end:

CONTRIBUTIONS

• Keep bucket of water contributions at 1 so AFKing remains viable
• Increase bark and boiler log contributions to 3 points each
• Increase sweetgrub and coloured water contributions to 4 points each
• Increase bitternut contributions to 8 points each

REWARDS

• Add reward crates with an emphasis on cooked non-blighted food and skill-boosting drinks
• Add a Brewer's Respite drink to the reward shop. This drink provides the same bonuses as a boosted stamina potion but can only be used in Trouble Brewing (it would be an exception to the no items rule)
• Reduce the cost of a Medium scroll to 1,000 pieces of eight and add hard and elite clue scrolls for 3,000 and 5,000 pieces of eight respectively
• Add skill lamps to the reward shop for 500 pieces of eight each

MECHANICS

• Change Polly's overhead dialogue to be more specific and useful (e.g. calling out specific ingredients)
• Add a Pieces of Eight contribution meter so people don't need to use a plugin
• Update the game timer so it is denominated to the second (this should also be done in Castle Wars)

[pure dagger]

Currently if you stand in the waiting area in the line furthest from the middle, the game doesnt see you as being in the lobby

Also if you join late, you get in quickly on red team, but it can take up to 10min to get in on blue team

[past robin]

Yes the blue team bug should be fixed as well

[pure dagger]

The minigame also needs to same kind of lobby system that people have asked for for castle wars.
Have 1 lobby, and dont sort people till the game starts, to dissallow specific groupings

[verbal compass]

I don't like your crate idea

[past robin]

Minigames need incentives for people to play them or they'll be dead for non-cloggers. Any other ideas?

[pure dagger]

people dont really want to play it though, there is a lot they would rather do, if you loot crate something, and the value is high enough people are gonna do it to make gp though

and its gonna be bottet a lot

[verbal compass]

I do think there needs to extra rewards but can't frick up TB like CW.

I was thinking gambles similar to Barb Ass. But you need x points in all ingredients excluding buckets of water for each gamble.
Biggest reward would be a monke pet. Other rewards would be like a special bowl to recolor monke red or blue.
Some sailing cosmetics.

[pure dagger]

Yeh barb assault crates just showed how bad that idea was.
And the afking added to the main worlds kinda ruined the minigame, not sure if its gonna die down

[verbal compass]

If you want to add blighted food as rewards I think my x amt of ingredients is still needed. Otherwise it'll be 100 bucketers each side

I agree with the seconds timer. Wiki doesn't say anything about it but logs in boiler drain every min based off the minigame timer on bottom left

If you aren't paying attention you can literally put a log in and lose it next second. Also see how much more rum you can squeeze out. More of a thing for sweaty players but still it would be helpful.

I like the idea of contribution for certain things being increased. Nutting is forsure the most fricked role and should be rewarded some more just don't know if 8 is too much. I think barkers shouldn't be rewarded more tbh. Most of the time it's (helpful) afkers there for 80k cooking xp anyway. Grubbers 100% deserve love though.

@past robin This is important and I feel should be added to the post.

Make the area around Trouble Brewing safe in pvp worlds, and let us PLAY in PVP worlds. Comp games with a perm Sabo and a perm defender would be so fun.

We were trying to 2v2 in pvp world it was so sad to see you couldn't play LMAO

[hearty knoll]

AFK leeching needs to be made less viable, I’d suggest something along the lines of, if you only deposit water, you get a 50% PoE penalty

[verbal compass]

All the RRs here huh

Data come play offline worlds sometime 🙂 we test stuff and go for high rum duo/trio games

[hearty knoll]

ive still got too many other goals to complete before i think about doing something like playing TB for fun lol

[pure dagger]

wont people just do bare minimum + water then?

[hearty knoll]

if 20 people all do the bare minimum then that actually adds up to a decent bit of contribution

[verbal compass]

He's not wrong I always ask afkers go just get 1 trip of flowers. If like 4 of them do it, it makes a huge difference.

[hearty knoll]

even if all people do is just deposit some bark, that means all the brewers don’t have to go get bark now

[verbal compass]

Yea that's how I think too. And I'm not saying this to disagree with you but there's almost always some ironmeme fletching for 80k (or whatever it is) cooking xp there so the bark won't make much a difference most of the time.

Wait I just thought about it. You might be brewin bro. That's only the side the fc is on. Blue will be more balanced!

[hearty knoll]

from my experience there was rarely anyone depositing bark for xp, not after the nerfs

[raw elk]

Another problem I see is fix the layout

Blue side is slightly more advantageous due to how everything is laid out

The water pump is on the same side as the ladder to the hoppers upstairs

Red side you have to run to the other side of the island and back

Similarly, the flowers too

Blue you can do a straight run to red side to grab flowers and then back

For red, you have to run to the other side and then to the blue side

The scrapy trees also need the Forestry timer treatment

They should add a left click to the hoppers and all that

This is coming from my experience after green logging

TLDR: Mirror the red side base to be in the same orientation as blue. Add left click options to everything. Add forestry timers to scrapy trees.

[pure dagger]

left click to hoppers and making it auto deposit once started aswell would be nice, it has way too much clicking

[neat lava]

yeah the unbalanced teams are a pain.
specially with all the afkers.

[limpid obsidian]

not sure if its mentioned but i wouldnt mind if they added a req that to get pieces from rum made u have to at least add 1 bark,grub,nut and 3 bowls of colored water

think it should only take 3-4 mins max

[pure dagger]

problem is, the meta to actually get the upwards of 29 rums in 1 game, you dont want people to have to do all the different things, you want them to hyper focus on their role

[limpid obsidian]

i know u can grab all in 1 trip it would force the afkers to do a trip and u would reach that 29 alot faster just need cpl ppl to rush at start of game then and every1 could afk but the person force spawning

[pure dagger]

Nah, the way to punish afk'ers is not by punishing the people who are trying to min/max it

[limpid obsidian]

how is it punishing u can grab a piece of bark+grub near tree for nut and if ur running for flowers u go right by tree

just gotta do the 1 trip for it

[pure dagger]

the 1 trip? where you have to run and make coloured water on 1 trip and colour in your monkey to have it pick nuts on the 2nd trip?

Its much more efficient having people do different roles

I want them to buff it, but you dont buff something by making it worse at the same time for those who are doing the minigame the right way

[limpid obsidian]

but if every1 was forced to play it would be done in like 5 mins

[pure dagger]

Nah it would just lower the player count by quite a bit

the reason its so infested is because of clogging, and cloggers use it as their afk activity

[limpid obsidian]

and again they should not get the xtra pieces then make them do something for it

alot of ppl would do that 1 trip to knock 60-80 hrs off the afk time

[pure dagger]

Currently when you are doing regular TB you still have to do buckets of water yourself, because the point per minut is just bad for the other stuff, which is something OP wanted to fix aswell

[limpid obsidian]

then increase the points but still make every1 that wants the points from rum add 1 of each ingredient

[radiant tiger]

Sorry I’m late. I also don’t know if I love the crates idea now that we see what loot crates did to other games

Think you could do a “brew crate”? Aka you don’t buy the stuff anymore, you buy brew crates which could have the stuff but also might have ales (matured or otherwise).

And I personally would be down for a pet chance with a crate 🙂

I don’t personally care about layout changes, or getting rid of afkers. I actually kind of like that TB is a true afk clog if you want it to be. We should just incentivize actually playing (so yes your idea of different contrib per item is good).

Finally my last suggestion would be just remove the need for balanced teams. In an ideal world we could get like 5 brewers brewing in a private world, who gives a shit that it’s 5 vs 0 lol. The whole reason we have to deal with leeches is because you can’t be asked to get 10 dudes brewing at once.

If all of a sudden you had the ability to solo brew with 5 guys instead of 10, you could worldhop way easier.

(But everyone can afk away on the main world)

[radiant tiger]

If you wanted to really stop the leeching problem, I think the real solve would be to attach additional PO8 (after base 100) to how many rums you got to see (like how the xp drop at the end of the game works). I think that presents some problems though (aka the poor guy spending all of his time flower trading gets fucked over, or the guy putting flowers into the kettle.) in real life I’m not sure you can get rid of leeches. Might as well just make it easy to worldhop and incentivize all other ingredients besides buckets.

[frozen vessel]

After Green Log and engaging with the minigame the whole time I enjoyed the minigame. The people making rum in the friend's chat are great! There are some issues I see with the minigame preventing people from playing the minigame the intended way.

Trouble Brewing Recommended Changes:
-Increased contribution for non-water bucketers. With a 40 second brew time it is not beneficial to making rum getting any more than 30 grubs or bark. The main Gameplay loop after ~7 minutes is running to the other team's base, getting flowers and bitternuts, tending the boilers, and depositing the rum.
-Some tiles in the lobby does not put you in game. Blue takes 10 mins to join a game in progress but red can be joined after 1 min. Adjusting blue to join at 1 min would be significantly better than making red join time 10 mins to match them. This will allow the group of people actually brewing rum to join the blue team reliably instead of mostly camping red for the decreased time penalty from joining due to a full/imbalanced lobby. The afkers aren't the issue during the game but rather prevent the dedicated 3-10 players who are engaging with the minigame properly from joining at the game start. This could also be fixed but allowing more imbalanced teams.
-Make rum visible for everyone on the team. People who are actively playing the game not being able to see the rum feels bad especially when you lose a rum as someone tending the base while others are out gathering ingredients.
-Significantly increase the Kettle limit of 10. 20-50? Or give an indication as to the level of the kettle. With 3+ players at the kettle and the delay of putting flower in/taking bowls out it can be quite confusing and hectic unless you are in active voice chat with those players.
-Remove sabotage. There is no winning or losing in this minigame. Both teams are hurt by sabotaging bridges. I get how this could be used in a 'competitive' non-TB world match. In the official TB world it is trolling.

Additional rewards:
-Anything added to the rewards should either be 100% cosmetic or beneficial items able to be brought into the minigame but cannot be used outside the minigame.
Small consideration to either buffing 'the stuff' to make it 100% to be mature or an additional item that costs 5-10x
-Adding any gp incentive to this or any minigame that doesn't already have it would be the worst thing possible. Prime examples being Soul Wars that is botted on almost every world and the most recent example Castle Wars. This has been horrible for the communities that love them and does not actually promote gameplay rather afking in the minigame.

Like to have:
-Revert xp drops from all actions awarding Cooking xp. I am speculating the nerfs mostly from the announcement of the new fletching minigame but this is a Cooking minigame as the only requirements other than the quest skilling level is Cooking. Why nerf the Cooking xp from a Cooking minigame? If anything make it scale to level with 40 awarding 3-3.5x Cooking level in xp to be nearly in line with current levels and scaling with level to 99 close to the changes in May of 2024.
-Allow hoppers to slowly put all supplies in like the water bucket hopper and also allow the water bucket hopper to be 1-ticked like all other hoppers. This allows for both less intense and more intense gameplay and is a part of skill expression.

[frozen vessel]

Potentially add a Cooking xp drop for putting Flowers in the Kettle as that is the most important part of gathering ingredients. As stated above any amount of bark/grubs past 30 is not necessary on the official TB world. Giving a 2-3x multiplier for Putting flowers in the Kettle vs. bark/grubs into the hopper would incentivize players to do the hard part.
Picking flowers should not receive an xp drop as players would just pick and drop them not really helping the team.

[past robin]

100% agreed on sabotage! REMOVE SABOTAGE