Fix the throwing of shoulder pets

[Pipinghot]

[Edit: This is a (one hopes) improved version of this suggestion. Based on feedback from other player the tone of my previous post was too hostile and unpleasant. I guess posting when you're irritated at a game mechanic is sometimes not a good idea.]

There is no good reason (emphasis on good) why throwing down shoulder pets has to be so unpredictable. Ultimately it's a huge waste of the time of your players without offering any game play benefits.

Comparing a game to the real world is always a big risky, since part of the point of game is that they're not the real world (especially games where you ride around on dinosaurs, I'm pretty sure I've never seen anyone riding a megalosaurus in my town. In spite of that, I'll make a comparison to the most simple of activities - if you're holding a cat and you put it down on the couch it doesn't mysteriously go flying across the room for no good reason. What we're doing here is just a basic, simple and oh-so-easy thing to do, setting an animal down on the ground.

If a player only tames a few shoulder pets for personal use then this issue will never bother them, but if you ever do something like breeding shoulder pets then it immediately leaps out as being a pretty terrible game mechanic. There's just no reason why survivors can't set down shoulder pets in a very predictable manner. There are no game play benefits to this mechanic and it breaks immersion to have to pick up and throw down animals multiple times to get them in the spot you want, especially if you're organizing & arranging a cluster of them for base management or for breeding.

Just as it made no sense for newborn babies to be born on wander and you (WildCard) recognized that it was a game mechanic and fixed it, I suggest that this animal behavior is also severely flawed and needs to be fixed as a significant QoL improvement.

 

[JCELL]

I happen to agree, it does seem a little odd, plus the throwing can cause issues if you try to take a drink without a canteen of some sort and wind up throwing your pet at a piranha instead (had that happen). However the aggression is totally unnecessary! On the premise, might be worth looking into but simply because of how you put your argument and then went into bashing people... no. Interesting point but you completely ruined it with a bad attitude.

[Qwertymine]

Never had problems with this mechanic before unless I was standing in a collectable bush, why should it be changed? 

[Pipinghot]

On 2/10/2021 at 7:38 PM, JCELL said:

I happen to agree, it does seem a little odd, plus the throwing can cause issues if you try to take a drink without a canteen of some sort and wind up throwing your pet at a piranha instead (had that happen). However the aggression is totally unnecessary! On the premise, might be worth looking into but simply because of how you put your argument and then went into bashing people... no. Interesting point but you completely ruined it with a bad attitude.

That's a fair criticism, I was heavily irritated with trying to arrange a room full of glowtails and bulbdogs while doing some breeding. I've edited the OP in hopes of improving things.

[GP]

On 2/6/2021 at 12:42 AM, Pipinghot said:

Whoever the utter moron was that designed this game mechanic must have long since left WildCard, you won't hurt their feelings by fixing their painfully lamebrained decision. And if they do still work for WC someone needs to smack them upside the head with the idiot stick and tell them to clean up their mess.

You need to grow up mate.

[Qwertymine]

On 2/9/2021 at 5:49 PM, Pipinghot said:

Are you saying that when you put down shoulder pets they always land on the exact spot you're aiming for or are you saying that you don't mind the game mechanic even though it's inconsistent and random'ish?

Oh, I'm saying I've never had any problems with it before. Yeah, it can be a bit inconsistent, but I don't really care about where I put my shoulder pets and stuff, so I probably just haven't noticed it. Honestly, it has helped in some situations as well, can't tell you how many times I've thrown a shoulder pet up a slight cliff to save its life early game or thrown one away from me to distract a pursuing carnivore. 

[JCELL]

Much better revision!

[Pipinghot]

1 hour ago, GP said:

You need to grow up mate.

Wow, you really put an impressive amount of logic and thoughtfulness into creating that well reasoned answer.

So, just to be clear, you're saying it never bothers you when shoulder pets land in random locations with no rhyme nor reason no matter what you do? You're 100% ok with the fact that your character has such a complete lack of motor control that they're incapable of setting a pet down where they want to.

After all, if you try to put your cat down on the couch it's totally cool that 45% of the time it just goes flying through your living room window. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Yeah, it's definitely not stupid that the game mechanic causes every character in the game to have an uncontrollable mini-seizure every time they try to set down a shoulder pet.

[Pipinghot]

4 hours ago, Qwertymine said:

Never had problems with this mechanic before unless I was standing in a collectable bush, why should it be changed? 

I don't quite understand your answer, so I hope you don't mind me asking a follow up question.

Are you saying that when you put down shoulder pets they always land on the exact spot you're aiming for or are you saying that you don't mind the game mechanic even though it's inconsistent and random'ish?

My answer for why it should be changed is pretty simple, because it makes no sense that the location is random. I think it's pretty obvious that a person should be 100% capable of setting down an animal on the exact spot they want to set it down rather than some random location in their general vicinity. It's not like setting an animal down on the ground causes a sudden attack of epilepsy, it's a pretty basic thing that any human being can do.