DevStream 2022-12-18, 20:00 UTC

[jorb]

Thanks everyone who participated! YouTube upload here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34buGpp78Cs

Merry Christmas!

[SnuggleSnail]

Within the context of the current state of public clients I feel your stance on leaving vanilla client bare bones is rly bad. It has been the case for 3-4 YEARS now that there has been no PVP viable public clients, and it rly doesn't seem like anybody intends to release one.

Considering haven is theoretically a perma-deathy, consequency game, it seems to me like the /FACT/ you need one or several programmers willing to work for potentially hundreds of hours before you can even survive let alone be successful is game breakingly bad. Like, top of the prio sheet, more important than OCO or render rewrite ever were.

The farmers should be breaking my ankles and calling me a faggot at least some of the time

[Nightdawg]

Not to mention there's some kinda OP shit like critter auras and steel<>bunny boots scripts that really help in pvp, and these advantages only pile up against people who don't have them. And lots of other stuff like hiding trees, seeing the openings on everyone rather than your target, an actual target indicator, a keybind to aggro nearest player, one to switch the target to the nearest player, etc.

But jesus christ man, THE DRINK BUTTON HOTKEY is like... holy fuck. That alone makes 90% of players go from absolute trash to decent in pvp.

These things actually make pvp fun btw.
Inb4 some absolute retard comes and complains about us hiding trees, clipping people around trees is an actual fun thing to learn. Learning to not get clipped and stay on target 90%+ of the time is even more fun. PvP isn't just some stat check (unless both players know all the tricks, which is very rare the case apparently), and it shouldn't become a brainless "queue attack and run" simulator.

[SnuggleSnail]

also RE: acution house bad because people wouldn't make markets / similar


My group played a bit more casually than normal this world(boring world, ree) but I'm still one of the most autistic people in game and I still have issues moving bulk goods between markets. When you're targeting the lowest common denominator markets are kinda unusable just based on weariness.

As well the effort of using barter stands, especially far away barter stands, especially with bulk goods is insane. Most worlds, including this world, did not have a major market for like 6 months, after 80% of the userbase already quit. Trading is some of the best content in the game, but it's so hamstrung that most people don't rly interact with it meaningfully because it's not supported.

There are so many downsides to just letting the players figure it out, and you've found one (1) upside that is people are arguably more likely to build monuments, which I'm honestly not so sure about considering there's been more Dakkan's Pyramids or Tuz's old folk homes which had no purpose than significant markets.

I REALLY believe there have only been 3 realistic MAJOR pieces of content suggested on the forums outside of balancing that would have a significant impact on people's long term interest in haven: auction house, free-form building, VOIP

At least two of those seem insanely low effort to implement considering how impactful they could be

[pawnchito]

Within the context of the current state of public clients I feel your stance on leaving vanilla client bare bones is rly bad. It has been the case for 3-4 YEARS now that there has been no PVP viable public clients, and it rly doesn't seem like anybody intends to release one.

Considering haven is theoretically a perma-deathy, consequency game, it seems to me like the /FACT/ you need one or several programmers willing to work for potentially hundreds of hours before you can even survive let alone be successful is game breakingly bad. Like, top of the prio sheet, more important than OCO or render rewrite ever were.

The farmers should be breaking my ankles and calling me a faggot at least some of the time

Truth TBH.

[Fostik]

To me this stream showed that devs are very far from the point of understanding current game issues, challenges and other problems.
Especially take on auction house and trading, it showed me that devs not only not understanding how big effort it requires, but also not going to make trading more convenient or develop some mechanics that helping, moreover, they won't even read it.
Haha, this game is so dead

[jorb]

To me this stream showed that devs are very far from the point of understanding current game issues, challenges and other problems.

What are three bullet points of actions/implementation I can take/make to address the most important problems that the game currently, in your opinion, has?

Especially take on auction house and trading, it showed me that devs not only not understanding how big effort it requires, but also not going to make trading more convenient or develop some mechanics that helping, moreover, they won't even read it.

I am not at all opposed to improving the trade UIs and whatnot, and I think we got some good input on that. The point I made is that I don't think a global auction house maintained by us would be better, as I love the fact that there are public, player maintained, markets in the game.

[SnuggleSnail]

If you want there to still be incentive to make markets, but want global high volume trade to be reasonable you could just let barter stands have infinite range & add more slots to barterstands. this would:

• Make building markets MUCH easier, hopefully meaning they will exist before everybody quits
• Drastically reduce(but not entirely fix) the issue of weariness preventing newer players from traveling
• Make bulk trade reasonable, at least for the buyer
• Make trade in general much easier, EX if you want to sell eggs your selling-eggs-cupboards can just be right next to your coops

It seems like it'd be easy to implement considering there have previously been bugs to mimic the same behavior, and presumably easy to change back if it doesn't work out for w/e reason. I think a straight up auction house would be better, but this seems like a rly good/easy compromise to test if trivially easy trade could be one of haven's "killer features". I rly believe it could be

[Zentetsuken]

I will repeat what I have repeated 100 times with even more conviction and confidence.

Remove PVP.

If you rely on players to fill in major QoL gaps and make the game a more enjoyable experience (as you humbly admitted on stream just last night) you are just incentivizing gatekeeping.

People who excel at PVP and care deeply about it develop private custom clients that give them irrefutable major advantages.
The people who use them and make them are openly admitting this.

I think both the players and the developers, if they are being very honest, will understand that there is no fast and easy way to balance this gamebreaking problem. Gamebreaking is not an exaggeration. People play this game with the sole intent to take advantage of the unintuitive combat system to dunk on noobs. It is not as simple as telling new or disinterested players to "just learn PVP" because even if they do, they simply can never be as good as somebody with a highly customized client.

The only solution that will balance this undeniable, gamebreaking problem quickly and efficiently is to REMOVE PVP.

Haven development is historically known to be a series of bandaids ontop of bandaids.
The saving grace will be that this bandaid will be placed with the intention of it being temporary.

Call me cynical all you want but this is dire.
The developers have said near 100 times that a lot of this custom client content is something that they disagree with and have no intention of adding. There are massive debates and brainstorms to be had.
If players are made to wait the exhaustively long period of time it would take for them to create their own versions of even some of these additional features, the game will be purposefully left in an incredibly broken and imbalanced state this whole time.

There. is. no. fast. and. easily. solution.

EXCEPT


REMOVE PVP

[ctopolon4]

• Make building markets MUCH easier, hopefully meaning they will exist before everybody quits

learn players howto have rockCrystal for personal charter.

• Drastically reduce(but not entirely fix) the issue of weariness preventing newer players from traveling

learn players howto use pipestuff & bed

• Make bulk trade reasonable, at least for the buyer

learn players howto use barter pole, and notice board

• Make trade in general much easier, EX if you want to sell eggs your selling-eggs-cupboards can just be right next to your coops

look at 1st answer