Prelude: World 13

[MarcusXDead]

.

Let's make it clear. In Eve online:
Multiaccounting.
It is encouraged, and is used to gain advantage in a lot of game aspects. BUT. Is is stated in end-user license agreement (EULA) that to log in more than 1 account you must have a paid subscription on both or more accounts you log in, and doing otherwise is considered a violation of said agreement. Some means of avoiding this, in fact, exsist, but CCP has a paid state of workers to track such issures and ban rules offenders.
My point here is - Jorbtar doesn't apply such a policy, and the result is quite obvious. Whatever you need to do - just make an alt for it. It's always easier than making 1 character multi-purpose and efficient in several tasks, not even speaking about hard labor and avoiding thraumas.
Botting.
It exists, and is prohibited by EULA. Eve stuff sucks at fighting botting, and it's one of the cause of game rotting from inside. The fact is, much larger corporation can't win against means of automating something. I don't see how 2 devs are capable of doing so.
I must point that botting itself is not so dangerous as when combined with free multiaccounting.

I don't feel inferior to people who've got years of play time because I'm just as good at flying a cruiser as they are and, even if they're piloting a battleship

That's because EVE has the polar opposite concept of H&H. It explains to you, that you are immortal and you won't lose your skills progress, learned for years, when you die in the very game intro.
Eve has a lot of "safe" things, like isk wallet, that cannot be lost like your H&H inventory. It has NPC stations, where you can put your stuff and it'll be totally safe for unlimited period of time.
In Eve, player owned structures are "quality of life" objects, rather then mandatory for game progression objects, aside for capital ship building.
In H&H you literally cannot play and progress without having a claimed piece of land to put your stuff on.
The siege in Eve is something that is not considered a loss and doesn't serve a reason for a losing side to stop playing, unlike in H&H.
When player dies in Eve he loses usually, well, about 30 min of grinding of in-game currency. "Already replaced" is not just a meme.
When player dies in H&H he loses about at least half of his progress in time, stat-resources, equipment that may be hard to get again (unlike buying literally anything in 1 click in EVE).

Taking inspiration and using experience of bigger companies sure is fine, but fact are facts.
Jorbtar is but an indie party of 2 people.
And you're not so familiar with all the game aspects of Eve online. Highsec is botted and is still profitable; nullsec is botted and brings their owners so much real life income through RMT, that you can't even comprehand; there's everything wrong with large groups dominating, because currently any enjoyable gameplay can be only found in public NPSI fleets, that are not allied to anyone, and every other content in this game is a lie and a bait for you to waste your life protecting someones TCU.

On topic, it still saddens me, that playing game without ugly custom client and making a shitton of alts and at the same time without a fear to be raped in PVP by a swimming by Knarr filled with fighter-bots is not possible.

[TerraSleet]

Nobody seems to have brought this up yet, so I will - I wonder how strong alchemy will be once the first people "crack the code" this world. This is the first world with alchemy from day 1.

The perfected potions could potentially buff abilities by +100 or more at Q40. Big early game exploration buff for fast cave clay and rare global pool shit, survival for early big game kills, or masonry for better Q clay/ore/stone. Also lets you easily heal gores and such.
Or it just takes so long to find the right recipes that by the time you do the buffs are irrelevant.

This also begs the question - are alchemy ingredients randomized each world?

[Harthel]

Just a humble noob's opinion, but if they are going to start everyone on the same central continent then may I suggest giving the outer continents more/better resources this time? This would incentivize the more hardcore players to leave the central continent ASAP or risk being behind the curb if they choose to stick around and grief. The central continent should be more noob-friendly, allowing people to choose to venture out into more dangerous areas in search of those better resources once they have more skills. This allows more people the choice of risk/reward. I started W12 like 2 weeks in and there were already tons of abandoned villages everywhere. The outer continents were only more peaceful because they had trash resources/biomes.

[bmjclark]

I think havens design flaws that you touch on go deeper than just bots. Even without bots casuls with jobs are not going to compete with gangs of teenagers/jobless nolifers. The same problems would still exist, ie the game only being fun after world reset. Bots probably just excelerate it but the game needs to have fun endgame that isnt infini-grinding.

In my opinion the players who no life this have a larger impact than those who bot. I feel that people just underestimate those with a lot of free time and a good set of Google timers. As far as botting goes, it is a game of cat and mouse. Loftar could do his best to implement ways to prevent botting, then it'd be on us to figure it out and defeat it and then it would be on him to figure out they we defeated the system. It would really become more work than he could keep up with -- and that is only if you believe botting is such a huge problem to begin with.

I think people hear the word "bot" and imagine that the factions are off living in a fully automated village where they look at their screen once a day to see all of their stats have increased by 30 and that they're fully geared from their bots hard work.

[KwonChiMin]

I think people hear the word "bot" and imagine that the factions are off living in a fully automated village where they look at their screen once a day to see all of their stats have increased by 30 and that they're fully geared from their bots hard work.

wellllllllll... techically u CAN have a village that is set up for you to just make end products from resources ready to pick. maybe animal handling is hardly fully automated if you are aiming for quality increase...

but there will be ton of prior work made by hand and it is much easier and foolproof to make it semi-automatic

[Sevenless]

I think people hear the word "bot" and imagine that the factions are off living in a fully automated village where they look at their screen once a day to see all of their stats have increased by 30 and that they're fully geared from their bots hard work.

Aye. *snip*

putting the rest in the botting discussion.

[MagicManICT]

n topic, it still saddens me, that playing game without ugly custom client and making a shitton of alts and at the same time without a fear to be raped in PVP by a swimming by Knarr filled with fighter-bots is not possible.

I'll say that the knarr issue was "fixed" about this time last year due to one person's... demonstration, I'll call it... of how this was a "bad thing" and needed fixed.

Multiaccounting.

FWIW, it's encouraged by the players... always has been. Back when they did the quarterly reports, stats published were only about 10-15% of the player base was actually doing it. I realize that they've added some things to the games that puts a bit of passive encouragement to the practice, but it's still not anything that a player has to do. (IMO, any actual push is because of the declining player population the last 5-7 years. Last time I played for more than a week or two, it was still 50-55k concurrent players at peak.) I've also not followed development as closely the last few years, as I have no enthusiasm for going back to a game all my former corpmates have left. If something did get added that has ignited this push more than the players feeling a pinch on number of people they have to fleet up with, then I have likely missed it.

[kirion]

I've looked at the trailer again and something struck me at 0:25

Bottom-left, next to the dock. Looks like a better/bigger rowboat but with a sail. Is that a new boat? Ocean-worthy but less than snekkja?
Maybe it's liftable if you remove the sail and there's no cargo, even then you'd go stupidly slow

[VDZ]

I've looked at the trailer again and something struck me at 0:25

Bottom-left, next to the dock. Looks like a better/bigger rowboat but with a sail. Is that a new boat? Ocean-worthy but less than snekkja?

Isn't that just a Snekkja?

[kirion]

Damnit you're right. And here i was getting excited about a new boat...