Prelude: World 12

[borka]

But I never said bot detection and alt usage prevention is easy, why are you quotting me on this?

sorry - edited

[VDZ]

P.S. on the topic you’ll whine to a point where Jorbtar starts making mini-games and captchas, lol.

Speaking of which, I once did see in-game captchas in an MMO. In Ashen Empires, whenever you craft something, there is a chance of a window suddenly opening asking you to e.g. select a loom and displaying several crafting stations. While I imagine it could be a fairly effective measure against automation, it always terrified me when it popped up. What would happen if I accidentally clicked the wrong image? What would happen if I started crafting, went to the toilet and came back to a captcha window showing I repeatedly didn't answer in time? It was almost enough to make me not want to craft. While this is probably the most feasible way of fighting botting, I really hope nothing like this ever gets implemented in Haven. Minigames become a lot less fun when the stakes are getting your account branded as a cheater and possibly banned.

[Melkior13]

P.S. on the topic you’ll whine to a point where Jorbtar starts making mini-games and captchas, lol.

Speaking of which, I once did see in-game captchas in an MMO. In Ashen Empires, whenever you craft something, there is a chance of a window suddenly opening asking you to e.g. select a loom and displaying several crafting stations. While I imagine it could be a fairly effective measure against automation, it always terrified me when it popped up. What would happen if I accidentally clicked the wrong image? What would happen if I started crafting, went to the toilet and came back to a captcha window showing I repeatedly didn't answer in time? It was almost enough to make me not want to craft. While this is probably the most feasible way of fighting botting, I really hope nothing like this ever gets implemented in Haven. Minigames become a lot less fun when the stakes are getting your account branded as a cheater and possibly banned.

Good ole' Ashen Empires, ha. I remember that!

In my opinion, so much of the war against bots comes down to implementation of mechanics. For instance, the way farming workings today (plowing, planting, and harvesting tile by tile, and repeating this for best quality rolls) begs for it to be automated. This creates issues in terms of disadvantages for players that don't automate, but more importantly, it's not fun for anyone, especially the botters.

Broad-brush assumptions like "you can't stop the bots", or "mini-games could never work" will overlook the best solutions, which are almost a clever blend of ideas, and rarely anything extreme.

Just as an example, one way that you could start to address botting, while improving the enjoyment factor of farming, and with mini-games no less, would be:
- Replace the +/- quality roll with a skill-based minigame (let your imagination run wild, I don't have a specific suggestion. I suppose I could give the Stardew Valley fishing game as an example).
- Replace tile-by-tile farming with a drag-select that allows you to plant an entire field at once (perhaps up to a limit of say, 100 tiles). You would play the mini-game one time for this whole field. Appropriate amounts of seeds, time and stamina cost would be checked and applied.
- And finally, to appease the people who simply hate mini-games, you could give the option to skip it for the old quality roll mechanic, except it would be limited to perhaps +/-2. Something to make it so that the true minmaxers couldn't settle for botting, because it would fall behind the players who perfect the mini-game.

Yes, this suggestion still has flaws, and would not be easy to implement. The point is simply to illustrate that somewhere between the extremes there exists an acceptable middle-ground that adequately addresses these issues, and most importantly: might even be fun (for a little while, at least!).

[MarcusXDead]

Yeah, that's usually the problem, "being fun for a little while" when we're talking about smth involving grinding.On the other hand, grinding never is (and never probably should) be fun. The problem with minigames and farming is the size of the fields and amount of crops you have to attend to.
For some reason when I played stardew valley, the fishing process wasn't boring for me. Maybe because I was leveling fishing, thus getting minigame to be easier, and maybe because there almost always was a variety of difficulty based on who was on the hook. Like, after easily winning several such minigames you suddenly get some hard one - where you start struggling not even getting perfect score, but even not losing it! The feeling that such hard game means there's some prized and rare fish on the hook peaks your interest even more, you don't want to skip the hard part (like in credos, ha), but rather look for such challenges to get most valuable prizes.
Speaking of credos, devs said a solid no when I proposed to make harder quests not being equal to easier ones in terms of reward. Like, having to choose between several easy tasks or one hard task, or getting more "completed quest points" for doing harder task sounds reasonable enough to me. Devs don't really explain the reasons behind their decisions. Maybe they're solid enough, but without knowing them I just can't understand those guys sometimes. If only I knew why considering such change, calling a public vote to collect data on which quests people consider most canser, then combine that data with their own vision of quest difficulty and reworking the system to encourage actually bothering with hard and time-consuming quests rather than always skipping them, is such a bad idea, I and dozens of other people could try to come up with another solution to those problems. If only.

[VDZ]

- Replace tile-by-tile farming with a drag-select that allows you to plant an entire field at once (perhaps up to a limit of say, 100 tiles). [...] Appropriate amounts of seeds, time and stamina cost would be checked and applied.

This is already the case, though. You can shift-rightclick your seeds then click and drag an area to plant them in to plant the seeds in your inventory in the marked area. Likewise you can also harvest an entire area at once (though inventory management requires frequent manual intervention for that).

On the other hand, grinding never is (and never probably should) be fun.

This is only because the word 'grinding' has connotations of being unfun and when the process is fun other words are used instead. Various kinds of RPGs make repetitively killing enemies (and/or doing other activities) feel rewarding due to not only variety in the gameplay itself, but also a good reward system where the resulting character growth causes exciting gameplay changes (learning new skills, class changes etc). Grinding can definitely be fun as long as the benefit gained from the grind outweighs the tedium required.

[Melkior13]

For some reason when I played stardew valley, the fishing process wasn't boring for me. Maybe because I was leveling fishing, thus getting minigame to be easier, and maybe because there almost always was a variety of difficulty based on who was on the hook. Like, after easily winning several such minigames you suddenly get some hard one - where you start struggling not even getting perfect score, but even not losing it! The feeling that such hard game means there's some prized and rare fish on the hook peaks your interest even more, you don't want to skip the hard part (like in credos, ha), but rather look for such challenges to get most valuable prizes.

This is some great insight. Without the prize (specifically the rare prize), monotony would take over quickly. It's ideas like this that help refine the mechanic into something that actually works.

For instance, this same idea could be built onto the farm suggestion above:
- The minigame ranges in difficulty, randomly. Perhaps a normal distribution with the middle of the curve intended to be around a 90% success chance for the average player.
- On rare occasions, the difficulty spikes dramatically. Success in this case results in a valuable curiosity, or an XP event.
- Perhaps a side-objective could rarely appear in the mini-game, similar to the treasure chest in SDV fishing.

And finally, the minigame difficulty could be affected by farming ability or other attributes to some extent, rewarding players for growth.

[Yorla]

Jorb, Loftar, thank you for your hard work and for listening to us. This game hooked me up for good few years ago and once again I caught myself waking up looking forward to see my dear little pests-hearthlings battling heroically through their everyday life. I thought with that new project taking your attention this will go down little bit. But you are still with us and I'm glad. Thank you.

I just wish this sandbox had a liiiitle bit more sand. Something to cooperate around aside from military activities and kingdom building. Yeah, I heard about wales, but never saw one myself. How about something similar on the dry land? Oh, wait was it an Ent or aggressive driad in the video? Heh, you probably already put some thought in it. =)

Jorb said he can't decide which way to go with wood colors - natural or more colorful. Personally I prefer something inbetween like stained wood (not painted), with soft hues and textures, but not limited to yellow-brown palette of northern tree species. Also it's been asked many times why we don't have roof tiles made of clay while there are so many varieties of clay in the game? Probably that's because of the model of houses. But right now we have just three colors for roofs of small buildings: straw, tar sticks and several shades of green which people of late game usually avoid using because of their "unnatural" colors and absence of corresponding wood hues. Glimmer moss is beautiful, but still is one of those green shades. Maybe cattails or reed could provide another color, like gray-brownish something?

As it was mentioned above pink clay has been rendered practically useless in W11, are you planning to do something about it in W12? Would be nice to have it back.

And my usual complain about robes. Merchant robe is the ultimate choice for those who didn't master the nomad credo. Can we pleeeeeease have another color for that? Pretty please. Or maybe something instead - like apron or skirt? Oh, and you changed linen items colors, but forgot about shirts and pants - they are still yellow. Doesn't matter much, because we don't have golden pants yet, but nevertheless...

Gosh, can't wait for the new world! Even if smithing is killed and growing crops won't be as enjoyable as before, though I'm sure there will be some new stuff to cheer us up. >.< Thank you!

[Melkior13]

- Replace tile-by-tile farming with a drag-select that allows you to plant an entire field at once (perhaps up to a limit of say, 100 tiles). [...] Appropriate amounts of seeds, time and stamina cost would be checked and applied.

This is already the case, though. You can shift-rightclick your seeds then click and drag an area to plant them in to plant the seeds in your inventory in the marked area. Likewise you can also harvest an entire area at once (though inventory management requires frequent manual intervention for that).

You are correct regarding the input. I meant to also change the act of planting and harvesting, so that you plant and harvest the entire field in one action, rather than just one input that allows your character to carry out 100 actions. Perhaps the harvest would go direct to stockpile instead of inventory, for instance.

[psyknx]

Wooo

[xzo]

Merchant robe is the ultimate choice for those who didn't master the nomad credo. Can we pleeeeeease have another color for that?

add pigment to crafting formula and make its color pigment based !