loftar wrote:Really, though, one of the main reasons we ourselves focus on it is because I think what the game really needs is more social interaction and happenings. People hermitting inside their walled compounds isn't very conducive to that, no matter how much content there is.
That not saying that we don't want to make content updates at all, mind you. It just seems like social dynamics is the real priority for the well-being of the game.
IMHO the biggest problem in balance the game has is that the older the world gets, the bigger the loss from failures and the harder to recover from them. Combine this with mass murdering sociopaths that will grief in whatever way possible, just because they can. In case some wall is breached, the enclosed area will be looted of all valuables (from attacker perspective), the rest of the items will be dumped to despawn, anything that moves will be killed and every object of slight value (either because of quality, or because it takes time to create) will be destroyed. Because they can. And with the current system, should a toon have taken enough damage from leaving scents (or weekly playtime runs out on that account) the next one is brought in to continue.
Please rewatch the videos from jordancoles (the horse destroying the base, and the new brodgar raid) to get this into your head, they nicely show the problem unfold.
Current solutions employed by players are alts, used as backups, vaults and throwaway one trick ponies. Valuable alts (farmer, crafter) never leave the wall and never login in slight case of danger, because to replace them is hard (up to impossible in an old world). Combined with remote location so no one ever finds you (which charterstones made easier since they are unable to be found by following something, compared to roads).
It also leads to a mindset of effectively farming for characters, with exploits like for combat alts to use an experienced fighter in good armor to lure an animal into an enclosure, lock the gate, make it flee and then parade am endless line of characters with 5* take aim decks along it to discover all possible moves from it in one sitting. And bots to feed that army with feps and curious.
In my view the current consequences of permadeath reminds me of a variation of realm of a mad god without respawning in the area with the low level monsters but where you died, plus leveling up taking weeks or longer.
This is bad, since it - from my perspective - takes away the fun of playing the game.
As long as it is easier to raise a freemium alt army than a single subscription character and the need to do it exists because one currently can't reasonably recover from death... I see systems like the nidbane unable to reach their potential since they can't be made to deliver working penalties to serial wrongdoers without being overpowered against small time criminals.
So death needs some form of recovery (to not end up with a useless character) working within a reasonable time-frame (to both deliver the penalty, and relief).
Character development needs gates that it is unfeasible to raise an alt by just feeding food and curios, the current xp system is a good basis for this and could be refined so that one trick ponies (like crafters never leaving walls) are impossible to make.
Goal should be that people can (and usually do) play with a single character, which dies from time to time without that being the end for the player. Then systems can be structured that theft, vandalism and murder are no longer feasible on massive scale and the victims have reasons to stay in the game.
No society can survive overboarding amounts of criminality - not even in a game, unless you have hordes or respawning NPCs to victimize.
Alternative is to convert the game to a RTS style where one can control a horde of peons without micro managing their actions by just placing building construction signs, and selecting what other colored peons to attack and structures to destroy. Which is where we are currently headed, enabled for tech savvy players through bots, which are rooted in the fundamental design decision of permadeath and an implementation that doesn't work for the play time H&H aims for per world.
tl;dr Address death (as you have posted while I was writing this) . my suggestion is to go for something that over a reasonable time-frame recovers the old abilities, should you want something that takes effort then I suggest you pick something that isn't just a resource sink that can an will be automated. Maybe discuss with community first (make announcement ingame when logging in linking to a thread on forum to include non-forum-dwellers) and code later instead of reverting after hard work?