HnH Needs Adjustment to Wipe Frequency or Progression

[Robben_DuMarsch]

Only I'm not.
Most of HnH's content becomes obsolete in the lategame.
Dungeon runs, early game animal hunting, early game equipment and crafting, fishing above ground + finding cave sculpin, searching for quality nodes, unlocking thingwalls and exploring the area, meeting and interacting with your previously unknown neighbors, not being able to just faceroll any/all wild animals that you meet, setting up FOBs and animal traps, taming, exploring for not yet found local resources, optimizing curiosities as your intelligence is constantly changing, changing combat meta as your weapons and armor change, unlocking combat discoveries and fighting without complete decks, trading to have access to all the seeds that you need, alchemy not being fully discovered yet, working through your exploration*perception milestones, just to name a few.

I've heard it said, rightfully, that "there's always something new to do" in the HnH early game.

How amazing is it to kill your first few orca and whales?
How pointless is it in the late game?

You lose the vast majority of meaningful things to do when you get to the lategame and the only meaningful progression is spiraling quality (autistic questing, iron gathering, bone collection) and eating botted foods.

There's also a very real duality between early game and lategame. You don't need bots early game. You need botted food production lategame. You are progressing through tech and overcoming real obstacles early game vs number go brrr late game.

[SnuggleSnail]

Most of the playerbase does not achieve all of what you've listed in a regular world, and the people who do aren't looking forward to not having a red defense or taming piggles for the 100th time.

It's the same as all grindy MMOs. Your reason for grinding 2,000 hours to get the funny orange weapon is to stand next to the mailbox and be seen with it, not the 8% DPS increase or the experience of doing the LARPy quest. Nothing feels rewarding to grind in haven past the first few months because there's nobody left who cares, so you don't care either. It's a bubble. The game resetting so often nobody cares to begin with is not good for the bubble.

[jock]

Haven is too front-heavy on progression, the pace you can power up to rush content and the lack of content that scales past the 3-6 month part is the real problem. Honestly, they could rip the hunger modifier bonus and slash most of the better curios down to on par with the other's less good ones and keep adding more of these dungeons and the game might last 12 months for most players.

In regards to domestic animals sucking, it's more the time it takes for them to get to useful being like 12 months + if anything they should remove breeding quality and the negative drops in quality then some weird top ql limit of +2/+5% and some catch up of +5/+15% or something. Then they might get relevant.

[Robben_DuMarsch]

It's the same as all grindy MMOs.

But it's not.
But it has one huge distinction between it and a traditional wireless MMO: Endless mmos with no wipe rely on consistent new content churn.

Even old school mmos that used to be wipeless, like classic wow, now rely on fresh servers to keep the players engaged.

There are plenty of games out there with limited content, arguably grindy, that utilize repeat wipes. Survival games, extraction shooters, and even ARPGs like Path of Exile, all rely on repeat wipes on timers that are often 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months. Half of London was playing.

The game has a lot more in common with the "survival" genre than it does with a traditional wipeless MMO.

[Ø]

Shorter worlds would require, at minimum, the following changes to be viable:

Shorter growth periods for most, if not all, aspects of farming and gardening; crops, taming, breeding, animal growth to adulthood, trees/bushes, potted and mound bed grown items.

Shorter periods to make wine/alcohol/vinegar.

Much shorter cheese making.

Shorter Steel making. I'm not sure that other smelting would need to be shorter. Input is welcome.

The balance of hunger would likely be thrown off.

Garden pot and coade brick kiln time may need to be reduced.

Production rate of milk, eggs, and tamed animal offspring would need to be increased.

Drying time for soak may need to be reduced. Maybe not.

Seasonal lengths will need to be adjusted. If people are complaining about the length of Winter in a normal world a shorter world would likely exacerbate the situation.

Then, of course, the mine pyre burn time would need to be reduced.


It's a lot of server side changes to set up a test world to see if something like this would work. Add to that, I'm likely leaving a lot of stuff out and missing things simply because I don't know any better. If you really think it's worth the effort then feel free to add to the list of changes that would need to be made in order for this world to exist and still be playable and enjoyable.

You know quality spiral better than me. What would need to be changed to fit a shorter world?

[Robben_DuMarsch]

I'm not sure any time gates would actually need to change.
Just reduction in grind, examples of which could include 1/2 credo quests required to progress, more generous hunger curve that provides more FEP for less intake but approaches same progression as now at moderate/heavy intake, etc.

[DonVelD]

i wipe my ass frequently

[Ø]

I'm not sure any time gates would actually need to change.
Just reduction in grind, examples of which could include 1/2 credo quests required to progress, more generous hunger curve that provides more FEP for less intake but approaches same progression as now at moderate/heavy intake, etc.

So, you only get a few weeks in L9 mines and then server resets? It's 8 weeks minimum to get there, right? That's starting a pyre to L2 on day one and pyre for the next level as soon as the mine hole is completed without gaps/delays. Which would mean second place rushers would be about 9 weeks or so. Everyone else would likely never make it to L9 in a 3 month period.

I agree with grind reduction, credo changes, and FEP/Hunger changes for shorter worlds.


Can you explain time gates for me? What am I missing/misunderstanding?

[Robben_DuMarsch]

It's 8 weeks minimum to get there, right?

. . .


Can you explain time gates for me? What am I missing/misunderstanding?

Level 6 is when people get gold, or whatever level they moved it to this world. Other than trombone chantrelle blocks, which are level 9 exclusive, you've got access to most everything at level 6. So around 6 weeks, when people have had time to exploit level 6, is when the game progression is more or less "complete" in terms of time gated content access. It takes less than 2 weeks to make MBC, and a little over 3 weeks to make Oscypki, so certain top tier cheeses would certainly become rare rather than staples of the endgame diet; they'd be bottlenecked not by mass vinegar which you could start at day 1 relatively easily by pressing apples, but by how many aurochs or sheep or whatever you wanted to try to start taming early, which would determine milk availability, which would then determine your total cheese potential output.

Lower levels just set the stage for higher availability of blood ore nodes, which you need to spiral your anvils to infinity. You need trees for higher QL pickaxes to increase speed of mining, and for branches to make higher quality stone axes, but if you really spiral, you can actually outstrip your stone axes by making ridiculous quality tinkerer's axes for mining quality nodes and shears for butchering. We had extremely good anvil and hammer in Whatever Bay, but the world leader was still about 80 ql ahead of us, because they started to spiral before level 9 - It wasn't a big deal for them because they had fully automated smelting of all their iron ore.

Level 9, or 8 weeks, isn't the end of progression, but it just starts when quality progression more or less as a matter of necessity shifts to spiraling, which not many people have the fortitude to do, much less for 12 months.

There are 52 weeks (and a day or 2) in a year, so we if we had 4 wipes per year, we'd have 13 week wipe cycles. We'd achieve content completion by major factions at 6 weeks, optional spiraling endgame by 8 weeks, then wipe at the end of the 13th week.

If all time gates remained the same, we'd have about 2 months of progression then 1 month of endgame where major factions could optionally grind for slight quality advances, and other groups could play catch-up. It'd mean that the a group could pull ahead by botting certain production goods (cheese, iron), but that these methods of production would never be a necessity to remain competitive.

There are also more catchup mechanics than ever before in Haven. This wipe introduced freely available windsown weeds, tree seeds in badger setts, and high quality rock in boreworm caves. If FEPs and credos were a little easier to grind, and your group learned to utilize these free quality handouts, any organized village even of moderate size should be able to hit the endgame rather easily every wipe.

I see no real issues with the timegates and a 13 week wipe schedule. The only issue is the amount of time that is consumed to complete these tasks. Frankly, you could elegantly handle this in a lot of different ways. But if you wanted to be inelegant, you could literally just double ALL base outputs in the world (every non-craft menu task that would produce x1 product would instead produce x2), double every stack size, double all fluid container sizes, and cut credo quests required to unlock credos in half.

[Ø]

Things worth noting.

I see. I still have so, so, so much to learn.


What happens if the play style of factions changes to nomadic griefing at the beginning of the world? I doubt that would happen, but I like to ask dumb questions. If a single faction goes out of its way to destroy as many starting villages as they can would they be able to snuff out the efforts of the other factions and have free reign over the world by getting the rest to quit? I don't think the world is small enough for this to happen, though.