Discussion on making the hafen world more dynamic

[lachlaan]

In light of the world reset requests, I'd like to steer the conversation towards what Jorb really wants feedback on, namely : Dafuq are they supposed to make gameplay cyclical in a fun manner that'd keep us engaged?

And to this question I quite frankly say .. I have noooo clue. I admit I am the type of player that enjoys the rat race but will eventually become bored with the end-game grind which is more of the same past a certain point. The only answer, if ambiguous, is progress. The question is what type of progress do we really want?

So I'm just gonna throw some general ideas out there, feel free to jump into a category and flesh it out, argue for or against it for Jorb's benefit.

a) The stat grinders, would gladly spend the increasingly mind-numbing grind times for the sake of being bigger and badder and buffer. Clearly this group exists still as the world culimated with people posting pics of capped chars, so there's room for improvement in that area.

b) The builders, which would love to build the everliving shit out of their beautiful towns, but I guess after a while the time needed to build simply wears down the soul? To this I would've proposed a sort of builder buff, allowing to build with less materials and faster, but sadly infrastructure is heavily tied into the PvP aspect and imbalance would ensue.

c) the explorers, myself counted among them : would love a badass varied world to explore constantly, and while the fancy schmancy world resources do give reason to explore, they also stay put and thus give no more reason to further explore. Perhaps shifting fields of spawn chances? Along the lines of "The deers have migrated south! The good water fucked off since the deers peed in the river upstream, meanwhile the polluting factors over yonder have diminished for better water". Perhaps with a base field that stays constant and a randomized one that keeps changing. Other exploration related events would also work, and a viable set of forageable foods and gear and curios.

d) quality grinders for the sake of quality grinding, perhaps make the process more enjoyable and engaging? idk

e) more forgiving combat system, both pvp and hunting, more permanent wounds and a less soul-crushing way to recover. And let us accumulate wounds that are irremovable in a separate window or something. As it stands a wound will lower your maximum health, but gaining a point is just as hard as if you had full health. As in, you have 100 con worth of HP, you get hit for a 50hp permanent wound, it'll still cost you the food cost of going from 100-101 con to get back to where you were HP wise, and your maximum (with the stat cap taken into consideration) will be permanently lowered. I say simply let animals take a bite out of our con, people too, make us work to get buff again. Similar damage events for all other activities/stats with scaling risk/reward. Less murdering unless either the victim is outright retarded or it's a PvP scenario and the murderer reaaaally wants to invest in the death of his enemy, in which case make them work for it.

f) could add a passive stat regression over time, but idk how you'd do that for periods of inactivity. but perhaps it could work basically as a job/role enforcer. the more of an activity you do, the more you have it fresh in your memory how to do it, and forget how to do that sewing thinger you initially experimented with in your early days but haven't done since. not sure how it'd work to not make it incentive to grind

g) could separate combat stats from other stats, make combat scale with combat experience and success, and only partially make it scale with stats. that way you can tweak infrastructure without messing up combat.

[dageir]

In light of the world reset requests, I'd like to steer the conversation towards what Jorb really wants feedback on, namely : Dafuq are they supposed to make gameplay cyclical in a fun manner that'd keep us engaged?

And to this question I quite frankly say .. I have noooo clue. I admit I am the type of player that enjoys the rat race but will eventually become bored with the end-game grind which is more of the same past a certain point. The only answer, if ambiguous, is progress. The question is what type of progress do we really want?

So I'm just gonna throw some general ideas out there, feel free to jump into a category and flesh it out, argue for or against it for Jorb's benefit.

a) The stat grinders, would gladly spend the increasingly mind-numbing grind times for the sake of being bigger and badder and buffer. Clearly this group exists still as the world culimated with people posting pics of capped chars, so there's room for improvement in that area.

b) The builders, which would love to build the everliving shit out of their beautiful towns, but I guess after a while the time needed to build simply wears down the soul? To this I would've proposed a sort of builder buff, allowing to build with less materials and faster, but sadly infrastructure is heavily tied into the PvP aspect and imbalance would ensue.

c) the explorers, myself counted among them : would love a badass varied world to explore constantly, and while the fancy schmancy world resources do give reason to explore, they also stay put and thus give no more reason to further explore. Perhaps shifting fields of spawn chances? Along the lines of "The deers have migrated south! The good water fucked off since the deers peed in the river upstream, meanwhile the polluting factors over yonder have diminished for better water". Perhaps with a base field that stays constant and a randomized one that keeps changing. Other exploration related events would also work, and a viable set of forageable foods and gear and curios.

d) quality grinders for the sake of quality grinding, perhaps make the process more enjoyable and engaging? idk

e) more forgiving combat system, both pvp and hunting, more permanent wounds and a less soul-crushing way to recover. And let us accumulate wounds that are irremovable in a separate window or something. As it stands a wound will lower your maximum health, but gaining a point is just as hard as if you had full health. As in, you have 100 con worth of HP, you get hit for a 50hp permanent wound, it'll still cost you the food cost of going from 100-101 con to get back to where you were HP wise, and your maximum (with the stat cap taken into consideration) will be permanently lowered. I say simply let animals take a bite out of our con, people too, make us work to get buff again. Similar damage events for all other activities/stats with scaling risk/reward. Less murdering unless either the victim is outright retarded or it's a PvP scenario and the murderer reaaaally wants to invest in the death of his enemy, in which case make them work for it.

f) could add a passive stat regression over time, but idk how you'd do that for periods of inactivity. but perhaps it could work basically as a job/role enforcer. the more of an activity you do, the more you have it fresh in your memory how to do it, and forget how to do that sewing thinger you initially experimented with in your early days but haven't done since. not sure how it'd work to not make it incentive to grind

g) could separate combat stats from other stats, make combat scale with combat experience and success, and only partially make it scale with stats. that way you can tweak infrastructure without messing up combat.

Sounds like more grinding.
The world need cataclysmic or near cataclysmic events to renew itself.
Earthquakes? Tornadoes? Volcanoes? Tsunamies (in the lakes). Seven year droughts (global event). They should hit randomly with random intervals making some start over others to gain the upper hand.
Also: What role do the nidbanes actually play? Are they really furthering game play?

[Kaios]

As far as stat grinding goes, perhaps a form of einherjar in which a player can sacrifice their character but instead of receiving a portion of their stats through some form of a prayer this could be a way to continue character development by giving the reborn character some type of special skill or ability. A sacrificed character would always lose some or most of their stats but a second option might be to allow a reborn character an increased stat cap.

[lachlaan]

The staticness of this discussion might suggest people don't want dynamism and instead just want frequent wipes lol. Discuss damn it! Or Jorb and Loftar will just go with their own ideas which will only please half the population and the other half will whine that they didn't get a chance to give feedback on the topic, so give feedback now knowing they're pondering this aspect of the game

[Teleskop]

being forced to relocate to a fresh newly generated part of map would be cool

[Hasta]

There are not many obvious options to ensure perpetual dynamism at endgame of an MMO. From the top of my head I'd name two: neverending upgrade and neverending upkeep of your goals. Be it your base, your character, or some vaguely theoretic thing like a "title", once achieved, it loses it's excitement. Players are not very keen of "having" something, unless they can use it, boast with it, or both.

As a neverending upgrade (since we have a stat cap) the option of sacrificing one (maybe two with some percentage chance, like "parents" etc) character/s to gain a "next level" character with unique bonus/es would be probably the first that comes to mind. Not sure about what would be the best way of implementing it.

As a neverending upkeep the obvious reason is decay (of everything, including your stats) and hostile environment. These two I'll elaborate a little.

Flat stats decay would be a terrible thing to have, as someone already said in C&I section - noone wants to log in after a month vacation just to find his statcapped toon reduced to barely playable nab. The solution to that would be "thresholds", which would be un-decayable, for example - 20 stats, 50, 100, 150, 250. This way, with decay paced slow or moderate (say, 2 random statpooints/1 RL day), the character would require constant upkeep, which would be easily achievable; and, on the other hand, a well-developed character would stay pretty well developed even if left offline for a year.
Arguably, stats decay could be affected by ingame mechanics, such as getting KO'ed, having hunger levels below "hungry" etc. Also I'd suggest lower stats to have a higher chance of decaying, i.e. if your priority stat is STR and your INT is low, you have a higher chance for it to get even lower. The reasons are obvious: encouraging specialization, making upkeep of specialized characters easier but still necessary, protection against stat decay turning specialized characters into totally unusable one after a while without upkeep (for example, if you have a character specialized in mining, and random procs of stat decay concentrate solely on that toon's STR, although it was his highest and only valuable stat).

Now for hostile environment (that would be the neverending upkeep of your base). Since the community, obviously, failed to produce a decent number of raiders, dedicated enough to keep the whole world on DEFCON1 24/7, this burden falls on the devs' brittle shoulders (in all fairness, they are partially to blame, with all their limp siege mechanics etc.) Therefore, we need a zombie apocalypse. Ofcourse, I'm speaking metaphorically, but if some of you familiar with "The Walking Dead" series, you can surely find the resemblence. Groups of people and sole individuals running around huge empty world, claiming resources and establishing bases, raiding each other mercilessly. Ofcourse that fuss would settle in a few months, but there are also zombies (slow, stupid, easily disposable of but all the while somehow always managing to get inside stuff and chew on someone). To reinforce my vision, I'll make another reference to single-player survival sandbox "Terraria" (never actually played Minecraft, although, judging from what i've heard, that'd be an even better reference, duh). You have the day to build your base, set up defences, find yourself a weapon. Then the night comes, and THEY'RE ALL COMIN' TO GETCHA. If you were smart enough, your doors stand this night, but next time they'll be tougher... etc etc. Repair your walls, sharpen your blades, and wait for the next wave.

I believe we could have this on a more global scale, maybe as singular events at first. Troll invasion! They spawn randomly at level 5 every night in huge groups and slowly, by 1 or 2, make their way upwards to the nearest nodes of activity, mined tiles, sound of work or battle etc; they are strong enough to palibash or even damage a brickwall, but they despawn/turn into stockpiles of stone (that players have to clean up) at each dawn. A week of this would surely show, who was lazy with those walls and who lives to see another day. And, since we already have trolls in our beautiful game, we are limited here only by our imagination. Dryads attack en mass! Grab your stuff and hide in a cave! Oh, wait, there's trolls there - jump into a boat! Whaaa..? Giant squids? OH SHI~

Well, you get the idea.

tl;dr - either an upgrade of ingame goals, or upkeep of those, or (preferably) both should be made perpetual. That'll be a survival I'd play.

[lachlaan]

As a neverending upgrade (since we have a stat cap) the option of sacrificing one (maybe two with some percentage chance, like "parents" etc) character/s to gain a "next level" character with unique bonus/es would be probably the first that comes to mind. Not sure about what would be the best way of implementing it.

I remember a friend playing Lineage 2 or something back in the day, and showing me a system where the classes evolved like that. You had the base specialized character, but could sacrifice it and start over and give the new char a perk/ability of some sort. Could work if done right i guess.

[Ysh]

Reposting:

Going back on my word, agreeing consistent world resets is not the answer, but rather to put emphasis on the time frame in which the game is exciting and addicting. Perhaps something random and worldly interactive, to rekindle the unknown chaos. Where people aren't losing (to much) character and village development.

Reading some thread idea here, it seems like we can have the best of both worlds. We can have some notion of ''rounds'' for this game, inside of consistent permanent world. For example, maybe there are some impassable from snow mountain range surrounding some area. This range can only be passed during some week long window when snow will melt and then can be shut off again for some months. Or maybe some island obscured from the mists. Or maybe some alternate plane with temporary portal openings. Many ways to do the flavor for this mechanic. Main points are:

• Area does not allow free passage between main world and area at all times.
• Area maybe will only be open for some single cycle (in and out), then closed forever. This can be like a world reset, but for only this one area.
• Or area will be permanent, but passage between main world and this only is available for period times.
• Some areas of each type why not?
• Can limit amount of items player can bring with travelling (both to and from).
• Area will have some unique resource that player will want to be getting.
• Area is sized in such the way as to promote conflict for resource.
• Harder to fortify position in this area (e.g. walls will be weaker, siege can be easy).
• Any characters brought to this area are at much higher risk of death than in main world, from worst fortification.
• Only developed characters can make this dangerous journey (need minimum stats total to go, to stop alt circumvention of item limit).

Idea is that this area can be dangerous for the characters that will go, but rewarding for the main town if player can come back alive with the goods from it. This has some benefit:

• Obvious position for PvP to happen, to make PvP semi-consensual. Notion of it hard (as it is now) to be siege player main town, but easy to siege their ''outpost'' in special area.
• You will see many other game similar to this one with full PvP will have some areas that are safer (but still not safe) than other area so players can do their risking management (e.g. EVE Online sector security level).
• Gives some notion of these ''rounds'' to this game, without a full world reset to do a new round.
• If a player will lose a round (his outpost will get razed or travelling characters killed), he still has main town to recovery from and can try again next round.
• Limiting this number of items to bring into new area can simulate new world with no development, except with established characters instead of fresh babes.
• Players will need to decide if they will risk crafting character to go to this journey, since maybe finished product can make the trip back but the raw material can not.
• Possible to run multiple special areas at same time. Giving one better loots will cause top player to naturally gravitate here while weaker player can fight for scraps in other area.

I think this can solve a lot of problems with balance the PvP for carebear and hardcore player and give some end game content people can want while preventing stale. Interesting to me to hear your thoughts. Thank you for the read.

Checking this thread you might like for more this topic.

[MadNomad]

maybe remove curiosity system and make us get higher skill values by using the skill? for example if i use ua in fights it increases and if i use smithing and str to make armors it will also increase the more and the higher quality resource i use and it should work the same for all other skills and attributes i use idk, just a thought
well idk if that would make world more dynamic but maybe would be better than curiosity system and not limit like curiosity system so we can get higher stats anytime we want to work for it without having to wait for curio to finish maybe only having to use limited resources for raising the skill would limit us

[SacreDoom]

maybe remove curiosity system and make us get higher skill values by using the skill? for example if i use ua in fights it increases and if i use smithing and str to make armors it will also increase the more and the higher quality resource i use and it should work the same for all other skills and attributes i use idk, just a thought
well idk if that would make world more dynamic but maybe would be better than curiosity system and not limit like curiosity system so we can get higher stats anytime we want to work for it without having to wait for curio to finish maybe only having to use limited resources for raising the skill would limit us

That will reintroduce the issues with the previous LP system that was present in W1-4, where bots would chop down entire forests and turn every log into buckets to gain the maximum amount of LP, or doing other things that give the maximum amount of experience per hour. It's not really viable in a world as persistent as Hafen, IMO.