by NotJimmy97 » Sun Jun 18, 2017 8:28 pm The problem:
- As we've always seen in this game, there is a scarcity of incentives to get players to leave their bases, resulting in less player-to-player interactions and a growing sense of disconnect between player villages and the outside world. The end-game for most villages is to satisfy all their base needs without ever exposing their non-warrior characters to the outside. Of course, this is a somewhat toxic game-play model, as it divides the game into a factory-efficiency-simulator within villages, and a brutal gankfest outside. When it comes to interactions with higher-level players, you can all but guarantee that any character of theirs you find outside a village has been bred specifically to kill. This is an impediment to an MMO which should thrive in the department of organic, player-created interactions.
Localized resources have effectively exacerbated the problem described above. Villages will wall-off any ice spires, salt pools, and brimstone springs they find, and there is no incentive for other players to siege these claims because the overhead is far too steep. An alt will log in periodically to harvest said resources, and the big villages which managed to wall off the most nodes will obviously have an impermeable advantage versus smaller newcomers. This late in the game, it is simply impossible to recoup the same power as, say, Dis or the Hedgehugs, because the salt/brimstone/ice just isn't there. This is one of the biggest reasons why the game in its current state cannot run on a permanent world, and why wipes are a necessity to return to a point where being on top is possible.
How this can be improved:
- As I see it, barring significant changes to siege and claims, the best way to address people walling off localized resources is to make it literally impossible. This can be done as follows:
Make localized resources temporary. Instead of generating nodes at worldstart and keeping them there forever, make localized resources shuffle around as they are harvested, thus creating a constant incentive for players to go out and explore the world. After being harvested, the localized resource crumbles into dust, making walls and claims no longer viable.
Give reduced bounties from localized resources collected in enemy territories, and a slightly increased return from resources collected in your own territory. This will create a tangible incentive to expand control over larger swathes of land, and provides a new incentive to chip away at enemy territory for reasons other than griefing.
Now, this creates a new problem, which is that people will just send their warrior alts out to find resources and continue ganking people as necessary. This can be disincentivized as follows:
Implement diverse requirements for harvesting nodes and influencing their respective qualities. Make it such that the quality of your resources depends on skills and attributes not often used by warrior characters.
Restrict resource harvesting to characters with 'pure souls'. In other words, serial murderers who have left murder/assault scents in the past few weeks shouldn't be permitted to gather from resources. This creates a dynamic whereby villages have to balance their desire for localized resources with keeping their warriors in play, expending large amounts of LP and food just to make an 'adventurer' character who only gathers resources, or more realistically, creating an adventure party where village crafters are escorted by warriors across the lands in search of valuable plunder. You could also explore putting resources in play which require multiple characters to gather, although such a system is likely to punish hermits and incentivize alt creation.
Future implications and suggestions:
- If such changes were to be implemented, I think it may have a good shot at fixing the issue we face with players never exploring the outside world in any meaningful capacity. If you ask me, I think that localized resources should be explored as ripe, fertile ground for new content. Putting gathered, localized resources into the production chain of basic industries (such as metal, cheese, and farming in particular), we can stop the current trend whereby Haven & Hearth asymptotically approaches a rural factory simulator, and start returning to an adventure/exploration MMO where people experience the beautiful outside world as a routine part of gameplay.
Please tell me what you think, and I hope Jorb & Loftar will have time to read some of my thoughts. Thank you.
