Stat Caps Should Return

[CSPAN]

As the title says, caps on player stats should make a come back.

But first a look into the reasons why, in the long run, infinite character growth is a flawed design resulting in fundamental failure observed in all previous iterations of Haven and Hearth. Infinite character growth creates a demoralizing atmosphere for new players and current players alike. Infinite character growth means infinite industry, resulting in the endgame content being chore grinding. Newer players will be forever useless in an established village setting, aside from labor only, since so much of foraging has been industrialized.

Imagine looking into a game and realizing you will never be close the top tier of players and likely to never reach a real significance industrially. You will always be behind. But this problem is not only for would-be new players. A similar, however less severe, case lies in front of villages that are well-matured. They too only lose value as the world ages. This game focuses so heavily on industry (especially metal) that if you've given up on that competition, there isn't really anywhere else to turn if you want to find another niche that's meaningful. But even if you stick to the grind, that's exactly what you'll be doing for the remainder of your days on Haven. Grinding. A grinding that doesn't have a fixed end point, that doesn't push you onto a different phase of the game. That's a big part of why people quit in quick succession after 2-3 months. A player spends their time at the start of the new world with challenges that lie ahead. Phase 1 being; Find a location for a village, Phase 2; Build Village, set up industry, Phase 3; Optimize industry, Phase 4; Make numbers go up infinitely. Phase 4 is the point people realize that, competitively, nothing lies ahead because unless you and/or your group quit their jobs, stop studying and devote your life to the Number God, you will fall behind only to watch those ahead of you get smaller and smaller as the distance grows between stats and industrial capabilities. And if you're a new player looking to be of use or try to accumulate what you can to trade, tough luck, most foragables are now also industrialized. What of the days when you could trade blueberries and when bluebells had value?

How do Stat Caps fix these issues?

It gives players an obtainable goal that they can see, killing the sense of forever being behind. Hardcore players still get a sense of getting their much quicker, and be able to move onto bigger things before other players. Industry would eventually become less of a focus, giving players more time to experience what the game has to offer in terms of PvE and PvP. More players would be prone to entering the geopolitical battle arena, creating a more inclusive PvP community. The developers can spend less time worrying about balancing and shifting around fundamentals based around the idea of infinite stat growth, and put more time into content meant for players with a certain amount of stats and create challenging content that require teamwork, rather than having situations where 1 player with absurd stats can steamroll what is considered endgame PvE. It'd be all around easier for new people to get into the game and recruiting for villages would be made much easier.

Jorb, Loftar, as of late you have been juggling around "catch up mechanics". You mostly likely see the gap between the best players and good players and it must be troubling. Catch up mechanics like the ones you're juggling around are merely bandaids to a bigger issue. Even with them, they won't make much of a difference, and the gap will continue to widen. These top tier players can keep their status with Stat Caps. It will only shift in what it is that makes them the best. It'll go from time devoted to infinite stat and industrial gain, to player numbers and geopolitical power. With Stat Caps you create a game that people can leave and come back to, which I feel is very important, because as it stands, if you take a break you take a penalty you can't come back from. (Most people won't come back until world reset because of that)

So in short, bring back Stat Caps. Don't worry about doing the mental gymnastics of trying to level the playing field that is naturally set at an incline with "catch up mechanics". And finally with Stat Caps, you can change the endgame from grinding numbers upward, to something meaningful for the players via a sense of community, PvE and PvP, This could create a more permanent world that'd last longer and retain more players.

If you managed to make it this far, thank you for reading!

[Bozdogan123]

+1

[Mario_Demorez]

It would ruin the game. No. Plz no. This game is for the grind. Don’t take the grind away.

[Hasta]

-1.
I saw statcapped Haven decay, I saw unlimited growth Haven rot. Neither option is significantly better than the other, and both have inescapable flaws that ultimately make the game NOT INTERESTING ANYMORE after a relatively short while. Having an unlimited growth with indefinite diminishing returns and devs working hard on a "catch up mechanic" (i.e. slow the progression relative to achieved level) at least makes a world stay populated a little longer.

If anything, devs should look into "prestige" (or "recursion" or whatever name you guys have heard) mechanic as a flexible player-side statcap. But that's for a separate discussion.
A rigid statcap as a "final goal" is a hard pass.

[MooCow]

Infinite growth is a form of player driven decay. Eventually q100 is worthless. When you are in a village, and people push the worlds max q above what you are able to produce, it is almost no different than having the effective q of your village simply decrease over time.

I fully understand why this is bad, and it pushes people away, but stat caps are not a complete solution. You can't simply remove end game content (no matter how boring it may be) and replace it with nothing. To say that people will just do something else doesn't seem fair to the people who like the grind.

To be completely honest, most stat cap discussion feels like people don't even dislike the infinite grind, they are just upset that other people grinding better than then makes it impossible for them to play. Being unable to play is a very real problem, but I don't think a stat cap will actually help them. People get ahead in this game because they work hard, then kick the ladder out from underneath then.

[Mervin]

+1

Not only does the infinite grind mess with new players, it makes balancing PvE nigh impossible. I'd put the cap fairly high, say 1k, so that reaching it would still take some effort.

There's still some questionmarks like what to do with curios and food once you reach the cap, maybe they could add temporary buffs or something?

[Ants]

-1. I think only battle related stats should be capped. You don't need very high stats to be a decent crafter and it's not hard to stay up to date with the industry if you trade.

[Lyrroth]

make statcap and factions will be able to produce a lot of equal fighters that will just bring everything to whos bigger zerg here. it will be worse. death will be meaningless if you just change char/account to basically same character.

[DoctorCookie]

+1

[Justforthis]

+1

I think it's a good idea to introduce some form of statcapping, but i realize it needs to be tuned a bit. Maybe have certain stats cap lower than others, or just cap the combat stats like someone else said.
The caps should be set kind of high, maybe between 800-2k depending. But the most important thing would be to add in something else to strive for when the stat caps are reached. Creedos kind of fill that role, but it could also be something as simple as achievements (though these should be achivable before then, but it would still add something to do when there's "nothing" left).

I don't think the argument that every battle turns into "who has the larger force" holds up. For one that argument still holds true somewhat as it is now, and what's more fair: that one person can slaughter 12 people without effort? or that 3 people can kill one person if they gang up but 1 on 1 they're even? the obvious choice for fairness is the later.
But this is still assuming that every character in every battle will max out their stats to whatever the limit might be, which i don't think will happen every battle if the statcap is properly tuned. It should take a while to reach the maximum, if the cap is 2k then maybe from 1800 the required FEPs are doubled or trippled or whatever is proper.