Mortal Reminder

[NOOBY93]

Trash idea, if dying removed only combat stats why would anyone raise any quality/stats/whatever at all? Everyone could do everything at Q10 - if you die, whatever, you didn't raise your combat stats anyway! Enjoy the sandbox!!!

Because you can use these stats to kill people in a way where they can't kill you back? Why do you raise stats now? You could just run around with q10 alts all day, dying means nothing because you spent nothing raising the alts. There are lots of other games out there that are sandbox, lack permadeath, and yet people still play/grind in them. Wurm for example, EVE for another. Why bother flying anything but a frigate in EVE? When you go to a game that's just full loot, god you get so many more fights. Haven's severely hamstrung in the pvp department due to permadeath. And at least in my opinion, frequent pvp (and its resource use) is the only real endgame sandboxes can offer. As is, even with just the wounding system haven is by far still the hardest core game out there for punishment of death.

I'm not really sure your logic is a proper argument against the concept other than "I like permadeath". But you could just say that if that's your position.

I think the issue here is how many people quit the community due to permadeath/lack of accessible pvp and how they'll not be checking the forums to comment on this. I guess the idea is doomed to fail because the people who are left either like permadeath or are at least tolerant of it.

But if you grind combat stats you can only actually "kill" (read: remove stats of) people who also grind combat stats. Others can just choose not to grind combat stats and you can't do anything to them. This would effectively be a "PvP toggle", where people could choose whether or not they want to be able to participate in combat - if not, getting killed does nothing to them and they're not capable of killing anyone.

PvP toggles or mechanics that serve the same effect have no place in a game like Haven, again, because of things like localized resources, hitboxes, long-lasting effects to the world (such as - chopping trees makes them go away forever)

[Sevenless]

Trash idea, if dying removed only combat stats why would anyone raise any quality/stats/whatever at all? Everyone could do everything at Q10 - if you die, whatever, you didn't raise your combat stats anyway! Enjoy the sandbox!!!

Because you can use these stats to kill people in a way where they can't kill you back? Why do you raise stats now? You could just run around with q10 alts all day, dying means nothing because you spent nothing raising the alts. There are lots of other games out there that are sandbox, lack permadeath, and yet people still play/grind in them. Wurm for example, EVE for another. Why bother flying anything but a frigate in EVE? When you go to a game that's just full loot, god you get so many more fights. Haven's severely hamstrung in the pvp department due to permadeath. And at least in my opinion, frequent pvp (and its resource use) is the only real endgame sandboxes can offer. As is, even with just the wounding system haven is by far still the hardest core game out there for punishment of death.

I'm not really sure your logic is a proper argument against the concept other than "I like permadeath". But you could just say that if that's your position.

I think the issue here is how many people quit the community due to permadeath/lack of accessible pvp and how they'll not be checking the forums to comment on this. I guess the idea is doomed to fail because the people who are left either like permadeath or are at least tolerant of it.

But if you grind combat stats you can only actually "kill" (read: remove stats of) people who also grind combat stats. Others can just choose not to grind combat stats and you can't do anything to them. This would effectively be a "PvP toggle", where people could choose whether or not they want to be able to participate in combat - if not, getting killed does nothing to them and they're not capable of killing anyone.

PvP toggles or mechanics that serve the same effect have no place in a game like Haven, again, because of things like localized resources, hitboxes, long-lasting effects to the world (such as - chopping trees makes them go away forever)

You get their gear, you inflict a development penalty on them, and at no point did I suggest removing the siege system or base permadeath. This covers all aspects of why you'd want to kill a non-combat type doesn't it? Stealing their stuff, griefing them, or removing them from a location. With the gilding system around, and equipment destruction, trust me no crafter is going to "be fearless of death". If you insist on adding a more hefty non-combat penalty for death, I'm not opposed to that entirely. Part of why I was advocating that was to give combat types who are "out of the fight" something to do while recuperating instead of Xing them from playing the game entirely until healed. The intention being to lessen the number of players who feel forced to use alt characters.

The important point is that it never enables you to remove a player from the game world meaningfully. Which allows them to rebuild, and come back and continue fighting you. You still have agency to solve localized conflicts, but at no point do you get the power to remove other players from the game. Frankly, that's a power players should never have. You can't end long term fights, and that's good. Fights are what drives haven and all other sandboxes as endgame content, they shouldn't be something that can be ended. So long as players can win battles, but leaving it very hard to conclusively win the war, the game will have more long term potential. It may involve factions getting ousted, and being forced to move to more remote areas, but more players playing the better.

But I want this mostly so we can massively expand the pvp activities in the game. Things like beacons to fight over. 20v20 fights should be something that can happen frequently and actually end with a side winning without massively impacting the game faction balance. And more pvp = more crafting demand, which keeps crafters happy too.

[ven]

If I understood you correctly, your premise is that more pvp is the best way to make haven succeed.

I don't think that's right. Instead of comparing haven to other games, which is complicated due to differing contexts and other variables, I'd rather look at gaming psychology. In my opinion permadeath is irrelevant in general, what matters is what can make the gameplay more meaningful for all players, understood here as progress milestones, new and unlockable content, emotional attachment, clearer feedback for player effort, and challenging environment: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... hp?print=1

If pvp is able to bring that into the game, that's fine. I don't think it does though. Maybe it would if the game was entirely different, I don't know. In any case, what you suggest seems to require quite a lot of dev work. Do you think (not rhetorical) that would be more efficient than implementing, for example, pets, relics, customizable weapons and armor, monuments and rare biomes and map features?
There are also additional technical issues that make your suggestion difficult to implement. FPS is what comes to mind right now, and combat between lots of people may end up not being fun at all because of lag.

But I think the fundamental flaw in this idea is that it assumes it is the players, not the devs, who should make the world lively and interesting at the endgame, and that this can be achieved by increasing conflict. The world, as has been pointed out before, is dull. Nothing changes, no seasons, no weather, no external events challenging you to change your gameplay, nothing to look forward to after you have reached the endgame and did and saw everything you could. By arguing that that dullness is better solved by more combat, instead of lively world mechanics, you're making the playerbase responsible for what I think should be the devs' job.

And, quite honestly, there are games that handle pvp and conflict better than haven ever could. If I wanted this I'd play them, not haven.

[Sevenless]

In my opinion permadeath is irrelevant in general

Permadeath gives a very meaningful impact on risk/reward activities within the game. I don't see how that can possibly be irrelevant when designing a game.

There are also additional technical issues that make your suggestion difficult to implement. FPS is what comes to mind right now, and combat between lots of people may end up not being fun at all because of lag.

The controlled pvp environment I'm suggesting is honestly ideal for stopgapping FPS issues until a better fix is found. Playercount allowed to compete can be limited per beacon if it proves to be a significant issue.

what matters is what can make the gameplay more meaningful for all players, understood here as progress milestones, new and unlockable content, emotional attachment, clearer feedback for player effort, and challenging environment: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... hp?print=1

If that flowchart is true, the entire sandbox genre should not exist. I know it applies to many game types, but I'm not certain it's fundamentally compatible with the concept behind a sandbox game. At the very least certain portions of it are nullified like "concrete goals".

In any case, what you suggest seems to require quite a lot of dev work.

I'd have to ask loftar about that honestly. I don't think it requires more effort coding wise than the siege system did, most of the gameplay elements already exist and could at least be partially lifted depending how modular the code is. Art asset wise it requires a couple rocks and a cool looking pillar, it doesn't seem to straining on that side either. To avoid extra work rewards could simply become XP, since this already has high utility sinks in existence if adding additional magic/items is too much of a burden. Ultimately it just needs a valuable itemsink from the player's point of view.

But I think the fundamental flaw in this idea is that it assumes it is the players, not the devs, who should make the world lively and interesting at the endgame, and that this can be achieved by increasing conflict.

That is my understanding of the entire sandbox genre. If we're coming at this viewpoint from two different angles, I'm not sure how we can agree on this one. Sandboxes use features as gateways to allowing players to interact (EVE is the best example I can think of), and to create (Minecraft is heavily based around this aspect of sandboxes). Haven already has a wonderfully fleshed out creation system, they could expand it but in and of itself it's quite fulfilling already. However pvp is not a significant portion of a pvpers active day. They spend most of their time prepping for pvp, and very rarely getting to do it. Gear wise items rarely get lost or degrade, because death of the character holding the gear is far more valuable than what they're wearing into combat. The majority of the "degradation" is achieved via reaching higher qualities and rendering previous gear obsolete. However, when the gear qualities raise up high enough, the difference between gear becomes essentially irrelevant, leading to an endgame lack of gear turnover. We've also run into the issue of gear creep: It's now so powerful that people mention they don't need to upgrade it very often either, or that it pushes their stats so far above where the quality spiral needs them that they can ignore it entirely.

I see increased pvp as a potential gear sink to keep crafters happy and additional engagement for pvpers.

pets, relics, customizable weapons and armor, monuments and rare biomes and map features?

Many of the suggestions you put forth are elements of traditionally themepark mmos (devs make the content not players). However, realistically haven doesn't have the coding muscle or budget to attempt to emulate that, which is why I focus on interplayer activity for my suggestion.

[NOOBY93]

pets, relics, customizable weapons and armor

Yes, please turn Haven into yet another generic "pets, relics, customizable weapons and armor" game.

[ven]

In my opinion permadeath is irrelevant in general

Permadeath gives a very meaningful impact on risk/reward activities within the game. I don't see how that can possibly be irrelevant when designing a game.

There are also additional technical issues that make your suggestion difficult to implement. FPS is what comes to mind right now, and combat between lots of people may end up not being fun at all because of lag.

The controlled pvp environment I'm suggesting is honestly ideal for stopgapping FPS issues until a better fix is found. Playercount allowed to compete can be limited per beacon if it proves to be a significant issue.

what matters is what can make the gameplay more meaningful for all players, understood here as progress milestones, new and unlockable content, emotional attachment, clearer feedback for player effort, and challenging environment: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... hp?print=1

If that flowchart is true, the entire sandbox genre should not exist. I know it applies to many game types, but I'm not certain it's fundamentally compatible with the concept behind a sandbox game. At the very least certain portions of it are nullified like "concrete goals".

In any case, what you suggest seems to require quite a lot of dev work.

I'd have to ask loftar about that honestly. I don't think it requires more effort coding wise than the siege system did, most of the gameplay elements already exist and could at least be partially lifted depending how modular the code is. Art asset wise it requires a couple rocks and a cool looking pillar, it doesn't seem to straining on that side either. To avoid extra work rewards could simply become XP, since this already has high utility sinks in existence if adding additional magic/items is too much of a burden. Ultimately it just needs a valuable itemsink from the player's point of view.

But I think the fundamental flaw in this idea is that it assumes it is the players, not the devs, who should make the world lively and interesting at the endgame, and that this can be achieved by increasing conflict.

That is my understanding of the entire sandbox genre. If we're coming at this viewpoint from two different angles, I'm not sure how we can agree on this one. Sandboxes use features as gateways to allowing players to interact (EVE is the best example I can think of), and to create (Minecraft is heavily based around this aspect of sandboxes). Haven already has a wonderfully fleshed out creation system, they could expand it but in and of itself it's quite fulfilling already. However pvp is not a significant portion of a pvpers active day. They spend most of their time prepping for pvp, and very rarely getting to do it. Gear wise items rarely get lost or degrade, because death of the character holding the gear is far more valuable than what they're wearing into combat. The majority of the "degradation" is achieved via reaching higher qualities and rendering previous gear obsolete. However, when the gear qualities raise up high enough, the difference between gear becomes essentially irrelevant, leading to an endgame lack of gear turnover. We've also run into the issue of gear creep: It's now so powerful that people mention they don't need to upgrade it very often either, or that it pushes their stats so far above where the quality spiral needs them that they can ignore it entirely.

I see increased pvp as a potential gear sink to keep crafters happy and additional engagement for pvpers.

pets, relics, customizable weapons and armor, monuments and rare biomes and map features?

Many of the suggestions you put forth are elements of traditionally themepark mmos (devs make the content not players). However, realistically haven doesn't have the coding muscle or budget to attempt to emulate that, which is why I focus on interplayer activity for my suggestion.

I can’t see what stands in opposition to sandboxes there. Sandboxes do have concrete goals - in our case: craft axe, build palisade, find metal, found village, craft better armor. Curiously, this is the part of the game that people usually report being the most fun. It's only after the concrete goals stop and the feedback gap becomes too wide (raising stat from 410 to 420 and experiencing no change in gameplay) that we see complaints of boredom.
The problem is that the goals we already have are linear and therefore necessarily limited, instead of being renewable or expandable. Once you reach the endgame, those challenges vanish.


I don’t think all content must come from the devs. I’ve suggested elsewhere that more tools be given to the players so that we’re able to generate more ingame content than we are currently able to. But I also think we need internal mechanics that make the world change by itself as primary content generator. Just as above, I think it’s best if gameplay is made circular instead of linear.

I do agree with you that sandboxes need to give players features that encourage interaction. What I disagree with is that this interaction has to be translated as direct combat. Even if we stay within the realm of conflict-based interaction (ignoring all LARP suggestions), there are alternatives that appeal to different playstyles, not only to sword-on-sword pvp. Economic and religious subjugation mechanics, for example.


Those examples refer to old suggestions for increasing activity in the late world. Maze’s relic idea was intented to make kingdoms fight each other regularly and leave a few permanent goals open, much like a ball in a ball game. The same with rare biomes, such as a level 6 containing harsh environment and unique stones and ore, providing a continuous challenge for endgame characters. Or the suggestion of a map disposed in scaled difficulty from the center, which encourages industry and grind to explore further into unknown areas. Pets, custom armor skins and list of kills on swords give players the emotional attachment they need to return to the game, and can also be sold at the shop. I think all these ideas are feasible and relevant to us regardless of where else they have been used.


All this discussion is kinda excessive though. Because the easiest, cheapest and more objective option would be to create the granger server so we could finally have concrete data on how much permadeath really matters for the players. Everything else is just speculation that may cost a lot of time and effort and end up backfiring.

[Fierce_Deity]

I'm fine with some alternate permadeath idea, but yea this would need some tweaking. Non combat stats should still be impacted in some way. Would be silly to see a villages farmer just going about his day while raiders bash down his village. If you ask me, the problem isn't so much permadeath as the lack of fights or encounters with others that does not result in death.
We have a game that takes a decent chunk of time to build up a character, to have them simply disappear rather quickly. Fights need to be less black and white, and so does sieging and raiding. Players KO'ed by another should remain knocked out for longer periods of time, those with perms or in same village should be able to lift each others bodies, and there should be incentives not to kill people beyond nidbanes. Wound system should be expanded on for sure, and a war system between realms and villages should be implemented. Entities at war with eachother would not suffer debuffs from commiting murder on those they are at war with, while killing some random sprucecap would cause some sort of debuff or some discouragement.

There should be an alternate way to gain access to villages for quick raids rather than sieges. A way to damage a wall section enough to gain access, but entry through said point gives a debuff that does not allow vandalism, or other advanced destruction beyond theft. Advanced sot hp damage when raiding this way, damaged wall can be repaired after hour to full strength(so it cant just be re handbashed). You siege someone when you want full access to their village in order to wipe them out. It should remain difficult, but that does not mean we should not have other meaningful ways to attack enemies.

Leaving it at that, don't feel like typing up the wall of text in my head and this is long enough.

[Sevenless]

I'm fine with some alternate permadeath idea, but yea this would need some tweaking. Non combat stats should still be impacted in some way. Would be silly to see a villages farmer just going about his day while raiders bash down his village. If you ask me, the problem isn't so much permadeath as the lack of fights or encounters with others that does not result in death.
We have a game that takes a decent chunk of time to build up a character, to have them simply disappear rather quickly. Fights need to be less black and white, and so does sieging and raiding. Players KO'ed by another should remain knocked out for longer periods of time, those with perms or in same village should be able to lift each others bodies, and there should be incentives not to kill people beyond nidbanes. Wound system should be expanded on for sure, and a war system between realms and villages should be implemented. Entities at war with eachother would not suffer debuffs from commiting murder on those they are at war with, while killing some random sprucecap would cause some sort of debuff or some discouragement.

I can agree with these arguments.

There should be an alternate way to gain access to villages for quick raids rather than sieges. A way to damage a wall section enough to gain access, but entry through said point gives a debuff that does not allow vandalism, or other advanced destruction beyond theft. Advanced sot hp damage when raiding this way, damaged wall can be repaired after hour to full strength(so it cant just be re handbashed). You siege someone when you want full access to their village in order to wipe them out. It should remain difficult, but that does not mean we should not have other meaningful ways to attack enemies.

How do you deal with forms of base advancement that are stealable then? Smithing hammer, treeplanter pots spring to mind. You end up pestering villages with needing alt vaults again, or a mechanic that keeps them safe at greater expense (which starts circumventing the whole point of quick raids). I'm tempted to suggest some new mechanic, but at this point I don't feel like asking for more is reasonable.

Leaving it at that, don't feel like typing up the wall of text in my head and this is long enough.

You are a stronger hearthling than I.

[NOOBY93]

I'm fine with some alternate permadeath idea, but yea this would need some tweaking. Non combat stats should still be impacted in some way. Would be silly to see a villages farmer just going about his day while raiders bash down his village. If you ask me, the problem isn't so much permadeath as the lack of fights or encounters with others that does not result in death.
We have a game that takes a decent chunk of time to build up a character, to have them simply disappear rather quickly. Fights need to be less black and white, and so does sieging and raiding. Players KO'ed by another should remain knocked out for longer periods of time, those with perms or in same village should be able to lift each others bodies, and there should be incentives not to kill people beyond nidbanes. Wound system should be expanded on for sure, and a war system between realms and villages should be implemented. Entities at war with eachother would not suffer debuffs from commiting murder on those they are at war with, while killing some random sprucecap would cause some sort of debuff or some discouragement.

These are some shitty ideas. KO'd players being liftable by allies just calls for more alts brought into PvP, alts whose sole purpose is lifting downed allies.

The war system wouldn't work - fighters would simply leave their realm before dying so that it counts as if he was a random victim and not a victim of war.

[dafels]

However, permadeath pvp makes haven pvp both appealing only to a notably small niche, and also an activity that can't be engaged in frequently due to the costs of preparation time.

This game will never succeed to have decent amount of players until a balance between death penalty / stat grind and pvp is not found, pvp is locked to only small part of community right now that can play more than few hours every day and grind like an autist and this just turns into a base building game for the most part of the community. But is a important feature like in every sandbox/mmorpg game. Permadeath is too hardcore for most of the community to handle, but it also brings some meaning in death. I think it brings more bad to the game player count, pvp activity wise, than good. I would like to see a server without permadeath, where the casual faggots can have their fun and the hardcore autists can have their fun.