Alternative view: Hafen Development

[Fierce_Deity]

I'm all for some sort of npc minion being added to the game. I think I suggested an idea for golems of a sorts to be added before.
There were some parts of that post i would like to see retained if any sort of minion is added is that we must fuel or power the minions with our hearthlings energy and stats. A minion farming a field needs to be given the energy from the hearthling to do so, and the hearthling who supplies said energy also determines the stats of the minion. Minion stats should also face some sort of reduction, maybe based on quality. 90% stat reduction for a q10 minion, and 10% reduction for a q200 minion. Don't get hung up on the numbers, they are just conjecture.

[ven]

The current player count makes it difficult for us to create feuds, societies and so on. Populating the server with npcs for hire to help with automated features like farming and stockpiling in exchange of XP, realm authority or a percentage of our stats seems like a good solution to several different complaints we read around.

[iamahh]

imagine an army of garden gnomes working on a farm field, the NPCs could use custom models from the store... gnomes and beavers...

[viznew]

there seems to be multi people wanting player controled npcs, its not bad idea honestly would make long term game play easyier but i really dont want them to be added i like all changes happening is active players, with npcs hard to tell hubs of activity accurately​, some people might play a soild npc game and barly do stuff with thier mains, thou i whould like some easyierend game, building is my fav thing but when you finish a plot it does seem to go stale i wouldlike huge project add (massive wonders of somesort or harder to build road system (wagon travl? idk))

[tirioll]

Stockpiling minion
jorb might remember my report regarding botting, where I have outlined that one of the key things that should be addressed is stockpiling items. It would be rather interesting to be able to buy a minion/spirit that would collect the type of the resource you would select on the ground, then stockpile it in the area you would highlight. Quite easy to code in, but will increase the number of subscriptions/subs (if linked) and make maintenance part much easier.
Maybe, you should be able to summon the spirits that would harvest/autoplant for you as well after reaching a certain level in skills. Let's say you've got farming 400, or smith/lore/whatever at 500.
With that system, people would constantly build more, create bigger settlements, work on logistics so that their minions would be more efficient. Spending their time on planning, rather than the stupid grind.

I like the idea that it would take time and effort to unlock these automation tools: you need to manually grind through all routines sufficient number of hours to build up skills/stats, and this will eventually liberate you from the tedium. Higher level minions can do chores more and more efficiently. Given that manual maintenance is a pain, reducing this pain can be sort of an endgame goal.

[Shadow7168]

IMO I'm not too keen on npcs. Just doesn't fit with the style of game, or whatever. It would be nice to have a proper automation system though. Like, being able to record a macro of you doing a job once and then you can just hit the "harvest/replant fields" or "fill troughs" button.

I know adding bots to the game would definitely alienate people, but I think the vast majority of the problems people have with botting is that it's only accessible to the hardcore players that have the patience to actually program a bot/make a custom client capable of doing it. With in-game support, everyone would be on a even playing field. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em).

Plus, doing it this way means you'd be risking a actual character, if say someone leaves the gate open and a boar kills your bot then it's not just some meaningless npc that dies.

[Dominick]

I feel like I'm one of the few that actually enjoys the grind and maintenance tasks lol.

Except trellis'. Fuck those things.

[tirioll]

IMO I'm not too keen on npcs. Just doesn't fit with the style of game, or whatever. It would be nice to have a proper automation system though. Like, being able to record a macro of you doing a job once and then you can just hit the "harvest/replant fields" or "fill troughs" button.

I know adding bots to the game would definitely alienate people, but I think the vast majority of the problems people have with botting is that it's only accessible to the hardcore players that have the patience to actually program a bot/make a custom client capable of doing it. With in-game support, everyone would be on a even playing field. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em).

Plus, doing it this way means you'd be risking a actual character, if say someone leaves the gate open and a boar kills your bot then it's not just some meaningless npc that dies.

...But let these automation tools be unlocked at certain skill level, and be more efficient as you level up further. And let even the best developed automation be less efficient than manual labor.

[maze]

As my past ideas.

Alt should be minions.
you can log on to make em' stronger then when you log off they will preform their task.
But the imagination of this is always thrown out the window.

1. Feeding the animals. ~~~~~

This was to combat people from having a billion. 1 person should not be able to feed 500.
With a simple farm I was able to keep feeding animals. however the rest of the caring for animals part is indeed annoying.

and butching it self has made people quit since the dawn of time. so has leather working....The system kills people early game.

Selecting the crops. Crops should take longer to grow, but have 10+ q quality increase, instead of +5-5 (or whatever is set). The point is to make it so that you would have to harvest the crops less frequently, spend less time on that. Having to log in too frequently to keep up with the quality race will just drive any dedicated farmer mad and feel like quitting. Binding longer crop growth times to seasons would also make sense.

make Q higher and make timer higher...
What?
So basically beets take 2 days to grow make it 4 so that it will be q10 instead of 5. however you production for beets go down since now you have to wait longer. meaning to get same production rate you have to increase you farms by 100%.

bad idea.

However current farming is dull. it differently has things missing.

3. Checking your village every few hours whether it'd getting sieged or not. The siege system should really be reconsidered. I have complained multiple times that it's not fun for either of the parties and encourages the scorched earth tactics. Although, the system hunted in the latest announcement topic is rather worrying, since we have been discussing similar stuff in our voice chats and concluded that setting siege camps and etc. are no less abusive than the shield system.
Possible alternative would be separating actual city/village claims from claims used for the resourses and etc. So, if you're building hard enough, developing your base, got enough people or whatever, it would be really hard to siege you (gaing almost infinite amount of shield, depends on the population activity). While a claim/village maintained without much of an effort should be much easier to destroy. So, people would be concentrating more on getting someone's salt, rather than breaking their village and industry.

scorched earth tactics can be solved simply by J&L putting in "challenge town" preventing all item drop decay for 24hours.

not really sure what you're talking about for sieging.
But I agree that towns should be be easyer to decay.
there should be 2 authoritys. 1 for LP and one for Activity.
If one or the other hit low. then the village claim should turn off and decay.

[LadyGoo]

1. Feeding the animals. ~~~~~
This was to combat people from having a billion. 1 person should not be able to feed 500.
With a simple farm I was able to keep feeding animals. however the rest of the caring for animals part is indeed annoying.

Combat people will have a billion if they will really need it. The thing is, that as long as you keep us with the world average no-one really wants/needs to have 500 animals. The stats difference in combat is nerfed already. Like, really, I could maintain 1000 heads if I would really want or need to. Just build a slightly larger city that is. Meanwhile, people are facing the problem of animals starving while they're away for some time. Not good.

So basically beets take 2 days to grow make it 4 so that it will be q10 instead of 5. however you production for beets go down since now you have to wait longer. meaning to get same production rate you have to increase you farms by 100%. bad idea.

Sounds like you're not really attempting to provide crits, but try to sound smart. obviously it can be tweaked either way, depends on how the devs want it to be. Yeah, you might have to have twice bigger fields (bigger cities as a result) or just yield more crops per harvest. 6 beets instead of 3.