Characters and accounts.

[meus]

Why would you want a limitation to just one character?

Having a single character is even more powerful on the long term. Alts are not more powerful per se, they just benefit from timed game mechanics such as hunger & curios.

The reason people make alts is, for the lifespan of a world, you can't reliably level all stats and skills to the level that are actually useful for one specific task. And most characters are very very specialized, as already mentioned. The farmer doesn't need Agility whatsoever, neither does the miner need Farming.

[MagicManICT]

I'm just going to say this against it: trying to manage a village as a solo player with the current mechanical rules is impossible if you want more than one character but limited to only one account.

And before anyone says anything--too many mechanics (primarily charter stones, but also cheaper per tile to maintain vs a personal claim) tied to having a village claim to not have one.

[Sevenless]

Maybe a better way to look at is, is encouraging people to only use one character? There is already a bunch of benefits for only managing one, but it's rather outweighed against the benefits of alts.

What makes you think they haven't been? This has been an ongoing soft push through mechanics (encouraging not forcing) to let you use less alts. Less brutal gank killing ability = less need for foraging alts. The satiation system allowing you to eat more without costing more hunger per FEP was also a compromise on that system to a degree to let players work on their main instead of alts.

[Rebs]

Maybe a better way to look at is, is encouraging people to only use one character? There is already a bunch of benefits for only managing one, but it's rather outweighed against the benefits of alts.

What makes you think they haven't been? This has been an ongoing soft push through mechanics (encouraging not forcing) to let you use less alts. Less brutal gank killing ability = less need for foraging alts. The satiation system allowing you to eat more without costing more hunger per FEP was also a compromise on that system to a degree to let players work on their main instead of alts.

I agree that the recent worlds there has been an increased usage of main characters, as soon as they added masonry for me it becomes more tedious to have a farmer and a miner due to them sharing masonry in some aspects of their jobs. so I now just stick to one character to save me time and effort in crafting and the changes to sats have defo helped. and with the change to WWWs requiring farming now early game foragers will now also need farming if or farmers will need exploration.
so I 100% agree that they are pushing towards this. I was merely pointing out that encouraging them instead of limiting them would be the better way.

[Sevenless]

A big component of the game as it exists now is the nearly mandatory social living requirements the game imposes. While it does annoy some, I think for most of us this game just wouldn't be the same if you could truly be a one man village. This limiting specialization is a big part of that. Yes, people end up using alts. But at the same time, even with alts, you still end up needing quite a few players to form a village proper. Usually you have a couple communal crafters (tailor for example, is only needed for a very short time to do their job), people with characters for their primary jobs, and then some combat alts. But you can see, most things still fall on actual players and not shared accounts outside the fighting alts.

Thing is, if you let everyone do everything you might be solving an annoyance, but at the same time I think you'd be unintentionally killing a big part of what makes haven special. No other game have I ever truly "lived with" people the way I have in haven. For better or worse most definitely, but easily 2/3rds of my current online friend group have roots in people I met and lived with in haven.

Sometimes annoyances are worth the things you can buy with them.