Idea: Outer Heaven

[ven]

Why do people stop playing? Because the game is not renewable. It is a straight line from 0 to 1, reached once you've got a few million LP. After that point most have nothing more to do, discover or build.

We're immortal, we never age, we don't reproduce, and we don't need to learn any more skills after a certain point. We don't have challenges either, and we don't need to adapt to the weather or to random phenomena. So most of the things that make the real world change and transform in interesting ways is absent in haven, at least for the moment.

Real life doesn't have an end, you can always explore places no one has been before, learn more complicated things, build more expensive structures, and craft more unique and refined items. If haven had that it would certainly give people something to look forward to.

As endgame boredom is by far the most common complaint, there's quite a lot of general suggestions that attempt to fix it:

Endgame skills
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=50986&p=674585

Endgame activities
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=49571

Megastructures that make a kingdom work weeks to build
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=56780&p=731061

Seasons
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=53114&p=704207

Dynamic politics
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=52762&p=699618

Dynamic time
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=50162&p=665164

Ocean content
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=52726&p=699035

Kingdom objectives/quests
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51612

Interesting geography
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51972&p=687466

Forensics/archaeology to make the world less dull
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=48265&p=630365

Tools to let player actions leave a more lasting effect in the world and create permanent lore for everyone
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51049&p=675513

[Granger]

Permadeath is a deterrent for many, either to go into PvP in the first place (the ones without alt farms) or even to play the game at all.

PvE might be fun with new mobs, but they are used up fast when you learned how to end them, or are simply frustrating when they lead to instant death (when you haven't figured then out).

Noone wants to grind months because of a lost fight. This might be not a big issue for alting faction members but these are only a fraction of the population.

Eve Online would be dead, amount of player wise, would clones not exist.

[iamahh]

Sounds cool, but I wonder if its possible to Palisade Inner Haven and claim the gates then build a second layer and make us hermits pay for it

[Fierce_Deity]

Sure, I could go with this idea.
Kind of similar to an idea I had for adding a level 6 to the cave system. It would be a cavernous layer filled with dangerous creatures like crystal golems, demons, trolls, goblins, agressive mushrooms. Some of these mobs could guard something, like several crystal golems surrounding a large crystal(mby rock crystal). I don't think I ended up posting the idea, but I had the same thought that it would be an area that could not be built on or claimed.

[MrrPunchers]

Sure, I could go with this idea.
Kind of similar to an idea I had for adding a level 6 to the cave system. It would be a cavernous layer filled with dangerous creatures like crystal golems, demons, trolls, goblins, agressive mushrooms. Some of these mobs could guard something, like several crystal golems surrounding a large crystal(mby rock crystal). I don't think I ended up posting the idea, but I had the same thought that it would be an area that could not be built on or claimed.

I'm down for stuff like this, but in mining's current state basically ALL the cool shit comes from the underground. We should focus on boosting farming, fishing, hunting, etc first.

[Jacobian123]

Why do people stop playing? Because the game is not renewable. It is a straight line from 0 to 1, reached once you've got a few million LP. After that point most have nothing more to do, discover or build.

We're immortal, we never age, we don't reproduce, and we don't need to learn any more skills after a certain point. We don't have challenges either, and we don't need to adapt to the weather or to random phenomena. So most of the things that make the real world change and transform in interesting ways is absent in haven, at least for the moment.

Real life doesn't have an end, you can always explore places no one has been before, learn more complicated things, build more expensive structures, and craft more unique and refined items. If haven had that it would certainly give people something to look forward to.

As endgame boredom is by far the most common complaint, there's quite a lot of general suggestions that attempt to fix it:

Endgame skills
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=50986&p=674585

Endgame activities
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=49571

Megastructures that make a kingdom work weeks to build
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=56780&p=731061

Seasons
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=53114&p=704207

Dynamic politics
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=52762&p=699618

Dynamic time
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=50162&p=665164

Ocean content
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=52726&p=699035

Kingdom objectives/quests
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51612

Interesting geography
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51972&p=687466

Forensics/archaeology to make the world less dull
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=48265&p=630365

Tools to let player actions leave a more lasting effect in the world and create permanent lore for everyone
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51049&p=675513

Most of these ideas I'd love to see implemented. A sense of adventure is something this game is severely lacking right now.

[DeadlyPencil]

I like the idea of unclaimable areas. I think mountains for example should be unbuildable, that would prevent people from walling in the salt nodes.

for this world an outer haven likely would be best, for an new world, I would like to see that area to be the middle 4 supergids of the map so people go inward. my issue with the outer grid, is if DIS is located NE for example. who is going to go hunt in the NE outer grids? probably no one unless they want to fight DIS on purpose. by having it as the inner grids. it doesn't really matter where your village is located, everyone is going to the center.

[Sevenless]

Permadeath is a deterrent for many, either to go into PvP in the first place (the ones without alt farms) or even to play the game at all.

This has been my feelings about haven for several years now. More towards pvp limitations than about people not playing in the first place. We're only talking about people who actually do play getting bored since we can get feedback from them. Anyway, I remember going from haven to playing darkfall (full loot for anyone who doesn't know it) and it was astounding. In haven, I'd fought maybe 2 times in 3 months. Really active pvpers probably get fights maybe 1-2 times a day at most, and even then that'd have to include a lot of sprucecap stomping. In darkfall I had 30 fights in a single day.

Permadeath limits what kinds of pvp mechanics you can implement successfully. You can't have constant wars like eve does, because replacing losses for the average soldier is frankly too high. Haven is like EVE where only titans can fight, there's no frigates (minutes to replace), battlecruisers(couple hours to replace) or battleship (up to 1-2 days to replace) tier of resource investment into combat. And even beyond character permadeath, we have base permadeath as well. Goes back to the same issue, pvp has such grave weight it can't be a primary source of endgame content like it is in eve.

I'm not sure how to suggest endgame content for a game so heavily intertwined with pvp. Much of the crafting in the game focuses around empowering pvp even, so you run into similar limitations if not as stiff.

My only suggestions that don't involve removing permadeath involve things like a "spirit realm" where pvp of some form can happen without killing players in the traditional gameworld. It'd have to eat consumables/items from the normal world to make any sense inside haven though.

[Potjeh]

I think a bigger reason why people quit is that Haven is more of a job than a game. You can't take a break or your quality grind will fall hopelessly behind, especially livestock. Nothing that you're forced to do can remain fun for very long.

[Sevenless]

I think a bigger reason why people quit is that Haven is more of a job than a game. You can't take a break or your quality grind will fall hopelessly behind, especially livestock. Nothing that you're forced to do can remain fun for very long.

There's a lot of games that have long term grind and feel sorta like a job. WoW, EVE, Everquest, all of them have longterm grind elements that need to be just gotten through so to speak. But if the game is engaging and fun outside those activities, and said activities take up a small enough portion of the gameplay it's not a problem.

Potentially the one takeaway I could see from this might be that the amount of work behind maintaining a herd of animals that grows in quality sufficiently quickly might be too high. If raising animals to improve quality was less of a giant chore, it wouldn't be so bad (complaints about crop quality raising are much fewer, despite it being identical in daily requirements to level competitively).