Сritique: Hafen and Hearth development

[Avu]

And usually the guys ahead can't use their ahead status to murder your. Though that is becoming less of a problem in haven too. Finally.

[Sevenless]

In real life it doesn't matter how much somebody trains, they'll never be 10x stronger than somebody who doesn't train at all. As for other MMOs, virtually every single one has a stat cap and no permadeath, so eventually everyone achieves equal max power level.

Sandbox builders are notable that most of them have something like this. EVE has ships/skills that take years to finish. Wurm has skills that take year upon years to max. Effectively "uncapped" growth potential if you consider most players play a game for 3-9 months. Dungeons and Dragons Online has a prestieging system that allows you to grind for a couple years gaining additional stats.

It's important for haven imo (watching numbers tick up is a big part of quite a few sandbox builders), but the scaling system may or may not be appropriate. Several skills are not rewarding to scale infinitely (carpentry) while others are (combat related skills). Also, rate of skill gain increases dramatically as you progress through quality levels, which causes a large lag between the cap effectively slowing them down and where the average joe gets to.

I've been feeling for a while a couple things:

A) 300% hunger bonus that can be regularly achieved is causing ridiculous stat bloat for factions. Symbel quality importance serves to allow top factions to use 300% continuously, let alone multiplying the impact of salt if they need it. I've seen a picture that I no reason to doubt that had 1k str, 1k agi, 1k con. This was utterly unheard of in previous worlds.
B) Satiations in their current form only serve to hinder people starting, they are simply too harsh before you have the tools to manage them effectively (which for my little playthrough is about a month into the game). Although the bonus is 125%, the difference between 125% and 30-60% is huge. It's not hard to get to 30-60% via compounding penalties. You're forced to eat variety food due to your main meal being low Q, but this is extremely difficult to track the satiations on and easy to mess up. I'm pretty good with these types of systems, and I won't lie it has been very hard to deal with the sheer breadth of this.
C) potentially both stats and skills don't scale harshly enough. I'm at 100 farming, yet I get about 3 points of farming per day. The scaling on skills barely changes the required amount of LP day to day. However, my LP gain is set to jump soonish as I increase in int, meaning I'm actually accelerating in skill growth not slowing. Haven has a big issue where your starting growth is significantly slower than your mid-endgame growth. This is the trait that those other things I've mentioned don't have. In EVE, you can be flying a useful ship within a couple weeks. You can fly it well within a month or two. In wurm your first 30 skill points take a couple hours, but going from 99.5>100.0 skill takes as long as it took to get to 99.5 originally.

Suggestions:

Unless we want them to be removed, both the hunger and the satiation system have too wide of a penalty on them. No matter what other changes happen to them, they need to imo be massively reduced in stat range. Hunger should be something like 125% vs 90% not 300% vs 90%. I've been told by Nooby that endgame, tables mean you always eat in the top food bracket anyway so it's not serving to actually limit food consumption. Perhaps this is an argument to limit it to an lower cap of 90%, perhaps not. Satiations, especially because they compound, are just attrocious if you can't manage them. Maybe leave the penalties as is, if you want to preserve the current setup otherwise, and cap the penalty so that you never go lower than 75% as the final multiplier. There's incentive to manage it, but it's not going to devastate people who don't understand the system.

Satiations are too complex. Noobs are choosing to ignore it rather than pay attention because of how much information exists. Especially given the current penalty, this fucks them utterly. As much as it's neat to have complexity (for me personally) I think it needs to be toned down. At this point I just want foods to satiate what they use (until they hit the 50% reset point, but never penalizing below 75% total), and have drinks work as they do as a stored buff. It would be a system that's beneficial to manage via drinks and that's about it. The overwhelming variety of FEPs available is already complex enough for most people to have their heads spin.

Stats need to have differential scaling. Currently, I'd say "noob zone" is 1-100, "mid game" is 100-300, endgame is 300+. Some skills have caps that make them not needed in the "endgame" values (such as carpentry, masonry). I feel like we need to ramp up the LP scaling for the 100-300 zone and massively up the LP scaling in the 300+ zone. My only hesitation here is how farming work, ye who is ahead would always have a higher crop cap via farmers. But depending how harsh the scaling is, the crop cap might not matter (Q400 vs Q450? Not the end of the world at 6.7 vs 6.3 quality multipliers). Entirely possible something along this line needs to be added to FEPs as well, due to the interaction of increasing quality undoing a lot of the innate scaling penalties already built in.

All of these changes basically require a world reset to test properly though.

[iamahh]

the only way to make players less defensive is to equalize the battleground

there are no firearms in the game, so theoretically players should have a chance to beat each other, regardless of the grind

no stats, no ql, simplify combat and remove permadeath

[Potjeh]

IMO effect of stats should be on logistical function instead of a root function, and cost to raise should be exponential.

[Sevenless]

IMO effect of stats should be on logistical function instead of a root function, and cost to raise should be exponential.

Sure, either or. There's more than one way to skin the cat here.

Edit: My initial reasoning is that the game has distinct level ranges that we want players to reach. I'm not sure if a general formula will mesh well with the other quality systems.

[sMartins]

Pretty agree with Sevenless here.
Also one thing I think is missing about crafting is more "gamish" feature that reward the player giving him some reasons and fun while grinding, such as extra bonus, "legendary items" and that stuff with a very low chance based on the actual "rank"....could be a "delicious meal" that give you some more fep, a legendary axe that give you some % of stamina reduction, etc....to surprise and reward the player.
Also, with seasons incoming we could copy the new Zelda also.....about food that give you cold and heat resistence, or idk some fish food that give you stamina reduction while swimming...etc....
I think contents side this game is already amazing, to me now the development should focus on the technical side (push out, better pve with hunting,etc...) to more gamish features (like stealth, hide...and those think we are testing now)...
The gameplay now is too "flat", we need to add more "game" to it, improving the technical side...idk maybe more differences with the in game time also, some animals sleeping during night, giving you the chance to stealth approach them, just saying here....more "game" is what we need i think.
Then like Sevenless said: balance is always pretty important for an healthy gameplay...

[Aceb]

Pretty agree with Sevenless here.
Also one thing I think is missing about crafting is more "gamish" feature that reward the player giving him some reasons and fun while grinding, such as extra bonus, "legendary items" and that stuff with a very low chance based on the actual "rank"....could be a "delicious meal" that give you some more fep, a legendary axe that give you some % of stamina reduction, etc....to surprise and reward the player.
Also, with seasons incoming we could copy the new Zelda also.....about food that give you cold and heat resistence, or idk some fish food that give you stamina reduction while swimming...etc....
I think contents side this game is already amazing, to me now the development should focus on the technical side (push out, better pve with hunting,etc...) to more gamish features (like stealth, hide...and those think we are testing now)...
The gameplay now is too "flat", we need to add more "game" to it, improving the technical side...idk maybe more differences with the in game time also, some animals sleeping during night, giving you the chance to stealth approach them, just saying here....more "game" is what we need i think.
Then like Sevenless said: balance is always pretty important for an healthy gameplay...

I cannot stop but think about those people who were crafting boots from block of wood and trying to get that 2% second gildable for them, just to complete quest. That would pretty much happen again, just to obtain "legendary" stuff.

[sMartins]

I cannot stop but think about those people who were crafting boots from block of wood and trying to get that 2% second gildable for them, just to complete quest. That would pretty much happen again, just to obtain "legendary" stuff.

Yeah gildable stuff is good to improve the gamish aspect of crafting, while grinding at the same time...I think that could be applied also on other items in game....only being carefull about damage weapons to not screw up pvp side.

[reexar77]

yeah i will say the main problem is the updates are fixes to other updates , but honestly combat changes are pretty okay but still it feels lacking since everybody goes with the same deck pvp wise usually cause some attacks are always better then others , most people quit either cause of the lack of updates they like but just like people said , DIS killed alot of new people , and weak players , killing such players drove them again from the game since building up even a low character for them was difficult since the lack of experience , veterans die , inherit and regain their stats quick , but there's also that side of the players base that sees it as a really big chalange , a world wipe won't help some ask for it but it won't help it will just reset players base back up again cause people will rush resource nodes and such and after that people will probably focus something else , for now we need to wait and see if Jorb & Loftar will ask for some feed back and hopefully they will put together a solution with the comunity , since for combat changes asking pvper's is important and also asking the majority of the player base about what they dislike and of course what they would love to see more of , feed back and comunication with the player base always helped , one thing i personally dislike is how the game went from hardcore to softcore , no more perma-death from players , no more siedging without having to wait too much and even then people can just stack claims , etc

[dafels]