A Plea for Decay (Character)

[skltnk]

Every time i hear about stat decay the first thought is that its the same people who sit smoking weed drinking themselves unconscious, no job and no money whinging about anyone that has a home and a job.

You think the people with 10k stats dont deserve these stats because you started after them? they put in more time and effort..

Ironically.. might be the same people.

Answer is simple: "it's about balance"
Have you ever IRL seen a person so dedicated that he became a godlike, immune to swords bullets whatever, and capable
of destroying everything in one punch?

That's because real world has a balance and H&H in a current stage doesn't.
(I'm not saying you gotta do everything like in real world. But you can definitely learn from it.)

And this is why people thought about level cap. But hard level cap wasn't able to solve or make better situation with bots / alts. Some people thought it can even make situation worse.
Some people was afraid it will leave no reason for them to play once they'll reach it.
And to satisfy everybody decay was proposed. It is capable of solving ALOT of current flaws and satisfy everybody,
"dedicated people" included.

[skltnk]

Any type of punishing mechanics = stupid. Decay doesn't feel rewarding. It is a punishment in a nutshell.

Punishment makes reward feel better. That's why permadeath feels good. You might wanna ask yourself why you even playing this game, not another one.

If you want to resolve something, make it via rewards, not punishments.

At least you didn't say "lootboxes". A little respect for that.

[skltnk]

Why would someone who start later, had it easier to catch me?

It's not about that.

It's about being imposible to play smart.

You having 10k stats only means that you are good at doing chores. There's not much of brain activity involved.
It means that you are more sustainable to repeating, mind-numbing activity than others. Didn't want to say this, but it takes a good degree of stupidity to invest so much time in such boring stuff and being capable to have fun.

Why doesn't H&H have a huge playerbase?

Cause it takes to be smart enough to see a brilliance through the "ugly graphics" and it takes to be pretty dumb to continue playing after some point. Otherwise it feels like pain.

This scares of decent people from playing.

I know a good bunch of people who tried to play H&H and quit. And all of them saying the same thing:
"If there's ever a proper balance in H&H - i will play the shit out of this game. But for now it's nothing to do there."

Yeah...all you can do is cook and eat food...

Politics, wars, trading, all forms of player interaction are completely ruined by infinite character progression.
No strategy, no tactics, no means of defense against overpowered characters.

Instead you have bots, alts and shitload of empty abandoned settlements.
Each person you see either teleports or runs away.
And a constant circlejerk among top players which is impossible to witness without dying out of cringe.

How can you NOT want to cure this cancer?

Decay is able to fix this and some other problems.
Maybe it's not the best solution. But it will get the work done without bringing more problems.
And i don't see anyone trying to come up with another idea. Just people going ape trying to criticize any possible change
without even thinking it over.

[loftar]

Where is the difference to having a hardcap at 200 (apart from increasing the time it takes to reach the cap - and raising the incentive from credos to kill off the character on a regular basis to make them easier)?

Well, it was just a mathematical example; in a real implementation, the amount that can be gained "per character" would of course be much more flexible, thus making a negotiable cap similar to your decay suggestion. That being said, again, I'm not actually advocating this mechanic, I was just using it as an example.

[pheonix]

It's not about that.

It's about being imposible to play smart.

You having 10k stats only means that you are good at doing chores. There's not much of brain activity involved.
It means that you are more sustainable to repeating, mind-numbing activity than others. Didn't want to say this, but it takes a good degree of stupidity to invest so much time in such boring stuff and being capable to have fun.

If you have 10k Stats in one stat type it means youve been working non stop for months cooking hunting growing trees and feeding animals. The core of this game so thats considered boring? if so why play the game. and attacking them for doing this because you wont makes you seem jealous or petty attack the system not the players.

Why doesn't H&H have a huge playerbase?

Cause it takes to be smart enough to see a brilliance through the "ugly graphics" and it takes to be pretty dumb to continue playing after some point. Otherwise it feels like pain.

This scares of decent people from playing.

I know a good bunch of people who tried to play H&H and quit. And all of them saying the same thing:
"If there's ever a proper balance in H&H - i will play the shit out of this game. But for now it's nothing to do there."

Yeah...all you can do is cook and eat food...

This is a multipart issue and not one problem by lumping it as stat inflation ignores the fact we need alot of other things to attract players such as
The current feasting system were discussing is broken
the inital Ui is so User unfriendly it scares anyone away even if they get it working.
the combat system takes too much to learn for a new player
the end game is severely lacking which is what jorb and loftar is doing atm with dungeons and hopefully darkness next world.
lack of any decent tutorials besides the ingame one- adding one from say a player done competition into the game ui to help new players would help alot like taming animals combat exploring factions kingdoms etc instead of saying to go to forums they have an info dump first.
and theres more.

Politics, wars, trading, all forms of player interaction are completely ruined by infinite character progression.
No strategy, no tactics, no means of defense against overpowered characters.

which would change with a decent stat progression system and during last siege there was tactics employed but as we can see siege mechanics have a long way to go.

Instead you have bots, alts and shitload of empty abandoned settlements.

the bots used by the factions are to reduce the tedium of things like satiations or farming into stockpiles like goo mentioned.

Each person you see either teleports or runs away.

they dont wanna die or get robbed lol

And a constant circlejerk among top players which is impossible to witness without dying out of cringe.

this is common to any game ours seem to have a sonic fetish though.

How can you NOT want to cure this cancer?

Decay is able to fix this and some other problems.
Maybe it's not the best solution. But it will get the work done without bringing more problems.
And i don't see anyone trying to come up with another idea. Just people going ape trying to criticize any possible change
without even thinking it over.

Stat decay is something i hate because it is the no effort bandaid response, its the tax people more to solve problems of overspending by governments instead of doing things more cost efficiently. i don't want a system like this because i love infinite stat growth, to know that i can keep going no matter what if i put the time and effort in.

We have mentioned time and time again the answer to stat growth is to slow it down so that the gap between hardcore and hermit is smaller and my suggestion of a feasting system mentioned before where its a system that we sit down and eat only what we fit on a table and the amount of food satiates our character and technically time gates the feasting session. Terrible spammy foods have higher timers and more complex ones have less time so if a hermit fusses about making decent food they can be at a similar level to a faction character.

which would you rather? stat decay or a decent feasting system? Punishment for playing or a rewarding and fun mechanic?

for example i mentioned this back a while ago and i dont know if anyone saw viewtopic.php?f=48&t=59230&p=757246&hilit=Satiation#p757246

[Granger]

Infinite progression makes balancing (and through this: long running worlds) impossible and defines taking a break or being late to a world as 'you lost'. A timegate on feasting might slow the first but makes the latter worse.
So no, slowing progression is no solution to the consequences of it being unlimited.

And BTW: Stat decay and sane feasting isn't mutually exclusive.

[pheonix]

This is no longer a discussion with you. All you want is to punish players for playing the game longer then anyone else which is inherently a negative viewpoint, you dont care about ideas about better systems, its just take from them as they have more then me. A level cap is 10x better as at least it doesnt take away players hard work for no reason but to make those that started later feel better. If you hate players with 10k stats then kill them because im sure as hell he couldnt fight off 5+ 1k guys boxing him in or drowning.

as for the feasting the whole system is designed that if your smart you can catch up because when we start a new world we start at q10 shit food itll be months before we get up to q100-200 food so while were eating q10 q20 q30 food and gaining bugger all foods a late player can come in after weve done the research and raised the goods and eat good food and catch up fast to us. an example

say pumpkin pie blueberrie pie and steak and tubers is what we eat as fighters and give 10 minutes timer per and a q10 give enough to gain 1 fep until 30 stats. thats 10 hours for a 30 str agi int character the next day they push and get half for same time so 40 stat char at 10 hours again add 7 hours for agility and thats 27 hours to reach that point. say someone starts 6 months later when they can buy q250 tools and food and theres recipes that add stats that have 1 minute timers. they could eat food to get to 40 stats and have a timer of 2 hours what took us 2-3 days initially.

Now you complain that at later stages of the game we'll never catch up to them even eating efficiently, but currently tables and setups have created a warped view for everyone because it gives such a stupid multiplier to foods where it should be eating a few things to gain 1-2 feps when up at the 400-500 levels. We need to have the system designed around the idea that when you hit a softcap the food requirement for gaining levels becomes steeper so a new player can get up to 100-300 stats behind someone but never surpass because no one deserves to get further because they started later in a race. Now heres the other part we also want the system to allow us when we die to get back to a point close to where we died because a new player and a vet dying is the same situation to us.

here is a table i threw together quickly to illustrate my point.

what we have is the first section of a vet trying to reach 500 stats and taking 2.5 months next we have a new player assuming they bought goods or traded for the seeds and tools available currently after 2.5 months that roughly they could catch up to where we were at 2.5 months in 7 days if they really wanted to catch up. Here we have a situation where the vet is only 125 stats above the new player or dead vet.

another example and bear in mind its all random numbers but say 13 months like were at now and we have a vet at 3600 stats but takes a year of non stop grinding and the newb has 7 months to catch the same point which tbh become unrealistic at this point to catch up but getting to within say 1k stats is realistic and not a massive delta atm. and keep in mind this is a balanced str/agi/con/(charm/int/pysche) where you could sacrifice another stat to catch up.

The tables are meant as an example and not realistic as jorb would have his own touches, but to use as a point that we need it balanced that reaching decent stats later in the world is easy and quick for a dead vet or new player but you cant catch up because its too much food and time. and with the combat system i doubt the 1k stat difference by year end would be a big thing since the system hopefully takes skill into account more then stats.

[Burinn]

Leave Granger alone!

[MagicManICT]

If you have 10k Stats in one stat type it means youve been working non stop for months cooking hunting growing trees and feeding animals. The core of this game so thats considered boring? if so why play the game. and attacking them for doing this because you wont makes you seem jealous or petty attack the system not the players.

Been down that road, and can say it does get boring and annoying and stupid... and that's why I gave up and just larp in game now. The rat race is fun once or twice, but long term it has no benefits because the server is just going to get reset.

I think the two core problems are A) balance of current mechanics allowing this sort of runaway development, and B) this really bad attitude amongst players:

Infinite progression makes balancing (and through this: long running worlds) impossible and defines taking a break or being late to a world as 'you lost'

If anything, taking a break means you've lost a shit ton of investment in livestock and resource development. That's what you're really losing. Coming back then feels lame and meaningless. Being a part of a village helps to mitigate this in that others can be around to look after cows and save important materials if raids come, but so often the whole of the village gets overworked from the new world start up that many want to take a break at almost the same time leaving a scant few to look after it all... which they don't really want to do. (That seems to be the common story I pick up on around the forums, anyway.)

[Fierce_Deity]

I'd like to see a balanced world at some point, with PvE that remains meaningful, and PvP all can aspire to have an impact in.
So here goes an attempt to make decay more palatable.

Call it stat regression, and implement it so that stats that have decayed are easier to restore to their previous point. Where the more that you've lost, the easier it is to regain it. As you approach your original levels the bonus gain would drop off somewhat. So if a person had a thousand stats, and decayed all the way to 100 then they would find stats increasing at a much faster rate than when they originally leveled to that point. A minimum 25% bonus to increasing to previous stats, with it increasing up to 90% depending on the percentage that has decayed. There is still decay, which is creating a sort of stat cap by having a point where it become difficult to raise your stats past what the decay rate keeps you at. However its less harsh on those who have lost significant amounts of stats from prolonged breaks. It would also make it easier to sustain a sweet spot where you eat enough to maintain a stat level that keeps you happy. Less time spent maintaining or increasing stats, more time for bleeding your foes and going into dungeons. Could even go so far as to implement foods/food buffs & dungeon items that will freeze a stats ability to increase, but also stop it from decreasing.