Petition to Jorb for Stat Caps

[Griffone]

...

Second, in my opinion, I think encouraging players towards two specific routes is a viable way to go and you have already partially achieved this with the credo system. Players should either focus on raising their attributes and skills evenly for a "balanced" build or could instead choose the route of specialization. This could be achieved by implementing diminishing returns in the form of a player's highest skill or attribute affecting the learning point/food cost of all other skills and attributes.

An example of this might be, Player A raises their combat skills to 300 before raising anything else where as Player B raises theirs to 1000. The overall impact this has on other skills is that the learning point cost for Player A to now raise something like Exploration would be 30% higher than its normal cost at level 1 and Player B's learning point cost would increase marginally higher at 100%. As you close the gap towards your highest skill the cost increase would lower until you match your highest skill at which point the rate returns to what it would normally be at that level. Not sure if that makes sense but I hope so.

This combined with the credo system would hopefully encourage more players towards balancing their skill sets and attributes or specializing to be the village smith or something like that.

Of course there will always be those players that want to min/max everything and obtain all they possibly can or pump out numerous alts with varying capabilities which is fine and they should be able to do so but I feel with some sort of diminishing return in place like this it will at least make that achievement a more difficult prospect and also add value to any player's character(s) that do happen to reach those points.

I'm not sold that catering to hardcore and softcore audience separately is the way to go. It will increase the existing gap between the two. I would rather argue "catch up" mechanics to make life easier for casual players.

But maybe you just gave an unfortunate example with stats, as you're punishing specialization by making it more difficult to despecialize, which in my mind leads to more alts for hardcore players, not promote village specialization.


Also, it looks like we got somewhat off topic from stat caps to end game. Perhaps it's time we open a discussion specifically for that, as to promote more arguments about what content we want once we stop recipe progression in HnH?

[Kaios]

I did put some consideration in to de-specialization as well actually although I didn't think to address it. What I was thinking might be good since it seems many people want to promote more players towards risking their characters not only in PvE but PvP as well that reincarnation would be the ideal way for players to re-specialize in another skill.

In order to entice players though there would have to be some advantage to reincarnating and losing some of the progress you've made, and such benefits could still be applied at varying degrees whether or not you intended for your character to die. This could be something as simple as giving the player a learning point bonus in their current highest skill during their next incarnation so that they could not only specialize in their last skill but also a new one to better bonuses like maintaining certain credos on your next incarnation (This could already be the case with credos I honestly don't know much about how they work). In any case I think some interesting ideas could be implemented to encourage players to continue improving their character even upon death.

I'm not really sure what you mean by catering to any audience separately, my suggestion was intended to appease both of those sides. It should not be easy to become a jack-of-all-trades but I certainly feel that it should be possible to get there or at least very close with significant effort.

[MagicManICT]

haven is a finite game so their is a half way point even if it is not obvious or explicit u dont need 2 have a victory condition 2 conquer half of the games challenges the victory is implicit in the mastery of the games hardest challenges

Haven is not a finite game.... unless you mean in its unfinished state. Then yes, there is definitely an end: when development hits a wall or a new idea comes up that forces a world reset. (Or added mechanics just got so out of hand that the only choice is to reset so they can be balanced.) Otherwise, a finite game has a clear beginning and a clear ending. After you reach the end, there is nothing else to do other than to restart from the beginning.

In a way, I'm disappointed you don't see the sandbox for what it is--a means of playing a game in a way you can't play others. I think problem might be with the size of the player base, not with the game itself. Too few people and you just don't have enough to make politics and wars exciting.

You're right in that you can really only push a particular artifact so far in quality boosts, both as you run out of things to gild on to it, and as you only need so many bonuses in many parts of the game. More bonuses, and you're just wasting time and energy. This is true of many aspects of Haven, though. The end is always advancing, though, so what might be a finish for you after the world is 3 months old, definitely is not the end of the game, as two years later, the game has far exceeded where it was at at the three month mark.

[maze]

every time a pro-infinite-stats.

I just imagine him running a bot all day or finding him with some exploit.
then later running around the wilds with his dick out yelling "I'm titan now"

the only augment they have is "stats is the game!!! there nothing else in this game to support a statcap game"
without realizing there is much more.


But I love these "stat cap threads"
it's always a fuk ton of toxic people that dick wag then call people autistic for disagreeing with their ideas.

petition for 2 worlds. 1 infinite grind and one stat capped

[xdragonlord18]

haven is a finite game so their is a half way point even if it is not obvious or explicit u dont need 2 have a victory condition 2 conquer half of the games challenges the victory is implicit in the mastery of the games hardest challenges

Haven is not a finite game.... unless you mean in its unfinished state. Then yes, there is definitely an end: when development hits a wall or a new idea comes up that forces a world reset. (Or added mechanics just got so out of hand that the only choice is to reset so they can be balanced.) Otherwise, a finite game has a clear beginning and a clear ending. After you reach the end, there is nothing else to do other than to restart from the beginning.

In a way, I'm disappointed you don't see the sandbox for what it is--a means of playing a game in a way you can't play others. I think problem might be with the size of the player base, not with the game itself. Too few people and you just don't have enough to make politics and wars exciting.

You're right in that you can really only push a particular artifact so far in quality boosts, both as you run out of things to gild on to it, and as you only need so many bonuses in many parts of the game. More bonuses, and you're just wasting time and energy. This is true of many aspects of Haven, though. The end is always advancing, though, so what might be a finish for you after the world is 3 months old, definitely is not the end of the game, as two years later, the game has far exceeded where it was at at the three month mark.

haven is finite cuz their r only so many challenges the game can offer 2 its players u can make all recipes and obtain the resources 2 make the strongest items u can defeat the hardest enemies and interact with every aspect of every system haven has 2 offer u dont need a clear end it just needs an end and most mmos have an unclear end but an end none the less haven is a sandbox but even sandboxes only have so much sand in them and for the most part u r entertaining urself and making ur own content that is separate from the game in that sense the actions of the players r not part of haven since wars would not exist without players but wars exist without haven so war and politics r aspects of humans and not haven also all games can b played by multiple people at different speeds and time frames this is not a quality specific to mmos there r people playing dark souls for the first time right now and i completed that game years ago

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

their r only so many challenges the game can offer 2 its players u can make all recipes and obtain the resources 2 make the strongest items u can defeat the hardest enemies and interact with every aspect of every system haven has 2 offer

This here is the flaw in your thinking. That you think these activities are the core and purpose of the environment you're playing in. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. What makes Haven stand apart from other games is that these activities you describe do NOT define the whole or even most significant parts of the experience.

There are always new players to help, new things to build, new projects to address, new areas of the world to explore, and always, always the burgeoning risk of war. There's the creation of things for other people to help them achieve the goals you mentioned above, the ability to choose to be someone who polices the land according to some set of rules (or some arbitrary sense of 'oh look free scents'). There's the crawling over what people have built, seeing the everchanging landscape that occurs as old powers fade away and new ones grow in their roots.

These things don't exist in other MMO's for the most part. Sure you can stat grind until you hit the uber-titan state, hunt down and kill everything you find... But if you do, that's the end of your game, and that's why you think there's an End Game.

There isn't. There is always something new you can do, always some new ambition you can set out to, you just have to realign your way of looking at the game.

The game you're describing is available in WoW, in Everquest, in a million cheesy Korean MMOs.

Haven is the only one to offer us the experience it does... Yet you insist that it's the same. Your inability to see my point is rooted in the fact that you're myopic about game design and MMO design. So are a lot of people having this argument right now.

[Avu]

The end is near it has finally come to pass: I agree with Lunarius...

[Griffone]

...

I'm not really sure what you mean by catering to any audience separately, my suggestion was intended to appease both of those sides. It should not be easy to become a jack-of-all-trades but I certainly feel that it should be possible to get there or at least very close with significant effort.

I was referring to:

...
Second, in my opinion, I think encouraging players towards two specific routes is a viable way to go ...

But reading through it again, I realized it's not "hardcore" and "softcore" paths, you were presenting "Jack-of-all-trades" and "Janet-the-cave-specialist" paths. That caters to the MMO aspect of Haven, making specialization more valuable, while still letting hermits do their thing. This can work, although it still feels like a system easily circumvented by alt-ing. Even if you take the lesson from credos and make specialization not about food and clothing, but character achievements, tryhards will still just make an alt for every specialization. But you can argue let tryhards tryhard and focus on the other members of the community.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

The end is near it has finally come to pass: I agree with Lunarius...

That made my day. Immortalized.

[MagicManICT]

haven is finite cuz their r only so many challenges the game can offer 2 its players u can make all recipes and obtain the resources

This is shortsighted. These objects exist to create and enable conflict between players, not as the goal themselves. If you aren't setting your own goals beyond items, then does haven really have more than a few hours of gameplay? Why do you come back and play again and again?

Your arguments make me think of another discussion I read a long time ago. Someone argued that Minecraft was a crappy multiplayer game and that its only goal was to defeat the Ender dragon. it wasn't good enough to go beyond that. The counter was that Minecraft was so great that the addition of such things actually decreased the greatness of the game. It was already a great and amazing game that you could just explore and do fun things with without needing some big boss.

I'd like to make the same proposal here. I'd love to see dragons and other big fantasy things. however, haven as is is already great. There are tons of things to do, tons of goals to create. Maybe the addition of these "greater things" will actually lessen the greatness of the game.