Endgame Competition & Skill Decay

[Robben_DuMarsch]

Two things are stopping Haven from being as successful as it should be:

1. Lack of Endgame Competition
a.
- Currently Endgame Competition consists of (1)utterly destroying your enemies and (2)avoiding utter destruction.
- Mechanics favoring (1) guarantee players quit as they lose everything, Mechanics favoring (2) guarantee players quit as they get bored at a stagnant world.

b.
- New mechanics may allow a middle ground, allowing conflict between groups that do not result in absolute defeat... such as battles over territory not related to the destruction of cities and characters.
- These mechanics should not simply be timegated, but should involve active play at preset times by individuals to ensure that they can log in and enjoy competition at X time, instead of sinking tens of hours into potential conflict.

2. Skill Grind
a.
- Skill grind consists of (1)being utterly useless to a developed group until you reach their relative skill and (2)being utterly without content when you reach skill cap.
- New players to a world that is past launch are assailed with a variety of barriers to entry.
- Old players to a world are uhh.. bored.

b.
- Skill decay in some form would lower the barrier to entry, increasing new player retention.
- Skill decay would make it exceedingly more difficult to maintain "fire and forget" bots that undermine the games economy.

[Shadow7168]

There's already been plenty of talk about faction systems & formal wars, end-game PvE/PvP, pre-determined siege times and making resource nodes points of conflict like they were originally meant to be.

The current system practically ensures that players in a village will lose hardly anything as they have time to evacuate their crafters & alt-vault valuables. The only thing that isn't safe is the village itself, but it's easy to set up a new one.

Skill decay is really dumb, it'll be yet another thing for end-game players to grind (therefor making things even more tedious) and only harming the nubs who won't be as able to keep up with it as easily. It won't stop bots either, since they're well... bots. Also, new characters to a village aren't at all useless. There's lots of things they can do to help without being at the stat cap, and they can be fed top tier food and gear to rapidly get them up to a competitive level.

It's already been discussed to death, and Jorbtar are most likely going to work on that after they finish the combat and floating point shit.