Mortal Reminder

Thoughts on the further development of Haven & Hearth? Feel free to opine!

Mortal Reminder

Postby Sevenless » Sun Apr 09, 2017 9:27 pm

Summary:

-Death creates a combat limiting wound, with significant but not crippling advancement penalties. Wound can be partially healed by burial, and must be either waited out, quested away, or possibly healed with new medicins. Depending on abuse concerns, healing criteria can be altered to suit.
-New resource created from broken equipment on corpses and from resource fountains realms fight over. Scheduled weekend resource spawn events at the resource fountains give structured pvp opportunities, also include ability for realmless barbarians to take part. Ritual sacrifice to give a game mechanic for players wanting to destroy items for this resource, but with limits to prevent abusability.
-New magic to use the resource, or the resource gives XP and XP uses expanded. Possible magical expansions include new temporary realm abilities, temporary combat/non-combat buffs, gild crafting, wound healing.


For the longest time we've had the community arguing back and forth over the aspect of permadeath in Haven. It's both a unique quality, and a unique flaw that haven has in its genre of long term progress MMOs. Many people have advocated removing it, however I've never felt that they proposed a system to attempt to preserve any weight of combat and death in haven. At least I haven't read it in the 6+ years I've been visiting the Haven community on and off. Further I feel the weights of this problem reach deeply into the endgame stratification. All of the examples I'm aware of for long lasting MMOs that are in the sandbox genre feature PvP heavily as a form of emergent content. However, permadeath pvp makes haven pvp both appealing only to a notably small niche, and also an activity that can't be engaged in frequently due to the costs of preparation time. In haven even active fighters will get only a couple fights a week outside noob killing, while in other comparable sandboxes like EVE it's relatively easy to get into a couple fights per day. In games that haven't achieved lasting potential like Mortal Online or Darkfall, fights can be gotten hourly or more frequently.

Some people have proposed stat caps as a means to combat this issue, by capping the amount of work a character can intake, you cap both the time to rebuild and the time investment per character. However, attempting to stat cap haven low enough that it becomes reasonable for frequent combat would in my opinion at least require gutting much of what exists currently of haven's non-combat charm. Although a game like that might be viable, it's a shot in the dark and wouldn't really be haven in my mind.

This leaves me with three major points that need addressing in order to help haven's endgame:

1) Frequent pvp appears to be the only known successful formula for sandbox games.

2) In order to encourage pvp, some form of in game reward mechanic is usually required. Right now there is relatively little to fight over, especially since the sieging system is currently quite difficult. Things are either valuable enough to simply lock away behind a base shield, or are let to sit in the wild and checked with competition. However, weakening the sieging system is a dangerous issue due to the fact that "base permadeath" exists as well.

In order to address these issues, I'd like to propose the foundations for a combat endgame.

Rebirth System

The wounding system is reworked to replace the need for permadeath. When you die, you are either presented with the option of being reborn or logging off. Rebirth queues the screen shaking/screaming of being first spawned, and rebirths you at your hearthfire or an appropriate location if you lack one. Your corpse, and all of its belongings, remain at the scene of your death. At this point in the game, enough low magic has been introduced that rebirth no longer seems at odds with the gameworld hearthlings exist in.

A wound called "Mortal Reminder" appears. This lowers HHP to 1, and also reduces UA/Melee/Marksmanship by 99%. To keep the immersion and aesthetics, burial in all its forms continues to serve the function of repairing a % of the wound. The wound can be further repaired via specific rare medicines, preferably sourced from a non-bottable system that allows beginners to contribute to the war economy, by doing quests for your ancestor (a unique quest spirit named after your character that gives normal non-combat quests and heals portions of the wound as a reward), or very slowly over time. Since this wound only impacts combat attributes, there is no punishment to other non-combat aspects of gameplay outside potential equipment/mentory loss.

The primary importance of this system is that it keeps a high risk/reward in pvp that our current pvp playerbase enjoys, while reducing penalties for both newcomers to the system and non-combat types. To deal with issues of multiple corpses and abusability, each active corpse could only heal a proportional amount of the wound. If burial healed 50%, two corpses active, burying one corpse fully would heal 25% instead.

Edit: I realized after re-reading this makes it seem like mortal reminder would be the only wound. I love the existing wounding system, and would only want to see this added on top of it. I'm also not certain if this is "going too easy" on non-combat types, especially with regards to animals and how they should be a respected danger in the world. Some form of non-insignificant but also not crippling advancement penalty like -20% LP gain could be applied while mortal reminder exists.

Beacons of Wisdom

Right now we lack any gameplay oriented realm conflict. Realms have good reason to spread, but don't have any particular reason to conflict with each other. With the reworked death system, fighters could engage more freely in combat knowing that healing fully from a death would take a specific amount of work questing/time/medecin in order to be back at combat capability. To this order, I propose an additional rare structure exist in the world known as a "Beacon of Wisdom" or something appropriate. This would be an item that generates resources at a specific time on the weekend. However, this only happens if a realm claim is covering them, without a realm claim they lay inert. Realms would have the ability to shift the spawn time of the resources to aid in fitting their timezone, although it would be within a reasonable limit so that some realms couldn't simply set the contest time when almost no one is online.

The key to combat here is that the beacons are only lit for a limited but publicly known time, and take significant amount of time to finish harvesting. Hearthlings, either realmless barbarians or nefarious agents of opposing realms, will however have options to plunder the bounty for themselves if the host realm doesn't defend them appropriately. I'm going to be honest when I say that at this time I'm not 100% certain how this conflict should work. Some form of challenge beacon might be fairest, and cause the largest groups of players to fight by alerting the defending realm of the incoming raid. But at the same time it might make it too easy to defend as the strongest realm (the people who would arguably need the benefits the least).

However, it should always be that the defenders get greater rewards than the raiders if they manage to collect. This gives the cairn warfare a reason to take place during the week leading up to the weekly beacon rewards.

Blood Magic

At this point, it's important to discuss what exactly the rewards from beacons and killing are. Skulls in particular would need a rework, to avoid needles alt slaughtering and any potential LP shenanigans from them. I'd propose to deal with alt spam, only characters with 0 mortal reminder wounds give developed skulls (if they pass the other existing criteria). Depending on how balancing works, this might require that mortal reminder not actually heal over time but only via questing.

But beyond that, rewards do need to exist to encourage this combat. The two potential systems I can see are either XP rewards and its uses, or the creation of a new resource type entirely. To encourage gear degredation, character death could destroy items on the body and generate this reward item in an appropriate way. Mortal reminder wound checks would be done in order to prevent abusability. Alternatively, rather than having people simply take their farmer behind the shed, ritual sacrifice of crafters wearing good gear to generate that reward (for those who don't need combat stats while playing) could be incorporated as an explicit ingame act with appropriate sacrifice buildings/tools.

At this point it gets rather speculative as to what rewards could be offered. All currently existing magic in the game could be switched off XP and onto this new resource entirely. Alternatively new magical abilities, like temporary skill or combat buffs, could be introduced instead. Buffs like % bonus quality from resources collected are certainly a possibility given that exists as an ingame mechanic currently. Potentially guilding rocks/leaves could be forged via this mechanic with appropriate RNGness to ensure the resource is continually in demand. The potential for benefits can be spread into both crafting and combat elements.

Wrap up

I apologize this is long, everything that I feel is important ends up being lengthy. To anyone who made it this far, thanks for giving it a full read. I hope that this idea will spur increased amounts of combat, resource consumption to keep the crafters busy, and also aid in PvPers having resources to cycle back into the crafters to keep them interdependant in a way that keeps both sides of the equation happy. Mostly, I want to see Haven succeed, and the only way I see it moving forward is somehow reforming the negatives of permadeath before grand attempts at increasing the population.
Last edited by Sevenless on Sun Apr 09, 2017 10:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby sMartins » Sun Apr 09, 2017 10:04 pm

Sevenless wrote:However, permadeath pvp makes haven pvp both appealing only to a notably small niche....

It's not just about that, permadeath makes everything in the game way more meaningfull for everybody, even for the happy farmer.
Every kid creates his myths and legends; "that location is dangerous..."..."there that strong faction killed that guy, better you stay away"...."build immediately your paly or you will die very bad...."
All those stuff (mostly bullshits :D) make the game very interesting and unique... HnH will not be HnH without permadeath, and I believe you'll kill it removing permadeath.
So if you ask to me, I will never agree with removing permadeath from this game.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby Sevenless » Sun Apr 09, 2017 10:14 pm

sMartins wrote:
Sevenless wrote:However, permadeath pvp makes haven pvp both appealing only to a notably small niche....

It's not just about that, permadeath makes everything in the game way more meaningfull for everybody, even for the happy farmer.
Every kid creates his myths and legends; "that location is dangerous..."..."there that strong faction killed that guy, better you stay away"...."build immediately your paly or you will die very bad...."
All those stuff (mostly bullshits :D) make the game very interesting and unique... HnH will not be HnH without permadeath, and I believe you'll kill it removing it.
So if you ask to me, I will never agree with removing permadeath from this game.


I respect that opinion, even if I don't agree with it. But with many of the people I've played with, they word it differently:

"Haven is such a magical game, it's only major downfall is the permadeath"

There's going to be a survivorship bias of permadeath players. The remaining community will have been cleaned of people who innately dislike permadeath via obvious mechanisms. But as someone who once felt it was magical, years passed and I've come to feel that it stifles too many aspects of the gameplay. I don't think the game can grow without moving past permadeath. But heavy respect for death and combat doesn't require permadeath, and I feel this proposed wounding system offers that.

Thanks for adding to the discussion, even if we disagree.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby apoc254 » Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:08 am

I disagree. While the aspect of death does certainly hold you back from many things in this game, I don't think the proposed solution is a good one. There are many different systems in games to deal with death.

1.) die, ghost spawns. Ghost must venture to shrine to revive and must wander back to dead body to regain stats and items.
2.) death deletes character and offers no method of retrieval.
3.) death spawns you back at the beginning and takes your items, gold and exp of current level.
4.) death takes off of current level's exp and gold.
5.) death takes gold
6.) death takes all items
7.) death respawns you at beginning of world/last save point/town.
8.) death causes you to go through a mini quest to rebirth
9.) death takes a away a random roll of stats/all items/gold

then we have haven: death takes away all items / deletes character and allows recovery of percent of stats.

Its really not so out there of an idea. Its certainly not the most fun death system, but it gives all of your work on your town purpose. If you could be unharmed where you would normally die, what was the point of making your warrior factory/base?

The game would need a serious re-vamp in nearly all aspects if death was not permanent.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby speedfreak » Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:33 am

I like the idea of non fighting characters getting almost no penalty. That way it wouldn't be so frustrating to get your farager stomped by some stranger.

But what would be the penalty for crime then?
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby Sevenless » Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:42 am

apoc254 wrote:Its really not so out there of an idea. Its certainly not the most fun death system, but it gives all of your work on your town purpose. If you could be unharmed where you would normally die, what was the point of making your warrior factory/base


Same point as now, more stats, better quality gear. It just wouldn't be printing alts, it'd be working on improving existing characters.

speedfreak wrote:I like the idea of non fighting characters getting almost no penalty. That way it wouldn't be so frustrating to get your farager stomped by some stranger.


It's my hope that alts would be significantly less important with this modified system. I wouldn't bother having a developed one, maybe a cheap 1 week project so I could afk fish and not care if it died.

speedfreak wrote:But what would be the penalty for crime then?


What is the penalty for crime now? Travel restrictions, risk of death. Death still carries a notable penalty, scalable depending how difficult the wound is to heal. It's a capped penalty though, so dying 5 days into the world and dying 50 days into the world carry the same weight. Beyond that murderers need combat stats, so if they die it's actually quite penalizing to them. Thieves don't but the game gives you ample opportunities to defend yourself cheaply from them except for resource claims like clay or water.

At this point in time, neither river ball clay nor river water impact endgame resources. Letting thieves steal those as a game mechanic isn't the end of the world, but factions can still choose to punish those people with base death or mortal wounds if they want to.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby Granger » Mon Apr 10, 2017 7:10 am

A first thought was: the resource 'to fight over' will just be walled in quickly by the realm.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby Sevenless » Mon Apr 10, 2017 12:06 pm

Granger wrote:A first thought was: the resource 'to fight over' will just be walled in quickly by the realm.


Well we are talking "magic" here. Teleportation mechanics, no wall build zones, different rules for siege equipment near them. We can get a bit creative since any walls around this are meant to be breached.

The least abuse prone option I can think of is a guarenteed no build/no action zone around them. Trees, rocks, etc are all static from world start so the battlefield can't be mucked up. And then add in some form of teleport/jump to the beacon mechanic for raiders, probably through their challenge item.

What this means is that A) there really isn't a point to walling them, so no one would and B) Even if there's walls around the outside, the beacon guarentees an area of combat/play that isn't modified by players. Depending how pvpers want it, I suppose allowing a retreat of some kind, perhaps with some kind of minor penalty rather than death/loss of all equipment, could be allowed. But haven's a pretty hardcore crowd, so not sure which way their vote would swing.

At this point, we have ingame mechanics that make all of this believable if properly described/named within the game. We have charter stone teleports, timed siege activities via shields, we have area movement restriction via dragons, and we have resource fountains in the game.

Here's how I'd personally envisage the sequence of events:

Kingdom sets wisdom beacon spawn time within +/- 4 hours of the games neutral time. Adjust time range as seen fit, not sure how wide a range is acceptable..
Raiders set challenge beacon declaring the challenge within a fairly large but not infinite radious of the wisdom beacon (I assume this notifies the defending kingdom and gives them time to prepare somehow, exact timeline for that up for debate)
Wisdom beacon is surrounded by large impassable rocks, forming the battle arena, inside no build/destruction actions are allowed by the ancient spirits.
Defenders and attackers are teleported into the arena one opposite sides at beacon spawn time. Each side has a stone that allows them to return to the location the teleported from (where the defenders teleport from is up negotiable in my mind)
Appropriate time is given for jockeying, eyeing up the opponent, namecalling before the two teams can cross the middle
Movement restrictions are lifted, fight begins and beacon becomes active for harvesting.

The only mechanic in here that's unique is the requirement for preventing teams from attacking each other during the setup period.
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby NOOBY93 » Mon Apr 10, 2017 12:13 pm

Trash idea, if dying removed only combat stats why would anyone raise any quality/stats/whatever at all? Everyone could do everything at Q10 - if you die, whatever, you didn't raise your combat stats anyway! Enjoy the sandbox!!!
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Re: Mortal Reminder

Postby Sevenless » Mon Apr 10, 2017 12:28 pm

NOOBY93 wrote:Trash idea, if dying removed only combat stats why would anyone raise any quality/stats/whatever at all? Everyone could do everything at Q10 - if you die, whatever, you didn't raise your combat stats anyway! Enjoy the sandbox!!!


Because you can use these stats to kill people in a way where they can't kill you back? Why do you raise stats now? You could just run around with q10 alts all day, dying means nothing because you spent nothing raising the alts. There are lots of other games out there that are sandbox, lack permadeath, and yet people still play/grind in them. Wurm for example, EVE for another. Why bother flying anything but a frigate in EVE? When you go to a game that's just full loot, god you get so many more fights. Haven's severely hamstrung in the pvp department due to permadeath. And at least in my opinion, frequent pvp (and its resource use) is the only real endgame sandboxes can offer. As is, even with just the wounding system haven is by far still the hardest core game out there for punishment of death.

I'm not really sure your logic is a proper argument against the concept other than "I like permadeath". But you could just say that if that's your position.

I think the issue here is how many people quit the community due to permadeath/lack of accessible pvp and how they'll not be checking the forums to comment on this. I guess the idea is doomed to fail because the people who are left either like permadeath or are at least tolerant of it.
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