Alternative view: Hafen Development

[LadyGoo]

Building > Maintenance timewise
Rationale: From my hafen experience + people response it seems everyone are very excited on the early 2 months of the game, when you have to build your base, explore and etc. Meanwhile, people seem to drop out during the late-game, when you switch from the building mode to the maintenance. Or start using the bots heavily to stay in the game.

Whatever changes and updates are made, this pattern never really changes. Develop and build actively, play a lot in the beginning -> play some time maintaining what you have built, rise q, craft curios and food -> quit from boredom/tiredness/real-life -> wait for the next world, do not really come back to the game after the break since you're outdated in terms of q/your base is destroyed/noone else is playing

That maintenance part is the critical stage when people start dropping out. In my opinion, the maintenance should be much easier/automated than the building stage. And the building stage should never finish, so people would constantly be creating new infrastructure, building and etc. Too much maintenance just leads to people burning out eventually.

Let's see what forces you to always log in to the game and feel stressed about missing 1 week of gameplay.
1. Feeding the animals.
2. Selecting the crops
3. Checking your village every few hours whether it's getting sieged or not. Miss 5 hours window and you're rekt.

1. Feeding the animals. With the cheese nerfs and buffing other foods it now makes no sense to have too many animals for botting factions anyways. Therefore, to make everyone's life easier and hafen more enjoyable, the devs should really work on making animal husbandry less time-consuming. Selection, milking, shearing, butchering all alone consume way too much time already. Imho, 1 feeding trough should be enough to feed 20 animals for 1 week. The server population is already dropping low, I do not see any reasons why not to try that for a month or two and see what people would say/feel about it.

2. Selecting the crops. Crops should take longer to grow, but have 10+ q quality increase, instead of +5-5 (or whatever is set). The point is to make it so that you would have to harvest the crops less frequently, spend less time on that. Having to log in too frequently to keep up with the quality race will just drive any dedicated farmer mad and feel like quitting. Binding longer crop growth times to seasons would also make sense.

3. Checking your village every few hours whether it'd getting sieged or not. The siege system should really be reconsidered. I have complained multiple times that it's not fun for either of the parties and encourages the scorched earth tactics. Although, the system hunted in the latest announcement topic is rather worrying, since we have been discussing similar stuff in our voice chats and concluded that setting siege camps and etc. are no less abusive than the shield system.
Possible alternative would be separating actual city/village claims from claims used for the resourses and etc. So, if you're building hard enough, developing your base, got enough people or whatever, it would be really hard to siege you (gaing almost infinite amount of shield, depends on the population activity). While a claim/village maintained without much of an effort should be much easier to destroy. So, people would be concentrating more on getting someone's salt, rather than breaking their village and industry.

Stockpiling minion
jorb might remember my report regarding botting, where I have outlined that one of the key things that should be addressed is stockpiling items. It would be rather interesting to be able to buy a minion/spirit that would collect the type of the resource you would select on the ground, then stockpile it in the area you would highlight. Quite easy to code in, but will increase the number of subscriptions/subs (if linked) and make maintenance part much easier.
Maybe, you should be able to summon the spirits that would harvest/autoplant for you as well after reaching a certain level in skills. Let's say you've got farming 400, or smith/lore/whatever at 500.
With that system, people would constantly build more, create bigger settlements, work on logistics so that their minions would be more efficient. Spending their time on planning, rather than the stupid grind.

[iamahh]

NPC trainning (official bots) as a late game skill... you learn to train NPCs to do specific tasks... since we have bots already, may aswell embrace them like a visual entertaining part of the world... could be fun to watch NPCs doing work... also could lead to Merchants NPCs traveling around, robbers drama, etc...

[NOOBY93]

+

remove most of senseless maintenance and embed some botting into the actual game to make it legitimate. ++++

[Avu]

Wtf a few hours ago I started and half wrote a post about implementing npcs to take care of tedium... Either the world is ending and I have to agree with Goo by default or there is something there. Also the fact that she is suggesting the very thing I've been harping on forever make vaults useless by correlating defensive strength to village size amuses me greatly.

I think you should finally just fucking consider infinite stockpiles for everything. It has been a joke to you for very long but you know what? The shit we have now is horrible and a annoying as fuck. Like the retarded inventory tedium doesn't add anything. Just make a weight system (since that is in already with carrying) and let us fucking carry a fucking cargo container at once if we want to. Also allow us to craft from stockpiles and containers and allow us to open stockpiles at a distance. People end up botting stuff like these because it is so mind numbingly boring.

I think npcs that take care of tedius stuff like animal milking and shearing, food crafting, tree cutting and stacking (god damn there needs to be a way to stack logs) [and fucking let us open wagons while riding a horse], ore transportation !!!!, etc... should be worked towards rather than payed for or available from the start. Just include them in the building process. Turn the world into a windmill/steam utopia, connect everything to a windmill; lumber mill, aqueducts/ water pumps, mine elevators, mine carts/trains (that go in elevators), tube transport systems (we already break reality with barter stand manipulation of teleportation).

Also give us fucking information already. I don't care if my neighbour can see the q of my cows and crops and trees at a distance since I will too and I will not have to fucking click 50 cows until i find the lowest one and then I turn my head because I heard a noise and the fucking cow is lost forever in the sea of bovines and i have to start all over again. Give us information so I know which fucking trees to cut without having to inspect each fucking one. Also it fucking make sense to realize which tree or animal looks healthy as fuck and which one is a piece of shit that will die come winter. Do the same for wild animals and fish. Make it toggleble.

Implement leaderboards for quality, animals killed, so everyone can be envious of the top players quality and it would make quality hiding pointless anyway. Also will be a reason for trade AND conflict.

Btw I quit because I got bored and the tedium of day to day had no upside in gaining stats since top grinders already had like 5 times more stats than I did and I didn't have an army to back me up anyway and being alone gets you killed no matter what stats you have anyway.

Oh yeah make fucking feasting tables larger. Make all containers larget. Infinite stockpiles for everything!!!

Now I'm done...

[iamahh]

i'm ok with inventory and stockpile limits... inventory is a good incentive to support the game.... the way the game works is not so much about quantity, but the constant work and regularity, which bots helps...

[NOOBY93]

pls no leaderboards

[Fostik]

2. Selecting the crops. Crops should take longer to grow, but have 10+ q quality increase, instead of +5-5 (or whatever is set). The point is to make it so that you would have to harvest the crops less frequently, spend less time on that. Having to log in too frequently to keep up with the quality race will just drive any dedicated farmer mad and feel like quitting. Binding longer crop growth times to seasons would also make sense.

The point for late game only, and top fractions. What will nabs do?

[Sevenless]

2. Selecting the crops. Crops should take longer to grow, but have 10+ q quality increase, instead of +5-5 (or whatever is set). The point is to make it so that you would have to harvest the crops less frequently, spend less time on that. Having to log in too frequently to keep up with the quality race will just drive any dedicated farmer mad and feel like quitting. Binding longer crop growth times to seasons would also make sense.

The point for late game only, and top fractions. What will nabs do?

Add in an extra stage of crop growth that takes longer, but gives the effect of larger quality boost at the cost of less product / day? I mean, carrots already have this feature but sort of in reverse. The more often you check it the more rewarded you are Q wise, but at the same time you get less product.

~~

I'm not opposed to these ideas for the most part. I think that maintenance shouldn't be time consuming, but at the same time encouraging players to check back daily is a frequently used tactic to encourage long term player base. I think it might be best to aim for maintenance that is done daily, but time required to do said maintenance is reduced. This might mean refactoring crop growth times to help them line up more manageably. I don't mind NPCs existing, but I still side with jorb on the comment that (paraphrased) if bots are felt to be required by players it's a game design problem. NPCing away quality grind isn't the answer I see, I'd rather have them used to implement new systems if the work into programming them is going to be done.

The issue seems to be what goo hinted at here:

That maintenance part is the critical stage when people start dropping out. In my opinion, the maintenance should be much easier/automated than the building stage. And the building stage should never finish, so people would constantly be creating new infrastructure, building and etc. Too much maintenance just leads to people burning out eventually.

It's when you're *just* doing maintenance that it becomes a problem. Your goals become only to log in daily, and nothing you can do beyond that is really important. You should feel like logging in for other reasons, and quality grind being a brief but manageable chore before going off to do ____ instead.

[DDDsDD999]

Let's see what forces you to always log in to the game and feel stressed about missing 1 week of gameplay.
1. Feeding the animals.
2. Selecting the crops
3. Checking your village every few hours whether it's getting sieged or not. Miss 5 hours window and you're rekt.

1. Feeding the animals. I don't really have too much issue with feeding animals. My main issue with animals is managing them. What happens is their population just EXPLODES because managing them is such a bitch. I suggested some stuff here, some of which got implemented, some didn't. It'd be awesome if we could create a "pasture" area, kinda like a field cairn. We could pull up a list of the animals, with stats, and be able to mark them different colours like a kin-list, or outright harvest/slaughter them without having to path-find through the monstrous hit-boxes.

2. Selecting the crops. I like the suggestion of increasing crop's grow time, but compensating with increased quality gains. However, this poses an issue in the early game where the bumble for seeds is already agitating. This could be fixed by adding a realm buff that has crops grow slower, but offer more quality and quantity, making this change in crop growth when people want it, in the end-game. Or some way to harvest seeds from early crops for early farm expansion.

Also, fix trellises, can't area-harvest/plant them, growth times are all fucked up, etc fuck trellises.

3. Checking your village every few hours whether it'd getting sieged or not. Yeah, the siege system could be more robust. There could be more dynamic aspects of the siege system that make checking on your village less needed. It'd be great if we could have alerts when wrecking-balls/siege systems are built on our territory or whatever, and see them on the map and choose to ignore them or whatever. idk, lot of stuff could be changed here.

[Jacobian123]

fuck trellises.

x1000