Purposeless content & redundancy

[Massa]

I would like to have a collective thread in which we provide feedback for Jorb about how some particular pieces of content are poorly executed, need fixes in some capacity, or are utterly redundant.
Please, feel free to help with your opinions on these matters so we don't have to "scream just to get attention" from Jorb & Lorb, and to centralize actual feedback from the "docks pls", "bridges plz", "gunpowder plz", "x tiny critter pens/tanks", "x random, inconsequential aesthetic/furniture" threads.

This is a new world, which means now is a crucial moment to coax the game into growing with engaging, enjoyable content that serves a purpose - currently, there are simply a set of glaring issues that are really wearing down lots of players who stand on their own two legs and warrant an ear simply because of the longevity and value they add to the game & how long they stick to it. This list is in no order.

Hunger

This is a redundancy, but it's derivative of quests as a whole.

Hunger serves the same purpose as satiations, both of which step all over each other, and turn it into a double dickdown and a stupid headache. First of all, satiation numbers are stupid. You eat one sausage, and within 1-3 sausages, you can bet your sausages are now 40% shittier. This will only get worse, and after you've stuffed no more than 6 sausages down your throat, you can go back to netflix, or sitting in your chair, larping as a tree whisperer or some shit because your sausages are arbitrarily at 10% power because you ate too many of them even though that's the entire purpose of the efficacy system. They overlap and are stupid as fuck. This system doesn't need review or consideration, one or the other needs gone.

It heavily encourages nothing but alts for every little thing, never leaving your base for shit, and waiting, and turns the game into a boring song of 2 hour cycles that people will eventually just automate or get bored and slowly dwindle away because they can't be bothered to put in the hours of a full time job to dedicate to eating sausages and cheese wedges. Sprucecaps lowkey complained enough to get this whole shitty system turned on the heads of people who actually want to be bother with the game.

This system is the most punishing to miners. I guess funworms and slimes weren't bad enough, having to constantly shovel food into your mouth just to play the game (and thus, fuck up your hunger AND satiations so your stats are basically permashit) is a good part of it. Trying to do any demanding tasks, stamina-wise, just fucks your FEPS/Satiations/hunger up so bad. This was all of W10 too, but tolerable at least, between salt and drinking and simply ignoring it.

Fixing this

The simple solution is to remove hunger efficacy and leave it at a flat rate (150% or 200% seem good) - while this fucks up quest rewards, I'll get back to that later & on top of this change, drastically (REDUCE) the amount of satiations gained, so eating one piece of sausage puts you back 3% instead of 40%. The old numbers worked fine for this.

Midges

This one is a personal pet peeve of mine, and serves as (largely) purposeless content.

Why the fuck are they anywhere outside of swamps? They only thing these things do is discourage stepping away from your computer within your own walls. Just let these guys get stuck in swamps. They (and allergic reactions) are a perfect example of arbitrary shittiness. They should only exist in swamps to discourage bots and camping alts, but their keenness to spread through civilization as some Jorbian reminder that you are evil for sitting outside of your stone steadings and that the midge death that awaits you is just dumb and weird. Make these less purposeless and make their purpose (and any content like them) have a clear purpose. Right now they just make everything a bit shittier.

Roads

This was a kneejerk reaction to a roundabout issue: questing.

Roads were good. They had their purpose. Though that purpose might have been abused, spending an hour walking to a point of interest is boring as fuck, and will turn the bulk of this game into exactly that: boring as fuck, getting stuck on trees, avoiding the boars suspiciously meandering straight towards your path, cliffs over and over and over and over again, over the same area, repeatedly, because of a needless nerf to the means, and not the end, of a different system.

Roads were used to bring lots of villages together, and one of the biggest unifications of player efforts to create a handful of huge trade hubs that were good for the game. Amazing for the game. You should get the warm fuzzies when you see community events, games, tournaments, etc. hosted by and built by players because that's where Haven, ideally, would go. That is stellar engagement, and now it's crushed under a weird heel.

Get rid of this travel weariness nerf and figure something else out because between continents and a lack of instantaneous travel (which some people bemoan but I also don't think they actually play the game) will take its toll on the general player engagement of the game.

PvP will also die down because getting to the meat of the game and competing with other players isn't hard, it's borderline inaccessible. You can't get to other people, and even if you can, there's a convenient "HEY YOU'RE FUCKED IN 24 HOURS GO BREAK THE SIEGE ENGINE."


QUESTS
These are the source of your problems and the reason it was time for a wipe.

They don't need minor adjustments, but entire reworks.
- Remove the hunger reduction and remove the hunger efficacy system.
- Keep LP rewards, but keep them rare and much less scaled as they were last world by your stats.
- Keep EXP rewards, both of these incentivize doing quests but aren't wildly gamebreaking as 100K+ rewards from hubbed givers.
- Rewrite the entire (+x quality boost to y in this area) because it's utter dog ass.*
*My personal input on this particular system is an item. An item that, when activated, through some means (even simply using it), buffs an area's x/y/z by a/b/c quality. A little item akin to a gilding rock that players can trade and use in an area up to a certain cap or with diminishing returns. Nobody cares about upping the fox quality to 27 from 26, but if they can focus it? That's good content.
- Buff gilding trinkets.
- Think of another creative reward. Numen, anyone? EInherjarspekt and shit. Prayer for a metal, or bread, was it? Jorb and Lorb can be creative, it's no secret.

CREDOS

On god, the people who haven't done more than 2 or 3 credos are the ones infatuated by the idea of credos in their current form. You can see why people killed their highly developed characters instead of doing credos: it's because credos were ass. The simple and pure distillation it.

They were the summation of this slew of gripes. They are boring walkfests where you had to oftentimes surrender yourself to RNG, dumb luck, silly bullshit and randomness to, not be better at something, but be allowed by the game to do something because, without the credo, you are bad and worthless. I once spent 3 weeks waking up every 2 days to a new player in my village because my friend considered it more worth his time to bomb his character into repeat suicides than actually do credos 'the right way' because of how they scale. They are ridiculous.

Now? I'm already hearing people in and outside of my village ready to quit weeks in before they spend the 32*5 step quest requirements for a single later-game credo. You had tons of feedback, and listened to none of it in any meaningful capacity. Specializations? Seriously? After the talk of the town and Lorb and Jorb about reducing the need for alts, remove specialization, adding lore and will and masonry and a million silly stats to encourage well rounded characters, a system of specialization is forced. To do even a few of the higher end credos would take literal months, be utterly unrewarding, and cause to simply stop playing.

So many people said credos were silly, and instead of a positive change to them, they are just another sad change that doesn't reflect well on the direction of where people want to spend their time and efforts.

That's not to say there shouldn't be challenge involved in getting them, but 160 quests, often in multiple parts, each of which are highly demanding (go experience a dryad, study 5x random piece of 40 mental weight shit, and gain 20 will!) is a good way to not fucking bother with that shit.

A scatterbrained semi-conclusion

Instead of playing the game, people go and play grab ass with Auslafognaosnloppberg and berglorg and, as I said earlier, get very fucking bored of it because it's boring. Quests take fucking forever to complete even if you're efficient, and getting better otters out of it when you need your stomach unfucked so you can stuff sausages down it is dumb. This is time you can't spend building your village, or playing the game, hunting, doing anything of value, because if you did, your hunger would be fucked up and you'd have to do more quests.

People want to play the game, compete with other players, build, create. They don't want to spend hours walking across annoying obstacles that weren't quite annoying enough on their own to warrant being changed. If the choice is between building, working for resources, competing in an inherently competitive game or, instead, running around getting stuck on trees and being bored by being forced by the game to touch random trees with names who ask you to do silly things like touch other trees, the answer should be clear.

I think the direction Jorb and Lorb keep taking the game is one of punitive, negative reinforcement where the path to growing and getting people to buy more hats and actually want to play the game is by enabling creativity, rather than punishing it. The abuse of certain systems can be fixed, but when it's so wildly heavy handed and sometimes random (see mining before adjustment) it discourages people to play, because it tells them the game is becoming too constricted and that their reward is further tedium.

The updates we've been getting have been frequently untested and generally not very good for anything. I'll skip the list, but the simple question to ask is whether or not the update encourages player interaction, game interaction, engagement, if it has a purpose and is what Jorb and Loftar would be willing to spend hundreds or dozens of hours doing, because that is what they're putting out for the game.

Some seriously good changes came about on Monday where Jorb engaged player feedback and made reasonable changes to a very heavy handed system. Shit goes a long way.

[Vigilance]

there are definitely some good points here i'm inclined to agree with, particularly where hunger and satiations going on top of eachother feels awful. i think between the two satiations can be buffed out to be better/more reasonable but unfortunately more tedious, but at least you can't game them as hard as currently i can game the hunger levels (not saying that questing for 3 hours a day minimum is fun, not at all.)

i dont think i'm quite at a point where i can put together feedback just yet outside of what would probably just be perceived as whining. i'm glad they actually took a look at the things i had problems with (those supports) but i really wish they didn't take some steps backwards in the same exact patch.

i said it best a bit ago, in that saying this world feels like w10 except worse in every facet. spiraling is worse, questing is worse, character progression is worse, credos feel worse, and a whole lot of changes i really was hoping i'd see are, at least for now, not even present.

i am hoping monday was the start of more meaningful reception of feedback, and not a mere compromise so they can continue in the directions they're going. i would really like this world to last longer than the few months at current rate before we're down to abysmal population.

[MagicManICT]

I'm going to let jorb have final say on this one, but for now, i'm locking it. he's the one that says he doesn't like grab bag threads, and most of these ideas have come up recently and have their own threads for discussion already.

[jorb]

Idk. A bit grab-bad but perhaps some questions that merit a broader discussion. Unlocking. Will try to take more of a look at it later.

[razfen]

Hunger

Totally agree

Midges

Totally agree

Roads

Totally agree. The vortex mechanics immediately come into mind, and they could be possible to be made similar to how wormholes work in eve online.

Make them NOT damage knarrs AT ALL, add a 10-30 minute cooldown for the knarr to stop it from spam-moving through them, and make them switch destinations more frequently. VOILA you have a wonderful means of travel suited for pvp players to quickly get to their opposing continents!

QUESTS

Sort of agree. I'd just totally remove LP and hunger reduction rewards, move gilding rewards into some other activity, and basically keep them strictly for exp. The problem in my opinion with questing is that it gives you FUCKING EVERYTHING that you need to develop your character, therefore it IS the optimal way to grind, and it's not fun at all. It's the exact opposite.

CREDOS

Credos sounded weird to me in the beginning and I have never finished more than 2 credos on any character so I can't really comment on it, but I can agree that it definitely encourages alting. A useless, boring mechanic. Just let us buy the credo bonuses for LP or EXP and remove credo quests? I'm not sure on my take about credos.

A scatterbrained semi-conclusion

No comment on this. Just my usual shit: Make the game FUN to play. Always think about how a certain change makes the game more fun.

[Mario_Demorez]

Other than the roads I agree with everything. Most of the stuff just seems to reduce progression. IF you really want to progress you just run around lighting fires and taking naked swims. Midges are pointless, I think they are a sick joke with jorb and loftar.

[Aceb]

I agree with most of that, especially with food, but there's some but's I would put in. Might do it later, but for now, wanna see people discuss even more. Apparently.

[Nek]

Agree on Hunger

Agree on Midges

Disagree on Roads. The Travel Weariness could be reduced per road usage but I don't want it going back to how it was.

Somewhat disagree on quests, I like razfens idea better. Remove the LP reward, remove the hunger reduction. Quests can still continue to give gilding stones, exp, and increasing the q of shit in the area (though tbh thats a bit of a shit reward). Maybe they can give you other things too, like combat moves or some shit, I dunno, it can be anything as long as it's not something as huge and potentially gamebreaking like LP and Hunger reduction.
Questing should definitely be OPTIONAL. I don't like to do them, a lot of my friends don't like to do them but we have one person in our alliance who has been questing all day every day since the game started and he quite literally has over triple all our LP and that is straight up fucking horse shit and don't give me that 'well he worked harder so he has better stats whats the problem?' shit. The guy uses shit tier curios, has barely killed anything despite his stats unless it's for a quest. I'm using top end curios for this stage of the game and I'm killing a retarded amount of animals daily and I have no chance at keeping up despite playing just as long as he is purely because he's questing. Well I ain't gonna quest. Period. And if questing does stay like it is for the longhaul I ain't sticking around because you can fuck right off if you think I'm going to spend my days walking around talking to trees and lighting fires and going for naked swims and catching a big fish all day. That is pure tedium, it isn't even remotely fun.
Nerf that shit to the ground, nobodies going to complain about not being able to catch up to the people who have already quested a shit load because if they haven't been questing from the start, they were never going to catch up anyway. Might as well change it now while we're still early in the world, then when those people who have quested a shit load do eventually die off (and they will die off, everybody dies) we can return to a state of normality.

Credos.
I dunno. I don't like that they're just quests basically but at least these serve some purpose so I don't really mind them compared to quests.

I sound like a broken record but I couldn't give a fuck tbh, do something about quests and hunger before anything else. Literally everything after that you can take your time with but those two things need addressing asap.

[Massa]

I agree with most of that, especially with food, but there's some but's I would put in. Might do it later, but for now, wanna see people discuss even more. Apparently.

I was actually ok with the grab bag tomfoolery and was ready to open up numerous threads on each topic.

I think it'd be great if people did what you've already done and extrapolated, and keep it in the thread.

[Aceb]

I agree with most of that, especially with food, but there's some but's I would put in. Might do it later, but for now, wanna see people discuss even more. Apparently.

I was actually ok with the grab bag tomfoolery and was ready to open up numerous threads on each topic.

I think it'd be great if people did what you've already done and extrapolated, and keep it in the thread.

Ye kind of. Sorry for splitting, didn't want to make it even bigger ,most people already stop at reading OP.