rye130 wrote:what a quirky indy game by some quirky indy devs who love listening to feedback
Just implementing common feedback because it's common is how you get mainstream games. Quirky indie games are quirky because they're made by devs who follow their own vision rather than making what people are already used to. If devs changed everything that commonly gets complained about regardless of their vision, Haven would have no death, no PVP, no wound system, no penalties for getting KOed, no risk in anything you do...basically, everything would be dumbed down. The devs seem to want seasons to be long-lasting periods of significantly altered gameplay; rather than just complaining that
it shouldn't exist (the devs will never remove seasons), it's a lot more useful to point out what makes it unfun and make suggestions to improve it.
Personally, I think winter as it is now is completely fine. It's a unique season with its own advantages and disadvantages. Fall is less distinct and could use some more differentiation (it's pretty much summer with slightly different forageables). Spring, though, is pretty much Summer-lite - it offers absolutely nothing that Summer doesn't also offer (Coltsfoot doesn't count; it's just a bad curio with no unique properties), while still restricting access to things that are available in Summer and Fall. That this follows the very restrictive Winter season adds to the frustration.
With Winter being a hunting/mining season and Spring being a season of growth, perhaps farming-related activities could get unique boosts (not in the sense of increased growth speed but more like unique products for planting during spring (perhaps similar to how the Lady's Mantle improves at dawn))? Foraging is also something that finally becomes more relevant again after ten long days of Winter; why not boost foraging as well, be it in the form of unique forageables (or unique variations of existing ones), increased spawn rate, quality increase, etc?
Amanda44 wrote:Can confirm that it
does make players quit ... I have lost three sets of neighbours, two lots, a total of 5 players quit during the winter and the other one which had 3 players came back for about 2 days and then said this game was the most boring game ever and quit for good.
The big question, though, is: To what extent is that because of Winter, and how much can it instead be attributed to people naturally quitting as they reach a certain level of progress? I also noticed my motivation starting to decrease halfway through winter - not because I was not enjoying winter, but because I had completely finished building my base, my Snekkja was ready for action, and I'd finally managed to build a minehole to get to layer 2 and explored the whole place. The only things left now are to repeat the things I've been doing to get better quality, a deeper layer, more trade goods...there's nothing 'new' for me to do anymore. (In that sense, winter actually helped as the kicksled greatly improves travel over land, allowing me to do 'new' things like long-distance trading, more exploration and easy land-based hunting.) People inevitably start quitting a few weeks in. Winter (and now Spring) just happens to also be a few weeks in. If there's a similar increase of quitting players the next time these seasons roll around that could imply the correlation may be causation, but in this case the timing is far too ambiguous.