Credo rebalance

[Nightdawg]

And don't even get me started on how absolutely fucking cancerous mystic is.

nah bro I did it and it was fun

[DDDsDD999]

Credos were a mistake. Right now all they do is needlessly increase the amount of effort to do basic tasks by first requiring the credo, otherwise all you produce is garbage.

I'd much rather they just unlocked larpy emotes, clothing, character customization, etc. Or just enable some basic things, like if you just really enjoy raising livestock, you go down the herder credo and you get to unlock some more livestock curios. This means you can spend less time doing things you don't like to fill up your study. Not this bullshit "get herder credo or else all of your animals are trash"

Also the amount of effort to get the credos for what they are right now is just absurd. Unless there's some major changes I don't plan on getting more than just forager for the required movement speed. I assume I'll always have villagers that want to do all the required credos because they're required, and if no one wants to commit the time to it everyone just quits anyway.

[kirillius98]

We need credo system to be reworked. For now credo is not a mistake but this system can be much better and be complicated and simple at the same time.
There are some ways to improve credo system:
1. To solve it's problems. To begin with, Credo is the way you play the character, not the thing you need to stop being useless. For now, if you don't have a needed credo, like Herder or Miner, your efforts of making sellable goods meaningless. If you don't want to create goods for sale and want to just spend time as a hermit, you have to spent very large amount of time to get things such as high quality wood and metal, so you won't be able to get a well-developed character. If you don't want to improve it, so, you have no problems with credos and other game mechanics that this game consists of.
Well, I mean that players have to spend lots of time to get traits, without which character can not they are not effective. The ineffective characters are not the goal of avarage player, so, if you want to be "good", you have to complete credo, otherways you will develop character too slow comparing to neighbours. So, avarage player wants to complete credo to be able to compete with his neighbours. What does he have to face? With lots and lots of RANDOM quests, that may differ from eating an ant to killing a bear (as Hunter) or from studing a stalagoom to experience "Crashing Through the Forest" (see a dryad and pray for it to not be on cooldown or pray for it to count to complete). Lots of players are mad at this system, because it is unfair and takes too long time to complete a thing that is important to play for fun and don't worry about completing awkward and awful quests. So, the first problem is in randomness of quests, that one is ridiculous. The second thing that is bad about credo is it's importance - the first problem wouldn't be a problem if credoes offered less very helpful traits such as baseline quality improvements, stats improvements, resource consuming reductions and some good utility improvements.
So, credo gives good perks at random cost. For well-developed players this isn't a big problem to complete any credo in the game, but any lesser group of player will suffer from being unable to complete it. Is there any way to fix this? Actually, it is.
2. The solutions of problem
1) Split credos in two parts: the one what depends on quests, and the other what depends on players' gamestyle.
The first part will offer player a permanent bonus for completing a few quests, such as inventory improvement or trolls no longer attacks you, but this part shouldn't give player any stats or skills for completing quests, only one-time permanent bonuses. The more bonuses you want - the more quests you have to complete. The difficulty of quests should depend on amount of acquired bonuses, stats summary and learned LP amount, and won't let random to change the difficulty of quest too much. You should be able to improve your studing desk by completing quests such as gain LP equal to (20%+5% per completed quest) of your total LP collected. Or you should be able to make trolls no longer atacking you after killing (10+4 per completed quest) trolls. The second part, that depends on the player, should give you scaleable bonus to quality and chances such as (5% quality and 2% chance to get extra forage) for collecting foragebles in large quantities (first level at 1000, second at 4000 and etc.). Some abilities, like Druidic Rite or Deep Artifice, can be added to credo system, in both of it's parts. For example, more silk you try to do, the more silk you will get in the future, up to 2; more trees you plant, better they sprout. Ability to make druidic clothes and rites can be learned when you have completed some quests and achieved high chance of sprouting and/or high ammount of unraveled silk.
2) Make credo's quests easier and/or add credo quests variety. Make quests for forager not like collect rare foragable, but to collect a lot of local foragables to improve level. If devs' like seeing foragers looking for rare herb, so, give forager's a choice: collect a lot of one kind of common herb, or find a bit of rare one.
3) Just a little correction to the credo's quests, such as making them more local, add instant refresh on event that required on mystic right now (if this event had given expirience and should be on cooldown, make it not giving exp) and make it more possible to trigger while it active and other little improvements that can be made.
3. Problems of solutions. The first problem is botting. Nothing can be done with it to make this problem be solved. Bots are good tool for making simple tasks automatically, such as farming and crafting (sometimes they do more advanced tasks). But having bots making other player's efforts worthless, so they create a large problem in world economy, what leads to the next statement: who has better bots also is richer and better developed then the one, who has worse bots. Bots can abuse credos to gain lots of free resources and nothing can be done to destroy all the bots. To be honest, bots are the problem, but not the main one. The second problem is quality growth. If quests will be done easier, it will be easier to raise quility for players, so this can lead the world to some bad situations.
4. Conclusion. Credo system needs rework. Bots are problem, but only thing that can be done with them is randomness and math scaling. For the small villages botting is not a problem. Kingdoms and big villages often create bots on their own and use them to get advantage over opponents, and usually it doesn't create a problem to avarage person. Often people don't care about botting, untill they used they farmed quality to destroy innocent people. At this moment, nothing can be done, except resettling in other place. It is normal behavior for Hearthland.
Quest system improvements:
1) Make quests more scaleble with character development. If character is a newborn hearthling, the quests should be local and poorly paid for, but if you live in hearth for a long time and got better character, you should get more difficult quests. The type of quest should depend on your attributes: if you have high charisma, you have to talk with trees a lot, if you have a lot of will, you have to travel on a long distances, if you have high perception, you have to find a foragable and etc. This will make quests more close to players' playstyles and add new activities for them.
2) Make quests less random. Quests should be linked to continent (on rare occasions, such as nomad or wandering sage, continents) and shouldn't say player to get thing what requires them to travel through the large part of the world, such as mole, hedgehog, strawberry and others.
3) Make quests alternatives. If the player has got a quest, there should be an option to reroll it for the cost of LP or some sort of a cooldown, to make players be able to reroll quests from trees/credos the can't do even if they really want.

[Zentetsuken]

shameless self promotion/reminder of my credo alternative idea that adds incredible balance, replayability and maximum fun

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=69460#p868403

[kirillius98]

shameless self promotion/reminder of my credo alternative idea that adds incredible balance, replayability and maximum fun

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=69460#p868403

Well, I like your idea, but it is too far from our current credo system. If you would advice something between your idea and current credo, it would be nice to read about. For example, you say about butchering foxes and getting mastery of it, but why we call these credo? Credo is a way of play you play, so it would me more reasonable not to just talk about foxes meat and skin, but about the whole hunting, so if you hunt a lot, you gain points, the more dangerous animal was, the more points you get. After getting enough points, you can spend them on quality improvement and/or chance to get additional resources. This solution is not the perfect one, but it is good. Can you please a bit more information about your mastery system on your own thread?

[Zentetsuken]

shameless self promotion/reminder of my credo alternative idea that adds incredible balance, replayability and maximum fun

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=69460#p868403

Well, I like your idea, but it is too far from our current credo system. If you would advice something between your idea and current credo, it would be nice to read about. For example, you say about butchering foxes and getting mastery of it, but why we call these credo? Credo is a way of play you play, so it would me more reasonable not to just talk about foxes meat and skin, but about the whole hunting, so if you hunt a lot, you gain points, the more dangerous animal was, the more points you get. After getting enough points, you can spend them on quality improvement and/or chance to get additional resources. This solution is not the perfect one, but it is good. Can you please a bit more information about your mastery system on your own thread?

My system is a 100% replacement for credos since credos are absolute trash.

Also, there is no reason to assume that there might not be a mastery for hunting as a whole as well.
I can certainly see it including mastery bonuses for amount of "all animals" killed and ultimately providing some basic similar bonuses after certain milestones are met.