Critique: This game reminds me of Silkroad Online

[Händler]

I never made the connection before, but the similarities are actually striking.

Silkroad Online was a game where only handful of people refused to bot out of principle, while the rest of the players were more or less forced to bot to simplify the tedious chores that made up the game's grind. Almost everyone in that game botted.

Let me preface this with a little information of how I play Haven & Hearth with friends:
Every year, we start the map only once all the big PK factions have gone fed up and gone MIA due to boredom after they done messing with everything.
We travel around, breaking into bases - active and inactive - exploiting weaknesses where possible and thereby catapulting our tech/industry and receiving quantities and qualities of goods that could well be compared to those that big factions may own at times.

This also means every year we get to see a lot of base architectures of all kinds of players, big and small. Meaning, what they emphasized in their base, which trees and crops did they plant, what food did they prepare with which ingredients, what did they primarily invest their time into, what did they put all their bricks and clay into, how did they section their areas, where do they keep what. These sorts of informations.

Example: Let's say we break into a medium to large-sized botter base. The base so happens to be at coastline and we have a few ships with us, so a good chunk of what's inside the base can be taken. However, it still takes a lot of time to transport all the most useful and/or most valuable goods. It consumes the sort of time that is beyond a regular player just to scout, break into and transport stuff, in part also because the time investment doesn't stop with the transportation of the goods. At some point your base starts getting clogged up with gemstones, troll skulls, equipment, armor, and all kinds of other stuff. You have to create the space to store the stuff, since even if you try your best to consume as much of what you bring in to free up some space again, you just simply can't due to the time constraints of the logistics of it all. It takes forever to process just all the masses of ingredients for high tier food, curiosities and industry mats.

Now something that should become very obvious from this is that even though we don't produce anything ourselves, the time investment for obtaining all this crazy stuff is still rather huge, meaning it is MMO levels of grind time. Meaning you have to invest +6-10 hours a day for any meaningful activity other than just shoving in curios or feasting. But only because we take the easy route of just taking stuff.
It's different from Theme-Park MMOs like WoW, where you have to grind 6 months just to start with the game ("lategame content"). But only because we can focus our time on other stuff, due to using all the stuff others made. It saves us immense amounts of time. We don't have to wait weeks for cheese to finish. We don't have to dig into the deepest cave layers to find gold and silver and every day for 365 days straight are forced to time the harvest & re-planting of crops on huge fields just to consistently raise the quality of crops and trees.

Not much unlike the botters, this way we skip the grind that would otherwise be required by the game. Conversely, a single yet overwhelming thought portrudes itself: This game must suck really hard for any regular player.

Just imagine, you don't bot in the game and you don't proactively break into bases. The time investment then required to get to anything decent becomes crazy. You'll never get to anything meaningful, even if you spend all the time that a world gives you, you would just play all day long +10 hours each day for a whole year, to get your stats somewhere probably roughly to the lower end of 4 digits at best. Just the thought alone of how many high Q bricks are required to produce high Q of anything requiring metal or industry-affecting.
You need a farmer for the crops and the trees, you need a miner or fighter digging deep, who needs masses of water and food, building supports or playing sweeper, every single character of bigger importance needs to go down credo lines, most of which take forever to progress even if you have access to all the stuff that they require you to have at the ready. Every single character needs food and curios, so even if you get a whole group of people together, the time investment does not diminish and you are better off collecting all your resources to push a single character up rather than to divide it up between the characters equally.

In Silkroad even if you bot all day long every day, your character hardly progresses. You leave the bot on to do all the work for you, but nothing happens. The exp bar barely fills up anyway.
Think about that for a minute: Even THOUGH you don't invest your own time into the game as you are supposed to, you grind only with bots in optimized fashion, yet you still have to invest huge amounts of your time to progress, what a joke for the dumb masses. If this doesn't tell you the game was only created to mock you, nothing will.
It's the same dumb shit with Haven & Hearth. At least in H&H you can break into others' bases to minimize this required investment. Which is the only reason to play the game. The aspect of breaking into bases itself is fun, but the time investment is alright enough this way - even though it's still immense - to actually get joy out of the game. If it wasn't for this mere aspect of the game we'd never touch H&H, completely away from the context of PvP btw, as we don't attack other players.

Conclusion: This game's time sink is absurd.

Also, while at it, let's talk about a misconception that some people mistakenly call "PvP". I'm just gonna say it because nobody else will. Any other post you'll find on the topic will just be either of the 2 extremes, some hermit who got ganked or some faction member who sails around collecting skulls.

It's a bit jokeless how discussions in this game circle around PvP vs PvE and PK vs Farmville, when in reality this game is merely a hunting ground. It's not a PvP arena, there is no PvP in this game. Never was. Everyone knows that, it's not a Moba or Battle Royale, you can play something better for PvP any day, you can host Dark Souls Tournaments or play another game with physics-based 3D action combat or even a shooter to get some adrenaline flowing. PvP means two players fight. But in H&H people don't fight, and when they do they only do it so long before they realize who has the better cards, then one of the 2 sides eventually has to run. Usually this is decided upon the first hit, when they see the AGI difference, most of the time even before that when you see what the other person wears compared to you or how many of them there are compared to you.
In this game you just either hunt or you hide. There is no in-between. You hunt the critters, the game, the players, the bases, pearls, gems, hides, every activity in this game is a hunt.
When people complain that some PvPer kill them or someone raid them and ask for more safety measures, it always sounds like pleas for security vs freedom of interaction between players, but essentially what they complain about has nothing to do with PvP or security at all. They just simply don't like being the one that's hunted. Simple as that.

I just say it because next time some faggabat whines about PvP - no matter for which side of the argument, be it a botter of a big faction or some hermit who is too stupid to move out of his base without getting hunted down, you gotta know that the whole mechanics of the minor crimes that you implemented, in particular we are talking theft & rummaging here, but also vandalism, isn't just relevant for big botter factions. So when you think about which security measures to remove or add and how to "improve Siege" or whatever, your mind in that case mostly circles around 1 base - which is Brodgar. But Brodgar isn't the only base in the game. And Brodgar, technically speaking, is just another part of the botter factions if you get down to it. Those are not regular players. Most bases I see from inside, they were played by actual players who manually worked on their shit. The regular players, they seek the simulation of the hunt, that is why they play your game! They can't do that when a botter faction runs them down at any corner. And they also can't do that when you restrict and take away the possibilities to leave scents, cause hide & seek is still the name of the game. It's not a matter of whether PK should be possible or if there should be a PvE server -these are red herrings, it all simply runs down to handing players the tools to properly hide when an attacker comes around and properly attack when an opportunity presents itself. Maybe the weapons in this game should simply be more deadly. So deadly, in fact, that even a botter with 5 digits of CON can not survive a hermit's well-planned hit with some weapon, poisoned daggers or some trap setup. Just some food for thought. The hunters should also fear being hunted. All the players in the game should fear death, not just some. Even a snake in this game is a danger. It's not a tough opponent, but if I go near a snake, I risk being bit. The same principle should apply to any animal being hunted, even if it is just a minor hearthling. You want a priced developed hearthling skull, why should you get it without risk? The tools of defenders are a joke if you ask me. Nobody fears a sling or a knife. In the real world if you get near someone with a knife, anyone is gonna tell you that both sides will get messed up. You can't fight someone with a knife and get out unscathed, it's impossible. Knives that inflict %-based bleeding and nasty wounds would make an attacker carefully consider any attack. If you added deadly noob weapons like this to the game and focused around developing defender tools like this in general that allow counterplay to situations where you're being attacked, you wouldn't have to get headaches so much pondering over how people can better hole up inside and warp back to their bases. You could even revert all that shit with noob protection, just remove it, let people die when they make mistakes - which includes not properly investing into defensive tools - and let them survive if they do their part. Instead of babysitting hermits with your noob protection, give the noobs some inert power that - if used properly - can scare off attackers and if not, they are actually at fault for their own death. It shouldn't give them a free pass to survive unscathed like warping back upon KO, but be just deadly enough like Bum Burn, so that the attacker can and will not just mindlessly spam-PK any foreign hearthling he meets. Then you wouldn't have to constantly mess with the mechanics that everyone else (experienced regular players) derive fun out of in the game in the attempt to help some hermits or factions.

Instead of thinking along the lines of restricting if someone should be able to PK or be able to break into some base, how about just hand people tools to defend themselves? If a hearthling walks around outside their base, they are obviously not going to be afk sitting there, so leave it in their hands to ensure their safety.
If some raiders come knocking at your doorsteps, you aren't likely to be around at the exact time the raiders come knocking, so to save the time of the attackers and the defenders, just timegate the whole thing. You already partly did with the Realms, by allowing thingchallenges only during certain times. When people know the times at which action is possibly going on, it should make it obsolete to have to sit around an entire day defending a siege weapon and similarly trying to destroy it over such long time periods. Even the biggest no-lifer isn't going to invest the time into grinds like that forever. At some point you just get fed up or you went through all the grind and the point in repeating the process is gone.
So simplify the process. That's what developers do, right? Simplify processes. The less tedious the whole act is, the more people can fit it into their own timeslots.


That is all. Thank you for reading.

[sMartouts]

Thank you for reading.

You're welcome! I didn't read it, though.

[TemuSoldier]

holy fukken megayap

[Fostik]

Hey chat is it worth reading?

[DDDsDD999]

Yeah ok

[Audiosmurf]

Oh noooo it's too hard to spend 90 seconds reading a couple of paragraphs oh noooooooo oh god it's so hard oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[Saxony4]

Oh noooo it's too hard to spend 90 seconds reading a couple of paragraphs oh noooooooo oh god it's so hard oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Most of the people that play this game are genuinely retarded and lazy, why do you think people see it as a pvp game; because its easier and less intellectually intensive to steal and destroy other's work.

I've never played Silkroad so I can't draw any comparisons to it but I agree that the average player not involved in the aids riddled pvp factions are indeed resources to them, pvpers can't figure out anything past eating at a table set up for them and clicking attack or destroy, and rely on someone with more intelligence and willpower to create for them to be able to progress, whether it be a village member dedicated to keeping them supplied or going out and raiding someone who has something required.

If PVE was introduced it would likely lead to the worst people that play this game to hopefully off themselves because of their lack of victims to steal progress and extort cosmetics from for rmt

[Halbertz]

It is common knowledge that most of the C&I is retarded nonsence. By making it also wall of text you won't get sympaties of usual C&I reader (anyone but devs).
If someone has free time to try their hand at reading a ton of possible nonsense, they will most likely open Finnigan's Wake or something similar.

[Zachary09]

I like your idea of introducing weaponry which would bypass some normally existing mismatches. Take David vs Goliath - there is usually a soft spot you can reach.

It shouldn't be so that pvp titans with botted characters are untouchable.

[terechgracz]

Silkroad is game, haven and hearth is game. Striking similarities.