Toilets

[Chakravanti]

I don't see why you want to limit leveling speed. As I said, this, in addition to LP, is the source of your combat imba. People are already bathing in food. I accumulate cupboards of DDD's simply because I don't need that much damn AGI and Deer are so common for me. hell, CHA & Per is in such short supply, especially since the butter nerf, that I have never bothered to make a single BBB in the past few months. Boar meat is simply better spent on lamb sausages. Something I accumulated a cupboards worth in a few hours of hunting.

Food is only a problem for newbies who have to split their interest in balanced character development with limited production resources and settlement development. Either you start making food to feed yourself so you can have decent food while building defenses but risk having your development exposed or you survive off apples till you construct something moderately safe.

Personally I have not gone hungry in the past three months. I ate mulberries and apples twice. once when I neglectfully found myself at %4 and stuck light years from my village at a mining hearth with no alcohol. another time when I was moving resources out of Innsmouth and found myself trapped for a short time without food.

If you want gameplay balance, stop trying to create an arbitrary rate of character development. Just let it be purely about the acquisition, processing and consumption of resources. OF course, at the same time you'll need to add a double softcap to character development so that players cannot become stupidly powerful. Add 'toilets' or other method of reducing hunger that isn't, quite frankly, as ridiculous as what essentially amount to playing in the mud. Slow hunger to a reasonable rate OR alternatively, allow players to set their own metabolism based on a 'belief' slider.

[kimya]

the more youre able to eat (and thus gain fep) the more unbalanced the game will get. cause as you said yourself, you have cupboards full of food... but youre not the general player, you have a village that is able to produce such amounts.

[loftar]

I don't see why you want to limit leveling speed.

Obviously, leveling speed has to be limited per one mechanism or another. Otherwise, everyone would have infinite stats in zero time, no?

[Chakravanti]

I don't see why you want to limit leveling speed.

Obviously, leveling speed has to be limited per one mechanism or another. Otherwise, everyone would have infinite stats in zero time, no?

Double Softcap. Give diminishing returns for high stats in addition to the current, very weak softcap. Make it so that Eventually it's no longer worth the effort to buff your player a point or two of damage or HP for three or four cupboards. There is a limit that can be reach like this in the current system but it's excessive.

You need to balance FEP's; the effort to produce them, and the way they progressively benefit players.

Also, you may or may not use credos to adjust the values of a softcap.

I'm telling you that the problem with PvP right now is that %90 of it is done offline except in rare cases where nubs make mistakes, overestimate their potential or Avatars are ready to suicide. This is anticlimactic and disenchanting. It serves to further imbalance those players who have already achieved excessive amounts.

The reason this exists is because you have a game that arbitrarily timescales development via the LP system. Adding further arbitrary timeline of charecter development will only increase the margin of player development.

The problem with toilets isn't that players can eat shit to inifinity. It's that the current system actually make doing so worthwhile.

The margin of player development either needs to be capped or Barbie an WV can successfully Sub or Die your entire game.

[loftar]

Double Softcap. Give diminishing returns for high stats in addition to the current, very weak softcap. Make it so that Eventually it's no longer worth the effort to buff your player a point or two of damage or HP for three or four cupboards.

So that leveling speed is, indeed, limited. Mind you, I never said it should be linear, or even by what units it should be limited. Only that it needs to be limited per some mechanism.

The problem with toilets isn't that players can eat shit to inifinity. It's that the current system actually make doing so worthwhile.

The margin of player development either needs to be capped or Barbie an WV can successfully Sub or Die your entire game.

I'm not trying to say that you don't have a point, because obviously you do. However, actually capping character development (hard, soft, fluffy or otherwise) is also boring, because then you reach a point where you cannot improve your character any longer. It is true, of course, that in Haven you can still play on by improving your settlement and your supply lines and what not, and that is certainly meaningful, but both I and Jorb firmly believe that there has to be some way to keep improving on one's character in one way or another more or less indefinitely, or you'd feel stuck in the game.

I may or may not agree that the current system is untenable. I could also argue that it isn't, and that it is rather the application of the values amassed that is wrong -- the combat system, for instance, is unbalanced regardless of whether the system of leveling is. I could also argue that it might be more meaningful to have a system of character stats that is not mainly based upon strict improvement, but rather adjustment (so that you might think of the set of stats as coordinates on a hypersphere, rather than the current Euclidean system of stats); I am not entirely unconvinced, but certainly not entirely convinced either. I mean, putting effort into one's character should pay actually pay off if it is to be fun.

Either way, the reason that PvP is almost entirely done as Player vs. Offline Player, is not, as you say, the fault of the character leveling system, but the fault of various other aspects. First of all, that the combat system itself is horribly unbalanced (as I said, it is a matter of the application of character stats, not the purely nominal value of the stats; arguing otherwise is just numerology). Second, it's just so much easier to attack an offline player, and the other solution must be, as Jorb outlined elsewhere, that claims physically bite back one way or another at transgressors.

[Chakravanti]

leveling speed should be limited on both sides, not just one

Why? I promise you that severely limiting development speed having this mammoth range of character development is causing character value to be so high that people will not engage in PvP until they an unstoppable character like Barbie and at that point, there is no one willing to fight them. It takes months to get a character like that. Even just recently WV themselves logged off during a raid for fear of character death and let cutlass destroy a major portion of their village.

I don't understand why you think arbitrating character development speed creates balance. You're telling us what you think but not explaining the dynamics that you envision.

I mean, it's your game. Fuck it up however you like. I'm just trying to show you what your current system is lacking based on my experience playing it. PvP or this lame ass, anticlimactic version of PvP is not enjoyable. Provides us no real system of retaliation and balance.

If I want to grind a game for several months or years to attain asinine levels of character development I'll go play runescape. I want action. I want drama and justice. PvP is the reason I play sandbox MMO's and is the reason I came here. After several months of grinding I've realized that there is no way to play harvest moon style AND achieve PvP validity in a reasonable time frame. All this work and development. Always at risk. I really to enjoy the harvest moon community style of play in a sandbox atmosphere. But as I said before. The wide margin of Character development is not equivalent to the risk maintained during play.

I could really care less because I will have SBE soon. Not the most ideal sandbox game, but it's real PvP and now maintained by the player base so we can expect some real balance issues to be corrected and some reworking of that halfass shit the corporate maintainers fucked the game with.

[loftar]

I don't understand why you think arbitrating character development speed creates balance. You're telling us what you think but not explaining the dynamics that you envision.

I see your point. The rationale is that doing it that way bases leveling both on resource production and on actually playing the character actively. If resource production were the only mechanism limiting character development, then one could raise an army of alts by simply feeding them while not doing anything with them. Limiting character development by, specifically, the amount of stamina having been consumed may very well not be the best way of indicating whether a character is being actively played, but it is certainly one way. The reason I want to remove water as a manner of accelerating the pathway from lost stamina to hunger is because that makes it ridiculously easy to macro stat gains (as you say, just plow and drink).

PvP or this lame ass, anticlimactic version of PvP is not enjoyable. Provides us no real system of retaliation and balance.

Indeed. I don't think anyone argued anything else. Rather the opposite; both Jorb and I have always agreed emphatically.

But as I said before. The wide margin of Character development is not equivalent to the risk maintained during play.

As I said, the "wide margin" of character stats is just numerology. It doesn't matter if a noob has 10 in all values and Blaze has 500 in all values if that margin only confers a 1% bonus in combat hit-rate for Blaze. That's why I'm saying that it is the combat system that is broken, rather than character development. Not that character development is not flawed in various ways, but the combat system is much more so.

[Chakravanti]

Thank you I can work with this.

Edit - But I will have to do it tomorrow I'm getting to tired to form cohesive arguments. Jackard just proved that too damn well. And did it without being a dick nonetheless. Of course, he's probably on to the fact that I'm self aware enough to acknowledge my fault here and that's almost worse than being a dick.

[Jackard]

having a large gap in ability between novice and veteran characters is not really helpful for a team/stronghold/resource-based game

especially a permadeath one

[Chakravanti]

BAW! i'm getting tired and your coffee finally kicks in! my posts are getting asininely long and saying less and less because you just said everything in two sentance that I took four paragraphs to say, and not very well at that.

Edit: Although it occurs to me that I'm still having difficulty explaining why what you explained is the cause of this anticlimactic 'PvP' we are experiencing in the game. And in fact, not just the combat imba.