Scant regard for stats

[Jackard]

Your first problem is not splitting priorities. Everything crafting on one character, then you have a combat character, that's simple, you don't want to lose it all IF you go into battle, and when your combat character is 'good enough' you go full trad and you have little to lose, hell you actually GAIN if you're willing to gain a bit more stats and then einher. Proper character management (something I lacked personally for a long time) is essential for 'effective' playing. Really the gap isn't big enough if anything, the best way to gain LP (and has been for a while now) is wheat, wheat is largely an AFK task other than actually harvesting/replanting. You can easily set a macro (or if you're against that, just do it 'passively' checking on it) and for about 12 hours your character will be gaining awesome LP (and making awesome food for you to gain FEPs). There's really no problem here I see, the people who don't play much/effectively create the problem.

Grinding is important. Grinding makes the illusion that you had to work hard for your fun, without grind there's nothing to actually make what you did a 'choice' whether you want to lose it or not. The lack of PvP in this game speaks for itself in this regard, diplomacy is actually fun because you know if you fuck up it's battlefield time. The new recent defense mechanics make guerrilla warfare a very interesting and fun aspect because you know the other guy can't come after you easily since attacking a brick walled village is so hard. Everything got a lot easier and funner.
Fighting bears should be harder I agree, they should be stronger or we should get much stronger animals (not sure why we haven't gotten wolves[I hear due to pack mechanics], or trolls or SOMETHING that's actually difficult and takes fighting in groups). Not everyone grinds forever, there are a few in every village, but some of us find a plateau and are comfortable. If you follow the direction f the game they aren't trying to direclty limit things "OMG YOU NEVER GET JEWELRY PAST 100!!!" but instead are trying to make it so that if you want q1000 jewelry next map you better be fucking working months of increasing all your shit (bear skins, gold quality [somehow?] ) for that higher quality goldbeater's skin or whatever itll be called to raise it. 'Farming, Jewelry, these 'raise as high as you want!' stats will be gone as you know them, they are just placeholders.


No, if you ask for 'less grind' you probably don't belong in MMOs, sorry to say, but it's the truth. "Less grind" is "I'm bored" or "I hate repetition" and that's what MMOs are for. Don't look to the game to make you happy, it won't. That's what friends are for.

There is something very wrong with you, like in your head

[DatOneGuy]

The problems you guys are attempting to address are problems with all MMOs. essentially everything you are doing in Hnh boils down to the same thing: Clicking. Click here, click faster, right click, left click, move to the left and click!

Mining? Just clicking tiles
Hunting? Clicking 'targets'
Farming? More clicking!

Basically it comes down to the same few repetitive motions and it's all brought down to one simple thing. You don't have t break it down too much to get there either, the game is repetitive as most are they pick one 'style' and stick to it.

You're telling me that's fun? Nah there's more to it, play Hnh all alone with no interaction for a month or two and tell me how fun it is, (this goes for any game not just Hnh).

Regardless, I'm all for more fun throughout whatever means necessary, but 'relieving the grind' and making it super easy to reach max? That ain't the answer, WoW tried it, instead you grind items, it's still grind. You never truly relieve the grind, it's always there, making it easier just means you're at the max faster and get bored of the top faster. Making it harder to reach that max is what it seems they're doing stretching out how hard it is to get to the point where you have an iron mine, brickwalls, gold, silver, jewelry galore, a nice village, cows, and are making all your food production nice. Specifically we still haven't hit the point of 'animal grinding' where we rush to the next Q bone, we've always been grinding the bone Q but it gets serious at that point. Trees... etc

The fun part of hnh is that you don't need to grind though you seriously don't, (so I don't understand your rush) you could be a 'good' warrior (500+ in all combat stats/attributes) in a matter of 2 months if you play 'little', if you play a lot in 2 weeks or less.

What I really want to know is why you think stats (or capping stats) will make the game more 'fun'? Fun makes a game fun, and I don't see it happening that way to be honest, not really, at that point I'd just grind a quantity of characters instead of a quality and that's more boring and repetitive. "Hey guys, just got my 8th character to max stats, in case..."

Can't you think of Something better to introduce fun other than caps? Cause I'm not really buying that as an answer at all, didn't work for WoW (It's still grind), won't really work here. Most of the grind in the game as it stands is NOT skill value associated. Trees, animals, iron, natural resource (searching), etc.
--
This response is based on a quick overview of Danno's posts I'll read the rest tomorrow when I wake.

Btw about the pvp with little to gain it's true, you have very little to gain from PvP. You can't (easily) take over an idol, anyone with half a brain has their resources with LSes that never login and can be logged in to allow people to join and re-auth easily, also have huge pclaims so if you do break theirs it'll be a major pain in the balls to get in. So what do you actually gain? You could take down faction X and kill all their members main warriors, you still won't get that q105 Clay Spot you're after, you could brick it but they could still village warp, etc. You just never really 'win' what is worth it.

[sabinati]

at that point I'd just grind a quantity of characters instead of a quality and that's more boring and repetitive. "Hey guys, just got my 8th character to max stats, in case..."

this right here is pretty much the best argument against skill caps

[Danno]

Well, I think the fun part about clicking in Haven & Hearth is that you can see a difference. If you play any generic MMO, you right-click the enemy, your guy locks on and starts attacking automatically, then you can click/press a potion hotkey or a skill hotkey if you want. You kill the enemy, you gain a little experience, then you repeat the process since there's an infinite number of enemies like this.
In H&H, you click a tree, you chop it down permanently, you build something new. You still gain your precious numbers/LP from this, but the real fun is that you just changed the world for everyone to see and that you've begun to build a place to call your own.
Both situations are simply clicking, but the result is very different in H&H unless you're just grinding flour for LP, in which case it's simple click-grinding - something that is, indeed, boring.

If your idea of interaction is just trading, that will probably continue as always. People will attack each other and die (more interaction than before), so they'll need to trade stuff again. I think human interaction is an important part of multiplayer games. As this game currently is, I'm more likely to be a hermit and grind my stats up than ever think about attacking someone.

I don't know how you'd get 500+ combat stats/attributes in 2 months of playing a "little" without considering that a grind... unless you have q204587 tea and other huge LP enhancers sitting and waiting for you with q200 top tier FEP food ready to boost your attributes at a rapid rate.
526 hours of gameplay over two months comes to around 8-9 hours a day. With that much gameplay time, I haven't achieved nearly what you suggest possible with "little" playing. Though I am balancing my character in terms of attributes, I have some basic level of skill values in certain skills, but I focus mostly on farming and it's only at 120 right now. My stats would maybe be double what they are now if I didn't die once, and if I was just increasing combat-related attributes it would maybe double again, so they might be around 200 by now.

So, if you play without constantly grinding flour/buckets/whatever, 500 hours of gameplay is not nearly enough even if you cram it into two months. Who wants to throw away 500 hours of their life like a cheap toy to try H&H's PvP? As we can plainly see, nobody is willing to do that. Not until abusing the tradition slider so they can take back 375 of those hours after they die, anyway, but even with that option people are pretty passive.
If you choose to grind more characters to the cap, I guess no one can stop you. They might have to take measures to prevent people from logging onto combat alts one after another so you can't solo an enemy attack (or vice versa). There could alternately be limits on how many high combat characters could be in a village (or at least how many from the same IP or whatever) or how many could log on consecutively after someone dies.

You've already agreed that grinding is not fun. You only believe it's necessary because you're apparently too narrow-minded to see that an MMO can be different and that it doesn't have to be a chore to play. It's not like jorb/loftar would have to follow my idea precisely since it's only a suggestion/critique; like I said, H&H is pretty fun as is, just there's an inevitable boring grind waiting for all of us, which is when the game becomes pointless and not worth playing. They've done a very good job for the earlier parts of the game, but there needs to be a fun direction for later parts (and for infinity).

Early game: Learn how to play, build your home, run from boars and bears, survive, holy god this game is awesome.
Mid/early game: Make your home better, trade with other players, learn more about the game.
Mid game: Perhaps continue to expand your territory and make it more secure, maybe find yourself a mine, hunt, get your quality to decent levels.
Mid/late game: Maybe invite people to your village and/or make them your slaves, grind LP/quality.
Late game: Grind LP/quality. Maybe trade your god quality equipment for food if you can't produce enough food yourself, or for rare/valuable materials/equipment for your alts. Keep on grindin' 'cause it'll eventually pay off somehow, but don't dare rock the boat or you may lose all you worked for (despite that it's said we'll have a wipe/new world someday), and you'd hate to lose it since you had to wake up early, work hard everyday without breaks, then come back to reality exhausted for a short break before getting back to this fulltime job for overtime. If you're feeling brave, slaughter some newb village and claim it was an accident, you feel bad about it, and that nobody should attack you for vengeance... not like anyone would put their lives on the line to avenge newbs, anyway.

[DatOneGuy]

A few things wrong there:
1)Most fighting games while also simply clicking, have cool animations that make you think you're doing stuff. When you use 'Hyper slash' your character actually looks like he is doing a hyper slash, not some silly chop animation (something I honestly don't understand this ruins all forms of immersion in this game for me). You typically have to try harder, there are bosses that are tough. In this game other people are bosses, and I respect that I really do, but there's no reason to attack other people other than as defensive attack, because you don't GAIN anything unless they quit, resource spots ythey don't lose they still have, you gain nothing.

2)The whole 'you change the world forever', okay that's fun for a while, but someone else can just plant a tree and it's one of those things that should make you feel good deep down inside and there are many things to explore here, but none 'get you ahead', making huge spiders and marking grids? You get no LP. Writing 'AD' huge in grass? You get no LP.

3)Those numbers you wrote for getting 500+ in all stats are grossly inflated. Playing in an average village but having 'knowledge' of the game you could do that in 2 months without a problem .The stats is pisseasy, and the hunting or wheat for LP the same.

4)You're talking farming, I'm talking combat really 150 farming is pisseasy to get though and if you farm and COOK what you farm, hell eyea it's easy.


Saying I'm narrow-minded is just ridiculous, on the matter I've attempted and suggested many things HnH can do that I could think of to get 'away' from grind, but be realistic no matter what you do you WILL be grinding something. MMOs only have one trick: Repetition. The illusion if fun, something seems cool, you want it, you do al this boring shit, it seemed worth it, you got it, it's fun, (because the journey was so hard it seems fun, realistically it's just some pixels attached to data that says '1,600 damage', who cares?).

Early game: Learn how to play, build your home, run from boars and bears, survive, holy god this game is awesome.
Mid/early game: Make your home better, trade with other players, learn more about the game.
Mid game: Perhaps continue to expand your territory and make it more secure, maybe find yourself a mine, hunt, get your quality to decent levels.
Mid/late game: Maybe invite people to your village and/or make them your slaves, grind LP/quality.
Late game: Grind LP/quality. Maybe trade your god quality equipment for food if you can't produce enough food yourself, or for rare/valuable materials/equipment for your alts. Keep on grindin' 'cause it'll eventually pay off somehow, but don't dare rock the boat or you may lose all you worked for (despite that it's said we'll have a wipe/new world someday), and you'd hate to lose it since you had to wake up early, work hard everyday without breaks, then come back to reality exhausted for a short break before getting back to this fulltime job for overtime. If you're feeling brave, slaughter some newb village and claim it was an accident, you feel bad about it, and that nobody should attack you for vengeance... not like anyone would put their lives on the line to avenge newbs, anyway.

This is all for a first time player, if you want to be serious it's more like:
Find village
Secure village
Expand CR network
Build character/village quality/stats

--
It'll always follow the same basic idea though no matter how you 'try' and change an MMO, if it has numbers you will attempt to raise them, there will either be an absolute top and people will rush to see who is first to get there, (and he's the winner), there's pvp at the top (you better stay at the top and killl everyone who gets close), or there is no top (whoever is the highest is the best). The fact that in Hnh you don't KNOW where your enemies are is fun as hell to me. Were they content with 500 in each stats and stopped there? Or were their average warriors still hungry for more and went for 2,000 in each stat and were then content? Maybe they were never happy and are always grinding it up? You don't know, and you shouldn't, it's fun that way! The game is fun in this way very much. The ways to grind are currently boring because they are very limiting. You either invest in cooking and have a farming character, you do all the cooking, get tons of LP, dump into combat, or you hunt a lot and dump all into combat.

Most characters are better as shared characters displacing a lot of things (like farmer, smith, carpenter, survivalist). Most crafting is best done on alts and the alts might as well be shared, so really the only single character grinding you have to do if you're in a good village is the combat stats. It really isn't a grind into forever either, you shouldn't see it that way, if your view of everyone else is "THEYRE SO FAR AHEAD I CANT RISK IT" then that's you man, but some of us did a little more research into it and know where we stand, many people do, test the waters a little and maybe you'll find out. The game should scare you if you don't want to find out, because you have to take a little risk, just like in real life.

To recap:
HnH is fun in many aspects, but really needs to broaden it's 'ways to gain LP', macros right now are still #1 which is sad and pathetic!
HnH needs to find a way to make gaining LP more fun (Suggestions? I suggested minigames, doubt they'll ever happen, not sure what loftar/Jorb's stance is on it, not sure if they ever plan on having something more 'fun' and involved for various systems)
HnH needs something to push you to 'go have fun', in other games you hit a limit and 'DING' you get an item, or 'DING' it's time to fight X forY, and Y is awesome so yeah! But you gain nothing from confrontation in HnH, so you aren't pushed to it, villages are too well guarded by extra characters and such there's no way to actively damage a well protected village, there's nothing really to do, if someone has pclaim and full auth vclaim you're fucked buddy, even if they don't auth you have to wait 2 weeks at minimum for auth to drain. <-change this and we'll get a lot more 'fun' I bet
Caps are the devil and should never be brought up, there are natural caps and they feel good and work good, they are eventuallybroken and that's good, the ones you want fixed are already planned to be fixed( farming, jewelry).
Combat should never see caps ,use search.

That's all I got anyway,but seriously I'd love to see more suggestions of how to add fun to HnH, things that can be added that would actually not seem so boring, because wheat isn't hard, it's time consuming, repetitive, and boring, yawn worthy even. Hunting is fun and active but since the arrows, tbh it's now yawn worthy too, sling hunting was fun and active, engaging, and you could do it for hours without a problem, arrows mean :"fuck can't shoot that fox need to wait for a bear for more hq arrows" , "damn I'm hear 5minutes loading up against this deer, damn these q10 arrows suck balls".

Anyways, I'll wait for the assured reply, but you should really read the former threads on the matter too if you haven't.

[Oddity]

They might have to take measures to prevent people from logging onto combat alts one after another so you can't solo an enemy attack (or vice versa). There could alternately be limits on how many high combat characters could be in a village (or at least how many from the same IP or whatever) or how many could log on consecutively after someone dies.

All crappy ideas that neither jorb nor loftar would be interested in.

[Potjeh]

The problems you guys are attempting to address are problems with all MMOs. essentially everything you are doing in Hnh boils down to the same thing: Clicking. Click here, click faster, right click, left click, move to the left and click!

Mining? Just clicking tiles
Hunting? Clicking 'targets'
Farming? More clicking!

Data entry and posting on forums are both just typing, so why the hell am I here instead of earning money?


Anyway, your problem is taking things that are bad in H&H and treating them as some kind of immutable scripture for the purposes of future development.

First of all, you think it must remain Massively Singleplayer Online Game, ie that most of the challenge should come from the game itself. This is the number 1 problem in most major MMOs, so I can see how you got there. But thing is, you simply *can't* make an engaging PvE experience that lasts in perpetuity. Whatever obstacle you make, it will be overcome and become boring rote. Just look at single player games, they all get cast aside in a matter of months at most. There's no point in playing native Mount&Blade after you've successfully conquered Calradia, Dungeon Crawl loses it's charm after a full rune win, URW gets boring after you've taken over a Njerpez camp and filled it with dried bear meat, even goddamn Dwarf Fortress is no longer !!fun!! after you've built a pyramid in hell. CounterStrike, though, even if it's a simple game with rather dull basic gameplay, I could play every day simply because other people are more fun opponents than AI.

The former seems to stem from your view that it's how all MMOs do it, thus H&H must do it the same too. Thing is, you're wrong. Take EvE for example. Now, I've never actually played it (too cheap to buy subscription), but I did read some interesting stories (goonswarm takeover, great blueprint fraud etc) about it, and it seems to heavily focused on the second M in MMO (as I understood it, you invest heavily in a ship, and then go fight and hopefully have it pay off in terms of advancement of your faction before it's inevitably destroyed), unlike WoW or other "kill x of y" type MMOs. IMO, H&H must look more to the likes of EvE than to the likes of WoW if it is ever to become a great game. It's got a looooong way to go, but from the direction of the changes I've seen it seems that the devs, thank heavens, don't share your vision of H&H's future.

The thing with PvP in H&H, of course, is that there isn't enough motivation for it (there is *some* - LP - so don't say there's none whatsoever), but a far greater reason for it is the ridiculous power disbalance. In my entire H&h career I have never had a single character that was worth anything in PvP, and I never will have one as long as the current power curve stays. By the time I reach the current entry level skills for PvP, people who play 12+ hours a day have pushed it higher, and I am doomed to forever chase that dragon. Now, these hardcore players will always have an advantage over me no matter how you set things up, but I prefer it to be bouncing back faster after death rather than being more powerful, because then I could still actually do something worthwhile. As it is now, I'll never amount to more than a glorified wooden duck, my only use being drawing fire away from the useful combatants. I guess I just don't deserve to participate in PvP because I'm not dedicated enough to give up my social life in favour of H&H, and PvP should forever remain out of reach of the unwashed masses of lowly "casuals"

Anyway, game should be balanced with consideration for factions before characters. On a grand scale, H&H should play like an RTS rather than an RPG, with each faction being the equivalent of one player in an RTS. The game should revolve around increasing the power of your faction through conquering and holding strategic resources. Yeah, I know, that's not possible at all right now, but it doesn't mean it never will be. From what I gather, the only reason we don't have conquest yet is because the devs haven't come up with a good implementation for it. Within such a framework, where PvP is a must if you want to get anywhere, characters would be put at risk and die regularly because otherwise they'd be an investment that's not paying back anything. If there's a glass ceiling (asymptote cap), the decision when you have enough skill points would be a tough choice (and making choices is what makes games interesting!), since you'd have to weigh the gain from raising skills against the cost of missed opportunities (time is money). As it is now, especially with the godawful einherjer prayer(that abomination needs to die in fire yesterday), the gain simply outweighs the cost too much. Speaking of prayers, I'd also get rid of ancestors altogether, cut the tradition/change slider and make all deaths 100% loss, to make the cost of conquest meaningful (no need for a consolation prize if your death helps your faction). And of course, there should be no steamrolling - even the more powerful side should suffer some casualties (unless it's something ridiculous like a bunch of fresh alts fighting Sodom), so that they're forced to think strategically when deciding which battles to fight. And don't worry, even in this system you'll accomplish more if you play more by taking less time to build up a character, it's just that us lowly casuals will have some hope of winning battles, if not wars. The whole idea is to make your ridiculous grind divisible over multiple players for equal gain, so that if you play 18 hours a day like you do you're not worth more than 9 players who play 2 hours a day.

[DatOneGuy]

The problems you guys are attempting to address are problems with all MMOs. essentially everything you are doing in Hnh boils down to the same thing: Clicking. Click here, click faster, right click, left click, move to the left and click!

Mining? Just clicking tiles
Hunting? Clicking 'targets'
Farming? More clicking!

Data entry and posting on forums are both just typing, so why the hell am I here instead of earning money?


Anyway, your problem is taking things that are bad in H&H and treating them as some kind of immutable scripture for the purposes of future development.

First of all, you think it must remain Massively Singleplayer Online Game, ie that most of the challenge should come from the game itself. This is the number 1 problem in most major MMOs, so I can see how you got there. But thing is, you simply *can't* make an engaging PvE experience that lasts in perpetuity. Whatever obstacle you make, it will be overcome and become boring rote. Just look at single player games, they all get cast aside in a matter of months at most. There's no point in playing native Mount&Blade after you've successfully conquered Calradia, Dungeon Crawl loses it's charm after a full rune win, URW gets boring after you've taken over a Njerpez camp and filled it with dried bear meat, even goddamn Dwarf Fortress is no longer !!fun!! after you've built a pyramid in hell. CounterStrike, though, even if it's a simple game with rather dull basic gameplay, I could play every day simply because other people are more fun opponents than AI.

The former seems to stem from your view that it's how all MMOs do it, thus H&H must do it the same too. Thing is, you're wrong. Take EvE for example. Now, I've never actually played it (too cheap to buy subscription), but I did read some interesting stories (goonswarm takeover, great blueprint fraud etc) about it, and it seems to heavily focused on the second M in MMO (as I understood it, you invest heavily in a ship, and then go fight and hopefully have it pay off in terms of advancement of your faction before it's inevitably destroyed), unlike WoW or other "kill x of y" type MMOs. IMO, H&H must look more to the likes of EvE than to the likes of WoW if it is ever to become a great game. It's got a looooong way to go, but from the direction of the changes I've seen it seems that the devs, thank heavens, don't share your vision of H&H's future.

As I've said many places elsewhere, I don't think HnH should do these things, and I love the fact that HnH does something different and pushes what 'can't' or 'shouldn't' be done and does it well too. I don't 'want' HnH to be this way, but as I've said I don't see the suggestions made for capping skills ever helping this. There will always be some way to get better, I prefer if it's just these numbers here for combat, not some maxing out bullshit, thanks. There's already little incentive to keep grinding past a certain point so there's a large choke, after 500 base stats the grind gets really annoyingly bad, after 1k it's just ridiculous, so you won't see your average warrior with that much in stats, and really you don't even have to get that far, a character with 200-300 UA , 200-300 MC and some good thanes can be tossed out as a 'make do' warrior and actually help. The new changes have also seen to there being very little 'complete dominance' on the field, if you really want to be that 1hko god of the combat field the stats you need are crazy compared to before. I definitely agree with the idea that interaction is a big role, but there's nothing pushing me to gain anything from fighting. I haven't played EvE but have also heard stories. I'd assume you gain something by killing another guild or what have you, whether it be their ships, their resources, I don't know, but something. Killing people just for the satisfaction is hardly worth it.

The thing with PvP in H&H, of course, is that there isn't enough motivation for it (there is *some* - LP - so don't say there's none whatsoever), but a far greater reason for it is the ridiculous power disbalance. In my entire H&h career I have never had a single character that was worth anything in PvP, and I never will have one as long as the current power curve stays. By the time I reach the current entry level skills for PvP, people who play 12+ hours a day have pushed it higher, and I am doomed to forever chase that dragon. Now, these hardcore players will always have an advantage over me no matter how you set things up, but I prefer it to be bouncing back faster after death rather than being more powerful, because then I could still actually do something worthwhile. As it is now, I'll never amount to more than a glorified wooden duck, my only use being drawing fire away from the useful combatants. I guess I just don't deserve to participate in PvP because I'm not dedicated enough to give up my social life in favour of H&H, and PvP should forever remain out of reach of the unwashed masses of lowly "casuals"

I agree with the lack of motivation and the power disbalance, but this is already being handled (AGI kinda took back some of it I guess), but the changes in combat favor more quantity of warriors to quality now, you're better off with 2 guys who have 300 melee than one with 600, those 2 will also beat the 600 person easily. The balance is coming, but what I still need badly is the motivation, I reallllly want to kill people but it's not worth the risk of war when there is NOTHING to gain except the satisfaction.

Anyway, game should be balanced with consideration for factions before characters. On a grand scale, H&H should play like an RTS rather than an RPG, with each faction being the equivalent of one player in an RTS. The game should revolve around increasing the power of your faction through conquering and holding strategic resources. Yeah, I know, that's not possible at all right now, but it doesn't mean it never will be. From what I gather, the only reason we don't have conquest yet is because the devs haven't come up with a good implementation for it. Within such a framework, where PvP is a must if you want to get anywhere, characters would be put at risk and die regularly because otherwise they'd be an investment that's not paying back anything. If there's a glass ceiling (asymptote cap), the decision when you have enough skill points would be a tough choice (and making choices is what makes games interesting!), since you'd have to weigh the gain from raising skills against the cost of missed opportunities (time is money). As it is now, especially with the godawful einherjer prayer(that abomination needs to die in fire yesterday), the gain simply outweighs the cost too much. Speaking of prayers, I'd also get rid of ancestors altogether, cut the tradition/change slider and make all deaths 100% loss, to make the cost of conquest meaningful (no need for a consolation prize if your death helps your faction). And of course, there should be no steamrolling - even the more powerful side should suffer some casualties (unless it's something ridiculous like a bunch of fresh alts fighting Sodom), so that they're forced to think strategically when deciding which battles to fight. And don't worry, even in this system you'll accomplish more if you play more by taking less time to build up a character, it's just that us lowly casuals will have some hope of winning battles, if not wars. The whole idea is to make your ridiculous grind divisible over multiple players for equal gain, so that if you play 18 hours a day like you do you're not worth more than 9 players who play 2 hours a day.

[/quote] I've always been fond of the RTS idea in this way and would very much so like to see it play out this way, but the rest I just cannot agree with at all, on any level. Einherjar is good, you don't need caps for risks to be interesting, my character is strong but I fear losing himevery time I go out, and it doesn't matter how strong he is I'll be fearful. Does this mean I won't use him? No, that wouldn't be fun, that would take the fun out of the game, but after all the grind it took unless I go full trad (I should soon hmm?), it's just a large risk. When you are full trad though there is little risk, if anything it's gain when you have no ancestor.

I very much so like the ancestor system, should be tweaked maybe but I love it. Can it be abused? Yes, but I don't abuse it, I like to believe I use it in it's spirit, I go full tradition when I'm ready and get ready to fight all out, if I die I die, if I don't I don't. I don't go in hoping to die, but if it happens I don't lose much. Not like you can make good use of it in the same battle though, heh since you have to move sliders again. :s

[Potjeh]

You overestimate the power of numbers. It's all fine and dandy that three mediocre characters can theoretically beat one great character, but it'll never occur in a real combat situation. The stronger character won't go alone, he'll have his friends (even fresh alts in armour will do) to guard his flanks so you can get 2 characters to attack him at once, tops. It's all about concentrating firepower, and the side that can bring to bear the highest skill/character ratio will win, even if they're outnumbered 10 to 1. To illustrate with Starcraft references, imagine the strong character as a siege tank on top of a hill with a narrow approach, and the weaker characters are dragoons marching single file to attack the tank. If you park two tanks next to each other, they can take out an infinite number of dragoons, which would cost an infinite amount of resources, for just 300 minerals and 200 vespene.

As for ancestors, they are designed in such a way that they can be nothing but abused, and if you don't do it you're a silly LARPer like myself.

Anyway, I really don't see why the asymptomatic cap is so horrible. You can still raise skills to infinity, and it will still matter, only it will matter less at high level. But even then, if you have two players with equal player skill, a difference in character skill that gives just .1% advantage in attack weight will decide the battle, because H&H's combat system is so deterministic. What it does, though, is prevent the siege tank scenario in group combat.

[DatOneGuy]

You overestimate the power of numbers. It's all fine and dandy that three mediocre characters can theoretically beat one great character, but it'll never occur in a real combat situation. The stronger character won't go alone, he'll have his friends (even fresh alts in armour will do) to guard his flanks so you can get 2 characters to attack him at once, tops. It's all about concentrating firepower, and the side that can bring to bear the highest skill/character ratio will win, even if they're outnumbered 10 to 1. To illustrate with Starcraft references, imagine the strong character as a siege tank on top of a hill with a narrow approach, and the weaker characters are dragoons marching single file to attack the tank. If you park two tanks next to each other, they can take out an infinite number of dragoons, which would cost an infinite amount of resources, for just 300 minerals and 200 vespene.

As for ancestors, they are designed in such a way that they can be nothing but abused, and if you don't do it you're a silly LARPer like myself.

We've tested it, not only does it work, it works often. 2 characters with roughly 200 UA/MC each can overpower a 400UA/800MC character with ease.

The stronger character rarely has 'fresh alts' in armor around, and even then the idea is that you have to have more than them.

You should really try some mass sparring in with outbalanced numbers, the results are 'surprising' if you haven't tried it.

(I honestly don't play SC, never did, hate it, but I get your point).

However if you send in 6 'decent' characters at once against those 2 titans, 3 taking each they can handle him easily, it's all about tactic of each unit, something I'm assuming SC doesn't have as an RTS.

If you ever got a copy that leaked combat guide actually goes over how to do this in detail.