Scant regard for stats

[Potjeh]

Well, I'm not saying they'll be his own alts, it could be his faction members operating them. I'm suspecting you didn't make much use of cannon fodder in your combat tests, you have to put enough characters on the field to physically prevent encirclement. Of course this would require carefully choreographed movement of the whole group, but it can be done with enough practice. The only thing that could possibly circumvent this defence is ranger bows, but good luck getting any damage against a high level character, as he'll likely have a shitton of agi (this, BTW, is one of the reasons I advocate giving bows partial armour piercing capabilities).

Oh, and there's a lot more tactics in controlling individual units in SC than there is in controlling a character in H&H, but admittedly it's mostly because different units have different roles and combined arms win fights. But siege tank placement in particular can make or break you.

And yeah, I've read the guide, and it wasn't anything that'd convince me I'm wrong.

[Danno]

1)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.

Exactly. The risk/loss heavily outweigh the gain. There's simply no reason to attack anyone right now.

but none 'get you ahead', making huge spiders and marking grids? You get no LP. Writing 'AD' huge in grass? You get no LP.

It's because grinding plays such a heavy role in this game that we can't spare an hour to do fun stuff like that. Personally, I'm thinking of a huge event that will be shit for LP, but it should be a good time for all. If we cared less about LP/grinding, we'd feel more inclined to actually play the game.

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.

I thought you said it could be done without grinding/life dedication... And keep in mind not every "average village" will have access to the top materials/equipment/food. Getting a few hundred points in value to trade Sodom for abusable jewelry is also a great grind, and it would sure suck to lose that jewelry dying in battle. I'm sorry, but the average village doesn't have access to silver, gold, and amazing crafters to create these things themselves.
Besides, if you knew we were gonna attack you, you probably wouldn't sell the things to us in the first place. You might even ban them from the market if they were used against you by one group. Average villages really are quite powerless.

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.

Grindin'. I don't need 200 piles of flour or 200 plain bread. I'm at least using my wheat seeds to make the flour for LP, then it just goes to the floor. Might as well skip the time waste and just give me LP whenever I drop wheat seeds on the floor.

Saying I'm narrow-minded is just ridiculous

You keep insisting that H&H needs grind and WILL have grind. If you suggest other ideas, that's great, but I think it's narrow-minded to be so stuck on grinding. If we believed we must follow the examples made by existing games, we never would have gone beyond Pong. It's because some developers are creative and open-minded that we get new kinds of games that are fun and original. I think H&H should aim for that rather than follow suit. I mean, maybe they didn't even intend to make the game this grindy, so I don't mean to make it sound like they're trying to copy the worst feature of MMOs. Maybe they weren't ready for players to do everything possible and then resort to grinding, but that's how it came out, we all know it, and we all know it's boring to grind.

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

If you run out of numbers to raise, you have to find something else to do.

The fact that in Hnh you don't KNOW where your enemies are is fun as hell to me.

if your view of everyone else is "THEYRE SO FAR AHEAD I CANT RISK IT" then that's you man

That is an interesting aspect, but if my stats from 500+ hours of playing are considered worthless/newbie by someone who's more familiar with this game, then I think I have a good idea of where I stand compared to my enemies, especially since some people use macros and I don't. So I have to raise a combat alt, which would probably take at least 300 hours of grinding. At this point I'd probably keep it for my own defense rather than going out and making myself a new enemy. After all, my home would be defenseless after the enemy breaks through the wall. So, I better make a second combat alt since I wouldn't dare risk my main character.
I march my combat alt to my enemy's fortress. I build a ram and watch it for 24 hours if I didn't invest in this alt enough to make him a "pally basher". My enemies, if they're active, notice this before I can get in, so they shoot me to death before I can even get in. If they're inactive or if sieging was changed to be faster, I just left some mighty smelly scents and either the enemy or some random might wander by and kill me for it (or discover my home and attack it for justice). To avoid the former, I have to stake the place out for a couple weeks to find out when these people normally come online, then prepare to ambush them when they try to track my scents. Of course, they probably wouldn't dare track me if I'm shown as online. They'd only track me while I'm offline so they can summon+kill me.

You raise a valid point that it's my own fault for not taking risks, but to me it seems like it wouldn't be worth taking a risk unless I invested a few more hundred hours in combat alts and another chunk of time to trade for good equipment. But who wants to spend hundreds of hours grinding before they can PvP at all while there's a risk of losing your equipment/25% of your character's stats (if you went full tradition)? I know I sure don't. That's the sort of thing I might do only after I've grinded my way to establishment (see: at least 1200 hours of playtime).

Caps are the devil and should never be brought up, there are natural caps and they feel good and work good

Potjeh's idea, if it would take a significantly shorter amount of time to reach the "playable" PvP level, sounds like it would work better. I don't think we necessarily need to prevent players from advancing at all at a certain point, but if people keep seeing a need to improve themselves, they'll do just that.

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.

I don't think alts should be a necessary part of gameplay in the first place. This is just a potential solution if combat alts became a problem, which would be more likely if there was a low cap/pseudo-cap. But if they did have caps and wanted to allow a hermit to overtake all of the big villages with a slew of alts, alright.

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.

And we can see how often that happens with the current investment/risk involved.


It sounds to me like the only reason to prevent newbs from becoming a threat (unless they dedicate their lives to H&H) is just elitism. Why does it have to be 3 average characters vs. 1 god character instead of a fairly even 1 on 1 match? Like I said, I think only the Goons would be capable of handling combat in numbers like that. I'm currently in a village founded by some people from a different MMO we all used to play. Their stats are around half as good as mine (if not worse) and most of them are less active than I am; I think some of them even quit. There's no way me and/or my homedawgz can ever compete with established characters (who continue to grind and rise high above anything we could ever reach). Investing 1000 hours each, waiting/arranging for everyone to be online at the same time, and then attacking some other village just isn't worth the casualties we'd surely suffer.
Besides that, I'm not too keen on DESTROYING the game for other people for my own amusement. Chances are the people we're attacking would all be full change. I mean, who's expecting an attack in this world? Most of us think we're safe if we simply build a palisade, and that pretty much holds true. I'd like if we could all have fun. I wouldn't mind dying in battle if the investment/risk was much lower; I don't think many people would ragequit or become too frustrated/depressed/angry over that. We'd just attack and defend because we can; H&H would become about survival again. Survival+interaction>grinding

[DatOneGuy]

1)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.

Exactly. The risk/loss heavily outweigh the gain. There's simply no reason to attack anyone right now.

Yeah right now this is a problem but it's fixed by other means, doing what you said won't fix this, if anything it encourages it more because that LS alt is actually a fully spec'd character in combat.

but none 'get you ahead', making huge spiders and marking grids? You get no LP. Writing 'AD' huge in grass? You get no LP.

It's because grinding plays such a heavy role in this game that we can't spare an hour to do fun stuff like that. Personally, I'm thinking of a huge event that will be shit for LP, but it should be a good time for all. If we cared less about LP/grinding, we'd feel more inclined to actually play the game.

These things that aren't regular to the game actually do give you LP, since paving and grassing gives LP, pretty decent LP might I add.

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.

I thought you said it could be done without grinding/life dedication... And keep in mind not every "average village" will have access to the top materials/equipment/food. Getting a few hundred points in value to trade Sodom for abusable jewelry is also a great grind, and it would sure suck to lose that jewelry dying in battle. I'm sorry, but the average village doesn't have access to silver, gold, and amazing crafters to create these things themselves.
Besides, if you knew we were gonna attack you, you probably wouldn't sell the things to us in the first place. You might even ban them from the market if they were used against you by one group. Average villages really are quite powerless.

It can be. You grossly underestimate many forms of grind, bronze gear has long been known as one of the best ways to grind LP on a character, making bronze equipment is god tier LP and if you drink some tea and wear full pearl gear it's just like "Woah" ,I don't even do this and those numbers are based on the ways I get LP, you could get it way faster doing bronze gear.
I'm aware of the power difference in Jewelry, as I've stated before a fix is coming for that to change it around, big time.

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.

Grindin'. I don't need 200 piles of flour or 200 plain bread. I'm at least using my wheat seeds to make the flour for LP, then it just goes to the floor. Might as well skip the time waste and just give me LP whenever I drop wheat seeds on the floor.

Make pumpkin pie instead, you can always use more CON, or other foods. The whole point of farming for LP is to be useful.

[quote[

Saying I'm narrow-minded is just ridiculous

You keep insisting that H&H needs grind and WILL have grind. If you suggest other ideas, that's great, but I think it's narrow-minded to be so stuck on grinding. If we believed we must follow the examples made by existing games, we never would have gone beyond Pong. It's because some developers are creative and open-minded that we get new kinds of games that are fun and original. I think H&H should aim for that rather than follow suit. I mean, maybe they didn't even intend to make the game this grindy, so I don't mean to make it sound like they're trying to copy the worst feature of MMOs. Maybe they weren't ready for players to do everything possible and then resort to grinding, but that's how it came out, we all know it, and we all know it's boring to grind.[/quote]
You're also ignoring the fact that you aren't addressing a solution to the grind, you're just getting rid of a grind you don't like one for one you favor (getting one character to max and calling it a day), this is bullshit IMO, 'ends' are for regular MMOs, HnHs lack of caps is beautiful and unique and if you read all the other threads on the matter you'll see why caps (especially combat) are very stupid. They're attempting to regulate it so that grinding your ass off to 2k combat isn't worth much more than the 'average joe' getting to 1k in the same time but still holds somewhat of an edge. If you pay attention to updates, specifically combat oriented ones you'll see it's to help 'mid tier' players fare better against 'god tier' players, and it's been making a big difference. Before I would be having no problem going in fighting against your average guy, but now? I'm not so sure how well I fare, I need to spar more often and get better at combat to be sure I'm winning, this is the direction I wanted the game to go tbh as far as combat is and I hope it goes this way more, but caps just fuck it all up :V

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

If you run out of numbers to raise, you have to find something else to do.

Nope. Name me an MMO with an easily reachable 'endgame' that doesn't have some other predefined ingame system for you to 'get better at'.

The fact that in Hnh you don't KNOW where your enemies are is fun as hell to me.

if your view of everyone else is "THEYRE SO FAR AHEAD I CANT RISK IT" then that's you man

That is an interesting aspect, but if my stats from 500+ hours of playing are considered worthless/newbie by someone who's more familiar with this game, then I think I have a good idea of where I stand compared to my enemies, especially since some people use macros and I don't. So I have to raise a combat alt, which would probably take at least 300 hours of grinding. At this point I'd probably keep it for my own defense rather than going out and making myself a new enemy. After all, my home would be defenseless after the enemy breaks through the wall. So, I better make a second combat alt since I wouldn't dare risk my main character.
I march my combat alt to my enemy's fortress. I build a ram and watch it for 24 hours if I didn't invest in this alt enough to make him a "pally basher". My enemies, if they're active, notice this before I can get in, so they shoot me to death before I can even get in. If they're inactive or if sieging was changed to be faster, I just left some mighty smelly scents and either the enemy or some random might wander by and kill me for it (or discover my home and attack it for justice). To avoid the former, I have to stake the place out for a couple weeks to find out when these people normally come online, then prepare to ambush them when they try to track my scents. Of course, they probably wouldn't dare track me if I'm shown as online. They'd only track me while I'm offline so they can summon+kill me.

You raise a valid point that it's my own fault for not taking risks, but to me it seems like it wouldn't be worth taking a risk unless I invested a few more hundred hours in combat alts and another chunk of time to trade for good equipment. But who wants to spend hundreds of hours grinding before they can PvP at all while there's a risk of losing your equipment/25% of your character's stats (if you went full tradition)? I know I sure don't. That's the sort of thing I might do only after I've grinded my way to establishment (see: at least 1200 hours of playtime).

No risk no reward. :/
Again this is a problem with reward, it's not that you lose 'so much' it's a few things I see here as your problem when jumping into this:
1)You want a cap to tell you where your enemy is, real life isn't this way, games shouldn't be this way. You should have to guess (and there are many ways to pull out very good guesses when provoking enemies)
2)You assume a cap will fix this, you assume that somehow you spending 500 hours to level that character and then risking him anything will change because he's 'at max', it won't.
3)With caps any inheritance is stupid and shit and I love the ancestral system so far I just wish it was expanded. You'd lose everything with a system like this because gaining anything back is just stupid if there's a cap because you know where your enemy is when he comes back.

The 'pvp risk' you point out is not the same, I doubt you're going to go outside right now and poke Sodom, no you might poke a smaller village, they might have soldier's swords, maybe even dhelms, but you might be able to take 'em with decent combat stats.

Caps are the devil and should never be brought up, there are natural caps and they feel good and work good

Potjeh's idea, if it would take a significantly shorter amount of time to reach the "playable" PvP level, sounds like it would work better. I don't think we necessarily need to prevent players from advancing at all at a certain point, but if people keep seeing a need to improve themselves, they'll do just that.

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.

And we can see how often that happens with the current investment/risk involved.


It sounds to me like the only reason to prevent newbs from becoming a threat (unless they dedicate their lives to H&H) is just elitism. Why does it have to be 3 average characters vs. 1 god character instead of a fairly even 1 on 1 match? Like I said, I think only the Goons would be capable of handling combat in numbers like that. I'm currently in a village founded by some people from a different MMO we all used to play. Their stats are around half as good as mine (if not worse) and most of them are less active than I am; I think some of them even quit. There's no way me and/or my homedawgz can ever compete with established characters (who continue to grind and rise high above anything we could ever reach). Investing 1000 hours each, waiting/arranging for everyone to be online at the same time, and then attacking some other village just isn't worth the casualties we'd surely suffer.
Besides that, I'm not too keen on DESTROYING the game for other people for my own amusement. Chances are the people we're attacking would all be full change. I mean, who's expecting an attack in this world? Most of us think we're safe if we simply build a palisade, and that pretty much holds true. I'd like if we could all have fun. I wouldn't mind dying in battle if the investment/risk was much lower; I don't think many people would ragequit or become too frustrated/depressed/angry over that. We'd just attack and defend because we can; H&H would become about survival again. Survival+interaction>grinding

I put more effort in, I got out better results.

Isn't that common sense there? Of course if I spend 3x the time I should have better results than you. do you expect a child who never studied to do as good on a test as a child who studies 24/7? Do you expect a fighter who never trains and is in bad shape to beat a UFC champion? No.
The funny thing is they're being nice, in real life the UFC champion would simply slaughter you mostly because of technique, so they left that somewhat up to you it seems, your 'stats' are your stats, and someone with a potbelly COULD beat someone with a UFC champion's physique given technique, but it rarely happens, with that said they made the system similar to that (whether on purpose or it just happened to work I don't know, but I'm guessing on purpose).

If you feel so badly about it dig up Lothaudus's thread on the matter and actually reply, that Data could help (and help me understand why the hell you think a farmer with 1ua/mc/mm should be able to fair against an experienced warrior with 500+ in each stat.

--
Edit: Given your 'concepts' on the combat system I must ask, have you sparred much? Fought other people? hostiles? 2v1? 1v1? people with stats way above? way below? summonkilled?
What's your actual experience with the system?

[Oddity]

Of course, they probably wouldn't dare track me if I'm shown as online. They'd only track me while I'm offline so they can summon+kill me.

Where do you get this idea? Catching the perpetrator online is fun and often much easier than having to break into his place, which may not even be worth the time and effort.

[Danno]

These things that aren't regular to the game actually do give you LP, since paving and grassing gives LP, pretty decent LP might I add.

Well, they're not the worst LP around, but you'd get more if you turned those wheat seeds into flour instead of grass, so people are generally gonna choose to do that. Chipping stones is also a waste of time compared to other things you could be doing to advance your character.

It can be. You grossly underestimate many forms of grind, bronze gear has long been known as one of the best ways to grind LP on a character, making bronze equipment is god tier LP and if you drink some tea and wear full pearl gear it's just like "Woah" ,I don't even do this and those numbers are based on the ways I get LP, you could get it way faster doing bronze gear.

I guess that's nice for people who have bronze. Still, everyone praises wheat fields as the single best source.

Make pumpkin pie instead, you can always use more CON, or other foods. The whole point of farming for LP is to be useful.

If I have a river nearby, I can turned them into bread dough for more LP and then dump those. There's already more food in this village than anyone can eat. The only use for a 20x20 wheat field is for grinding (after we get our last stone mansion built).

You're also ignoring the fact that you aren't addressing a solution to the grind, you're just getting rid of a grind you don't like one for one you favor (getting one character to max and calling it a day)

why caps (especially combat) are very stupid. If you pay attention to updates, specifically combat oriented ones you'll see it's to help 'mid tier' players fare better against 'god tier' players, and it's been making a big difference.

Well, I'd prefer if there was essentially no grind and that gameplay was continuous/fun. It's not just me, nobody likes this grind - not even you. If my character could become established sooner, it just means I'd attack other people sooner or make an alt to do so sooner. So rather than waiting a year for me to attack you, you'd just wait a month or something.
I can only imagine how boring a battle would be if both combatants had equal stats. There would definitely be "perfect strategies" to win, so you'd just have your characters standing in front of each other doing something very predictable until one of you died by a very small margin. I think this is an issue with the combat system, though, not with the grinding nor with caps.

If you run out of numbers to raise, you have to find something else to do.

Nope. Name me an MMO with an easily reachable 'endgame' that doesn't have some other predefined ingame system for you to 'get better at'.

Well, I don't think I've ever really played an MMO that cut you some slack on the grinding. Space Station 13 simply doesn't have any form of grind or character improvement, so I don't think I can include that. DFO is probably the closest thing since my character is sorta close to the cap, but I don't even care enough to go that extra distance since there'll probably be some quests in the future to get me through those levels easier. I've enjoyed my fair share of PvP in DFO, made a new character of a different class close to my original character's level, and I've tried out some other classes (and some PvP on them). If you hit the cap and don't do those things, you can gamble your gold on reinforcing your weapon, which makes it slightly better, but also has a chance of destroying your weapon. I don't think that's really designed as a huge goal, though. It's mostly just "Sit tight till the next update, PvP, or make a new character."

1)You want a cap to tell you where your enemy is, real life isn't this way, games shouldn't be this way. You should have to guess (and there are many ways to pull out very good guesses when provoking enemies)
2)You assume a cap will fix this, you assume that somehow you spending 500 hours to level that character and then risking him anything will change because he's 'at max', it won't.
3)With caps any inheritance is stupid and shit and I love the ancestral system so far I just wish it was expanded. You'd lose everything with a system like this because gaining anything back is just stupid if there's a cap because you know where your enemy is when he comes back.

1) Not necessarily. I think the battle system could be more interesting with things like catapults, hidden daggers, poison-tipped weapons, etc. There are also variables in what combat mastery your opponents have taken on. They might hold swords in their hands to deceive you, but they might drop those, whip out their bows, and start sniping you. I want a cap for a better chance at an equally matched battle that would rely more on skill than stats.
2) Well, I'd always be up for an even lower cap. I assumed something like a cap at 150 wouldn't fly well at all and be controversial, but I imagine a cap at 50 would just be considered a joke. 500 hours is still something I wouldn't really risk too easily, though the following warriors would have an easier time getting up there if I could get my hands on a pearl necklace or whatever.
3) I like the general idea of the ancestors, but I don't like the current system. No one believes in tradition unless they're heading out to their own grave. Granted, you can't simply switch between tradition and change on a whim, but you can hand plow your stamina away and use your newfound hunger just to grind your stats a little more before heading out for battle. People reap all the benefits of change and only switch to tradition when it's convenient - I think this is pretty much abuse of the system and makes it pointless. As DeadlyPencil suggested in his thread, I think it would be better just to take the tradition/change slider away. Most of the prayers are pretty useless currently, moreso because people use custom clients (light + maps = worthless). The buff prayer sounds like it could be pretty devastating.
Your enemy might move to a new home after getting killed. The main reason that would be annoying is because he'd have to grind up his crop quality and stuff again, but it wouldn't be so bad if the grind was lessened.

I put more effort in, I got out better results.

If you feel so badly about it dig up Lothaudus's thread on the matter and actually reply, that Data could help (and help me understand why the hell you think a farmer with 1ua/mc/mm should be able to fair against an experienced warrior with 500+ in each stat.

Well, there isn't a whole lot of effort involved in this game. You just put more time in and/or started playing before me. I can also put time/"effort" into this game, sure. I could stop posting on the forum and spend more time grinding flour, I could setup a macro to improve my character while I'm asleep, I could multiclient and be grinding an alt while my main character is busy doing stuff like making bone glue. I could stop talking to my fellow villages whenever they're online, I could stop exploring... I could do a lot of things to make my character more efficient.
But this is all tedious grinding and it would be way more fun if it was put on a much smaller scale like in my Time Fcuk example. If you play for a week longer than I do, you'll be ahead, but then after a week or so I might be able to catch up and compete with you.

If you're talking about this thread, I don't think it would help much if I posted there. That survey was probably taken by people assuming things work with our current grind/LP system. When you think about Q10 vs. Q80, we all imagine a huge difference already. Assuming their values were changed to be more similar, it would be less confusing/misleading to simply say Q10 vs. Q20. It's a pretty drawn out survey and it's hard to compare answers. It would be easier to say "How important do you think skills vs. stats should be in battle?" to which my answer is around 70% skill / 30% stats, i.e. grinding should take up way less of your time.
A newb farmer with absolutely no combat skills doesn't need to be able to beat a fully trained warrior. Imagine stats were capped at 50, now throw a newb warrior against an experienced one, each of them fully equipped with equally abusable high quality jewelry and armour. You can imagine their base stats don't make a huge difference; it's more about the way they do battle. But, as earlier stated, I think the combat system also needs work so that this battle wouldn't be a simple matter of bashing two action figures together.

Edit: Given your 'concepts' on the combat system I must ask, have you sparred much? Fought other people? hostiles? 2v1? 1v1? people with stats way above? way below? summonkilled?
What's your actual experience with the system?

I can kill a fox unarmed, though it's pretty tedious. Unless I use "call down the thunder" first from a shore or other safe spot, the fox will gain combat advantage before I can do much. Then I have to break its defense out while taking damage until I can actually hit the fox. I've tried to fight a boar unarmed, but it gained combat advantage and initiative way too quickly, then it can do that heart beat thing to attack you at a pretty rapid rate.
I've also tamed animals, so I have some understanding of how the combat system/options works.
I sparred someone in my newbiest days, he was also pretty newbie. It took one or two sling shots to beat each other. Unarmed battles also ended pretty quickly.
I've one punched my armourless friends before as a joke.
Someone tracked me down for theft, but I logged on a little before they arrived, so they couldn't summon kill me. The only thing I could do was run because they looked heavily geared whereas I had leather armour since I've never had access to a mine. He KO'd me with a sling and sunk my boat.
I destroyed a thief's hearthfire and summoned him, let a boar rough him up, then dumped his naked body in a palisade with no gate (which I built around his own home).

The people in my village are pretty inactive and weaker than I am. We're not exactly a great military nation and I doubt any of us intend to charge out to the battlefield to get ourselves killed, so combat isn't on our priority list. I'm positive any properly equipped enemy could do us in pretty easily. I'm guessing I won't even be able to kill a boar until I can break its defense in one or two hits, which is surely a long way off from 48 STR + 52 UA (plus a bear cape and bear tooth talisman).

I don't have a ton of experience with the battle system, and chances are I'm not going to try it out much if I have to invest so much time into a combat alt (until I'm well established with around 1200 hours of gameplay). Why does this huge time investment have to be necessary? Why would it be so bad if you had new challengers coming in? I imagine constantly maintaining "winning" status would be as boring as constantly maintaining "losing" status. You can argue in theory that people can attack each other as is and that it's not hard to make combat alts, but reality is reality.

Of course, they probably wouldn't dare track me if I'm shown as online. They'd only track me while I'm offline so they can summon+kill me.

Where do you get this idea? Catching the perpetrator online is fun and often much easier than having to break into his place, which may not even be worth the time and effort.

I guess that depends on the village. A runestone with an empty threat of raiding was enough to scare one village off from securing their mine because they had bad experiences with raiders in the past. They killed one of our guys while he was offline (surprise!) since he left theft scents stealing stuff from the mine. They didn't kill him immediately even though they were spying on the mine; they killed him a day or so after the theft while the hasty guy was out in the wilderness with his wagon heading for the mine.
It may be fun and easy if you have god stats, sub-god stats, or a crack team of rangers, but I doubt you'd want to try it if you were just an average player. Or maybe if you could see that their crime was a newbie one. For example, stealing from a mine implies the thief doesn't have metal of their own; stealing from a settlement with no palisade implies the person is a common, petty thief. If someone's trying to ram your wall down by building a ram and a palisade around it, chances are they mean business and that you might not wanna mess with them. Why take the risk of getting your character killed in battle when you can kill the perpetrator while he's offline and then hide behind a wall? Not to mention you'd be full change and they'd be full tradition in a normal situation. If you enjoy tracking thieves down, then I guess you'd blatantly leave semi-valuables out in the open on your land claim.

[Jackard]

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

So, you haven't played WoW at all after The Shattering patch.

[DatOneGuy]

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

So, you haven't played WoW at all after The Shattering patch.

No, I really dislike WoW.

[rye130]

I can kill a fox unarmed, though it's pretty tedious. Unless I use "call down the thunder" first from a shore or other safe spot, the fox will gain combat advantage before I can do much. Then I have to break its defense out while taking damage until I can actually hit the fox. I've tried to fight a boar unarmed, but it gained combat advantage and initiative way too quickly, then it can do that heart beat thing to attack you at a pretty rapid rate.
I've also tamed animals, so I have some understanding of how the combat system/options works.
I sparred someone in my newbiest days, he was also pretty newbie. It took one or two sling shots to beat each other. Unarmed battles also ended pretty quickly.

So basically you have relatively no understanding of PvP and very little of the combat system in general.

[Valnar]

You can't really get rid of the grind in an MMO like this you can only make the grind fun.
If there are multitudes of things that you need to skill up and they are all fun and not extremely representative people will do them and it won't feel like a chore to them.
Also with this people that are able to spend many more hours on the game should not have an "absolute" advantage over people who can't spend as much time, they should have an advantage but other people should still be able to compete with them in some way.

[Oddity]

I'm guessing I won't even be able to kill a boar until I can break its defense in one or two hits, which is surely a long way off from 48 STR + 52 UA (plus a bear cape and bear tooth talisman).

You should be able to kill a level V boar easily enough at this point.