Final Words

[fratt]

Since my character just got murdered by Pumpkin and i dont plan to come back too soon, here a few things that i think are pretty bad about the game yet and should be thought about to change:

1. Str the only usefull stat, much too good, too easy to raise - make other skills work. meanwhile make str much harder too raise or at least create better food to raise the other useless stats.
2. Bears shouldnt be possible to trap (just make em 1 tile only like all the other creeps)
3. deers shouldnt heal foxes/boars/bears.
4. trapping deers by letting them attack you from north/west shouldnt be possible too.
3. collusion for players should be turned off (as jokkel suggested already in other thread)
4. somebody who tracks a criminal and takes revenge shouldnt become criminal too and shouldnet leave a scent.
5. armor pretty useless later on.. not worth all the mining, should be better in my opinion.
6. unarmed shouldnt be that good and weapons should have hp and brake after a while like armor does. repairable armor/weapons would be cool.
7. does rouse the rabble or how its called work? O.o
8. think about a new pvp system to make more players pvp. this tradition/change system is like pvp on or pvp off. the people i met while i was playing all seemed to be full change (even the experienced ones like blaze/rift/pumpkin). blaze even is full change and peacefull i think... 20k+ for lvl9/10 bear. but who wonders, no change no lp.. suggestion: get rid of the change/tradition thing, just make people loose ~10% lp/stats everytime they die and give people always 100% lp when hunting.
9. when you go hunt in groups it perma lags if the others are approx 1,5 screens away from you.
10. make stamina not drain that quick, its just annoying to drink tea every 2mins. more const - more stamina or less stamina drain for example.
11. id like to see other activities beside hunting giving more lp. cooking, farming, building streets, making cloth and armor/weapons for example.
12. a weapon skill that slows/cripples the enemy would be nice

Dont understand me wrong, i really liked the game in the beginning. the idea is nice and it was really fun to build up our village and discover the world. unfortunately it was the wrong time to start i guess because there was almost nobody playing. hope that was because of the upcoming reset and not because everybody got murdered and stoped playing like me =)

byebye
fratt

[JokkeL]

good ideas, all together. pvp atm is rly not that exciting or in other words: one-dimensional. i think with more stats coming into play on the new map (hopefully functional then) there will be an improvement in this issue.

the crafting / harvesting / building parts of the game are - as fratt said - very much fun.

[loftar]

1. Correct :)
2. Correct, but making their bounding box smaller wouldn't help (It would still be possible to build "traps" in various ways). Rather, better AI is what is needed.
3. Huh? Why?
4. That sounds like something that needs to be fixed, but I've never actually seen it myself and I don't quite understand it from your description. What happens, more exactly?
3(b). More precisely, I think the general problems associated with getting in and out of houses and mines should be fixed. Turning of collision testing between players would be too weird in my opinion -- you could collect entire armies of players on one pixel and what not.
4(b). For reasons described and re-iterated in the relevant announcement thread and elsewhere, that's not a good idea in itself. If anything, I am still weak for the general idea of making force summoning harder than just possessing a scent, but I cannot think of any better alternative. At least not for now.
5. Correct, more or less at least. I'd say the root problem is probably more related to how the fighting system works, but apart from that, it will be possible to make better armor given the quality system.
6. Correct -- weapons should be able to break. Half correct -- UACMB shouldn't be quite as broken as it is, but the same thing goes for many parts of combat, which will be revised later on. Finally, correct -- armors and weapons should be repairable.
7. I think so...? What makes you think it doesn't? Mind you, it only works on "rabble" -- that is, people who hold no official village position.
8. I agree that something needs to be done to balance tradition and change a bit. Not that I don't think that people are probably a bit too short-sighted in their choice of full change, but it is probably true that it's just too good right now.
9. I'm guessing that's the avatar problem. It needs to be fixed.
10. Stamina drain may have to be adjusted here and there, but there are ways to reduce it, really. I've never thought of it as such a great problem when I've played. Either way, water will help to recharge stamina on the new maps, although naturally it won't be as good as tea. :)
11. Agreed; very much so. The quality system will improve on that situation. Long term, though, I'd still like to replace the LP system altogether with something better.
12. Quite possibly, though it should probably be an instance attack or something rather than a weapon. After the map reset, one of the things I'm looking forward to implement is buffs, and use them to have a bit fun with the combat system.

[kobnach]

8. I agree that something needs to be done to balance tradition and change a bit. Not that I don't think that people are probably a bit too short-sighted in their choice of full change, but it is probably true that it's just too good right now.

I've experimented with various levels of the tradition-change slider, and the truth is, with tradition (and the pending map reset) I wind up playing runescape from a combination of boredom and lack of progress - but do play H&H somewhat. With change, I'll play H&H more for a while - but there's a constant risk of winding up murdered like the OP, and not coming back to H&H for a long time, if ever.

The 9:1 ratio of LP gained between full change and full trad is pretty extreme. One day playing on full change is worth more than a week on full trad. So the question for a player is - how long is it likely to be, on average, before someone tries to murder you - one could then compute an optimal trad level for minimum total grinding. My impression is that, for many people, that optimal level will be something like 1 point short of full change - particularly as the LP you gain from being almost full change may be enough that you can survive the murder attempt.

Unfortunately, while may be the optimal strategy, with those who don't use it falling far behind in LP, it's a huge shock when the predictable LP drops arrive - who wants to go from "kills level 10 bears solo" to "runs away from level 4 foxes' overnight ;-(

This is made a bit more complex by the effect of change/tradition on stat loss, which is equally unbalanced from what I can tell. Suppose a player has a strength of 200. To get this, they ate at least 10+11+12+13+....+199 strength FEP. Now suppose they are perfectly balanced between trad and change. If what I've read in the forums is correct, their descendant's stats will be decreased proportionate to their change/trad position - so they'll have 100 str in the perfectly balanced position. To get from 100 to 200 str costs 100+101+102+ ... +199 FEP. Let's sum these series. Starting FEP (10+199)*(199-10+1)/2 = 19855 FEP. FEP needed for new character to get from 100 to 200 (100+199)*(199-100+1)/2 = 14,950. In other words, saving "half" their stats only saves 25% of their FEP - the other 75% need to be regained. Ouch. So someone stat focussed probably wants more tradition than someone LP-focussed, with the current system. (At least, I think so - I'd be happy to hear that the stat recovery is based on FEP ratio - ie a square of the stat value - rather than simple stat numbers.)

[Ford]

Have you ever been murdered loftar? (where you stood to lose a lot)

[theTrav]

loftar has been murdered, (by jorb) but his perspective on the game can never be the same as ours... Firstly he's a dev, so anything he wants, he can do, period. Secondly he's not in it to be the strongest, fastest whatever player. It's just a sandbox for him to play around with every now and again and use the fun mechanics, and more importantly, watch what other people do with it.

RE Change vs trad. Maybe drop the LP bonus on change and instead make it let people move their belief sliders around more often?

[Erik_the_Blue]

I look at the tradition/change slider this way:

If someone's full change, they need to be constantly improving their character in order to survive future murder attempts, or else they stand to lose everything; thus a full change character should be playing all the time, which means they get even more LP than everyone else. The less they can play (and develop their character), the more of a risk it is to be at full change; thus such a person should move towards tradition. This means they'll have less LP than full change characters, and thus are still at risk of not surviving future murder attempts by full change characters. To reduce what they lose, they move further towards tradition, but increase their risk of not surviving a murder attempt by doing so. The end result is that those who can't keep up with the full change crowd should be at or near full tradition. Since one's position on the tradition/change slider correlates with how much they play the game (according to this theory), the LP gap between characters at the two extremes is even greater than what might be expected. Of course, this doesn't take stats into account, nor active players who are risk adverse, nor players who don't mind dying.

Short story: Players that play a lot can risk being at full change. Players that don't play a lot should move towards tradition in accordance with their risk of being murdered (or dying in general, even). In the end, active players will earn more than nine times the LP of less active players over the same length of time (not time played). This further stratifies active players from less active players.

[fratt]

@loftar

3. deers healing bears/foxes/(boars): i just find it strange to see deers healing animals that might kill em after =)
4. deer bug: if the deers are coming from north-west (from the top) when they want to attack you, they kind of bug and dont attack anymore. you can switch combat meditation on and kill em without taking any dmg. just try it.. attack deer run south-east, stop,w8 till the deer arrives.. always works.
7. rouse the rabble: ahh ok, tried it on hirdsmen.. didnt know that rabbles are citizens without any rank.
8. trad/change: sure it is shortsighted, but what should one do? no chance to catch up ever as a new player if you dont go change. if you are happy with a character that is the "rabble" for the rest of its existance tradition sure is an option. just make sure to hand over your agi cheese and apple pies every time your self declared landlord comes by and everything will be alright.
10. stamina: its not that bad ofc but its a little annoying. i usually had 5 tea pots with me in the end.. why not spare the players this clicking by giving more stamina and better tea? maybe 4 or 6 leaves for a tea pot then... just a suggestion, no big thing actually
guess if i had fought normally when pumpkin murdered me and didnt try to make some time till friends arrive by running around (and unfortunately getting trapped every few seconds in collision with pumpkin), i would have had to drink hmm.. 2 or 3 pots of tea till the fight was over =) isnt that a little strange? =)

[ArPharazon]

8. I agree that something needs to be done to balance tradition and change a bit. Not that I don't think that people are probably a bit too short-sighted in their choice of full change, but it is probably true that it's just too good right now.

What do you think of: 1) Make ratio 4:1 while keeping revival recovery rates the same. 2) Add two (expensive and high level) buffs to shift your alignment up to 4 points in either direction. Castable once every RL 24 hours or so, probably expires before that.