Game Development: Villages

[Pansy]

Pink or pale blue, depending on the gender

[Pansy]

Sorry, I guess you mean which attributes, not which fep.

Pink increases your sexual deviance and pale blue increases your antisociability.

[Lothaudus]

Am I supposed to be "leaving my village" whenever I enter the cave which is within my village's claim?

When someone get's online and sees their authority already at 39k like a trading neighbor of ours and then grinds for hours in effort to get it back up some, only to realize that 15k a day means they have what, 3 days left, maybe more if they can somehow break even. What "data" do you need to verify her conclusions? You will consider it "Obvious" and a "mistake" AFTER everyone loses their villages?

To be blunt, I do believe it means A LOT of n00bie villages are going to pop-out of existence. It might've been nice if loftar had started every village at full authority to allow villages a chance to login, adjust to the change, see the drain rate and effect a plan to do something about it. As it was OVER THE EASTER LONG WEEKEND WTF, I know my own village went through an OH GOD WE HAVE TO LOGIN AND SAVE THE VILLAGE moment. Even now, with the improved gain rate, we're only 16k above the 50k min auth.

It does not take a rocket scientist to calculate 15k and a quick overview of their situatioin to thrash it out. As for you Int/Chr stuff, blueberry spawn is as pathetic as everything else except taproot and mushrooms. As for her stats, I don't know the numbers but she of course has more than 10 Chr she formed a damn village and even with her chr/int she could see how long and how much of a grind it would be just to get some of the 15K ALP (since you have to triple+ that in character lp we'll give it a new name of it's own) to try break even tonight with 1 citizen in Germany on vacation, the other halfway across the country on a truck haul and the other working a spring break double shift sloshing drinks to sunburnt fools (also what me and Rhiannon have to be doing for the next month) here on Panama City Beach.

For the record, I only have 10 Cha and 10 Int because they're not stats I ever bothered about.

Now, this change gives some incentive to getting those stats. As sabinati pointed out, the higher your int and cha, in fact, the easier it is to maintain a village. An alt with about 100 of each will have no problems maintaining a village. That does seem to indicate that the higher level players will as always, take the most advantage of the system with several satellite villages, while the n00bs will struggle to maintain their one and only village.

However, it means the mechanism becomes much like swimming. Don't bother with it unless you have 40 of each. In the interim, personal claims may have to suffice. Once upon a time I used to have 50 Int because all I did was live off of fishing... Though that was back when there was only one type of fish, fishing rods never broke and they didn't need a hundred different bits and pieces of equipment.

Like swimming, I predict much whinging and whining as people complain about it. Some rightly, some wrongly.

To your claim that it isn't about running off all the casuals nor favoritism then tell me how worried YOU are, tell me how worried Sodom is, or the other couple of towns where the goon squad and "Private forum friends " all nest together. I doubt there is much worry going on about losing your villages. Did the "private forum group" know this was coming? (Just curious regarding what I read elsewhere on that issue)

I'm not a member of 'Ze Secret Phorumz' but I knew it was coming. jorb has mentioned before that he wanted abandoned claims and villages to de-grade over time. Houses now de-grade, it's only natural claims will have to as well. Otherwise it'd be pretty funny to come across a great big empty patch of land but with a fat-ass claim over it.

I have to say I'm also not surprised that the initial system was b0rked to all fuggery. ref: Personal hunger and the initial appetite of tamed animals, especialy pregnant ones. Those Crazy Swedes really do have a habit of implementing some kind of X-TREME system on day one.

To the numbers, of course people are curious, the more come the more talk, the more it spreads, visits are no measure of success it is only a measure of current awareness and or advertising. Of the 50 mmos I've tried I doubt any of them could count my couple weeks visit a "successful convert". Revolving door noobs can always keep the numbers high on paper...just ask Atlantica who got caught trying to advertise those numbers to commercial clients as "Active members" for their advertising dollar and nearly got sued out of a game when some inside employee went Narc on them.

This is just you bagging the game by argy-bargying over the number of people playing it and has nothing to do with the village authority issue.

jorb's point with the graph: We had ZERO people playing once upon a time. You can see that more and more people are playing the game and for a god-damned ALPHA, it's doing pretty all right. Considering on day one there probably was no such thing as village claims, the world was some tiny-ass over-crowded map, there were no boats and animals probably raped you up the ass the minute they saw you and then came back for seconds.

Just as change push some people away, change will also attract people given enough time.

Overall, it is clear as crystal, this radical update is a repulsive perversion of a justified and simple mechanic idea regarding allowing abandoned villages to decay (what Avu said). Instead of addressing that in a decent simple fashion it seems indeed like some radical favoritism to a small group and total grief to the majority casual players who have learned and been taught to stay small and secure and trust no one due to the atmosphere.

... and now you will learn and be taught that before founding a village, it would be a good idea for you to get some Int and Cha.

I mean look, I'm half-expecting my own village to disappear at some point because we won't be able to maintain it. And at that time, I will be very upset about the issue. However, we did last quite a long time without a village before we managed to get 5 people on-line at the same time in order to found it in the first place, so...

As it is, I think the mechanism will work quite nicely. I disagree with the 2 weeks time-limit if everyone abandons it as I'd prefer that to be about a month but it simply means people need to be online and playing as members of that village, so that the village remains. And even then, one person with decent Int and Cha would be able to maintain quite a large village independently for a long time.

In other words, when you encounter a village, no longer will it be a question of whether "this place is abandoned" or not, like I'd wager half of them were on the old map. N00b villages typically have a lot of people, which drops as time goes on, so on the whole I think the Int & Cha balance it reasonably well (older players will naturally have higher Int & Cha). I'm certain Blaze (a guy from the old map) would probably be able to single handedly fill 10 villagers auth meters up himself in one day.

If you personally feel the numbers are skewed, propose your own solution for a system that allows abandoned villages to decay naturally while active villages remain. How much LP should a group of casual players with low Int and Cha be expected to grind per day and now balance that against higher level players, some of whom do nothing but grind all day.

(What did Loftar say? to make it "harder" for solo or small villages = pretty much impossible = no causal players allowed unless ya want to be a SodomBread baking slave of his Sodom friends)

I'd ask you: Why do you NEED a village?

I realise it's nice to have one but if a village now needs a bit more thought than just "let's get 5 people online", is that such a bad thing?

[ThirdEmperor]

Okay, I see why the devs did this, inactive villages should degrade so people can reclaim the resources, this is good.
You have made it so people must grind endlessely to sustain their village, this sux.
The macroes will soon make the world a treeless wastle of plowed ground, I'm gonna cry.

How about making villages drain numen? One point per day for charter stones, 1/5th for banners, 1/3rd for statues (these numbers are probably off quite a bit.) This would make village sustaining virtually unmacroe-able without mega complex macroes. Or maybe once per week each villger could "pray to the ancestors" at the idol, the more people do this at once the longer the village idol remains charged.

[Haba]

I think it is bad design to force people to grind to maintain their village (or create the mental image that they need to do that, even if the number show the opposite).

Village authority should be something that enables them to do things they cant do with normal personal claims. You know, give a sense of common achievement for the entire village.

Our village seems to be doing o.k. after the tweaks, with 20+ statues. But even we cant really teleport people, remove claims or remove villagers safely. And then there is the question of mining outposts. We really desperately need to have the option of extending village influence to remote location so we won't have to make individual villages and grind individually there (which is just a waste of our time, and your bandwidth).

All in all I do see the necessity of having village claims eventually decay, though I disagree with the two week part to some extent. At least in the more final worlds with no reset looming in the background, a village should not just disappear in mere weeks. Maybe rather have different levels of villages, and degrade in levels as your auth declines. For true casual players, 20 minutes per day is already peak activity (1-2 per week is more realistic), and much of that time is not actually spent making LP (doing silk, steel, chickens etc.).

On more positive side, village authority can be used for interesting avenues too; imagine village to village conflicts where villages put their authority into stake (our shields are low, grind more bears boys!). Or a desperate duel between two champions of opposing villages, where both villages sacrifice their village authority to boost their fighter.

[Onionfighter]

rage

Let me suggest a solution: don't try to maintain a village by yourself.

[Sarge]

Sorry, I guess you mean which attributes, not which fep.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he meant FEP... and I found it quite funny

[SynthesisAlpha]

With about 6 people online, our authority went up 50k in an hour. Unless you're trying to maintain a village completely by yourself, this should be no problem.

And if you ARE, eat some damn food. Make a Necromancer's Cloak (or trade for one!), set your sliders to full civilization, and wear a bear tooth talisman. Hey, suddenly you've got 30 int and 30 charisma. Now you only need to grind 2k 'base lp' per day. For reference, if you have a single 6x6 wheat field, you get 360 base LP for harvesting it, another 360 for replanting it, and, assuming full nature, 36 flour and 36 bread or other baked goods would get you another 1400 or so base LP.
Hey look, you just maintained your village for a day with 15 minutes of work in a single 6x6 wheat field.

P.S. Calm the fuck down.

[Haba]

[--]maintained your village
a day ...
work ...

Seriously. You're actually happy that you only HAVE to WORK in a GAME for 15 minutes EVERY DAY just to be able to PLAY THE GAME.

Wow. Seriously, sit down and think about it for a moment (not trying to flame here you Synthesis, you just gave a good example).

What the fuck is wrong with us?

[SynthesisAlpha]

What are you talking about? I'm providing numbers to counter the "Oh god i have to cut trees for 3 hours a day" that the crazy people are screaming about.

Mind you, that 15 minutes of gameplay is not only something that you would probably normally do anyway, but is also only required by a SINGLE person in an entire village to maintain the authority of the village idol.

Did i mention the WORK i'm doing in the game to PLAY THE GAME... is the game? I mean, Haven and Hearth, the gameplay is Farm stuff, Mine stuff, Kill animals, Build Houses, shit like that. The reason I cited the example of harvesting a wheat field is because that's a very routine activity that most players will be doing. I could have said kill three boars, or cut 40 trees, or make 20 portions of rustroot extract.

Perhaps I should have said 'gameplay' rather than 'work', because that's the same as someone 'working' towards an epic mount in World of Warcraft, or 'working' on your awesome fort in Dwarf Fortress.

So yeah, one person has to play the game for a half hour a day to maintain a village. If anyone is actually paying attention to village authority, it should be pretty goddamn okay. If you're having problems, go eat some foxes and grapes.