The Ghost of Christmas Future, II

[Robben_DuMarsch]

I think the way you stop walls from being ubiquitous is reducing their value. They are a lot of work to build, but they are extremely useful to the point they are quite literally necessary. I propose they should be for a specific purpose - Slowing down potential invaders, rather than acting as impenetrable barriers (if you ram check.)

There are two solutions, one severe, one less severe.

The less severe is to make people pay decay upkeep for their walls even if they are on claims AND allow rams to be invulnerable during their dry period. Essentially, they provide 24 hours notice of when you will need to actively defend your walls.

The more severe is to allow walls to simply be scaled by a consumable hook & grapple, that is fairly resource expensive.

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The obvious effects of this will not only be that walls will become far less common.... but they will also not provide absolute protection for people that leave scents. Leaving a scent will actually risk your life, rather than be a minor annoyance.

[Saxony4]

I think the best way to solve the issue of everyone building walls to prevent raiders is to give a bigger penalty to those who want to be assholes.

Kill your neighbor? You get taken to trial in a town hub and if found guilty you are hung.
Steal from someone? Into the dungeon/stocks you go!

SImple and effective.
Bonus points for putting skulls on pikes to deter crimes.

[TeckXKnight]

That doesn't address the issue of why walls are necessary though, that just punishes people for playing the game. We still suffer all of the same circumstances that years worth of work can be destroyed in a day or two. If anything, by just weakening walls we make it so that you don't even have that day or two of buffer, your belongings are as ethereal as the wind.

The core of the issue is that valuables, land, resources, and characters are important to players and we need some way to meaningfully protect them. Even if protection is an illusion, without it you're creating a meaningless environment. This is why you have to IMMEDIATELY build a brick wall, ram check, alt vaults, criminal alts, alts for everything in the current Haven. Players must do everything they can to protect their investments or else there's no point in playing the game.

Also, never suggest that the limiting factor for being able to utterly destroy a village just be resources. Cost never scales well. What seems expensive to a lone hermit is pitifully cheap to an advanced group. If you make it so woefully expensive that even massive end-game organizations struggle to afford it, no one else will ever be able to. Cost should only ever be there to limit excessive use, engage in realism or immersion, or to guide the player to understanding the game better.

But yes, if you make walls worthless then no one will bother with them.

[TeckXKnight]

I think part of the issue with walls being so ubiquitous is that they're actually solving problems on multiple levels currently. We use walls to keep invaders out, to protect ourselves from our own villagers, to guard resources, to block caves, etc.

More formalized methods of defending resources would be a huge step in the right direction so that we don't need to wall off a supergrid to protect a clay node. Establish an extraction structure or somesuch that can't just be vandalized but requires a degree of actual sabotage to inhibit, degrade, and eventually remove entirely. Hell, don't even give us a means to block the inhibiting. Make holding highly desired nodes impossible and ownership switches between groups that perpetually attack them. That way we don't end up with the current meta of one village owning a node forever.

Give us actual village mechanics besides just removing claims. As it is, the only way we can bar players from doing whatever they please is by erecting walls within walls within walls and abusing claim alts. Give villages the ability to interact with their members much like players already interact with players. We can restrict who can enter what land and use what's on the land. Let us set the severity for breaking these laws, such as automatically being ejected from the village if they murder another member. There needs to be some degree of automation in the control and maintenance of villages.

As for walls being a necessity around each and every claim and village, well, that's because they're the only form of automated defense that we have. No one can be on 24/7. There is no such thing as a small incursion either. This isn't ye olde times where a thief coming into town means a loaf of bread is going to be stolen. If a thief gets into town then you'll be robbed blind, your cows will and chickens will be slaughtered for the lulz, your q120 clay kiln will be broken, and if anyone left scents then they'll be summon killed. If there was a way to reduce and mitigate the damage that could be done to a village, then walls would be substantially less necessary. If someone breaking into my village just meant that I'd be losing a few turnips and a shovel then I wouldn't care.

[Dill]

I for one, like the idea of a vault. I like that people try to protect their stuff in something further then a village. Also that if you come by an active vault you know its worth breaking into. I think the problem with 'vaults' is that it is fairly easy to make a vault unraidable. Not unraidable by using a glitch but unraidable in the sense that if you log on once every day you can stop the raid. If we could find a fix for these issues of making 'legit' unraidable bases then I think vaults would be a nice thing for the game.

tl;dr don't ruin vaults find ways to make vaults less effective.

Also making walls useless would effect villages more then vaults.

[TeckXKnight]

I think the idea of this discussion is that the indestructible nature of walls, vaults, and other such ideas makes them detrimental to gameplay. Farmvillers need to farmville though and criminalscum need somewhere to stay safe. It's just the current meta is an all or nothing gambit. If a "vault" were a hole in the ground covered in leaves and with misleading footprints everywhere, obscuring rangers using scents to track, it could accomplish something very similar without necessitating a giant brick wall to be erected and then rammed.

[Kearn]

The difference between games like EVE and Haven is that there is a reason to kill people in EVE because there is an almost guaranteed reward, no matter how large or small. This doesn't carry over into Haven because of quality- and stat-warrioring; 100% of your stuff is going to be thrown on the ground and destroyed, even if it's all quality 600, because the guy killing you has quality 610 stuff which is in any and every way superior to your stuff. There is no way that some guy that just wants to play the game and collect his own stuff is ever going to be able to defend himself unless there's some kind of limitation on vulnerability of assets and characters. Permadeath becomes nothing but a way to harrass newer players because some bored jerk with a brickwall and 1000 UA can simply kick in the teeth of every hermit and destroy everything they own with no benefit to himself. There's no reason for anyone else to risk their own characters trying to track the guy down, and the respawned character is even less capable of dealing with the attacker or any other opportunists than before.

The game needs to have some kind of rebalancing towards giving something that's q400 some value to someone that has q410 things. I'm willing to bet a lot of issues would be resolved if high-quality resources were rebalanced to give more processed material instead of an inherently and totally superior item; an example would be quality 50 ore giving more metal per unit of ore and/or having a higher chance of refining into metal. To compare games again: some guy with a frigate in EVE can slowly but eventually get himself enough money to get a battleship and skillbooks to compare to the next guy, but the older guy will have better skills and more experience; some guy in Haven with a q50 clay node is just going to get steamrolled by the next guys because they have a q60 clay node and want to make your q50 node into 50000 bricks for their village.

On the topic of walls, I think some kind of tiered, expandable village centers would work well to deal with the five trillion brick nonsense that currently runs the game. If there was some ability for some dude or tiny group of friends to build a little stone fort and have some farming and industry outside of it while having a small, safe place to keep their characters and store some limited amount of stuff, I guarantee the game wouldn't look like modern Detroit after the first 6 months of a world. Obviously the keeps or whatever you'd build would have to be both expandable and exponentially more expensive, but also require a large amount of something common like stone to keep people from simply collecting funny plants, selling them to someone for a couple bars of metal, and then having exactly the game defenses available to the most advanced factions in the game. Making such village centers manpower-intensive instead of placing some arbitrary high-end material requirement would certainly help to even out the game and make the amount of protected storage scale with the amount of manpower. It'd allow smaller villages and new players to build some little place for them to hide some supplies and themselves in so that they don't get their characters murdered and everything kicked over because some moron felt bored. Obviously, though, you could keep walls around as something closer to a perimeter defense to keep out casual thieves and wildlife.

I dunno. I guess that's my rant.

[RubyRed]

Wall are for the most part are fine, but some good seage weapons (like ladders, or rolling towers so people can run into the place). Would be cool.

Still the issue of people that just lets say use a claim, some bored dude come in claim or not and punches down your house for the giggles, well ripping apart everything so that player cant come back. Its just kind of not a nice thing to do.

Ya I am fine with the game being grim and gritty. But a balance is needed some place. The bubbles need to be able to be popped but the smaller players need ways to not need the bubbles all the time.

Edit: But some of the always being on edge does give some motivation that is something that would be nice to keep. But even if things are made based off what we have now. The new feel will adjust how people play the game. Plus the way it looks there might be more wild animals out there to kill you lol.

[borka]

@Kearn
manpower means having more time to play gives you more security ? (i ask just to make sure that i got your idea right)

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Interesting that much of the discussion circles around "bad habbit" socialisation and not about "positive habbits" socialisation which has it's reason probably in the lack of govermental (-management) functions. We don't even have functions that would make "society building" possible, that's why we circle about "war game" issues but not talk about what's needed in an MMO like this.

Atm it's up to individuals to try "society building", but we all know how that goes and that those that tried on a bigger scale failed or got somewhat annoyed by their people that don't get the intention or just don't care. Sadly enough even factions like AD or DIS seem mainly halted on the invader status and didn't develop further. (i.e. Vikings / Britain / Normandie)

If we had tools for "society building" (you may call it nation building if you like) that even allows us to go further than Lawspeaker and Chief, discussions about how hard it is to build walls and secure them would go *poof*. (i.e. vassalage / jarl/ eastfrisian or germanic headmans /Fír flathemon /frisian consulate constitution)

Sure i'm aware that i can't code that

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37974&start=2040#p514184

[Denkar]

I think walls should be severely nerfed and combat should be made far more important when it comes to defending your town. This way the strength of "walls" would be directly proportional to the amount and strength of people defending it, and sieges and clashes could actually become a thing. I'm not sure how this could happen but it would require a slight rework of the combat system, mainly to keep people from just running around and away from fights.

Sure, this would mean hermits would be far more vulnerable, but that's realistic. If you want to live comfortably, go live in a town, or somewhere secluded where you won't be noticed. Perhaps making houses as strong as walls and adding house keys, so hermits could just live inside their homes without needing any huge walls to protect their property.
That's actually something I would really like now that I think about it. People don't build walls around their houses, that's stupid, homes are already supposed to be built of strong walls.