by TeckXKnight » Thu Nov 07, 2013 1:39 am
An elegant solution to the issue of curiosities is a difficult one. Ideally you'll want to reduce grind for the sake of grind, which curiosities were able to do brilliantly, but at the same time discourage massive amounts of offline play, which we see because of curiosities and alts, and reduce the time investment necessity so that casual players aren't immediately stomped on by veteran players to at least some degree. The argument that bots will run and earn lp and develop themselves without players is a moot one as that bot is now functionally a player and has achieved Terminator status; thanks for creating SkyNet asshole. Discouraging botting can be part of the lp solution but it cannot be the sole center of it or whatever idea comes up will miss the other points.
The old system of grind is never coming back.
The current system of curiosities has done much to teach us of what's going on but is, in my opinion, dated and ready to be replaced by something better.
I'm sure many of us have been pondering long and hard on what kind of system would be necessary to accomplish a better gameplay experience. As such, it is safe to say that there is no 'change this one little thing and everything will be fixed' solution available.
Even without bots, being forced to be online for curios to work doesn't stop most players. Setup a palisade, run 10 clients, and have them sit inside of a house inside of your walls. Multi-clienting is already a common practice for resource gathering and the client is so unintensive on most computers (considering that my old laptop could run Haven and it was nearly a decade old) this isn't far fetched. Then of course you run into the issue that this creates a huge gap between players who can only play for 4 hours a day and those that will leave their computers on 24/7 to maximize lp gain, like we see with bots who automatically log on every few minutes to replace curiosities.
Edit: Also farming as it is needs to go and so does the belief slider. Both are archaic and, along with the hunger system, greatly contribute to the problems of Haven. Fixing them will go a long way to improving character development and the flow of the game.