Why should I keep playing?

[BlaineCraner]

Two weeks ago a pal of mine told me about an interesting game. Haven & Hearth. The graphics looked cool, the idea sounded awesome and I liked the ideas about magic. I never liked MMO's but decided to give it a try anyway.
During the two weeks I had lots of fun. With my friend we started to build a farm, from a humble shack up to a nice and organized ranch. After some time we invited some more players and started thinking about making a village. It was awesome!

Everything was going OK, until some dude armed with bad grammar and a sword showed up.

Long story short – everyone is now dead and the ranch is almost leveled to the ground. Each one of his attack killed almost instantly.

Two weeks wasted. Everyone is pissed off. All those hours and LP wasted (we had max in Peaceful and Change).

I liked this game up to that point and I would love to continue, but I don’t have the patience (nor do my friends) to go through rebuilding the whole ranch from scratch just to see it ruined again.

Tell me then, why should I continue to play?

And please, give me some serious answers.

[Avu]

If you can't handle perma death and doing what is needed to protect yourself you shouldn't really.

[spectacle]

If you mainly enjoy the building aspect, then consider joining an established village. They should have a brick wall to protect against random intruders like that, so you can build stuff and farm to your heart's content inside, and be respected and valued for the good produce you contribute.

[BlaineCraner]

Perma death isn't the problem. Getting everything you build from scratch destroyed every time you try to find a mine / arm yourself / have fun is my problem.

And from what I know, I’m not the only one who had difficulties with this issue.

About the villages: I found much too many ruins to believe that there is a serious one.
And we wanted to build something independent, something from scratch. For me that is the fun part of this game. Where is the fun of building something in a village that is already finished?

[spectacle]

Then you'll just have to deal with it I guess, if you still like the game. Try to get a brick wall up ASAP, then you'll be protected by all but the most determined attacker. Just consider it part of the challenge that there are such bad guys around. Also, you were really unlucky to be attacked like that. The 2 first villages I were in had their brickwalls unfinished for months, and we never had any trouble. If you found a new settlement deep in the forests of the outer grids, you'll have a very good chance of staying unnoticed until you have a wall up.

[aso11]

sorry for your loss, man. but that's the way this game goes. Albiet, I never got raped by other people, only bears and boars.

[NaoWhut]

When i see threads like this, it makes me
wonder if that's really how i make people
feel when i cut them down unexpectedly, do
all the people i put on display as a trophy
want to just give up when i take them out?
No, the ones that give up are failures,
i've killed people who go on to be great players
and people who never open the game again.

Why should you continue playing? You could
be an El_Diablo or an Lman, i've killed them
both, El_Diablo seems to have gone on to
great things, Lman... yeah......

[Gotrek64]

I had a rather peaceful beginning myself although there always was the looming threat of a village named Scevin coming to raid my first village....

[Reeyfer]

Same here Gotrek, I rarely got attacked in the beginning and the couple times I did it was just people sniping from behind trees with ranged and I could run off or log off without them hitting me. Then I got killed one day and robbed of all I had the next. The robbery was especially grating because it was a noob with a pumpkinhead who took my boat with my stuff in it, and I even got in the boat before he could take off but I left my sling in a chest to get more storage in inventory so I couldn't do anything even though I could have probably killed him. We played a little game where he'd get out on the bank (because he definitely couldn't kill me) and start destroying the boat and I'd hop out and try to hop back in the driver's seat at which time they'd get in first (because they already had the avast menu open of course) and I'd get in just as they pulled off. Eventually the retard figured out he could just pick it up and teleport (I was waiting for that one lol).

And Nao a lot of them are probably just leaving until the next world, or the "finished" game (if its ever truly finished), rather than try to get on even footing with juiced up no-lifers such as yourself. IRL random killers would of course be overpowered and then probably tortured to death by an angry mob (or raped to death in the case of a woman I suppose). Unfortunately HnH allows you to become an ubermenche well beyond human limits, just like all mmos, even worse because there's no level cap and next-level difficulty only raises geometrically. So unless you start at the start of the world, or you devote all your spare time to just the game (and have lots of spare time) you're pretty much screwed. Even if you do get all leveled up it doesn't much matter because you've got to log off sometime and people can punch holes in your walls. So what's the point for them, when they could just wait until a time when they could possibly get equal level with their harassers, and when whatever they built would last that much longer before the next wipe?

[Thurrok]

You want a reason to play this game? Well, there's good guys and bad guys and big factions and hermits and swords and walls and rams and... well, you get the idea. Most people I know who left the game didn't do so because of getting killed, but because they had done everything there was to do. Getting killed would, at best, renew my interest in the game because then, there'd be a new goal: to start from scratch, reach where I had gotten before and surpass myself.

Joining an established village really is important if you don't want to get razed to the ground. This "broken" game mechanic is what separates HnH from Farmville and tbh I like it. We could argue about walljumping and brickbreakers being a broken mechanic, but loftar doesn't seem to care enough to fix them and if you live in an active village, chances are you can atleast call some allies for help before shit actually happens.

In case you really want to live in your own village, I recommend sticking to Avu's village security guide. In short, it says that you MUST HAVE a Brickwall and you MUST NOT carry keys on you. Also, from my own experience, I've found that diplomacy tends to work miracles when facing a problem like this. 2 weeks' playtime can be easily brought back/surpassed by buying some mid- to high-end seeds, metal tools and better-q production equipment. But don't forget, FOR GODS SAKE, BUILD A BRICKWALL FIRST.