by Danno » Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:45 pm Jackard wrote:Show some restraint and ban yourself.
Well, that was easy enough. This will be my last post here.
Now, I've been called all sorts of stupid for suggesting H&H should not focus on grinding. I have returned fire against the community, but it is not because I hold anything personal against any of you, nor is it because you simply disagree with my ideas - it's because the things you say do not make any logical sense at all. H&H can be a good and unique game, and I hope it becomes one. It does have a fairly high level of success for an indie game, but I think the grinding is holding it back immensely. I see things in this game and get an idea of what the devs intended, but the intentions have been overruled by efficient/robotic focus on grinding.
Why do you want this game to have grinding?
You've been playing for years and you know it takes months to build up your super character and q400 crops. Perhaps you did not realize it since you were sluggishly progressing along the way, but everyone who starts the game after you is behind you by months. They have to do the same grinding before they can compete with you or else they'll simply be beneath you as inferior players.
"They can just forage pearls for hours and trade some for our q400 crops, then they can catch up faster."
If you like grinding and think it's a good game mechanic, why do you encourage everyone to skip the grind?
"You don't have to grind in this game."
No, but you also can't pvp unless you make sure to always travel in packs of 3. This game is not really designed to be played in a group. Why bring a group to kill a bear when one person can do it alone with a sling? Why bring a group to forage when you could get 3 times as much stuff if you go in separate ways? Why do anything together when you only need your fellow villagers for a minute to craft your armour or cut high quality boards for you?
"If you don't like grinding, you can build impressive things."
As much as I'd like to, H&H has few options for building. If I wanted only to build things, I'd play Minecraft since it's clearly more focused on that and far superior in that aspect. It will also only set you back that much more since the other players have been productive in that time with things that will raise their stats. Doing anything other than playing as efficiently as possible is pretty much considered foolhardy in this game, so why even bother?
"But Final Fantasy and many other successful RPGs had grinding. H&H is an RPG so it should also have grinding."
Final Fantasy 1 was incredibly boring. It may be a shock, but it was also one of the more grindy games with few visuals. Most modern RPGs will have your character progress as you play the game so that you will never need to specifically step out into the woods for an hour and grind. H&H is similar to some degree; you don't have to specifically grind at first, you just progress as you play the game. After you finish building your wall, homes, and basic necessities, pretty much all that's left is grinding, though. MMOs are capable of having infinite gameplay and infinite challenges against a virtually infinite number of human opponents that can have varying strategies... that is, when grind doesn't allow veterans to trump every other player in the game solely because they have been playing longer and grinding longer. Removing or giving a low cap to grinding would let you fight and die without much worries, adding some actual replay value.
Furthermore, RPGs have a storyline, which is pretty much their best part. H&H is not a standard RPG and should not be treated as such. It has no storyline, enemies and visuals are the same all around the world, no bosses, it has no human NPCs, it has no quests, it has no gold/experience from defeating enemies.
H&H has many unique and interesting aspects, but the grind casts a shadow upon it all. It causes people to do stuff like disable graphics or not use direct combat against animals since it allows them to progress stats more efficiently and reduce/eliminate the risk of dying in this game. A game without graphics might as well be a text-based game. Why don't you play a text-based game if all you care for is the numbers?
In a fully pvp game where everyone is afraid to pvp due to the months of investment they could lose, this game is pretty uneventful. Half of combat occurs offline when someone summons a defenseless perp and kills them. You can theoretically argue how viable pvp is, but the reality is that it pretty much only happens on the last day of the world. People have fun and go to war for a change solely because the grind is thrown out the window. I'm not saying everyday has to be chaos, but wars would make this game more interesting than spending the year getting that q1000 flax.
Anyhow, I quit. I find the community to be illogical to the point that it is shameful and frustrating. The game is pointless to play since I can't compete with bots, people who play the game with every waking hour, or people who have such incredible focus on grinding stats that it allows them to consider 100 or 200 stats nothing. I've built villages before with fancy decorations, got established, beat the wild, never been killed or raided by griefers/murderers/super villages. That's about as far as I can go, I suppose. I hope the devs will do the right thing in the end, as they did with changing LP per action to the curiosity system despite the controversy there.
Well, enjoy your grind.
