by Cookie » Sun Apr 18, 2010 2:19 am "Now I put my chicken coop on the right -with the little pink fence around it so it looks like it is a real chicken yard- and I put the bake ovens beside the wheat field with an apple tree for shade on either side of them -doesn't that look nice?- and I pave a little convenient path from the river up to my house and put all my hunting weapons in the cupboard on the right and all my gardening supplies in the cupboard on the left... Perfect!"
And then Joe Pvp comes along and if the nest-building player is home they get hit with a Bay12, but if they are not they come home from school to find the chickens are gone, the apple trees are cut and all the gardening tools are in the cupboard on the right.
Jorb and Loftar have addressed the problem of rage-quitters who drop the game because they lose their character to a sudden rush of Russians or 4chanfags, by giving the players reincarnation. It's a fine balance between character death being irrelevant and character death being annihilating. I'm wondering what about the players who quit not because of character death or even the frustration of having to start over when their little home gets trashed, but the ones who quit because they were playing for the love of their little plot of land, and once that plot of land has been trashed they don't love it any more. In fact they feel horrible about it. Just the sight of it now brings a lump into their throat. Warm fuzzy feelings gone, they click the red X and yet another claim is left to decay slowly until nothing is left except a treeless patch of land enclosed in a pink rectangle.
H & H wouldn't be H & H without the threat of someone attacking you. Neither would it be H & H without a host of players delighting in carving little homesteads out of the wilderness, connecting with neighbours and equipping their farm with every dark age convenience. You can protect your character investment by learning to fight, being wary as hell, investing in armor and making treaties with everyone in sight. But in case that doesn't work reincarnation exists to soften the blow. You can protect your homestead by building a claim, building a wall, planting fields in rotation and hiding things in vaults. However if that doesn't work there is no cushion to soften the blow for the homesteader.
Since the dev-gods have come up with a buff to protect your character investment, is there some way they could come up with a buff to protect your investment in your homestead?
I can't imagine what that buff could be. It's not the stuff that you can't salvage after hurricane Wayneville goes through that you end up mourning. Taming a second set of cows is easier than the first lot. You can probably get high q seeds through trade so you don't have to go back to hunting for www. Getting back to where you were after your village is stomped generally takes a lot less time than getting it there did in the first place, and yet people who are attacked give up in droves.
It's the connection to the place that gets broken. It doesn't feel like yours any more after someone else has proven they have more control over it than you do. Even the process of cleaning up the debris and removing stumps of what were once loved trees is part of the damage they do. You end up cleaning up someone else's mess.
