What really sucks

[AnonWat]

Have you heard of the "Chuck Norris Facts"? There are more than 50,000 jokes making their way around the Internet that purport to be "facts" all playing off my movie roles as a "tough guy" and my history as a martial arts champion. But they aren't "jokes" to those who spread them – they're "facts." Here are a few of my favorites: * "When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris." * "Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants." * "Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris." These "facts" have become a phenomenon – a fad spread mainly by young people of high school and college age. It's hard to explain why these things happen – how they take on a life of their own. Naturally, over the past couple years as this wildfire has been raging, people have asked me, "What do you think of all this?" My answer is always the same: Some are funny. Some are pretty far out. And, thankfully, most are just promoting harmless fun. (But be careful if you go searching for "Chuck Norris Facts" on the Internet, because some are just not appropriate for kids.) Being more a student of the Wild West than the wild world of the Internet, I'm not quite sure what to make of the craze of "Chuck Norris Facts." It's quite surprising. I do know that boys will be boys, and I neither take offense nor take these things too seriously. I'm so grateful for my fans. Who knows, maybe these one liners will prompt some one to seek out the real facts about me and the beliefs that have shaped my life and my career. While I have as much fun as anyone else reading and quoting them, let's face it, most "Chuck Norris Facts" describe someone with supernatural, superhuman powers. They're describing a superman character. And in the history of this planet, there has only been one real Superman. It's not me. Let me illustrate using a few of the claims being made about me in the various lists of "Chuck Norris Facts": Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: "Faster than a speeding bullet ... more powerful than a locomotive ... able to leap tall buildings in a single bound... yes, these are some of Chuck Norris' warm-up exercises." I've got a bulletin for you, folks. I am no superman. I realize that now, but I didn't always. As six-time world karate champion and then a movie star, I put too much trust in who I was, what I could do and what I acquired. I forgot how much I needed others and especially God. Whether we are famous or not, we all need God. We also need other people. If your whole life is spent trying to make money and you neglect the people important in your life, you will create an emptiness deep in your heart and soul. I know. I fell into that trap. I dedicated my whole life to fame and fortune. I had a huge hole in my heart and was miserable until I met my wife, Gena, who brought me back to the Lord. Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: "There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live." It's funny. It's cute. But here's what I really think about the theory of evolution: It's not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live. We are not creations of random chance. We are not accidents. There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me. We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures. By the way, without him, I don't have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things – and so can you. Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: "Chuck Norris' tears can cure cancer. Too bad he never cries. Ever." There was a man whose tears could cure cancer or any other disease, including the real cause of all diseases – sin. His blood did. His name was Jesus, not Chuck Norris. If your soul needs healing, the prescription you need is not Chuck Norris' tears, it's Jesus' blood. Again, I'm flattered and amazed by the way I've become a fascinating public figure for a whole new generation of young people around the world. But I am not the characters I play. And even the toughest characters I have played could never measure up to the real power in this universe.

Countered. With a REAL, wall of text.

[Jackard]

19) Maps. Jesus Christ. I won't be able to find my claim again. I need some sort of map that reaches the entire world. Minimap does not cut it. I need to be able to mark shit on a map that I don't have to spend a century of skill development and travel to be able to use efficiently. If I could build a recording device, a travel journal, that I could then spend some time writing in, that recored little logs of where I'd been, how far I'd traveled, (maybe even what I'd done since the last entry) and drew an add on to my world map every time I used it. That would be fine. I'd have to get the ink, the quills and the paper for the journal. My journal could then get stolen. I could, on a macrogrid basis, copy maps from my world map, and sell them on. Macrogrids would have to be revisited to be mapped again. You could build cloaking devices, that prevented the map generator from recording stuff. Everything under the cloak would be recorded as forest, for example. The maps would need some sort of decay rate. Pretty high. If data history maintenance is to be kept in check.

Mapmaking, this should be implemented soon, perhaps just generate the maps already, put them somewhere on the website, implement a mapmaking skill - once you map out 50% of a map you get access to the map via the website.

A cartography skill could let you take scent-like items from runestones for tracking. Simple, gives Exploration a use outside of tracking thieves, gives runestones a use.

Or perhaps you could LRclick a piece of parchment on a runestone, instead of a scent. Tracking is affected by Exploration and quality of parchment.

[theTrav]

nice bunch of ideas. Some sound like a lot of fun, others sound pretty horrible.
More of the former than the latter which is encouraging, looks like we're going to live in interesting times.

On the rivers. I think the primary complaint people have with them is that the scale is right off. If you made them 3 or 4 times wider, and let people swim 3 or 4 times as far with the same con then you'd get far fewer complaints IMO. They'd still be pretty deadly, but they'd also lose the insta-kill-ha-ha-noob effect. New players could paddle around on the edges and rapidly figure out that they won't make it.

Also, I'm repeating what I've said many times before, I have been able to get iron without major issues whenever I seriously need it... I'm not bathing in the stuff, but I have a pick axe, a cellar, a chest and am working out something to get a couldron. I don't estimate the effort I'm spending on them is any more than 3x the effort of the person producing the metal.

Once Brodgar gets its copper mine up and running, we're probably going to start doing some bulk trades and having a stock pile of iron in town that local players can trade for. That makes it pretty much available to all.

[PhaedrothSP]

5) Healing needs to improve. Srsly. I have a confession to make. I've been sneaking myself lembas lately. The shame. The dishonor. Not to win fights, though, but still. Hunting is a slow pestering pain on my HHP. I can't wear fucking bandaids all the time, because I don't want to chase sheep half way across the world, and I look like a douchebag in them. Leeches worked fine when you had like 50 HHP total. Now, @ 284, it's not as much fun.

Better versions of Bandages maybe, some that can be worn on any part of the body, like leeches can be applied anywhere.
Maybe ointments made from hard to find Herbs that heal a certain ammount automatically, no need to wait for regen.
And when I say rare herbs, I mean rare like how rustroot used to be.

[ArPharazon]

Jorb, I think you've done a fairly good job of covering a lot of the current problems with the game. However, some of these appear to be unnecessarily difficult to actually fix, some have been met with bitter controversy from the forums and some are fairly old requests we've been waiting for for a while.

Anyway, did somebody say wall of text?

1-4: I'm sorry but the combat system as it is is just broken, to be frank. It's boring and clunky.

The weapons: There is a grand total of 6 of them, fists included. The hell kind of RPG has 6 weapons? Frickin FPSes have more! Of course, adding more means lots of sprite drawing, balancing and coding... But I don't think there's anything you can do about that. The weapons should different attack speeds and accuracies. You should be able to specialize in them. (Make a "Combat" tab in the Character Sheet for all that) Something as simple as the Blunt/Slash/Pierce damage class would also do a lot for variety, especially if balanced right. It would of course require more armors.

The attacks: Ok, the initiative and combat advantage are great, I love those. So are special attacks. But combat is too slow! It's just silly that you sit there with your buddy Bruin bear, having a nice chat over tea, and maybe slapping each other every few minutes. Add to that that you hit only one out of 10 hits or so, and woow. I alt tab during combat more than anything else. There should be an attack once every 1-2 seconds, available moves should appear in the combat window and should be settable to auto-cast. Stamina should drain as a function of time so that the whole thing is less of a headache to balance.

Damage: The armor system is great, but damage types would be better. Also, ditch the flat damage thing already, weapons should have damage ranges.

Running away: This just doesn't work. Only foxes can run away, and you can't run away from anything unless you exploit an AI bug. This is because animals don't have stamina! So give them frikkin stamina already, and set their speeds to 3x so that we *can* sprint away if necessary. Have you tried running from a fox? It looks embarrassingly stupid.

5: Higher quality gauze. Fix interface lag and quirkiness so that leeches can be ctrl-dropped reliably. Add healing skills. Make HHP recover slowly over time, including offline time (Yes people will take an HH vacation for a few days and come back to a healed character... Big frikkin deal! What is this, a heroin surrogate?).

6: The real work with FEP is actually getting the food. Cakes take an assload of work, hunting is involved, cheese is glacial. Though, there's very little reason right now to drink tea at all. I liked tea personally, but I'm not sure what it should do... How about tea fills stamina and water increases stamina recovery rate? Since stamina recovery makes you hungry, that would also fit nicely with water making you hungry.

7: Get to work already!

8, 14, 21, 22: Discussed at length. At page 5 I suggested better faction management stuff but got shot down. We still need those factions, and faction buildings which are teleport points. Also, add some magical skill or classes which lets you buy extra HF slots, for exponentially increasing LP expenditures.

As for the chat thing... The interface is broken. But the main problem is, lag. It's a pain to chat in game, you never know when the text field will decide to lose or keep focus and what's more you sometimes leave your town by accident. You'd have to make the game not lag for in game chatting to be even worth considering (except where you have no choice) so you might not bother in the near future and just officially acknowledge the IRC channels. Maybe during character creation?

10-13, 17: Add horses. Add horse-drawn carts which hold more stuff. Add market/stable/warehouse building which can send horse carts to other market/stable/warehouse buildings if a road connects the two. The horse cart actually begins moving with the goods to the destination, and can be ambushed, though this is difficult (unless you block the road with felled trees) since the cart is fast (faster than players maybe) and has lots of HP/soak. The market has slots to keep several carts' worth of chests and can be used to post/review standing trade offers like in most browser based strategy games (e.g. Travian). Carts ignore gates for now because frankly, I think we can live with carts clipping through gates.

Mailmen could work similarly, either have a pigeon coop building which is analogous (except no paved path is needed, obviously) or have horses or dogs run between the markets. Also, you are yet to implement the hawks despite showing us sprites, and pigeon mail has been discussed.

As for iron, give it time. There is no sink and iron supply is growing exponentially, I think it will become dirt cheap and just as common in a few weeks. If you actually add significant iron sinks, then start messing with iron.

15, 16: Enjoy your wall of text. Also, see 8, 14, 21, 22.

18: Drop us a line and the wiki will take care of the rest.

19: Maps and cartography have been discussed in several places, I think one of them is the announcement topic. Add a new button, "(N)avigation", which contains options to locate HF(s), town idol, RoB, claim, and possibly other stuff. Make it use Survival and Exploration and show a radar like tracking. Preferably add locate nearest water, nearest tree/forest, nearest grassland etc.

20: Town scale [de]buffs. [De]buffs for plants and animals. Mines if you want (classic) kobolds. Psychology is accounted for by combat intensity and advantage... You could also make happiness affect combat (morale) since it does nothing right now anyway.

23: Discussed.

23: Add "marauding" skill for damaging buildings. Make idols (or are they already?) and huts destructible. Two random dudes CAN take over towns, by blackmailing the populace most easily. As for the forts, what's your problem? Walls are secure. If it bothers you that much, add locks on huts and chests, and keyrings.

26: I think I posted this somewhere, but anyway: Add buff which shifts the tradition slider. Decrease tradition LP penalty and change LP bonus.

I wouldn't blame you if you thought the suggestions board (this belongs there, by the way) has too much insane horsecrap in it and hence avoided it entirely, but if that is the case this can provide you with a very nifty tl;dr of what the community wants most badly. You guys seem to start a lot of really cool stuff but leave quite a few half finished... It's up to you, ultimately, but wouldn't it take less time and work to finish the currently half-done stuff first?

[Yolan]

10) Trade needs to get easier, not harder. Also, I need some way to transport built objects at a reasonable pace. I don't want to build a fucking anvil with iron being what it is. It'll suck, and I don't want to put points in mining. I want to buy a pick axe. I want to buy iron to build cellars and shit that isn't affected by quality, and I want to buy prebuilt cauldrons from competent smiths. I could actually consider buying tea premade, if I could get it via some reasonably fast paced medium.

11) Perhaps some sort of wide covering insta-market/auctionhouse, that could be accessed via a buildable object, for example. The auctionhouse could cost a small fortune, and be avaliable only to villages, meeting several requirements. Perhaps the village could then choose to tax that particular market. Perhaps the market could have a chat channel, avaliable at a certain distance from the market. Admittedly, IRC would still be a lot better, of course, but, then again, IRC doesn't reach even a third of the player base, judging by numbers. Meeting up and trade would carry no cost, and with optional log ins be much, much easier. Still, though. Anonymous buying from an automated process also has it's particular charm. I don't want to buy my tea from Joe Random's lemonade stand. I want it fast, efficiently and with no fuss, at a time of my choosing. You wouldn't have to count on people being logged in at the same time, when you really just want the stuff. Serious trades would still be negotiated and delivered in person, with all the potential fun that has.

12) Perhaps the local market could be connected to the world market. Free markets would probably be the only thing there was, unless there was also a neutral transfer charge, increasing with distance from market to market. Local markets could then be taxed. I don't want to charge in currency. That would force players to use currency as a medium of exchange in an unnatural way. Instead, I suppose the quality rating could be "taxed", representing theoretical wear and tear during transport, and whatever. One problem is that gold and silver would receive, perhaps, unnatural advantages as mediums of exchange under this representation, since they have no quality that could be taxed. Perhaps there could, quite simply, be some delay on transfers?

Hmmm.... I agree that at the moment, we have a void when it comes to trade. However, wouldn't this above suggestion run a little counter to the 'emergent complexity' philosophy of H&H? Take for example, Brodgar. I am currently floating the idea of setting up a space where towns from around the world can lease 'warehouses', being walled shacks that they claim themselves, all gathered around a square. This square then being on a river. Once boats are in, people can gather to trade in a place like this. Now, this is a patchwork solution that is not entirely ideal. People need to be online to offer up goods, others need to be online to buy them. It is a bit patchy. But, if we had an 'insta' market, wouldn't that negate any reason to build such things as 'market squares' or 'harbours' or 'trade routes' etc. etc.?
What I would like to see is some kind of trade enabling stuff that doesn't enforce a particularly highly specific system on the world, but leaves it open to people to figure out.

14) It'd be really cool if villages had their own, in game, chat-channels. These could be reachable, again, at a certain distance from the village idol, depending, perhaps, on authority objects. This way, people could make their messages heard in the game.

22) Villages need to be able to declare war on other villages.

Love both of these.

Also: How about GUI support for object swapping? We need this! Dropping things on the ground for another person to pick up is a bit naff.

[Yolan]

I must say I completely disagree with your ideas on globalization. Distance should have a meaning. You should encourage bulk trade, because it leads to whole trade chains and interesting organizations developing, such as guilds or shipping companies. By adding long-distance autotrade you deny us a whole lot of potential gameplay. Local autoshops I like, as in shops that you have to physically interact with to use. Anyway, I hope you consider going for stuff like cargo ships and horse wagons instead of teleshops.

Second. I am a bit freaked out by some of Jorb's ideas here. They also seem to run counter to the 'H&H is hardcore' response to the Dawgster.

EDIT: I am in full support of _local_ auto-shops and warehouses. Leave it up to people to set those up, and people to organise the trade routes.

[Onionfighter]

I have to say, I agree with a lot of what Jorb posted.

Someone already mentioned it, but the problem with a chat interface is that it would take up precious screen space.

Quality has made the game a lot more interesting but it seems like it could be balanced better my biggest problem is that it is impossible to get good quality wood, and growing trees seems to take a long time, and the process is shrouded in mystery.

I pretty much wear bandages full time. It has been this way since before Ragnarok. I have high hopes for the bloodstem.

Trolls sound awesome.

I worry about the removal of teleportation because that is how I get high quality resources. Trading for resources would be difficult because of differences of playing time. I have thought of roads, but carts just don't carry enough for the distances involved. For the first time, I am considering opening a second account to dedicate alts to different high-quality resources.

Having some sort of market system would be really helpful.

[canned]

what about such system that took note to the distance between trade posts in trade so that stuff traded gets locked when the trade is agreed and the exchange of items takes some time depending the distance between the "market" places.
And the pricing for stuff would work like seller places differend prices for stuff he is selling for example "1 jar of fish for 5 q10 flax seed or 5 jar of fish for backpack" or buyer can sent a proposal to seller for differend price, like for example: want sell 2 jar of fish for 3 grain seed, which the seller then can either agree, disagree , or make counter proposal)

And another thing i add to my suggestion is that to sell stuff you need area to store it where its being locked down to be sold after placing the price on it, so that people cant remove stuff they are selling so easily, and being thief is sound option for playing...

ask if my post didnt make any sense... i suck quite much at explaining...

[Potjeh]

Why make the items move on their own, when players can move them. A global market could be acceptable, if it just lists prices and quantities at various local markets so players can find themselves good trading routes more easily.

Game recommendations to Jorb:
Patrician 3
Transport Tycoon Deluxe
Capitalism