Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[McJager]

Haven is still an alpha game, It doesn't really make.. actually doesn't make a profit at all does it? Anyway, For a completely free game with no pay to win options I'd save haven is actually pretty up there. As for the combat, You're right it could use a little work but most people really just want to farm, Craft, Etc. Me for example I just enjoy trawling around in my boat or running around in the forest etc. Haven't been playing that long on this account but I've enjoyed what I've done so far. Comparing haven and minecraft is kind of hard to do, Isn't minecraft maintained by more than two people? Sure we got modders, And... forgetting his name, The guy that did the music.. Wasn't phades was... blast, Don't remember now Gato or something.

Edit: Was Kaka, not sure how I forgot that name...wtf is gato then.

[Kaios]

wtf is gato then.

All I know is he needs to clean his room

[Danno]

Well, they are similar in all the ways I listed earlier. The way you do those things is obviously different, i.e. in Minecraft you just attack blocks while in Haven you choose an action to chop down a tree. It's to the same end, though - surviving nature by building a home, walls, farm, and hoarding your valuables while not experiencing any meaningful PvP.

Haven has been in alpha for years. I don't think that should be used as an excuse to halt progress. For what it is, and for being free, it's a damn good game. However, when you compare it to other games or play for a month or two, it's just not good enough to play. I introduced many of my friends to this game. To be precise, I got 10 of my friends to play. One of my friends got about 3 of his friends to play and I also had 4 acquaintances who knew about the game before me and played with the rest of us. I also told other friends about the game, but they weren't interested enough to give it a try. There's also myself.
That's 18 people I personally know who played Haven & Hearth. How many of them are still playing Haven? Zero. How many are willing to play Haven again? Only one: myself. Out of the other 17, I'd say about 70% of them enjoyed Haven and played it for more than a week. They got bored of it, though, and the grinding, permadeath, and impossible quality competition left a bitter taste in everyone's mouths.

Hundreds of players have the same story about playing the game, getting their friends to play, and they all quit within a month. There's definitely something wrong with this game if it loses so many new players. This game should be so fun and engaging that the population steadily increases! This game needs more player interaction, more melee combat, and less grinding. Melee combat is pretty complicated, though, so there should also be something for more casual players to do, like having more creative building options (e.g. more stuff like paving pixel art on the ground).

[Kaios]

I like you Danno, you counteract Xcom's crazy.

[brohammed]

Calling haven "still an alpha" implies it will ever leave alpha

I've put 600 hours into haven, between W3 and 7, and I never reached great heights like some of the turbonerds here, but I had a good time. I don't like minecraft either.

If you asked me to sum up why I liked one and not the other, a few points spring to mind. Most importantly, Haven is an MMO, and being locked down to one permanent server with everyone else is key. If there were private servers, or singleplayer maps you could trash on a whim it would ruin it, it's not just the game, it's the existence of this forced community. Obviously that would be impossible with minecraft as it stands, but just imagine if minecraft only had 3000 players and everyone had to play in the same server, and you'd get a similar feeling. It's not just the mechanics, it's the fact that those mechanics exist in this tight ecosystem.

The deep persistence sandbox aspect helps too. There's something special about wandering the map, seeing a stump and knowing someone else cut it down, and seeing decayed settlements and knowing there was a story there.

It's flawed, yes, the combat system is impenetrable and pointless in many ways, permadeath and silly quality/skill/LP numbers intersects with a player attitude that leads to everyone bunkering down, and on a large enough scale the map gen is very simple. Also bots. At the high level I understand it's libertarian anarchist fuck you economy war simulator 2006.

I wouldn't say the problem is with player retention exactly since that's just a business concern.

If jorbtar took orders from me I'd request seasons, weather, bloodlines instead of characters, aging, a huge de-emphasis of numbers, environmental events, more PvE to give people a common enemy, a better world gen, and an animal crossing sort of furniture/item collecting economy. Obviously that game would no longer be haven but I've had my fill of haven, thankyou, a game shouldn't be considered a failure if it took me in for 600 hours.

[Danno]

My profile claims I've played about 1400 hours (also from W3 forward). The game is no failure, but it's also not really a success. I agree with your feelings about seeing stumps/signs of life (including fresher signs of life like freshly chopped blocks of wood on the floor), the goodness of everyone being forced to play on the same server, and your points in general. Haven has a nice feel to it; at least for a couple weeks, it's a fun experience and I hope to see that expanded on instead of hindered by the grinding.

[brohammed]

Yeah, stuff like that, and more graphics for decay (green wood aging to grey, moss and vines growing, windows breaking etc) instead of just shades of red, and ruins/trash instead of stuff disappearing.

And generally make staying alive a constant struggle, like Don't Starve, instead of "well, I built a wall, I'm perfectly safe unless a level 600 ranged player who doesn't speak my language insta-ganks me", and at the same time make dying less of a huge PITA.

The long term changing of the world, I forgot to mention, forests turning to grassland etc. That's something I liked a lot.

[LadyV]

I would agree more should be added. Permadeath however serves a good purpose. What affects things the most is Traditional vs. Change. In the long run Change can garner more points. Tradition however preserves more knowledge upon death. This seems balanced but only in theory.

Say a raiding party attacks a town. A high level farmer gets killed and a raider gets killed. In a short time that raider will be back to full strength long before the high level farmer. The second flaw is the very concept of tradition and change precludes any easy effort to refocus. The choices of either should be a choice set upon character creation and either can not be changed or requires a very long time, far beyond current limits. If your a stubborn Traditionalist a few days will not easily sway you to switch beliefs. Even life changing things to spark such would require time simply because you have no basis for thinking in such a way.

[TeckXKnight]

@LadyV
I must disagree with the change/tradition statement in that I feel change and tradition need to be scrapped entirely. The sliders were a great concept and a cool idea to try, but we've seen what they lead to in practical use. They add a waiting period before you start really playing the game at the beginning, as you don't want to use your best curiosities until you've achieved max change, and a waiting period before you raid, as you want max tradition before you risk death. Arbitrary periods of waiting before you can play the game are the worst uses of time. Of course it's not an absolute necessity to wait, but the penalty is pretty steep for rushing. For a combatant, dying at full change means ~93% LP loss as opposed to a ~43% loss at full tradition. Meanwhile, playing without full change means getting ~33% of the LP that other players are getting for the same curiosities, or worse, playing with full tradition at ~11% gains.

You can't just take the waiting period out either or the benefits become moot. Outside of fights you will always be full change for maximum benefit. Before combat you'll immediately switch to full tradition to minimize penalties.

If, as you suggested, it was decided at character creation, anyone who chose tradition could effectively count themselves out of being useful for anything. Even if the bonuses were minimized so that the full Change player wasn't running with 9x more LP than the full tradition player, the full change player is playing with a snowball effect. They rise out of the early game faster, claim the best resources faster, grow monstrous characters faster, and are more useful in village tasks. By the time the full traditional player has become effective in any sort of way, the full change player can and has blown them out of the water in every way.

@brohammed
I can't agree more with all three of your statements. More visual, and heck audio, feedback to the player would be awesome. As would constant struggle to live. I can't wish hard enough for a world that evolves on its own and alongside the actions of the players. Nothing was cooler to me back in w3 than when our deforestation had a serious effect on the landscape and the creatures that lived there. You wouldn't believe my surprise when I saw chickens instead of bears outside of my town.

[Oddity]

environmental event

It would be cool if there was some sort of "world events" that everyone could participate in. Like in Diablo 2, there was this "Uber Diablo" thing (not the other Ubers) where if anyone in any game sold a SoJ to a merchant, a counter would go up and everyone online would be notified of the total SoJ sold amount. After it reached a certain number, all games in progress would get an Uber Diablo spawn in them.

Something similar (but completely different, obviously) would be cool for Haven. Just the ability to contribute to adding or removing something huge from the world somehow... Could use a lot of brainstorming. I haven't thought about it hard enough to make a C&I thread.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1128

Q: Do you have any wild and crazy ideas on the topic?
A: A permanent cycle of death and rebirth would fit the game's theme very well. I've considered implementing a natural cycle of Great Sunderings -- complete map and character reset -- which could only be prevented through massive, epic level, rituals of world rejuvenation, which anyone would then be free to assist in, or work to prevent. That would be pretty cool, but it's far off. I agree with the people who have been pushing for a character reset in that, with the completion of the major roads between the settlements, and the near closing of the frontiers, map development has stagnated somewhat. The initial land rush of a few weeks ago was a lot of fun to watch, and It'd be great if those experiences could be integrated into the backbone of the game, rather than being one off events. It might conflict too much with people's ambitions to create lasting values to be doable, but at least we'd be creating a very unique game environment.