PVP Factions

[sabinati]

...There's also enough censorship to keep the comments minimally polite - Jackard's sig would have gotten him a 1-3 day suspension from play...
...Jackard's sig might well have gotten him banned there, or at least silenced.

a sig is the stuff below a person's post. an avatar is a picture next to their post.

pedantry ftw

[Delamore]

If Goonheim declares war on a town they will get 24 hours notice like Loftar says above, with options to surrender, give tribute, etc. To make the option of fighting fair for the defenders there would have to be a short window, say 3-4 hours at the end of the 24 period, when the fighting could occur. If there was just 'war' indefinitely the defenders would have to keep watch all the time, which is impractical for people who have a job or attend college/school. They might even want to go as far as making the 'window' occur in the evening, as most people wouldn't be able to attend in the daytime because of said job/school. Where would the fun be if each town spent hundreds of combined hours crafting only to go to war and wreck each other's stuff when they aren't there? That would just be griefing back and forth, not pvp. It would be just as lame for one town to force another to surrender and tribute/annex rather than being destroyed just because they had more commitments in real life than the attackers.

24 hours for them to hide everything they have in the town?
24 hours to build more walls?
Surrender to goons? hahaha
And it will never be fair, do you think someone is going to declare war on someone who is a fair fight against them?
Also whose afternoon? Swedish people?

[VoodooDog]

dont make it impossible to have an barbaric village. it would be fun if some guys in klingon-style slought all over the map.
they want peace or get other villages tribut.
they just want to slought and the rest of the wolrd have to become a unit to defeat them.
something like that should be possible.

[sabinati]

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slought

[kobnach]

And it will never be fair, do you think someone is going to declare war on someone who is a fair fight against them?

Serious question to anyone who cares to answer - where's the fun in the above, _unless_ one's either into griefing, or finds stealing from players more profitable than other sources of loot?

[ArPharazon]

Why is it that detente isn't breaking out in H&H? And why so much on-forum nastiness? Perhaps the nastiness is the cost of a complete lack of censorship. But that doesn't account for the rest of it.

Well, we've got Goons and 4channers forming the biggest groups besides B12, what do you expect? =p Just kidding. But seriously, I think a lot of the times complaints from victims ARE the victims being sore losers. Hence the nastiness.

Regarding alliances in other games, from my experience what does it is that the moment you even begin to target someone, the game throws their alliance right in your face- you instantly know, from the start, that you're messing with some big guys. In HH, say I run across some guy in a forest, tension rises, I threaten to attack, he says (best case scenario, he might not say anything at all) he's from Gooncastle. Why would I even believe him? Anyone could say that. There's a similar problem with knowing who is in your town and who is not (although this is easier for players to solve on their own). Although there's something to be said for the value of being able to hide your membership, alliances or towns should at least be able to make their own signet rings or something like that, which are difficult or impossible to forge (but not to steal ).

Second, in other games, alliances usually get their own page which shows attacks on that alliances, sometimes also its allies. In HH, I get robbed, I talk to other people from my stockade if and when they are online, then we talk to the town leader if and when he is online, then he calls the ranger if and when he is online, and then the thief is tracked down and the thief's superior is interrogated, if and when he is online... It's all quite a bit of a headache to orchestrate. Now I really liked how involved tracking down people was: It was almost impossibly realistic, first looking for clues, following them, finding suspects and weeding through the testimonies. However there really needs to be some mechanism to help communication, like a "guild board" which instantly lets you know when there is new stuff posted on it and has no character limit. Currently what everyone does is have a chest or basket with blank paper in it- but I found it to be rather impractical.

[Delamore]

Second, in other games, alliances usually get their own page which shows attacks on that alliances, sometimes also its allies. In HH, I get robbed, I talk to other people from my stockade if and when they are online, then we talk to the town leader if and when he is online, then he calls the ranger if and when he is online, and then the thief is tracked down and the thief's superior is interrogated, if and when he is online... It's all quite a bit of a headache to orchestrate. Now I really liked how involved tracking down people was: It was almost impossibly realistic, first looking for clues, following them, finding suspects and weeding through the testimonies. However there really needs to be some mechanism to help communication, like a "guild board" which instantly lets you know when there is new stuff posted on it and has no character limit. Currently what everyone does is have a chest or basket with blank paper in it- but I found it to be rather impractical.

This is a player problem, the Goons worked their own shit out why can't you?
We have IRC, vent, a wiki and our own forum why is it so hard for everyone to make their own too? We even offer vent channels to anyone who wants one and have a public IRC channel set up.
Make your own forum or an IRC channel.

[sabinati]

but it takes almost 2 minutes to set up a forum!!?

[kobnach]

However there really needs to be some mechanism to help communication, like a "guild board" which instantly lets you know when there is new stuff posted on it and has no character limit. Currently what everyone does is have a chest or basket with blank paper in it- but I found it to be rather impractical.

I guess Barrenburg had one major advantage - several of the original founders knew other founders in real life. When I needed the lawspeaker, I picked up the RL telephone. We also tried creating a mailing list on yahoo groups, and sending messages through the in game pm (email) system. The mailing list wasn't popular; we had members refuse to join it. And the in-game pm system limits the number of people you can send the same message to at one time. We eventually settle on sending pms about current events to the active subset, and very little to our inactives, except messages asking whether they ever planned to return to H&H.

What really gets to me is the time zone problem. With an always-on game where theft etc. is easiest with the victim off-line, the best villages have dedicated players in all timezones - and a resulting communications headache.

[theTrav]

Laketown has a google doc, goons have a forum, irc, ventrillo.

Most towns seem to be getting by fairly well using third party communication tools, I'm not sure it's a critical thing that Jorb and Loftar should drop what they're working on to address...