Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[Amanda44]

@ Potjeh - thanks, I understand better what you were saying but as I don't play that side of the game in any meaningful way it's hard to really agree or disagree, but, if I did indulge more in the combat side of things, I would like skill to play a major part rather than just the numbers. However, I also do think though that a player who has put more into his combat stats or combat gear should naturally have an advantage over a player who hasn't, in the same way a player who has played for longer should obviously have an advantage over a newbie. That doesn't mean however that skills shouldn't come into the equation, but, I still wouldn't want my stats to be limited.

The thing that gets in the way of that, though, is the infinite number pushing itself, which means that you're never really ready to interact with other players because they'll crush you like an ant thanks to thousands upon thousands of manhours spent doing (or botting) repetitive actions for the sake of pushing those numbers.

Though I guess that's maybe true for some players not everyone plays the same way, my main char is pretty good now with relatively high stats, I know it's not a titan, lol, but I would still be pretty upset if I lost it, but, as that is a part of the game I accept the possibility and am never hiding in my walls. My main char leaves the village regularly, there is not much point having good stats if you are not using all of them and that involves being outside the village as well. I don't have the time or the inclination to have a char for every aspect, my village has two, a farmer and a miner, any others are either for claims or trade. (Though I do feed two of them curios and have one set as nature and one industry, just in case, ofc they can never replace my mains but they are at least ready to be made into either.)

I also never run from anyone whichever char I'm using unless they agro me and it's clear I'm being given no choice, that has only happened twice this world and I lived both times, once due to talking, lol. Last week I was tracking scents to AD, I was sat outside their village on my main trying to decide whether to leave a rune or not, lol, yesterday I went to visit Ainrans old place and ran into a guy in a boat who wanted me to show him where he could find acre clay, I just jumped in his boat and off we went, though I'm aware that some would call that foolish.

I make a point of getting to know my neighbours, it's for security reasons as well as for interaction, it's important as a hermit to have friends rather than enemies and it's also good for mutual trade, esp before you have your idol up.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has more faith in both other players and myself, I'm aware there is a risk but in order to play the game fully, I'm willing to take it.

[McJager]

I think I get the gist of what you're saying, You dislike the way combat works or stats in general? As in the whole 1500 uac vs the whole 50-100 uac.

[Potjeh]

Yeah. The point is that I'm quite willing to allow for giving an advantage to characters with more time invested in them, but I'm vehemently against keeping it so the magnitude of that advantage is open-ended, ie player skill should always be able to overcome that advantage with a certain fixed amount of investment in the less skilled character (so you can't just use fresh throwaway alts for PvP). Also, swords should never just ping for 0 damage against an empty defence bar.

[Cajoes]

But raiding hermits is so much more cost and effort efficient than raiding established factions.

Or you are me and travel around for 3 hours and dont find one active base, then just log out for a week. Nothing effort efficient about that. Something tells me that the east side of the world sucks.

I admit my statement was somewhat facetious as well as alluding to the fact that with current mechanics, sieges rarely happen. Most raids happen to easy targets, in particular targets which superficially has protection from the bigger factions, but which only paints them as a even bigger targets because it is the only way to reliably draw their "protectors" out from their fortifications. Apologies for being unclear for the sake of cynical humor.

[Danno]

oh cmon, do you seriously think all you can see on the forums are all there is? juicy dramas are not always shared in public unfortunately, not everyone is a story teller, nor has a wish to share a story that may embarrass some players. just because you dont have friends in the scene and dont hear about them doesnt mean they dont exist...

Indeed, there are things going on in the game, too, but it seems like most of the time when a somewhat developed character is killed, they post a thread about their death. And most of the time, they died because a player with higher stats decided to bully them. Anyway, I was just told to look at Congress to see how it's full of threads about raids and faction wars. I did look and I see that there isn't much there.

@ Danno - I'm sorry but I am not going to agree with all you say, it is possible to have another opinion and I do. I love Haven, I do play the whole world through and I am certainly not the only one. I do think that improvements could be made in various area's but capping isn't one of them.

I'm not saying you have to agree with everything I say, but I think it's absurd that anyone would support infinite grinding to maintain an invisible war against numbers.

Maybe if I was a purely combat player I may feel differently but there are so many things I enjoy about Haven.

Contrary to how my posts make me sound, I've never been a combat player either. Not once since world 3. I think the only time I killed someone was at the end of the last world when me and 3 friends decided to look for somebody to kill before the world would reset. I think that's a huge problem because I love this game's combat, but I don't get a chance to actually fight anyone because if I do, I'll just be losing 2 months of work since I'm not as dedicated and efficient at grinding my stats as other people.
I don't think I'd want to take all that away from someone else's life either, really. I'd feel bad about destroying someone else's months of work. Playing against people and winning a game is fun, but we aren't playing a game, we're putting a fraction of our real lives on the line. If you lose, you lose hundreds of hours of real life time that you will never be able to get back. It's simply cruel.

Your ridiculous little simulator doesn't come close, lol, there were no forests to forage in, no rivers to travel the world looking for goodies, no animals, no building or crafting, no planning and execution, no village to form and decorate and no people to talk to or run from. It was pretty dull in comparison tbh, lol.
Ofc, I get your point but it's not one I agree with, rising numbers are incredibly satisfying and an indication that you are achieving something but they don't just rise at the click of a button, some of us play the game to get those numbers up and it's the combination that brings rewards.

Yeah, you have to play Haven for the first few weeks, but after that you're basically on cruise control. Once your village is established, there's nothing really left to build besides banners and looooong roads. Click a button to harvest the crops, click a button to replant for better quality, click the food on your table until your stats go up. You just stand around clicking to raise numbers without having to put in any thought or effort - the only thing it requires is your life and soul. It's all very robotic when you're at the wondrous "end-game", which consists solely of raising your stats and quality. Foraging is the only part of the game that stays fresh since you actively have to play to do it, but people even ruin that by disabling all the tree graphics and swapping the forageable graphics to make them more noticeable.

I have not found another game yet that gives me the same freedom, experience or satisfaction to keep me returning.

This game does have a unique experience, and it's great before it gets dumbed down to senseless grinding. Every MMO gives you the freedom to aimlessly wander around the world and talk to people. Haven could offer more freedom, but instead, the numbers cause people to build prisons to isolate themselves from each other, leaving them to endlessly toil away in the flax fields to get that q2000 flax seed.
It's great that Haven gives you the freedom to build your own little place in the world wherever you want, but it gets to a point where there's just nothing left to do. You have more houses than you need (too much extra storage space), you're completely self-sufficient, you have a fleet of a dozen boats, your home is double brickwalled for security purposes, and you have enough animal pens to fill Noah's Ark. What more can you build while feeling like what you're building actually matters? It mattered when you needed a house to put things in, when you didn't have a farmland and you starved, when you had no boats to traverse the rivers, etc. At end-game, it doesn't matter at all, though. You already have everything you need. You may have the freedom to do it, but why bother?

And it was you above that talked about survival being tougher with building walls and struggling to get fish and such. Your the one pushing for more work. So kindly don't lecture me on adding grind.

I'm not pushing for more work, I'm pushing for our efforts to be meaningful. It makes sense to catch a fish to feed yourself if you're hungry. It doesn't make sense to replant a flax seed for 6 months to craft a higher quality sling so you can pwn n00bs easier.

Haven is not a difficult game once you understand it and what needs to be done. Like anything the more you do the more you gain. But that's a personal choice now isn't it? In a free and open ended game you set your pace and goals. You define what path you take to get there. If you choose to do more to get ahead that is not a negative thing. Its a choice. If you feel your being left behind because someone else is putting more time into it then that is still your issue. It does not mean you have to dedicate more time it simply means they chose to.

I never said the game is difficult, I said it's tedious. I could waste my life grinding, too, but I choose not to because it's stupid. I'm married, I have a job in real life, I work on projects on the side, and I have a house in real life to take care of. I don't want to get fired, ignore my loved ones, and give up my aspirations just so I can succeed at your pathetic little grinding game.
Oh, but that's just my choice, right? It's my choice I have to be a responsible adult, it's my choice I don't have time to be a proL337 hardcore Haven player. I'm just choosing to fail at the game here, right? Games are supposed to be something fun you play in your spare time, not a job that you have to dedicate your life to.

I'd be cool with if you just had more houses or a bigger farm from spending more time on the game, but the fact that you can effortlessly kill me in 1 hit because you nolife the game is stupid. Why should I not be allowed to stand a chance in PvP? Why do you think you deserve to be untouchable? When you play a game, there's supposed to be a way to win and a way to lose. If you're immune to my character, then we aren't even playing anything - you're simply steamrolling a newb and crushing what time I did put into the game. I guess my 100 hours is worthless compared to your 2000 hours, but damn, that's such a shitty system to be in place. You might as well tell new players to stop playing after 2 weeks because everything they do is futile.

Make the game what you will. If you can't have fun with the time you choose to spend on it then its not the games fault. It just means its not a good match for you. To many people have gotten used to games setting goals for them and they feel they are lost if they don't have them. Haven is not that type of game. You set your own goals and measure of success. You control what you do. The system is there but its up to you to decide what you want.

Im sorry if you find repetition boring. I do agree more content is needed. But artificially setting goals, no. Freedom to choose my own path is more valuable to me than some petty position, rank, or trophy saying you won or you achieved this. I know what I aimed for and can judge how well I did.

It is the game's fault. That's why practically everyone who plays it quits within a month or two. It's not a good match for anyone except for unemployed people who have a hard-on for numbers. Either that or bots.
I'm not "lost" with the game not telling me to reach level 70 before I can advance to a second job class. The game "lost" me and hundreds of other players with its stupid infinite grinding system that spawns l337 gam3rz. I don't want to earn achievements for playing, I want there to truly be freedom in the game. Not the "freedom" to choose whether or not I should grind my UA up to 1000, but the freedom to participate in PvP if I want to without fearing that I'll be utterly crushed by the hardcore players who have a ludicrously unfair advantage.

[wolf1000wolf]

Reading all of this tells me this isn't quite the "game" for you Danno. Not that I don't agree with you on some points...

At the end of the day, I think people forget the original basis on which HnH was made. hint: it wasn't about making a game that reached large market acceptance

[Xcom]

@Danno you seam to have a very twisted view of what this games about. You missed all the endgame markers and think its a hardcore action simulator. Haven in proper endgame have tons of politics and cold wars. Those numbers you talk about aren't there to infinitely grind, they generate a whole level of pvp battle before the actual fight. Neither are those brick walls meant to be rammed every other week. This game is to complex then an action thrill seeker.

Also you can take this from me, even if you had twice the stats you would still die to a proper pvper. Stop complaining and try experience the game. Don't sit behind your brick wall and complain about numbers and stats being the reason you don't have the chance to do stuff. I know plenty people that pvp without stats. Most often they die but at least they experience and often come out the other end knowing whats what. Sadly you come to the forums and try experience the game sitting here reading what others do instead of logging in and getting a feel for the actual reality of what happens inside the game. I would advice to join a pvp faction and get a feel for how deep this games pvp is.

What you also have gotten completely wrong is how joining late fucks you over. Best example is DIS, they took a long break from the game and came back lacking resources. Instead of complaining on the forums like you are they banded up and attacked a village with some of the higher quality animals and stole them. Now they have some of the highest animals on the server. Even if your not a top level faction you get plenty of chance to trade for seeds and animals to catch up. In fact late game people constantly complain that abandoned villages around the world offer to much starter kits making the game feel cheap as a hardcore survival simulator.

I'll repeat this one last time, haven is not about gunho running out ramming shit killing and raping people. If you think it is then your in the wrong game. If you think its about the stats then your still doing it wrong. This game have a whole subwar underneath all the real fights that spring up on ICA and some of those wars aren't even pvp related. Some of those wars are trade quality related, others are about stats and very small portion is about the actual takeovers and kills. Faction to faction wars on larger scales don't happen often because a whole lot of political sub communication happens between village leaders and member to avoid total conflict. Of course as a bystander your clueless about all this.

[venatorvenator]

Haven in proper endgame have tons of politics and cold wars. Those numbers you talk about aren't there to infinitely grind, they generate a whole level of pvp battle before the actual fight. Neither are those brick walls meant to be rammed every other week. This game is to complex then an action thrill seeker.

Xcom, with that paragraph you made me like this game again.


EDIT: Although admittedly some public posts about what's going on in the world would be nice.

[borka]

@Danno

you really need a village that supports your wanting to be a casual PvP champ - where others do the tedious work and feed you everything so you can push all the stats needed to have a easy go in combat ...

[LadyV]

@Danno Nothing I say is going to make an impact on you. I do hope you find fun. Best of luck!