Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[loftar]

High investment characters, permadeath and PvP.

Maybe we are looking at things from a wrong angle. Are you interested in those attributes specifically or where they just a means to achieve something else? Maybe an emotion you want to evoke in players or something like that?

I think i's fair to say that whatever my actual "root incentives" actually are, they are at least something very closely related to that, and I can't say I can immediately deconstruct them to something more primitive. What I can say, if anything, is that I consider Haven to primarily be a RPG, which must reasonably mean that character progression (of one form or another) is very closely and intrinsically tied to it.

That is not to say, however, that I consider them to be the "central concepts" of the game. I'm not particularly invested in making a game that is primarily about PvP, so to speak. Whereas some people complain that PvP is too uncommon because the stakes are high, I don't mind that at all. I consider these concepts to be very important, but only as parts of a greater mix of attributes. They alone do not define Haven. If there are ways that even further downplay the actual role of PvP in Haven to the benefit of other elements, I would not intrinsically mind that. I do not consider Haven to be the MMORTS that some people seem to think of it as.

[loftar]

I think its quality grind fault. Most of the time to get into some group of players you need to have good stats and to be willing spend most of your time on doing tedious tasks if you don't have either of those well then too bad you won't play with them in their sandbox.
Want to be friends with some nearby neighbor? Sometimes he will think you're going to ruin his nodes and hes just going to wreck your shit.
This grind competition just drives away players further apart.

This is probably true to some extent, but I doubt it's the primary inhibitor of more social interaction. I would think there are tons of things that a nub can do in a village that do not actively harm the village. I would rather guess that a far greater inhibitor is the risk involved in taking on people you don't know extremely well.

[Potjeh]

It is a problem that occurs anyway. *Nobody* uses one main character for crafting and PvP, murder alts are the norm. It's a problem that will always exist, and increasing investment will only make it worse because the more time it takes to replace a lost character the bigger alt roster you need to always have a backup when you lose one. Sure, the current hands-off method of character progress makes that easier, but even without it people would still bot up murder alt armies (surely you remember the bucket bot days?). You can try to make character progress a bit more bot-proof, but by now you should have realized that it's a battle you can't win - the most you can achieve is making the game too convoluted for new people to get into. So yeah, I don't have a solution to the alt armies problem, but neither you, and in these five years that I've been following H&H there hasn't been the slightest hint of you coming up with one. If you think you have one now you should put it up for criticism, because I'm pretty sure people like Arksu could poke holes in it in no time at all and save you wasting effort on something that won't work.

Now, just because you can't solve that one problem doesn't mean that you should just ignore all other problems. And time investment beating actual player skill with no contest at all is definitely a problem. IMO player skill determining the outcome is a crucial element of anything that wants to be considered a game, and if we can't agree on that axiom there's simply not enough common ground for any productive discussion. So yeah, if we can't agree on that please let me know so we can both stop wasting our time talking past each other.

[Danno]

The part when you are getting numbers is the part of the competition. If you do it slower than enemy then it means you are worse than him in planning. And it's totally normal when people, who invested more time in game, have more opportunities than others.
As far as I understand you, you want to base the success on the random parameters like "who clicked first" and "who has less latency to the server", that's not the way to build a MMO game.

Let's say I join the game today and follow the hardcore advice. I grind my skill values up like crazy, trade for the highest quality seed available on the market, and progress the seed's quality from there. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the faction selling that seed is holding out on me - they probably have a seed 20 quality points higher to ensure they stay in the lead. At this point, at best, I can only increase my quality at the exact same rate as the established faction, meaning I will never ever catch up. Does this mean I fail at the game because I'm worse at planning?
Uh... and I don't recall suggesting Haven should become a twitch shooter? The combat system is (basically) turn-based, so "who clicked first" has nothing to do with anything.

hermit building a stone mansion or a brickwall on their own, THAT'S Impressive.

I've built stone mansions on my own and while it does feel a little good to have it complete, I don't find the tedious effort to really be fun or worthwhile. So many hours wasted... Maybe that's just me, though.

The problem is in the need to remove large parts of the game just so everyone can have an easymode cap they can reach in 2 weeks of gameplay.

Reducing the grind wouldn't remove any gameplay, it would create gameplay because people would be free to interact with each other.

Then again, if you hadn't had to do something to gain the character you wanted, you wouldn't have anything to lose if he died, would you?

A player could lose their dignity, perhaps? They could be dumped naked in a thicket, covered in bruises, tarred and feathered; their home ravaged and their supplies raided. I'd much rather that be my punishment instead of losing 500 real life hours of work on my character.
I recall reading that you don't like the game having things akin to magic spells and have some desire to remove teleportation. If players couldn't abuse the hearthless village teleport, the punishment could include finding their way back to their village (or what's left of it).

It is nice that it allows players to focus more on the production aspects of Haven & Hearth rather than the character progression aspect, but the balance between the two is not right at all. You spend an hour or two of your time searching for curiosities which can keep a character or SEVERAL characters supplied for days and spend the rest of your time working on village production, but what happens when you're at a point where you can no longer progress until some time has passed? A game should not force its players to log off because they can't do anything else, at least not a good game.

Personally, I love how the curio system encourages more exploration and gives you time to do meaningful tasks instead of making thousands of buckets. I definitely agree that it's bad design to encourage players to log out and wait for their curios to finish, though. This is especially harsh on newbs when they have to log off for 8 hours before they can get enough LP to buy the skill that lets them build a house. I mean, what good is all that time for "meaningful tasks" when your character is incapable of building anything meaningful?

Potjeh you say you want a cap. That's quite black and white and have zero interpretation.

Potjeh's idea is better thought out and caters to the old players, or at least for combat. He suggested a cap on how much delta advantage you can have over another player so that even a weaker player can stand a chance in combat if they know how to fight, but the advantage goes to the highest grinder. Still, the advantage would be within reasonable limits, so even I would not be able to complain.

Success in the game is equal to effort put in it, like in almost any other activity, both real and virtual.
Why do you think it should be otherwise?

No one said it should be otherwise, we're just trying to remind everyone something simple - this is a game. It's not real and it shouldn't be real. Just as it shouldn't take a full real life year for crops to grow in the game, it shouldn't take hundreds of hours of work to accomplish something in the game.
You have to put effort into learning how to play, how to use the combat system, how to build an efficient and self-sufficient village, and how to get nice things in the game. You and I both know that if someone came to Haven from Minecraft, they'd have no idea how to build things, no idea where to get building materials, and definitely no idea how to fight. It takes effort to learn all that.
There's also the effort you put into meeting other players, maintaining connections/alliances, killing animals, doing chores like hanging up animal skins to dry or cooking meals, etc.

It has been stated many times already, but neither Jorb nor I are of the opinion that the curiosity system is perfect. I can't say I've seen "heaping amounts" of better systems being suggested, however.

Overall, I think it's quite good, but perhaps you should be able to obtain more curios via "minigames" to help keep things fresh with variety. There is quite a few already and they're somewhat subtle, but very well done, such as dragonflies, ladybugs, ants, and foraging. The only problem is that players get to a point where certain curios aren't worth the effort or study space, such as ladybugs, boar tusks, and wishbones. Counting those out, the overall variety is lowered and makes curio hunting not as good as it could be. A more viable (similar to player's delta) combat curio might be nice - ants just get steamrolled (or eventually ignored due to their harmless stats), so they don't really count.

The main problem with it is just that the players need something to do. If they're too new to have the necessary skills or too self-sufficient for there to be anything to do, players are just left to log off. This is where there should be player interaction instead of grinding.

This is probably true, but I'm not sure I've seen any suggestions that have held water in any good way.

What's wrong with ideas like increased PvP incentive or nodes that are only suitable to grow certain crops (thus making trade necessary if quality matters at all)? Village management tools (alliances and permission options) would also increase player interaction. One of the main reasons I only played in a village with my friends or as a hermit is because I wanted to name my own village or not give up the home I already built, despite how much I'd rather play in an active group. As I suggested much earlier, you could also have certain structures only buildable if your village has x amount of allies, which would act as further incentive.

this issue creates a situation where the only way to grind "effective strength" is by mass-producing alts instead. Did you have any thoughts on how to combat that problem?

What about preventing alts? There are some decent measures in effect already, such as the horrible tradition/change slider and the fact that going afk stops time for your character (even if you take a few steps every half hour). Maybe you could just make it even harder to create an effective alt, such as making it unable to participate in combat unless it's been online (not afk) for an even longer period of time, requiring the character to do a certain number and variety of activities, requiring the character to do a certain variety of activities on a weekly basis, etc.
You could also put some more blatant measures in order, such as making it so you can only run one Haven client per computer at once. I mean, the way it is now, you've got the doors wide open for alting, so of course it's a problem. A lot of people probably wouldn't bother trying to circumvent the anti-alt thing if it's too much work or too technical. You could also have the game check for alts, flagging people who are frequently idle or repeating the exact same task for long periods of time.

[Duderock]

I think i's fair to say that whatever my actual "root incentives" actually are, they are at least something very closely related to that, and I can't say I can immediately deconstruct them to something more primitive. What I can say, if anything, is that I consider Haven to primarily be a RPG, which must reasonably mean that character progression (of one form or another) is very closely and intrinsically tied to it.

That is not to say, however, that I consider them to be the "central concepts" of the game. I'm not particularly invested in making a game that is primarily about PvP, so to speak. Whereas some people complain that PvP is too uncommon because the stakes are high, I don't mind that at all. I consider these concepts to be very important, but only as parts of a greater mix of attributes. They alone do not define Haven. If there are ways that even further downplay the actual role of PvP in Haven to the benefit of other elements, I would not intrinsically mind that. I do not consider Haven to be the MMORTS that some people seem to think of it as.

I think deconstructing them to their most primitive can only help. It makes it easier to pick out the baggage that doesn't help to achieve what you want, and alternatives can be suggested based on that. I'm interested to know what they are because before I was aware of the pitfalls, I would've tried something similar too, so maybe we want the same thing.

There are forms of character progression aside from just physical progression(raising stats). There are things like social progression(social status), mental progression(skill mastery, understanding of the world etc...). Of course those do currently exist, but the endgame is too focused on the physical progression.

I agree with you on PvP though and tbh I don't think anyone is asking for constant raids and sieges. We just want the other aspects to shine through but certain concepts get in the way of this.

[loftar]

It is a problem that occurs anyway. *Nobody* uses one main character for crafting and PvP, murder alts are the norm. It's a problem that will always exist

Certainly; I wasn't trying to paint out a dichotomy between "high single character investment XOR massive alting", where moving towards one intrinsically moves away from the other. It's a far more complex problem than that, and different aspects of the game prefer one or the other in different ways.

However, capping Delta the way I exemplified would certainly make the alting problem far worse, and I would think that it effectively just replaces the character grind with just as much alt grind. In that way, I don't see that it wouldn't even improve the situation you complain about. (Unless you prefer alt grinding to character grinding, but I doubt this is the case.)

And time investment beating actual player skill with no contest at all is definitely a problem. IMO player skill determining the outcome is a crucial element of anything that wants to be considered a game, and if we can't agree on that axiom there's simply not enough common ground for any productive discussion.

I'm not sure I agree on the finer details of the characterization of the problem, but I do agree that there is a problem in that general direction, and it is something I already intend to have in mind when designing the new combat system for Haven 2.

However, I think it should be said that I don't necessarily and intrinsically mind that people who have more time on their hands and/or more drive to play them game use that to enhance their situation in the game. I mean, what would even be the alternative? Sure, the numbers can be balanced in various ways, but I don't really see that there's a way to completely and qualitatively avoid that factor in a fundamental way. Say, for instance, that you have two players of about equal actual player skill -- would you then suggest that the game keep them equal even if one plays ten times as much as the other?

Enormous wall of text

I'm not even going to attempt to read that.

[Danno]

I'm not even going to attempt to read that.

This is probably true, but I'm not sure I've seen any suggestions that have held water in any good way.

Maybe you'd see something you might find useful if you didn't close your eyes. Leave Haven as an infinite grindfest if you want, it's your game and your call. Sorry I can't provide meaningful input with one-liners like all the grind supporters.

[Duderock]

Say, for instance, that you have two players of about equal actual player skill -- would you then suggest that the game keep them equal even if one plays ten times as much as the other?

A while ago I made an extremely unpopular suggestion, that sort of dealt with this problem... stat decay.

The main criticism was that players would lose the incentive to level up their characters, but I see it differently. The goal changes from mindlessly raising numbers to raising stats to achieve a specific goal. A goal which changes based on the circumstances. I think it would also help rid of some of the monotony.

[McJager]

In his defense Danno it is a MASSIVE wall of text. Sum it up for him if you want to get your point across.

[loftar]

I'm not even going to attempt to read that.

This is probably true, but I'm not sure I've seen any suggestions that have held water in any good way.

Maybe you'd see something you might find useful if you didn't close your eyes. Leave Haven as an infinite grindfest if you want, it's your game and your call. Sorry I can't provide meaningful input with one-liners like all the grind supporters.

To be fair, I even did read your first reply to me about players losing their dignity. While the idea may be cute and admirable, it is completely ludicrous to think it would actually play out like that. If the other replies hold the same quality, then it's not going to be worth my time.

Also, there's a fair difference between "one-liners" and two screen-fulls of text.