Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[Scubas]

1) Find me one aspect of any game that you can not eat or text while doing? That's just something you're choosing to do and nothing to do with gameplay??

You've still not given an answer to his question. In fact, you presented a specific example that bolstered his argument. The only thing I've ever had to pay attention to while playing the game was navigating in a boat. Why? Because the pathfinding sucks ass. (Granted, the game is still after all these years in alpha, I know. But I'm just being honest.) If the pathfinding didn't suck cock when you're in a boat, I would have no problems at all clicking off 5km's out where I wanna sail to, then proceeding to eat food, text, watch TV, play a fucking nintendo DS, (etc.), while my character played the game for me. and you can replace my example of sailing with literally anything else (chopping a stump, mining, building a structure, aiming a shot at an animal from the safety of your boat, etc.) all of these things are brainless, zombie tasks that require no skills or energy beyond clicking a button and waiting for upwards of 30 or more seconds at a time.

You ought to be on the look out for dangers or whatever, you might be mentally planning, you can run an alt and do something else.

1. With 3rd party clients that allow you to zoom out to an incredibly large degree, completely remove obstructive objects such as trees blocking your view, give a big ridiculous BRIGHT RED radius around any potential dangers, and the ability to instantly hearth to your safe zone upon even catching a glimpse of an unknown/red-named player, there is literally no reason to be looking out for danger besides glancing occasionally at the screen over your box of pizza and making sure there are no big red circles on the screen to click 1 button and casually walk away from.
2. Mentally planning...? Gee I wonder how many flax seeds I'll be able to grind once I get home...
3. If the game was designed around you running an alt while your character performs a task, it would been (halfassedly) integrated into the game by letting you control a party of multiple characters in which you can split them off to perform various menial tasks (such as Divinity: Original Sin) However, this is not the way haven is designed in any way, therefore people running alts on the side to "do things while you do things" is hardly a justification, nor is it "good design" in any way. In fact, running multiple clients on MMORPG's often violates, in one way or another, the EULA (not that anyone reads those, anyway). I realize haven doesn't have these terms in its EULA (if it even exists) but in an established game, those rules are there for a reason, because it enables shitty, borderline botting "gameplay".

If you're playing this while you're sleeping that, my friend, is just botting, and if you're bored and not using thought or effort in this game. That's probably the heart of your problem. But this isn't the place to discuss the merits of botting.

The thing is, is that I play with Danno when he plays haven, and he's actually gone as far as to never use ender's client, much less bot. Name something you can do while you're asleep in this game: wait for your crops to grow. wait for your steel to finish. wait for houses to settle. etc. How is this any different from waiting on defiling a clay node? I'll tell you. The only difference is the length of time one sits on their ass doing nothing to progress the speed of the gameplay. If you simply elongated the time it takes in the game to do just about anything, you could literally play the entire game in your sleep. (example: begin task x (e.g., tree stump removal, dig for worms, chop tree) - Task finishes in 9 hours, might as well get some shut eye) Like I said, there's nothing interesting about this. And while I don't think you should have to play a minigame each time you want to chop down a tree, the game "nickle's and dimes" your time to the point where, if you remove 60 stumps without a shovel, you've sat on your ass doing absolutely nothing for 55 goddamn minutes.

3) As for learning, You're learning every time you meet a new person, see a new village etc etc. Every person has a different playstyle and prioritizes things differently

This does not change the core "gameplay" in any way. Every person still has to eat 30 bear dicks until they evolve, everyone has to grind for q100 flax to trade for a q60 twig, etc. Once you know how to do these things, you are not learning anything anymore. There are no more "skills" to perfect or knowledge to learn, aside from learning what mechanics you can abuse the "gameplay" the most with. (You can place a prepared tanning tub in a boat, remove it, and suddenly it's at 98%. Gameplay!!!!!!!!!)

The more I really think about haven, the more I realize it's honestly on par with a goddamn free to play mobile game with NONE of the 'perks'. Even if you spend money on the game, you don't get a "speed boost" for 1 day. Not even for a fucking hour. And I do understand that the game isn't marketed as such. But it's honestly on par with Dungeon Keeper for Andriod/iOS. You command your little minions to mine the walls, do whatever, and it takes literally hours to do stuff, unless you pay to get things quicker. Remove the "pay to get things quicker" option, and what do you have? A game where you can plan a raid by building a bad ass battering ram, and "waiting for the glue to dry" for 8 hours, literally 2 meters from the front door. And the grand majority of the time, most of you fucks defend these concepts until you foam at the mouth, utterly denying that haven can, and should, be changed for the better. I love this game, I love the concept behind it, and even the dinky artwork. It's the execution of the so called "gameplay" that makes me want to execute myself.

[GrapefruitV]

You clearly haven't gotten any further than a square shaped brickwall with a couple of mansions. Most of the "flaws" you mentioned are completely your choice and your fault. Don't like red circles? Use standart. Don't want others to get advantage? But you wanted some challenge and danger! If you actually want pvp, just go and participate in it, doesn't matter if you do that by joining a village, fighting equals, gathering numbers or grinding stats. I know you will say "B-b-but titans...", but how many titans are there? There is probably like ~50 people in the world (huge world with players from different timezones) with ua/mc higher than 1000, half of those are owned by peaceful people or people which wouldn't attack a newbie. What are the chances to die to the rest of them? "B-b-but even 300 is a titan to me, because I can not into efficient developement, after all there is no skill involved and the only skill game should be based on is a fast reaction". Guess whos fault is that? Don't like the fact there is nothing to discover? Don't use wiki and don't be one of those veggies sitting on their asses and waiting for others to release to public formulas, which they discovered through collecting a lot of data, and share their ideas and little secrets. And so on.

[Danno]

1) Find me one aspect of any game that you can not eat or text while doing?

Let's see... any fighting game, any shoot'em up game, any racing game, action and/or stealth games like Assassin's Creed, platformers like Prince of Persia, etc. If you eat or text in the middle of those games, you will lose. While playing Haven, I'd often browse other websites, make and eat food, watch anime, exercise, or work on art projects because there was so much waiting involved in Haven's "gameplay" that I had plenty of time to do these things. When you're digging up a full inventory of clay, aiming at animals with a sling, taming animals, plowing, chopping a stump, building anything, walking on land while carrying a boat... well, barely anything in Haven really requires your attention.

Every person has a different playstyle and prioritizes things differently

Should I harvest the wheat field or the grape field first? Decision, decisions.

Wait, let me do some mental planning here. If I use a scythe to harvest each individual crop in my beehive radius field, carry 6 seedbags and collect byproducts like plant fibres or straw, make trips back to my farm house everytime my inventory is full so I can deposit everything into cupboards, and return to the field until the work is all done... then sort the seeds using 2 traveller's sacks and merchant robes, dumping them into my inventory and back into cupboards with the scroll wheel's quick sorting method, then go replant all the highest quality seeds... It should only take like, 30-60 minutes per beehive radius field to get my farming done for the day! If my calculations are correct, I should be able to increase my crop's quality by about 30-60 points by the time the month is over (15-30 man hours per month for one field), which will increase the crop's FEP value by 0.12. Man, this is gonna be so much fun, I can't wait to waste time getting all this work done in a 2D game instead of planting a garden in real life and harvesting real crops that I can really eat.

because I can not into efficient developement, after all there is no skill involved and the only skill game should be based on is a fast reaction". Guess whos fault is that?

Besides you, when did anybody ever say anything about how combat should rely on your reaction time? You people have terrible reading comprehension and are heavily biased towards your mindless grinding. You only like it because it gives you an advantage, and you don't want to give up that advantage since if you do, you won't be winning anymore. The grinder side whines about how the casuals want achievements and to beat the game, but isn't it you who has the obsession with "winning"? I don't give a shit about being #1, I just don't want my competitive rank to be "not eligible to compete due to not working long enough".

If you love to work and it gives you a sense of accomplishment, do some real work. If you came here to have fun and to play a game, then why are you so against having the game focus on interaction, fun, and challenging gameplay instead of work?

[Scubas]

You clearly haven't gotten any further than a square shaped brickwall with a couple of mansions.

Clearly.

Don't like red circles? Use standart. Don't want others to get advantage? But you wanted some challenge and danger!

I never said that I "don't like red circles", nor did I say "I want challenge and danger". If you can't construct a basic reply without shooting straw willy nilly out of your ass, then I'll just ignore your posts. Shitty game design is not "my fault". I've clearly indicated that the "gameplay" is based around waiting. Where is your contention to that? Try me, I'm not unreasonable. As for the comments about challenge and danger, is that true? I suppose you're right Mr. Psychic, however haven already has elements of danger(barely), though if you think there is any true challenge, you're completely wrong. The only "challenge" one encounters is that of the dreaded random number generator. Your metal may not refine properly, or you may not spawn next to a good clay node, or you may not see that flotsam that was floating in the water, or you may not get a pearl from that mussell, I could go on for ages. and that's not "my choice/fault." It's the facts. For something to be a "challenge", it has to contest a person's skills, abilities, or invoke some kind of special effort. Haven does none of these things. If you have knowledge of the battle system(I will concede that as being arguably "skillful" to an extent, but let's be honest... when you think "skillful", do you think of someone who's REALLY good at beating Oregon Trail?), and adequate combat stats, you can win any fight against animals, and I'd go as far as to say against humans as well. Does that make it challenging at all? When you get right down to it, no. You're merely mashing buttons in a certain order based on a 'flowchart' of what your opponent does. If opponent uses [move x], use [move y] to counter it, and if your stats are high enough, you win. And by this description alone, it does sound awfully skillful. But with the context of haven's combat system (in that you're waiting on "cooldowns" to build more IP and all that other convoluted shit) the combat is slow, and boring, and could only barely be 'spiced up' by running around while your characters hilariously pathfind their way into walls, edges of objects, directly into boulders, etc. Some may find the 'movement combat' as it is to be elements of a "meta game", but to those people, I say keep drinking the red koolaid. The game wasn't built around doing this shit, obviously.

B-b-but even 300 is a titan to me, because I can not into efficient developement, after all there is no skill involved and the only skill game should be based on is a fast reaction". Guess whos fault is that?

No one's fault, since no one (besides you) ever said that.

But I'll humor you anyway just because I'm a good sport. The game's combat doesn't need to be based around a "fast reaction", no one here has said or implied that. It's not a viable feature of the genre. and I'm not going to sit here and claim that I know the end-all method of making hnh combat/gameplay utterly godlike and perfect. However what I will do, is point out flaws in the games design, and make suggestions to make it a better experience, and all that is being suggested and alluded to is limiting/removing the grindy nature of the game. Is that seriously so hard to understand? Grinding in games is not "character development", it's padding out the experience to make up for lack of content. What's the difference in fighting 200 enemies to get safely to the next town in Final Fantasy? Was I "developing my character" along the way? No. Here's why: Stat points were being automatically assigned based on my class, skills were being automatically learned as well, and my characters had literally no dialogue at all between point A and point B. But yet you end up with around a 40-50 hour experience, sometimes up in the 100's of hours. Most of that time, you were probably fighting the same randomly generated enemies in a field repeatedly, so that you could stand a chance against the boss in Asperger's Tower.

Padding. Pure and simple. Now rather than injecting bullshit I didn't say nor imply into your argument, why not address the points that I actually made?

[Massa]

Danno the impenetrable wall meets a new opponent

[Duderock]

@ Danno and Scubas
I agree with your main point, but I think you are criticizing something that doesn't relate much to it.

Haven is a slow paced game and that is one of the things many of us enjoy about the game. I don't think waiting a while for things to happen is a bad thing. I'd go as far as to say, the player doesn't have to be constantly engaged all the time like a fighting or action game. As long as they take a bit of thought like you mentioned, then its fine. Time management is one of the true skills that the game requires.

I also think the bigger problem is the way these things lack meaning. Almost everything done during the endgame is done in the name of raising quality, which may feel a bit empty to a lot of people especially with the lack of social interaction in this game.

@ GrapefruitV and ninja_yodeler
Just to summarize what Danno and Scubas are saying; people aren't complaining about the lack of things to do. They are complaining about how little thought the tasks involve and how ultimately meaningless the goals become.

Sure, I can go out and pave my name somewhere, but some people find that unfulfilling. And in the rare case that I find something useful to do, like paving a long road somewhere, it usually lacks any thought or skill.

[brohammed]

What exactly caused this thread to turn into a healthy discussion after months of being dead?

[Anon9k]

If you came here to have fun and to play a game, then why are you so against having the game focus on interaction, fun, and challenging gameplay instead of work?

You chose the wrong game, get back to Happy Farm.

[Ninijutsu]

If you came here to have fun and to play a game, then why are you so against having the game focus on interaction, fun, and challenging gameplay instead of work?

You chose the wrong game, get back to Happy Farm.

[Xcom]

Problem with Danno and Scubas is the fact they just woke up one day and realized they have this wonderful idea about how everything in Haven can be fixed with more content. As they are so smart they rushed into these forums and now are lecturing us about how they are going to fix it all. First idea is to add content that can self perpetuate using some kind of player interaction. Then they tell us the "grind", a word summing up a very wide aspect of the game mechanics, should be removed as it is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game. Then tell us that if more content were to be added it would be ideal.

I have one suggestion for Danno and Scubas. Read up before posting. Most of your suggestions have been discussed in length and in more depth over the YEARS. Your ideas are as stupid as the noob suggestions found in C&I. You practically walked into main assembly of Havens oldest and now are lecturing us about how all the 100s of us are doing it wrong. There are people far more experienced in a whole lot of areas in this game then you and you think you know better then them. Learn how to present an idea and try not to reinvent the whole game while your at it.