Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[Tonkyhonk]

I would personally love to see stats influence the hourglass timers similar to mining. The whole stat rewarding better hourglass timers really is rewarding on its own. For example you would start at 30 seconds removing a stump with a shovel at level 1 carpentry. As you leveled up your carpentry it would reduce in time. At some very high level anything could be made instant. Other areas would also gain the benefit in carpentry. Picking leaves from the mulberry tree, picking apples, cutting or chopping logs and so on.

Similar it would be nice if other stats would shorten the hourglass in other skills. Cooking for sausage making and baking, survival for faster animal butchering, smithing for smithing crafts, farming for farming crops and so on.

Right now alts do the lumbering outside the town. If stats would influence the hourglass timers I would assume alot more people would come out of there walls to chop trees for example.

even though i understand how your suggestion *may* make people want to use main chars instead of alts, id rather have an opposite direction of the stat influence. what i mean is your suggestion is only making everything too easier for you to play as you play longer, but i think it should go the opposite. for example, stamina consumption; let the char with higher stats(maybe con and str in mix or average) spend less stamina, so the higher stats you have, the harder it gets to raise stats, but more convenient for playing, i.e. you can run longer, you can farm or mine longer, or hand-plow a few times more without regaining stamina, which can, i think, make you want to use your main char especially for pvp for the advantages.

[Dzedajus]

(instead "instant" better "bunch" - i.e. when harvesting)

Better yet instead of harvesting fields 2 or 3 times faster would be nice to get those magical village management tools, designate field and harvest it all with single click or until inventory is full.
Oh wait, we have bots for this.

[LordD1]

Food stats has nothing to do with one hitting someone

r u dum

I am talking about defense wise, not KO wise.
Everyone argues that you can't fight someone who can 100-0 def you with one hit.

Strength is about your damage, which is one hit KO wise, but not defense. Agility is how fast you can use a move and Constitution is how much damage you can take. Which none of them have anything to do with your defense. I should have made it more clear with the "one hitting someone".

Getting full advantage is a lot easier said than done. An easier and cheaper tactic would be to simply use throwaway rage alts for op knocks and then move in for a chop with a real character. But yeah, I fully agree that double val strike is OP, a game with investment like this shouldn't have a lower TTK than most FPS games. In general, I think melee damage needs to be normalized so it's not either OHK or 0 damage ping almost every time.

It is hard in team fights to get advantage, but in 1v1 it is not that hard at all. Even more so when you focus charisma as a primary stat and you go full civilization rather than barbarism. Andreas is one of these people that I know personally has done this and his stern orders give 2-3 adv from one move on 300-500 charisma chars. Thats +5 adv at the cost of only 10 ip. However yes, something in my opinion needs to be done about val strikes and cleaves atk weights as it only really takes two good val strikes from decent chars to take anyone down.

[Danno]

so, you assume devs are too stupid not to be aware of the issues many players have mentioned without you speaking out?

I want to say no, but they've got me pretty worried when they say they want high investment "character development" to be a huge part of the game and when all my points on why grinding is boring/stupid/bad is instantly written off as "horrible ideas". They have designed a massively multiplayer online game that barely has any multiplayer aspects at all even after like, 5 years of development.

I know I'm not the first to complain about this, I only hope to remind them that unlimited grinding is terrible end-game content. Everyone's excited to see Hafen, of course we're all excited to see updates and new content. The devs sound excited about it, too, being free from their Salem obligations; happily coding, making art, and privately chatting about their new project. With all the excitement, it's easy to forget that there are some major flaws in this game, which shouldn't be carried on to the new game.

Also, it's evident no one to this point has been able to convince them that a lifetime commitment to grinding is a bad thing. It's an extremely outdated concept that came from old games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. It sounded like a good idea in theory, "make the player defeat lots of monsters to become stronger", but the reality is that it's boring and tedious to be forced to do the same thing for hours before you're allowed to proceed. This is why JRPGs and MMOs are criticized so much by the gaming community, it's why many people won't touch them with a 10 foot pole even though they love video games.
Was I able to convince them that grinding and elitism are the worst parts of this game? No, but at least I tried. I guess Hafen will be the same thing Haven is. There will be 50-100 players who love the grinding and stay with the game forever; there will be 50-100 casual players who play, quit, and get replaced by new casual players; the rest of the players will be alts and bots.

I would personally love to see stats influence the hourglass timers similar to mining.

I didn't think I'd agree with you on anything, but I like that idea. If the hourglass is going to stay, it'd be nice to be able to cut down all that idle time. It would feel a lot more rewarding to gain stats if it affected the entire game like that, just like the reward of when you get enough CON to be able to swim across a river (without cheating).
Of course, I'm still against grinding, so I wouldn't want it to require something high like 500 STR to remove a stump in 1 second.

[Xcom]

even though i understand how your suggestion *may* make people want to use main chars instead of alts, id rather have an opposite direction of the stat influence. what i mean is your suggestion is only making everything too easier for you to play as you play longer, but i think it should go the opposite. for example, stamina consumption; let the char with higher stats(maybe con and str in mix or average) spend less stamina, so the higher stats you have, the harder it gets to raise stats, but more convenient for playing, i.e. you can run longer, you can farm or mine longer, or hand-plow a few times more without regaining stamina, which can, i think, make you want to use your main char especially for pvp for the advantages.

I'm fairly certain hunger grinding will be removed in Haven 2. The whole drain hunger eat is really broken from all viewpoints and I think Jorb mentioned something about it. All things considered after that makes the hourglass timer just a convenience factor rather then a direct influence on the speed you can grind stats. As much as I try to think about other instances then making foods the hourglass timer doesn't have any impact at all.

The game is already time gated in the forms of crops and animals taking there time to mature. Then you have the time in ovens and smelters for making the finished foods. The time to haul stuff around and the time to raise stats to reduce the impact of softcaps and similar. The hourglass timer is just an added time gate that could easily be reduced without impacting the game overall by to much. Even then the timers could reduce in a log function to make it impossible to get anything down to absolute instant. But it would feel alot more rewarding to have high stats doing any job around the game other then directly influencing softcaps.

[Tonkyhonk]

-snip-

the point of my post was never the detailed stamina consumption, but the direction i have in mind. what i wrote is just an example to show "the direction" that i would welcome happening. my opinion is that the direction you posted is only widening the gap between new players and already grinded players, which would only encourage/force players yet another grinding imo.
p.s. hourglass timer would have a big impact on hardcore grinders, especially you botters and you should know that.

[Xcom]

I must disagree about the botting aspect. The reason bots do so well compared to regular players is the time gate created by the hourglass. All tasks that are to time consuming like grinding 10s of cupboards of sausages, filling 40 cubs of mulberry leaves, butchering 10x Q300 animals and as of right now eating 20 LCs of baked goods is quite rewarding to the botters. A regular player must endure the hourglass while the botter uses the same long lasting hourglass timers but with automation over multiple characters at the same time. The regular player gets exhausted faster and gives up while the bot trucks on and often follows more strict routines making the bot narrowly precise and faster to finish the same tasks. A removal of the hourglass would encourage non botting gameplay over botted gameplay by a huge magnitude.

The best aspect of bots is the multi-character automation. As a botter you would have a harder time raising the stats of 10 characters to do the same task as one high stat character. This would encourage non botting as well because of the difficulty to supply resources to multiple characters at ones. As a botter you also run the risk of having your high value character get killed by hostile encounters or similar if you did happen to use a high leveled character for botting.

The advantages against botting is significant. The only type of player that would be adversely effected by it would be newer players. But as been said before, about any change favors the older players over new so its pointless trying to cater to the new players.

[TeckXKnight]

I must disagree with you Xcom. Even if there was no wait and players never became exhausted, lets face the facts, bots are on 24/7 while players are not. Bots are also not limited to just one character. Sure, for simple tasks like transporting logs and building walls I can multi-client pretty decently and get as many as 5 clients going with each being constantly productive. What's the upper limit on the number of bot clients that you can run, engaging in activities that would be attention consuming for a player?

Once setup and put into place, bots can run through endless lists of tasks as long as you keep enough resources around for them to cycle through. Bots can forage, farm, stock supplies, bake, boil, eat, grow, and essentially run endlessly in conjunction with one another. Given that their activities are so profitable, it's not even fair to say that you're risking anything. If your foragers died because someone auto-aggro'd them, the lp they've lost is a fraction of what they've earned for you in a day, let alone the wealth they've stashed for you for as long as they've been running. You can then use that profit to build a new forager to replace it. The only thing lost is a small time investment.

There's a reason that the value of a pearl has crashed and it's not because human players have boiled more mussels than any world before this.

In the current system a standard player has no chance against a bot. There is no advantage for being human. Waiting periods aren't the issue either. Even in combat users employ bots and macros to fight for them. Lets not pretend like these aren't things. Players with combat bots have instant and better reactions over human players. It is the nature of the machine.

[Xcom]

I agree with you TeckXKnight. But in the post above I was describing the disadvantage "stats effecting lowered hourglass timers" have on bots. Even if bots were to have the ability to instant finish a specific crafting or chopping task they would still have the same exact ability as the current hourglass timers. Simply put, botting would be unaffected by lowered hourglass timers. This would only encourage manual gameplay over botting.

[TeckXKnight]

Ah, fair enough.