What has changed?

[SeanPan]

I was reading back on the older posts and the way that the game was portrayed in late 2009, etc was that it was full of griefers, almost completely impossible for new players to get into, etc, etc. While I am more than glad to dismiss the complaints of most of the ragequitters who don't quite comprehend sandbox pvp, there seem to be changes that make it overall, more sane.

What has changed since then to make the game evidently so much more accessible?

[Butko]

I was reading back on the older posts and the way that the game was portrayed in late 2009, etc was that it was full of griefers, almost completely impossible for new players to get into, etc, etc. While I am more than glad to dismiss the complaints of most of the ragequitters who don't quite comprehend sandbox pvp, there seem to be changes that make it overall, more sane.

What has changed since then to make the game evidently so much more accessible?

Nope still the same. Currently world is not even big enough to go far far away from ppl so u will meet them alot.

[WarpedWiseMan]

Today it's full of griefers, AD and homicidal wild life.

The PVP is still incoherent, slow and annoying. And almost non-existent. It's more like botted super toon versus unsuspecting veggie farmer. Or mining tunnel rat versus hearthfire.

Accessible is not a word I would associate with Haven & Hearth.

The game is simply awesome because there are consequences to every single decision you make. And, if you play it right, the community you join and help create becomes one of the best experiences in video games.

[SeanPan]

So far, everything has made fairly logical sense to me; I've even met raiders and they did use intimidation, but nothing akin to 'lulz I kill you all.' They just demanded resources and tribute, and given the reasonable inclination of not wanting to die, cooperated. As for the people I've met, they've been generally cooperative and the nearby village protects us.

It helps that I've started with a number of IRL friends, I suppose, and I absolutely despise botters. I suppose that if I lose my guy to someone who's botted up to invincibility, I will be pissed(I did grind heavily myself, but at least that's an investment of time and sanity). My little group has had a couple of deaths from homocidal wild life but we've always been able to pick up and survive; or warn each other.

Lag seems to be the largest annoyance, and that's pretty inevitable.

[TeckXKnight]

I'm pretty sure the server capacity has increased, making the game roughly 4x as accessible as it was in World 3. World 3 was already a 3x improvement on what World 2 was -- Wait a second, I'm seeing a trend here. I'm calling it now, W5 will have a player capacity of 6000 people.
But yes, the biggest issue hasn't been people who want to play, its been lagg and the fact that going over capacity crashes the server.

[SeanPan]

I'm hoping that the new LP system eliminates the botters and cheating is squashed as much as possible, but beyond that, I'm pretty okay with things. Some form of aging/death, as mentioned before, would be neat too.

[TeckXKnight]

I'm pretty sure the death part is covered for most players.

[SeanPan]

I'm pretty sure the death part is covered for most players.

Well, I was referring to this:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11311&p=124193&hilit=aging#p124193

Perhaps death and expiration is a bit too much, but its not entirely a bad idea. A botter who obsessively macros the same actions will result in someone with a great deal of unhappiness, stress, and abruptly gets all sorts of unpleasant status penalties from early aging.

Ideally, actions that are intuitive to human players but very difficult for computers to process would be all that are needed to minimize cheating. Kinda like capcha, but for gaming entertainment!

[TeckXKnight]

You've clearly never had to make brickwalls before. Every character who works on that will die before they can cover half a village if that's what you're aiming for and they won't even be botting.

[SeanPan]

Sadly, I have had to. I still have flashbacks.