A serious attempt to analyse W5LP

[AzureAngelic]

I woke up today and, in a fit of boredom, decided to play some H&H. I hadn't played in about a week, having been too busy rotating between Castlevania, Dwarf Fortress, Pokemon and Space Station 13, and when I came on I discovered that World 4 has apparently suffered an epileptic seizure and was put down violently.

Unlike a lot of people, I didn't really lose that much. My character was a pretty terrible one, the village I was in was somewhere between fledgling and abandoned, and I more or less welcomed the ability to start on the same footing as everybody else.

When I saw the announcement for the new LP system, I wasn't upset or anything. "This doesn't seem bad", I thought to myself, "and it beats Operation Holy Fuck That Is A Lot Of Buckets by a mile. And yet if there's one thing that can be said to be a historical human failing, it's that things that look good on paper aren't always good in practice.

The new LP system isn't bad. I stress "not bad" because if I opened with "not good", nobody would listen to me. It has good things to it, but it also has a lot of problems. While I'm sure that jorb had good intentions when designing it, that doesn't mean it's flawless by association. And believe me, the old system wasn't perfect either.

First, getting something out of the way: yes, this is my first post. Yes, I started playing a month ago. Yes, I've spent all this time lurking the forums, reading the wiki, enjoying the game. No, I'm not going to quit H&H forever. I'm only trying to make a serious attempt to point out what I think are the flaws in the system, and if somebody wants to ignore every attempt I'm making to come off as reasonable and shit up everything with more endless "QQ GTFO NEWBIE", I reserve the right to kindly inform you of the nearest cliff face and ask you to jump off it.

Anyway. Good shit first.


W5LP rapes botters

Yes, this is probably the #1 reason it was even added; older-style botters are more or less gone. No more silent, motionless phantoms shitting out thousands of boar meats, no more hulking Russians with thousands of UA. For god's sake, let's not go into the AD/war/whatever shit, let's just say that W5LP more or less puts a stop to that.

Because of this simple fact, W5LP turned out to be a serious balancing force in the world of <insert H&H realm here>. And that's something that was definitely needed.

W5LP is original

At least I think it is. If anything, it's worth a few brownie points.

W5LP encourages Quality growth

In the classic system, Quality really didn't mean much when it came to leveling up. Now that higher quality Curiosities are the key to more LP gains, all those nodes and staked soil claims serve a vital purpose.

W5LP is less 'directly' grind-orientated

In World 4, LP costs meant that if you wanted to get your stats up high, you had to do a lot of work. Even though this was alleviated by the fact that EVERYTHING granted LP, it still meant that spending a few hours deforesting the universe and making enough buckets to satisfy every walrus known to man was a viable and recommended strategy.


Like I've said, W5LP has genuine good things about it.

That said, there are a lot of things that could be improved on. It's easy to tell the major problems just by reading these forums, but I want to try and go in-depth into them.

So, here goes nothing.


W5LP is not interactive

This, right here, is the problem a lot of people have, myself included. In classic style, you had to work for LP; that's as simple as it was. You want to get Yeomanry? You have to do shit. Chop trees, pave roads, harvest crops, whatever. With W5LP, Haven and Hearth becomes a game of waiting. The Curiosity system runs on time requirements that range from irritating to comically absurd.

I know what a lot of you "veterans" are thinking: instant gratification. And I won't lie, a lot of people do enjoy some of this mystical substance every now and then. But W5LP doesn't lessen instant gratification: it surgically removes it, nails it to a cross, and leaves it to bleed itself dry in the desert sun, like the climax of Monty Python's Life of Brian. But without the catchy songs.

The problem lies in, simply put, the Curiosity system itself. If you want to gain LP, you need to make a Curiosity; that's fine. You then equip the curiosity, and then...wait. That's it. There's no way to interact with it, there's no way to manipulate it, and there's no way around it. You have to sit and wait for your LP gains.

W5LP is purely time-based

This more or less goes hand-in-hand with the first problem. The system in place currently means that if you want to get ahead, you need to set up a curiosity and wait a set amount of time.

That right there poses a serious flaw: there is no way for a newbie to get ahead of older players. In other MMOs, player status was typically a result of time actively spent improving. In strategy games, player status is based on skill. In W5LP, it's based on whoever's been around the longest.

If a newbie joins months after more experienced players, what can he do? The only way to progress is to wait, and by the time you get to where the vets are by waiting, those same vets have progress further along. It seems to go against the very concept of a MMO in that player competition is nigh-impossible to alter through any means other than "hoping the other guy doesn't check in on his curis for a week".

W5LP is not a social game

This is partly a problem with W5LP and partly a problem with W5LP's discovery system.

When a new player joins a village with experience players, it makes sense for him to receive a few freebies/passdowns. Let's say this newbie gets a bonesaw from a vet. He goes out, does some chopping, and then gives the saw back. Later, when he's experienced, he decides to make a bonesaw for himself. He takes some bone from the storage, gathers branches, and...nothing. Because this newbie never "learned" how to remove a bone from a rabbit or something, he is unable to make a bonesaw, despite having the recipe memorized and having used a bloody bonesaw before. This alone more or less nullifies the concept of players helping each other by passing down high-tier items.

As if that wasn't problematic enough, the Curiosity system defies the concept of villages and clans. Let's say you make a really badass high-tier curi, and you're proud of it. You want to use it, correct? So you use it, and now nobody else in the village can have any rewards, any gains at all from the materials you sunk into the curi. In classic H&H, if you grinded up LP by making sausages, those sausages would go on to benefit the entire village. Now, the only way to gain LP is a method that drains the resource pool of a village and only benefits a single member, meaning there's no point in expecting a bonus from a village other than socialization and backup.

In essence, the very concept of players helping players goes against a lot of the fundamentals of the new systems.

W5LP's raw numbers were unaltered/poorly thought out

In world 4, most things were balanced in terms of LP/skill. This was good. But when W5LP dramatically reduced the amount of LP coming in for the average player, it left skill costs unaltered.

To put it into a metaphor: let's say you work in a big building. It costs 5$ to get lunch, and you make 7$ a day. It can be rough at time, but you can still manage to reliably get your workplace lunch with a bit of effort. Now, one day, your boss W5LP comes in and lowers your wage to 1.30$ a day. Even if this isn't much of a problem (shit is cheap in this world, after all), it means you cannot feasibly purchase lunch. Had the lunch price been lowered to 40c, you would more or less be in the same position. Instead, you can no longer purchase your delicious lunch, so you quit and go get hired as some place that doesn't pay you 7$ a day. Probably outside of China.

In W5LP, it's the same problem. You can make a kickass statue of a pondering bear engraved with images of dwarves eating cheese rum, and leave it in your study for 8 hours. What will you get? <1000 LP? In eight hours, you gained less than 1/100th of what it takes to get the Murder skill. Even if you can increase the LP you're gaining, by then you'll already be in a position of power.

W5LP is a system where the more you gain, the more you gain

And no, that wasn't a typo. Higher quality Curiosities give better LP. More LP is needed to make better curis. Better curis get more LP. More LP is needed to make better curis. It's a circular cycle, and it benefits the experienced vet while going against the tender newbie, which is usually the opposite of what games go for.



So that's a nice list of problems that have come up with the new system. So now what?

It's obvious that SOMETHING has to change. I sure as hell am not saying we abandon all jorb's work and go back to W4. But there are so many tweaks that could be made to make W5LP actually fun to play.

-A method besides the curi system to gain lp
-Drastically lowering the curi times so the game becomes less of Equip & Wait 12 Hours
-Reworking of LP costs for most skills
-More methods of gaining lp in general
-An overhaul of the infuriatingly useless discovery system that only serves to impede player socialization
-Less punishment for not specializing (ergo, cheaper skills)

I don't want to go back to thousands of botters, and I don't want to continue playing a game that simply is not fun by virtue of waiting endlessly. The system is new; it needs to be broken in, thought about, tweaked and adjusted until it reaches a point where it goes back to the accessibility of W4 without the grievous exploitation.

But hell, I joined last month. What do I know?

[babyhero09]

I agree this new system is fun but the waiting ruins the game and prevents progress even if you try hard your still stuck to a "limit" of lp per a day. If you were to build 20 houses and work yourself to death you still wouldn't be able to build that palisade that's very important because your cariosities are not done yet and you don't have the lp for yeomanry.

[Tamalak]

Good post and well thought out. I disagree mostly with a lot of your disadvantages listed. I disagree the most strongly with this:

W5LP's raw numbers were unaltered/poorly thought out

In world 4, most things were balanced in terms of LP/skill. This was good. But when W5LP dramatically reduced the amount of LP coming in for the average player, it left skill costs unaltered.

Exactly what standard do you use to measure how much LP we "should" be getting per day vs how much skills cost?

Because using world 4 as the standard is ludicrous. Your average metagamer was getting 300,000 LP per day.. three times the MOST EXPENSIVE SKILL IN THE GAME. There is no way in hell the intended daily income is anywhere near that much.

Our World 5 boss is not "lowering" our salary. We have no salary. We're alpha testers. Adjusting for the new, lower LP is certainly an uncomfortable business, but that's what alphas are like.

It's GOOD that the costs to buy skills are now relevant. It puts much more depth into character development and diversification. You're not going to buy Lawspeaking just for the hell of it because it costs about 5 minutes of grinding.. you're going to ask: "do I want my character to lead? Is that going to be his role?"

Now what's the disadvantage of this system? You're not going to get 740 farming. You'll have to settle for a two digit farming skill. How, mechanically, does this make the game worse?

[kholhaus]

Would it be a crime to have TWO types of LP gain?

One being manual labor and the other being the Curiosities?

Of course balancing would be needed, but I like the new system.

I want LP when I'm doing stuff that furthers myself, but I also like the fact that I can gain LP in the off-time, when I'm not focusing on development.

[brayan]

It hasn't even been 24 hours christ of course it's not perfect. Give it time, see how things play out.

This game is an ALPHA, after all.

[howyadoin988]

Wall of text.

Honestly, why say this wasn't purely a QQ thread and then QQ with a massive wall of text that just restates things that have been said countless times already?

[Guattanator]

I also agree the time/effort put into gaining a curiosity+ the time you have to wait for it to be studied slows down the game and the "discovery system" is majorly flawed. I think we should still get LP for doing things, just maybe decrease the amount of LP over time, such as I make a basket, get 10 LP, make another basket or two I get 8 or 6 LP for those until I'm only getting 1 or no LP from making them, kinda like what happened when you picked a lot of branches in W2, W3, and W4. I also think you should be able to get the recopies, not the "discovery LP" from a bone that was just lying around so if a friend gives you a bone, you didn't get the LP for discovering it, because you didn't it was handed to you, but you still get the ability to craft things with it.

[DaMaGe]

This new system needs major tweaking, but could be fun.
Yes, Joftar should definitely reduce the skill costs.

[Goddess]

W5LP is not a social game
As if that wasn't problematic enough, the Curiosity system defies the concept of villages and clans. Let's say you make a really badass high-tier curi, and you're proud of it. You want to use it, correct? So you use it, and now nobody else in the village can have any rewards, any gains at all from the materials you sunk into the curi. In classic H&H, if you grinded up LP by making sausages, those sausages would go on to benefit the entire village. Now, the only way to gain LP is a method that drains the resource pool of a village and only benefits a single member, meaning there's no point in expecting a bonus from a village other than socialization and backup.

In essence, the very concept of players helping players goes against a lot of the fundamentals of the new systems.

What I'd like to see there would be some kind of "Village Study", for example an extra inventory by right clicking the Village Claim, the Attention limit could be an accumulated amount of INT or the average INT of every villager in town.

If accumulated there could be certain High Tier Curiosities a single Player would most likely never be able to equip

So if you gain curiosities for example by using the village ressources, or just want to share - you can put the curiosity into the Village Study.
The gained LP will be evenly divided for every villager thus having many clone-war? alts in the village would actually slow down the overall progress.

[Valten21]

I have to agree with the murder of the social aspect... Last world, if a new friend joined me, I'd get him a sling and we would go out hunting together, and that was a lot of fun! Now, I would see myself grabbing some curiosities out of my cupboard of curiosities, giving them to him, and telling him I would talk to him in an hour.