The only world reset/wipe requests/discussion topic

[Mashadar]

Clearly the Zone should get smaller over time (with hearthlings outside the Zone gradually taking massive damage).

I don't know if you were being sarcastic, but this would genuinely improve the game from what it is now.
Even the 100-150 players still playing could generate some action and make the game actually feel like a game if they were forced into a smaller area instead of half a dozen oversized continents. People who don't want to resettle halfway through the world can go build their village right in the center of the world and the big villages will attempt to do just that.
Much better than the current single player carrot harvester simulation.

[Raffeh]

I'm ready for w13 now. Let me know when you want my money

[Zampfeo]

Systematically increasing the size of the world via concentric rings is an interesting idea. I remember in the very early days when the devs did this at HnH's peak. It gave intermediate players/villages an opportunity to search for high Q resources they didn't have because other, more powerful villages had snatched them up. Our village had moved 3 times in one world at one point. The downside is the perimeter increases each time you do this and a new character on the east side of the world are even further from the west and you end up with a lot of activity on the edges not interacting with each other and a whole lot of abandoned villages in the middle. Perhaps instead a portal opens in the old world connecting the new?

Still, there are major issues this wouldn't address with longevity of the game. 1) There's 0 effort put into marketing new worlds or expansions of existing ones. There's an announcement on the forums and that's it. No emails sent out to forum users or anything. At least in the early days of HnH, posts would make their way to gaming communities like Something Awful, 4chan's /v/, Dwarf Fortress forums, etc. and drum up a lot of new player activity. For the last 6 or so worlds, it seems like it's only hardcore vets playing on day 0 and takes away from a lot of the magic world resets used to have. 2) Infinite progression and lack of catch up. 3) The world's just end up looking disgusting after a few months because of all the abandoned villages. Decay should be ramped up.

Here's an idea: a new, relatively small world every 6 months that connects to the old, but you can only enter the new world under a certain skill and attribute level.

[rustles]

I think the everlasting sandbox meme only appeals to a small set of hardcore autists
For the vast majority of players the excitement is in early/mid game where they are setting up industries and exploring the world in search of fresh high quality resources
The game should be focused on seasonal gameplay in a world that resets every year in my humble opinion, that is what most people clearly want based on player count at the start of every new server. After 3 months half the population is already gone

I think someone already suggested something like this but start with a really large map and spawn people closer to the borders and gradually shrink the map size like some battle royal meme forcing players to move towards the center. It would encourage people to build their villages closer together as well near the middle of the map

[VDZ]

I think someone already suggested something like this but start with a really large map and spawn people closer to the borders and gradually shrink the map size like some battle royal meme forcing players to move towards the center. It would encourage people to build their villages closer together as well near the middle of the map

Most of your base is immobile (all structures) or hard to move (your bazillion cupboards), making moving a huge hassle. In practice this will just make people quit earlier (once their base is no longer inhabitable).

[Rebs]

It is very clear that alot of people love the early/mid-game. and to an extent the late game.

I have said this before, but Haven is now rather easy, it's not hard to stay alive I have even lasted 2 months without a palisade wall right next to the capital..

Dying is a sense, is a soft reset. In legacy, getting ganked was a daily threat, and I would typically get raided by a neighbor way before I got bored of the content which meant I had to "restart", and get to replay the early game.
Now I am just in a weird cycle of playing for 3 months, quitting for a couple. coming back moving with my old character to build a new base and repeat.

Imagine playing Rust without raiding or the threat of being raided or dying. it would get boring rather quickly.
On the topic of raiding others, let's be honest the early game is the only time the casual player will think they have a somewhat of a chance to fight their neighbors. once kingdoms come along, really the fighting is mostly between them.

So if the devs are moving towards a new player-friendly, less murderery type of game then they need to think of a new way of "resetting" people. There has to be a new gameplay loop.

Avoiding horrible ideas like "aging".

One idea that I have heard:
with the implementation of winter, every few months it may be a nice way of resetting (not the world just the gameplay loop), hear me out.
if winter was deadly as hell, increase mob spawn and level and make them murder instead of KO, make decay on structures crazy and turn all safety nets off for pvp.
this would make winter that looming threat like pvp was back in the day and it gives everyone a common goal of surviving the winter from the offset, it would basically a purge. and it would hopefully encourage people who died to want to try and beat it next winter, therefore restarting the loop (and redoing the fun stuff).

This is extreme but I like it.

Pinpointing why people stop playing after the early game is hard but I do somewhat believe that death = attention rate (at least from my experience).

Some games have a player achievement that resets the world I believe the devs were gonna go down that path at one point so maybe that, I don't like that idea but it's something.
I do think they need to figure out something that stops the world resets and encourages replayability, the game cant go on much longer with the constant dying worlds.

[Zampfeo]

The majority of content is in the early/mid game, so it shouldn't be surprising that most people enjoy those phases. Late game's infinite grind is only appealing to some and the prevalence of botting + multiboxing puts off a lot of people who refuse to partake. I personally never liked the quality grind; I found enjoyment late game in running villages and dealing with outsiders. Even so, things like PVP were exceedingly difficult/risky, so the political game was mostly limited to forming relationships, dealing with petty thieves, and trade. PVP has gotten even worse over the years with progressively more defensive options. Meteorites are cool, but not enough. The risk-rewards of PVP just isn't balanced well.
Unfortunately, I don't expect HnH to ever improve in this area despite the problem being so obvious. I havn't seen a well-designed gameplay system come out of this game since world 3. It's been nothing but gimmicks and seeing what shit sticks to the wall since. I will concede that the easiest fix would be to implement seasonal gameplay and scheduled world resets like a Rust public server.

[VDZ]

I too believe the early game is by far the most fun; I lose interest once I run out of things to do other than goals that seem futile (endlessly just raise quality numbers) or unachievable (found a kingdom, do PvP (not being member of a large faction)). However, I don't think killing players is the solution.

The biggest issue that prevents death from being a reset is the fact that most of your progress is in your base. Even if your character were to get obliterated without any chance of inheritance, as long as you still have access to the area (i.e. you have an alt there you can play on or use to spawn a new main), most of your progress is already made. You'll have to grind back up a little to get to your previous state (which is a lot less fun than actual early game play) but then you're back on your feet again, having had very little downtime. You'll probably have lost your best gear, but that's generally a minor setback.

That leaves the alternative of your entire base getting razed. While solving the above problem, it's a real feelbad solution, and many (most?) players just stop playing when this happens, sometimes permanently (for newbies especially). While giving you a new set of goals, it doesn't really encourage you to go at it again. (Ironically, the end of the world implicitly destroys your entire base too, but due to a different framing (a new world!) it does encourage players to start anew.)

But let's say you don't get discouraged, or just take a little break and then return to the game. While you are starting anew, the rest of the world is not. Struggling to get some tar as is common in the early game? No worries, your friendly neighbor will just hand you a barrel for free because at this point there's plenty anyways. Your tools are low-quality, and you have no advanced tools? You can just skip the whole crafting chain by just trading some bulk materials with someone. Oh, you found an abandoned settlement! Now everything you've worked on for the past week is obsolete because everything you find there is much better than what you have. The state of the world greatly accelerates the early game, and your own efforts frequently being rendered worthless due to this acceleration is discouraging. This effect increases as the world ages (around the end of the world I can just straight up buy my way to progress beyond what I managed to achieve at the start of the world for very little cost), and is then topped off by the existence and semi-unpredictability of world resets; I'm not starting right now as I anticipate there will be a reset soon which would invalidate any progress I do make in this reduced-fun environment.

I see only two ways of solving this issue:
1) Design something to give players interesting goals to work towards even after becoming able to craft practically every item, build practically every structure, collect every forageable, get decent quality on everything etc. What and how? I don't know; the typical solution used for this is just endlessly adding new content, but with a two-man team and Haven's design (which revolves around more interesting activities that make 'just add another raid boss' not an option) this doesn't seem feasible. A more open system like PvP could work, but designing it to be accessible (voluntary PvP is essentially restricted to the top players, involuntary PvP harms players and makes you feel like a dick) is not at all trivial and I have no idea what could be added to make something like this work.

2) Encourage players to voluntarily reset. I've mentioned this before in other threads, but Kingdom of Loathing has a unique system called 'Ascension'. After finishing the main quest (at which point you have access to most main content), you can choose to be reborn as a new character. During the rebirth process, you can make some choices that provide access to unique content (e.g. being born under certain moon signs allows you to visit the Gnomish Gnomads which among other things have a unique quest to unlock a unique new equipment slot) or give you special challenges (e.g. you can do a 'Hardcore' run which prevents you from accessing your old items or trading with other players), and as a bonus for ascending you get a permanent buff to all your future characters (you get to make one skill 'permanent' which makes it available to all your reborn characters even if the skill would be incompatible with the character's class). While intimidating for new players, it allows you to repeat the actual game progression while feeling you are making progress rather than losing it. (You get to keep all your items (though they're inaccessible during Hardcore mode and temporarily unavailable until some time after being reborn in softcore), just your character and the status of all your quests is reset.) A 'voluntary reset to make progress' system could work for Haven & Hearth to keep players interested beyond the initial buildup (by just repeating the initial buildup indefinitely). However, the 'most progress is in your base' issue would be a problem here as well; sacrificing only your character would do very little if you get to keep your high-quality gear, tools, structures, curios and food, allowing you to recover easily and making the rebuilding a grind rather than a proper and fun buildup.

Unless the devs managed to design something interesting that would provide either solution for replayability, I think regular world reset are the way to go. Perhaps world resets can be made more fun, particularly in the time shortly before the world reset; as it is now, an impending world reset just prevents people from playing. Having some kind of score system to work towards having some lasting result ('I was the #53 player last world!') or some way to 'win' at the end of the world to work towards ('I achieved X in world 13!') could encourage players to play specifically when the end of the world is near, which in turn could make pre-planned world resets more interesting (as you would be working towards a good end-of-world result rather than just losing everything when it ends).

[SinJin]

I'll continue waiting this out till W13 arrives. Give me a shout when the reset happens and you can start taking my money again.

[Naimad]

continue waiting this out till W13 arrives. Give me a shout when the reset happens and you can start taking my money again. m2