Past Worlds

[Sarchi]

This whole feeling of everything being totally mysterious and the mysteries actually being real; that is gone and wouldn't come back even if the game got fixed. I miss the old stories. It is hard to pinpoint it, but they had something more special than what has been around the past three worlds or so. Bagouser here, walljumper there...we didn't even have any walls back then and we did just fine (I sound like some grandpa now, don't I?).

That's a pretty good idea. Remove all claims (personal/village) and walls (except roundpole). Reduce material cost. Abolish timers, and abolish fast travel. That would make the game a lot more fun and dynamic.

Maybe there could be siege mechanics in which there are walls, but they cost more materials (limiting their size) and can be instantly sieged without cooldowns on rams and other devices. Type of material used makes the wall take a little longer to siege. Also remove summoning and replace it with keeping a criminal logged on 24/7 until the scents expire.

Add more decorations to compensate for lack of claims. This would also enable people to be more creative with their settlements.

[Oddity]

That's a pretty good idea. Remove all claims (personal/village) and walls (except roundpole). Reduce material cost. Abolish timers, and abolish fast travel. That would make the game a lot more fun and dynamic.

Maybe there could be siege mechanics in which there are walls, but they cost more materials (limiting their size) and can be instantly sieged without cooldowns on rams and other devices. Type of material used makes the wall take a little longer to siege. Also remove summoning and replace it with keeping a criminal logged on 24/7 until the scents expire.

Add more decorations to compensate for lack of claims. This would also enable people to be more creative with their settlements.

I don't know if this game could work without walls — but if it could, it would be interesting. And smaller worlds, so people actually interact with each other somehow. And more actual reasons for people to interact with each other (especially in non-violent ways).

[burgingham]

That was not my suggestion. Walls did also already exist back then. Most people simply had none, because it was not necessary. That was a fact to illustrate how the general mind of hearthlings has changed.

Smaller worlds I am all for though (needs claim decay). World 1 was a single supergrid and it still felt endless.

[bitza]

I don't know if this game could work without walls — but if it could, it would be interesting. And smaller worlds, so people actually interact with each other somehow. And more actual reasons for people to interact with each other (especially in non-violent ways).

idk if removing claims is a good idea either..without some sort of representation of 'this is my personal property' how would you summon someone for stealing or vandalizing.

as far as fast travel goes? maybe this would be a better game if it weren't possible for a hermit to put up a brickwall in 48 hours

[Amanda44]

This whole feeling of everything being totally mysterious and the mysteries actually being real; that is gone and wouldn't come back even if the game got fixed. I miss the old stories. It is hard to pinpoint it, but they had something more special than what has been around the past three worlds or so. Bagouser here, walljumper there...we didn't even have any walls back then and we did just fine (I sound like some grandpa now, don't I?).

That's a pretty good idea. Remove all claims (personal/village) and walls (except roundpole). Reduce material cost. Abolish timers, and abolish fast travel. That would make the game a lot more fun and dynamic.

Maybe there could be siege mechanics in which there are walls, but they cost more materials (limiting their size) and can be instantly sieged without cooldowns on rams and other devices. Type of material used makes the wall take a little longer to siege. Also remove summoning and replace it with keeping a criminal logged on 24/7 until the scents expire.

Add more decorations to compensate for lack of claims. This would also enable people to be more creative with their settlements.

Out of curiosity, what system would you replace claims and walls with in order to protect your belongings? You can't just have nothing, who would play if every time you logged off or left your settlement to forage every passing random can just help themselves to your stuff.

But i think these:

Maybe there could be siege mechanics in which there are walls, but they cost more materials (limiting their size) and can be instantly sieged without cooldowns on rams and other devices. Type of material used makes the wall take a little longer to siege. Also remove summoning and replace it with keeping a criminal logged on 24/7 until the scents expire.

are brilliant ideas, especially the later, providing ofc there was no way to build an imprenitable hearthvault.

Add more decorations. This would also enable people to be more creative with their settlements.

+1

[bitza]

Reduce material cost.

i feel like the material cost of everything is pretty much reasonable, as long as we don't have to goddam REPAIR everything all the time like we did in past worlds!

seriously, you had to repair goddamn everything. all the damn time, it was torture to log in and see all your brickwalls and houses and literally everything turning red.

[Sarchi]

When I was a noob, I ran a large palisade village. The wall decay was so bad that I would sometimes have to spend a couple of days just repairing the fucking walls. When I moved to Sodom, Avu used to bitch all the time because not many people wanted to make bricks to repair the town wall. My plot was pretty decayed, and I think a person in Sodom almost lost one of their mansions one day due to a combination of laziness in house upkeep and the terrible, terrible decay.

Out of curiosity, what system would you replace claims and walls with in order to protect your belongings? You can't just have nothing, who would play if every time you logged off or left your settlement to forage every passing random can just help themselves to your stuff.

But i think these:

Maybe there could be siege mechanics in which there are walls, but they cost more materials (limiting their size) and can be instantly sieged without cooldowns on rams and other devices. Type of material used makes the wall take a little longer to siege. Also remove summoning and replace it with keeping a criminal logged on 24/7 until the scents expire.

are brilliant ideas, especially the later, providing ofc there was no way to build an imprenitable hearthvault.

Even if we kept walls as they are now, I still think instant siege mechanics are a good idea. It could help people punish criminals/raider factions and make vaults less effective. In my idea, it wouldn't matter if you could build walls up against rivers and make illegal island vaults because you'd have some device that could either be used on water or land in order to destroy the walls.

[burgingham]

I don't want to let this drift too much off topic. If you guys want a siege mechanic thread let me know and I am gonna split this one up.

Sieges need to take more time btw and not less. Instantaneous destruction is one of the big banes HnH has to battle. I feel like Sarchis idea adds more to the"destroying stuff in minutes that took months to build" dilemma than it takes away from it. What we need is meaningful ways to express the activity and strength of a town when it is under siege to determine how easy or hard it is to succeed.

[bitza]

in w3 and prior, finding a mine meant you found pretty much an infinite source of that metal type. all you had to do was build a minehole and claim it. having a gold mine meant you could trade for pretty much any item in the game.

some things got a little bit out of hand in w3 in terms of game balance, a good example. look at the jewelry quality for sale in the sodom trade thread w3: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11098
my understanding too is that q1350 thimbles was nowhere near the max quality that faction was able to make.

there was also a buff to feasting, the "tidiness bonus". when a player would place symbel items on the feast table, there would be some sort of skill check of their psyche and cooking, and it would provide a bonus to the table. people would grind up psy/cooking characters and build 100% modifier feast tables that would literally enable them to eat forever without getting full (is it still possible to make a table do that?)

[bitza]

i think one particular change from past worlds that we should be thinking about, is the loss of permadeath in this game. with the curiosity system and a proper setup of alts, one person behind a computer can do literally all it takes to run a village. this leads to more creation of "treehouses" rather than actual villages of people working together. It seems like TechX had a lot of words to say about this so maybe I should post a link. But my point is, in the good old days when Sodom ran the world and everyone knew their place ( ), back then, you weren't able to solve any problem just by throwing alts at it. you were forced to work together in order to make something successful, if you wanted to make a crafter alt, you had to farm and craft a bunch of shit to get LP. or if you were a crafter and you wanted a combat alt, you had to go hunting all the time to make LP for combat skill. or you could team up with another person who had the skills you were missing. that's how villages were created.

i think a strong argument can be made here that the curiosity LP system causes players to lean towards more individualistic play styles, though I know there are still Dis, AD, and other organized villages still playing. i wonder how many players from past worlds are out there hermiting right now though.

well, jorb and loftar have made it clear that we will not go back to LP for farming and mining and killing animals. why not? because of the rampant botting (bucket bot, flour bot, mining bot, etc) that was always kind of around but got really out of hand in w4, leading to players creating 1000 UA monsters and rampaging across the hearthlands. hard to set up a proper society when the russians, butthurt after losing w3, decide to bot up and shit up the game for everyone else.

so, we went to the curiosity system. and now we have this. a far from ideal system, i remember either jorb or loftar saying once. it creates more of an incentive to work alone on a series of alts and less incentive for people to work together. in a hermitage situation, this leads to someone's "main" getting killed, and they quit, leaving an inactive claim that never goes away or possibly covers a node. that's what i'm seeing a lot of so far out in the hearthlands these days.

i have even seen the same thing happen in villages - everyone has 2 characters, one for combat and one to make curios/food for their combat char. pretty standard procedure these days. and people start hoarding shit. "i spent all this time making the blah blah blah and now its all gone.." and so forth. these things happen. but i believe that the concept of transferrable LP in the form of stuff leads to more greed and selfishness and paranoia (more stuff to worry about getting stolen or used up by an ungrateful villager or whatever)

so, yes, it's not just burg waxing poetic about the good old days of sodom. there really are a lot of differences between now and then, and his point stands that not all of them are a postive thing.