Game Development: Kicksleddin' on Thin Ice

[wonder-ass]

they lose in the quality and stat grind so they become "peaceful" hermits to avoid getting killed.

And here is the fault in the mechanics, that you can 'lose' the grind.

If that would be turned into you might suck at it, whatever hard, but you can turn it around within a world (which would have the implication of solving the problems with starting late, character and/or base death) then we could talk about siege.

Before it has to be basically impossible or it'll kill participation by every metric, simply as our residential asshats would burn everyone and -thing to the ground for their lulz, to make them quit by making them 'have lost'.

not possible with inflated stats and quality.

[wentyl]

You want siege to be more accessible for players, but still have safe villages that cannot be decimated when villagers are sleeping/working irl?
Simple. You have to separate land claim types.
Natural resources already cannot be claimed by personal claims only by villages. Why not change that around. Make us fight for natural resources.
Personal claim should be placeable on natural resources, be cheap, have low upkeep and only 12 hour safe window.
Village should not cover any natural resources, be safe for long time and more expensive with much higher upkeep (It's silly that I can now log on every 2-4 days study 2-3 low tier curio and solo max out medium sized village authority).
Hell why not go step further and create other claims for natural resources only that can be bashed within 4 hours.
Or lower safety on all current claims and create new vault type claim that is extremely expansive,limited in size and cannot be destroyed within first 32 hours of siege.
Sure it sucks: you log in and discover that when you were sleeping some bored a-hole destroyed everything you build, but too much safety can be even worst.
You can now start game and within 48 hours be almost untouchable, your house is safe, your fields are safe, your mine or at least your smelting area is safe, even your private tree nursery is safe.
I think your house should be safe when you sleep irl, rest I'm not so sure.
Finding balance is hard but I think that purge type event is not the answer.

[Agrik]

Would it be fun if there were like... a 24 hour event once every month, when all walls can be bashed?

I'm unsure what's the supposed purpose of this invention. And I can't even make suggestions if I don't know what goal you intended to achieve. Only a criticism.

- It surely will decrease the sense to use siege mechanics (as if they're overused...).
- It surely will push players into a combat that, as I understand, you deem as needing a rework.
- Lowered cost of attacking a base will lower the level of targets it's reasonable to attack. As an act of handbashing has basically no cost for those who got high enough stats, it will allow to raid anybody "just because". Rageless noobs that can't make a Nidbane included, if not straightforward preferred.

Regardless of length of such event, as far as it's enough for one high-statted character to break in one base.

It would be fun for ones and not fun for others. Again, what was the goal?

It's one of the hardest design challenges we face for sure.

As I see the ranking of current issues, it's: endless Q growth > predetermined combat > sieges. And locality somewhere beside, but it's unrelated to the question. That is, while you can work on them in any order, you won't see much overall improvement after tweaking sieges even if you make it right, until you have basic combat right as well. And you won't see if the combat itself is good until the issue with evergrowing Q gap is solved. Or until combat is totally untied from Qs and stats, which seems unlikely.

I mean... let's say it's four hours.

When America sleeps, when Europe sleeps, or when Asia sleeps?

[jordancoles]

Would it be fun if there were like... a 24 hour event once every month, when all walls can be bashed?

No, it wouldn't be fun.

You either have to book off work and camp your walls for 24h or walk away from it for the entire duration and hope for the best. People would alt vault their shit beforehand and the drive to make anything meaningful would be lessened from the very beginning because you know that whatever you make could be taken or destroyed every month. This siege window would only benefit a small group of people with bugged stats and it would kill the motivation of everyone else.

Honestly just give up on siege for the foreseeable future. No one gives a shit and if the pvp system was actually enjoyable then people would leave their walls to fight or to track criminals as it was in Legacy.

[lagrits]

Fun fact i just discovered, frozen vortexes still work, i walked over one with my horse and got teleported. The receiving vortex was right next to deep water, barely frozen over. If you're less lucky theres a good chance of drowning i guess.

[Archiplex]

Would it be fun if there were like... a 24 hour event once every month, when all walls can be bashed?

alt vault their shit beforehand

This siege window would only benefit a small group of people with bugged stats and it would kill the motivation of everyone else.

Maybe it's a hint that this 'hands off' approach to telling people not to do things such as botting, owning multiple large villages or alt vaulting is doing more harm than good

From what I've seen over the years, designing for this game is part coming up with something cool, then finding how people abuse it, then trying to hard-code a way they can't abuse it instead of just blanket telling people not to abuse things; reminds me of the entire debacle where the wizards raided tartarus with the charter bug in w9, or that screeny I posted in the screenshots thread.

Infact, now that I recall, I remember having a huge issue with big factions resorting to hoarding bugs they could abuse rather than reporting any of them...

[Potjeh]

No amount of time period will negate the human side of gaming.
There is no desire among people to have to choose between defending their base or attending the funeral of a loved one.

True for any competitive environment. At that point you're basically saying that siege just shouldn't be a thing, and I don't think that's the game we're trying to build.

You should definitely make the event take place on Mondays then, at like 10AM CET.

[Zentetsuken]

What if the event was somewhat player-controlled? Like maybe there is some sort of buildable altar everybody can have in their village and in the days leading up to, say, the very middle day of summer, this altar becomes active. The planets in the hearthling galaxy are known to align on the summer solstice and by making numen-esque offering to the altar, a world-progress bar is filled. If the hearthlings make the appropriate amount of offerings, the magic that allows for village claim protection to work stays stable, maybe the hearth is even blessed with some bountiful event similar to a meteor if the hearthlings offer enough to the gods.

However, at the same time, maybe there is some sort of activity you can do to remove progress from this bar, like maybe sacrificing a high level character somehow? Or making ents killable, but extremely hard to kill, and then killing one? Maybe something easier even, I don't know.

Might be fun to have the balance of progress bar even favor that it is NOT filled so there would have to be some pretty legit effort across the world to prevent shields from going down.

[Archiplex]

What if the event was somewhat player-controlled? Like maybe there is some sort of buildable altar everybody can have in their village and in the days leading up to, say, the very middle day of summer, this altar becomes active. The planets in the hearthling galaxy are known to align on the summer solstice and by making numen-esque offering to the altar, a world-progress bar is filled. If the hearthlings make the appropriate amount of offerings, the magic that allows for village claim protection to work stays stable, maybe the hearth is even blessed with some bountiful event similar to a meteor if the hearthlings offer enough to the gods.

However, at the same time, maybe there is some sort of activity you can do to remove progress from this bar, like maybe sacrificing a high level character somehow? Or making ents killable, but extremely hard to kill, and then killing one? Maybe something easier even, I don't know.

Might be fun to have the balance of progress bar even favor that it is NOT filled so there would have to be some pretty legit effort across the world to prevent shields from going down.

While im not too sure about this idea specifically, I like the idea of a general turmoil between hearthlings and the gods above, fueled by quests and sacrifices.

Maybe it could even be a way to introduce a natural 'world reset' that's built up to over the world.

[NeoBasilisk]

I'm not a fan of bringing back anything resembling palibashing, even if it's a limited event (unless it's at the end of the world or something). If I can log out, and then come back 15 minutes later and there are people inside my base, I'm not a fan of that.