Game Development: World 16, with Steam

[Pills]

Make botting (any kind of automation) and playing multiple characters for one players benefit a bannable offence. It doesn't matter whether you can detect it or not.
Add Anti Cheat software. A Report feature. Have some in-game moderators. A ToS and some basic rules everyone has to agree to before they play.

Just be a normal online game for the Steam release.

Anti-cheat software is aids and this game doesn't need it.

Personally, i'm a big advocate for bots because its fun, I do think the default client could have some nicer things to reduce the 'need' for bots. Our most used bot for instance is our farming bot, but if default client had just a nice "select your area and this action will automatically harvest, sort and replant the highest Q stuff here for you. maybe even store the excess in granaries/barrels" that'd be a start. I do agree steam normies will likely complain once they discover some people are botting, but I think the better thing would be for the game to address the most bottable things or add functionality to the default to enable something like that.

As for multiple characters, that's a difficult one, being able to play with multiple characters from one account would be a thing, maybe having tabbed sessions like some clients have could help? But i'm not sure if the devs would want to support that officially. But alt-characters definitely have their benefits and again, i'd rather see it supported better for steam than "bannable" because that's just insane.

It would be nice for default client to have a 'quick interact' button like most custom clients do too, for instance "pick nearest herb, close nearest gate" etc. I'd be happy to share how we handle that in ours if the dev's would be interested.

[Robertzon]

dreaming about anticheat is like expecting OCO to be possible

[Pills]

Another problem that maybe the influx of new people would help is purely the community, the community has over the years largely devolved into some of its most toxic elements, I think the hands-off approach when it comes to community management is great in many ways, I grew up in the heyday of the internet of the 90s when the idea of "community moderation" was a joke, but it also almost always leads to the same situation we have here, it's partly why myself, and likely many other people, don't even bother engaging with it anymore.

Very much this though. the lack of moderation allowing for the most toxic of players to become the most loudest, (even once banned from the game in some cases) is very unappealing. Though, i'd be surprised if many people finding the game through steam ever actually stepped foot into the forums.

But there is a reason most games have a terms of service and a report feature for extreme hate speech and the likes. I understand the aspect of wanting to remain hands off, and surely even adding a report option would just be abused by the same people that it would serve to target (though you could always ban people from reporting others if they abuse it), it might actually be time to reconsider the stance you guys take on just how free the game is. In the current scene, i'd fully expect (once realms are developped) for players not used to this games community to see it and just turn away and not want anything to do with it.

I would also add, Twitch has banned people for streaming content which includes extreme hate, something that, if realm chat or toxic players in area chat were on screen, is something beyond their control. This alone could stop people from streaming your game potentially which is where most of your visibility would come from with a new platform release.

[wonder-ass]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

this is a genuine unbiased opinion from personal experience having seen almost every form of bot in the game. the botting issue that majority of people talk about is MASSIVE cope. highest stat characters every world for pvp do it manually, highest anvil spiralers and miners do it manually. Like these hermits or small Villages of 5 people try to compete against tight knit villages of like 20+ people funneling resources in to important characters and complain when they cant compete.

why do we need 1000s of farm land to feed animals?
why is it so inconvenient to move cheese?
why is the steel making process so ass?
why are there animal nodes that can be scout botted?
why do i need to chug 1000l of water to mine?
why is pepper the way it is?
why do we need 10 towers to store resources?


default client vs competitive pvp client is so insanely massive but realistically its a none issue since even with a good client 99% of people are simply not at the skill level to make a difference, i could still beat them effortlessly with default.

[TheServant]

There's literally zero teamwork possibility other than both hitting the same person.
This is why PvP in the game is just carrying lakes of water and chasing each other for miles based on numbers, there's very little room for individual skill or group skill to play a part in the outcome of a fight

Dont think thats true, any zerg vs zerg PvP game is mainly based on shotcaller skill (map awareness, raise morale, quick thinking, strategy etc.), even in RL old fights. Theres room for individual skill and teamwork aswell, of course game could do better with more moves and maneuvers, and i agree it needs more. But no healing bs.

[Kaios]

Dont think thats true, any zerg vs zerg PvP game is mainly based on shotcaller skill (map awareness, raise morale, quick thinking, strategy etc.), even in RL old fights. Theres room for individual skill and teamwork aswell, of course game could do better with more moves and maneuvers, and i agree it needs more. But no healing bs.

I do agree that it certainly takes someone with a decent set of leadership skills and a focus on team dynamic in order to make something like that happen in a fluid and logical way without getting everyone else confused. However, like you said those skills are applied in any raid based game, and I think when you're talking about Haven & Hearth specifically you also have to consider how much of that information comes from the client itself. Is it skill and experience that allows someone to determine the path in which a player is moving? Or could it be the giant line in front of them that indicates where they are going?

[ChildhoodObesity]

this is a genuine unbiased opinion from personal experience having seen almost every form of bot in the game. the botting issue that majority of people talk about is MASSIVE cope. highest stat characters every world for pvp do it manually, highest anvil spiralers and miners do it manually. Like these hermits or small Villages of 5 people try to compete against tight knit villages of like 20+ people funneling resources in to important characters and complain when they cant compete.

why do we need 1000s of farm land to feed animals?
why is it so inconvenient to move cheese?
why is the steel making process so ass?
why are there animal nodes that can be scout botted?
why do i need to chug 1000l of water to mine?
why is pepper the way it is?
why do we need 10 towers to store resources?


default client vs competitive pvp client is so insanely massive but realistically its a none issue since even with a good client 99% of people are simply not at the skill level to make a difference, i could still beat them effortlessly with default.

Yeah this guy has a point!!! Pretty much all of these should be considered for QOL. To go into more detail on some:

It would be nice to see the amount of food animals eat decreased or the amount of fodder a crop fills in a trough increased.

It'd be nice to see the steel timer reduced as the amount of steel needed for PVP is quite large per person and you need to rerun it after every KO. A compromise would be at least fuel lasting longer so you don't need to check it multiple times per run.

As many others have pointed out I think randomizing the quality of animals rather than having it node based solves a lot of problems. Namely bots that login and ping a discord when a high Q animal spawns, and somewhat spam questing to raise the local animal Q in an area.

Water consumption should be changed from 0.05 to 0.01. There isn't really any reason to need to carry a million liters of water other than annoyingness.

I personally am not too sure on the best work around for cheese botting but that is definitely something that should also be considered at least.

I would also add that smelting could be reworked as it is in my opinion one activity that is so SHIT it should be botted. The amount of metal you need for support metal, armor, spiraling, etc, is INSANE having one blacksmith smelter run only 36 ore per 40+ minutes is terrible. You constantly need to be running a shit ton of smelters for long lasting periods. The process for filling each smelter is also annoying (add all ore, add exact amount of coal clicking once at a time on each smelter which should be a lot if you're being optimal). If I were to rework this myself I would probably make it so it can store way more coal/ore at once so you not only have to build less, but you have to swap it over less. I'm not sure the current smelter window would work well for this, but it could be reworked as a singular ore deposit, singular coal deposit, a singular metal output, and a singular slag output that allows for way higher inputs and just displays the quantity in each input.

I would say changing all of these would of course not removing botting, but greatly reduce the effectiveness of botting them and level the playing field more. I do think farming bots, steel fueling bots, animal spawn bots, smelting bots, and cheese bots are probably the most commonly used bots that actually play a rather large role in increasing the difference between non-botters and botters.

[Dawidio123]

...

This tbh. I really hate how devs always insist they want to combat botting by saying that if a mechanic is often botted then it's a bad mechanic but then like A LOT of the most basic stuff is just straight up second job if you don't bot it.
For example:
Why can't we make some automatic spitroasts? Just make it cost xp to spawn some whisp/magic/golem/gnome/literally anything that permanently will spin the spitroast when you put something on it, there are already bots that do it FOR FREE, and if you aren't using 20 alts to spitroast fish then you are wasting hours of time doing it.

[Pills]

why do we need 1000s of farm land to feed animals?
why is it so inconvenient to move cheese?
why is the steel making process so ass?

Literally the 3 most used bots in my group. Cheese atleast got made better with the change so it doesn't go sour if you just don't move it after it changes.

But the amount of farm we need to feed animals is awful. And having to log in every 10 hours just to refill steel crucibles sucks donkey dick

[Pills]

...

This tbh. I really hate how devs always insist they want to combat botting by saying that if a mechanic is often botted then it's a bad mechanic but then like A LOT of the most basic stuff is just straight up second job if you don't bot it.
For example:
Why can't we make some automatic spitroasts? Just make it cost xp to spawn some whisp/magic/golem/gnome/literally anything that permanently will spin the spitroast when you put something on it, there are already bots that do it FOR FREE, and if you aren't using 20 alts to spitroast fish then you are wasting hours of time doing it.

Honestly just make spit roasting not take 12 years. If it scaled a little with the size of the thing you're roasting would atleast make sense, but it takes like 1 second to roast a fillet of meat, yet what feels like an entire lifetime to spitroast the same fish but not butchered.