Undefined wrote:Your biggest hurdle with HnH on steam is the obtuseness of many mechanics, the current playerbase understands them because the current playerbase has been dealing with them for years.
The combat system, I know you feel is unique, but it's painful to learn and at its core it's one way and boring. I've talked about this before, but without things like the ability to heal yourself or your allies during combat health is a finite resource, combat is all about trying not to ever get hit or lose health. 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.
The game being open PvP will draw in a certain type of player, I first came to H&H after having quit Ultima Online because I was drawn in by this open world PvP mixed with survival and world building. In UO my playstyle was purely PvP, myself and my guild were very proficient at it, frequently winning fights while outnumbered 5x or more simply because of small scale solid teamwork. After learning the combat system back then (Which I admit was far worse than it is now) I just gave up the idea of bothering with it because it's just so boring. Every iteration of the combat system has had largely the same fundamental flaws and resulted in the same scenarios. To this day I just don't engage with it more than I have to because it's boring and broken.
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.
The largest and most visible elements of the in-game community are also these same people, it'll be seen and turn away many people who would otherwise come to love the game. Had I started playing Haven and seen only this I wouldn't have bothered sticking with it, back when I started we had such a wide mix of playstyles and opinions and a much more open and friendly community, maybe it's just the memberberries or just because the general state of the world itself is much more divisive and hostile than it was back then too, but the current majority of the posts or discord discussions remind me of schoolyard posturing and bottom barrel American comedy.
Moving on, we have longevity, thankfully with the goal of 4-6 month long server life this will partly be nullified, but one of the key problems we have is that character progression is entirely uncapped, think of any other MMO, those with AAA budget research and design teams and how they handle things like skills and stats, they cap them, because it works.
You need a reason to make new characters, you need to limit the power level a basic single character can reach. You can add ways to increase this, difficult to achieve (end game content right here), but again, capped to a finite limit. Reaching the absolute hard-capped power level on a character will be the primary focus of the player, this also explains the fundamental reason why credos are seen as essential by players: they HAVE to have the maximum efficiency, the absolute limit they can, mostly because it's required to compete on the same level with anyone else who has it.
When you have a game that doesn't ceiling this absolute limit you're creating a Sisyphean competition when it comes to character development. You can rebalance food as many times as you want, but it's just a boulder to push, not the reason we push it.
There's a lot more, but I've mentioned most of these things in the past. I really hope to see the Steam release be successful (I'll be on vacation through November so will miss it sadly), but to be blunt, I don't think the game is fit for general consumption. I personally love the game, but I fell in love with it a long time ago and I've stuck around through thick and thin, and still love it despite the large number of flaws and frustrations it has. It's kind of like a marriage.
Very well said, Mate
