Game Development: Dormant Doe

[animary]

"things should die in haven"

With animals that is fine if you play every day, but eventually you end up playing from obligation rather than enjoyment. Perhaps after a certain time of dormancy they would die.

A couple of worlds ago someone brought up that food never goes bad in the game, you can fill a cabinet with fresh meat and it stays good forever; stacks of turnips or pumpkins never rot. It would bring more a sense of purpose to the grinding in the game if you had to balance your farm production with use ..and no longer would your farm be cluttered with stacks of stuff you eventually throw away. You could smoke some meat to preserve it, and maybe build a root cellar to store vegetables, ice kept in a cellar could help preserve food; but nothing would last forever.

[Audiosmurf]

They still die off-claim, once your village is rotting, what's the problem?

[jock]

So this 6 month world is done, where is the next pointless 6 month world start end of the month right?

or can we actually have a good world system with 2 worlds running for 2 years, 1 year apart forever? world one could start soon, then next year same day you start world 2, then the year after that you reset world 1. Clarity, point of return and options of choice.

or we can stick to this fuck about schedule we have and the game can continue to eternally be missed at start by players who then won't bother joining.

While you are at it slow down the mine holes to 1 month rather than this rush nonse of 1 week per hole.

[jock]

This might have been the most backards and exploitable approach to adding this system in to the game.

Rather than increase trough capacity by 100x or decrease animal foods. you have literally enable a ticking bomb of animal production and lag factory.

I can't wait to see people crash as they enter houses with 10 million "dormant" animals or where villages create walls of dorman animals to protect against raids cause they can't get close without crashing XD

Not even to consider the buff this gives to factions that can tame animals early

[SnuggleSnail]

I don't think you're smart enough to justify being this passionate

[Dawidio123]

Not even to consider the buff this gives to factions that can tame animals early

Why would anyone tame animals early except horses if they can just tame them week 2-3 when they can feed them and it's A LOT easier on gear/health. I wouldn't risk my whole production on the basis of "oh yeah the animals will totally not lose anything or starve, just trust the new mechanic".
.

[jock]

I don't think you're smart enough to justify being this passionate

Have you run out of crayons to chew on yet?

[jock]

Not even to consider the buff this gives to factions that can tame animals early

Why would anyone tame animals early except horses if they can just tame them week 2-3 when they can feed them and it's A LOT easier on gear/health. I wouldn't risk my whole production on the basis of "oh yeah the animals will totally not lose anything or starve, just trust the new mechanic".
.

Sure you tell everyone that. Spread that missinformation.

[MaltGrain]

can we actually have a good world system with 2 worlds running for 2 years, 1 year apart forever? world one could start soon, then next year same day you start world 2, then the year after that you reset world 1. Clarity, point of return and options of choice.

or we can stick to this fuck about schedule we have and the game can continue to eternally be missed at start by players who then won't bother joining.

Have you seen the population tracker? You can find it through the wiki front page.
Havens population over time shows a clear pattern; 50% of the initial playerbase leave after about 2 months. A further 2 months and it's halved again. By the 6 month point the population is below 300.
I'm sure someone who's good at math could find an equation that describes player attrition more accurately, or tell me how to calculate it.

While world lengths vary, the pattern remains more or less the same - this suggests that world length is less related to player attrition. Where that not the case you'd see wider peaks reflecting world duration as peoples interest remains active.

This is one of the reasons that the seasonal model has developed in online videogames - it maximises engagement, 2 months at a time.

How to balance this in Hearth, however, where longterm goals and developments are a foundational element of the game, is beyond me. You can't possibly invalidate a players work by reducing the world duration - who'd buld wonders if they only lasted a few months? On the other hand, the majority of world history crawls along after a certain point.

The shitty advice I'm regularly required to give myself is; "Just play the fucking game now among other newbies who've joined, rather than comparing progress to the endgame tryhards - most of them fucking stink anyway, why would you ever consider them peers?"

[vatas]

I can't really see the issue with "people will turn dormant livestock into walls."

If you're raiding the place, you should not have Visitor Buff and can either wake up or butcher the animals. If you do have the visitor buff, there should be dozen other ways to make an effective fence.

You can even bring a filled Food Through and wake them up that way with Visitor!

===

Okay, I re-read the relevant message and apparently the main concern is "performance-bombing" a base so that the raiders can't operate there due to their clients being unable to render gazillion sleeping cows. Could be an actual problem.

Probably won't happen because Jorb seems to hate options that make game more functional but also more "ugly" - but maybe there should be a "performance mode" where (among other things) livestock is rendered with much more simple and static models?