Prelude: World 15

[Okocim]

I'm a ~500 stat boi this world, and I fought people with 5k a couple times. Even if it usually only amounted to kiting them while KOing their friends, or bullying them by breaking their shit then escaping because I'd go horizontal if they ever got to touch me for long.

Last world I was in a big alliance with all the competent players, I had ~6-7k stats I think, and near the best armor on the server. Short of DC nothing bad was ever going to happen to me even if I messed up pretty bad. It's fun to be the cat sometimes, but if you're never the mouse it stops being exciting pretty quickly.

I will agree a thousand times over that time spent actually PVP is very minimal. Even the PVPbois whose names you know spend <1% of the time actually fighting people. That said, it's the risk, the struggle, the brutality, and the social dynamics driven from that aspect of the game that haven brings (used to bring) are what sets it apart from other games.

The game is *probably* about PVP for you, even if you don't want to get in a fight.

It's not about if you can fight back, it's more about if you think you can, if you believe you have absolutely zero chances, you just won't try.
For me, yes it is somewhat about pvp, but I'm starting to realise it's not actually default anymore.

The thing is that Haven right now is not really made to be a pvp game and while avoiding becoming one or the other actually hurts both groups.

There are a lot (A LOT) of games that do all of these things better than haven outside of the danger. The fact you're here instead of there probably means you prefer the excitement that comes from doing it in a space where you might die, or your work might be destroyed and you need to prevent that from happening.

I don't actually know any games that would let me do all that haven do without element of pvp.

[SnuggleSnail]

The thing is that Haven right now is not really made to be a pvp game and while avoiding becoming one or the other actually hurts both groups.

Ye, I agree with this sentiment a lot. If you go back and read legacy threads it's VERY obvious nearly everybody accepted Haven as a primarily PVP game, even if they didn't want to be the one fighting. To circle back to my first point, it's the years of directionless development informed by people's short sighted emotional desire to be safe in spite of that ruining the spirit of the game that lead us here.

[vatas]

You rework industry to have more steps in it as much as you want, or add extra steps to glass, or add a new dumb plant nobody actually cares about, but no amount of mid content will ever compete with the excitement of existing in a brutal world.

You say everything is right, but this rightness is only for you, at the top of your values is domination over others and their humiliation. This is what you enjoy the most.
But for someone to be safe, and to be able to protect themselves from people like you, from the humiliation that you so like to spread, this is the same main goal.
Someone wants to have the best rare things, someone wants to be an effective manager at the head of the kingdom, someone wants to be useful and build public projects, someone wants to explore the world.
All these people can do without the constant fear of being killed by a random cannibal like you.
You say that the fear of death is “very important,” but this is the most important thing only for you personally. For most, this is only a hindrance to getting their "very important" items.

I have healthy amount of dislike towards Snail but unfortunately what he said in past three posts in this thread checks out.

For the millionth time, I bring up this tactic. I may have mis-represented it as super easy way to grief people, but considering the target has to be online at the same time as Snail, the amount of time spent to find those victims was non-trovial, possibly quite massive. The guy without visitor gate might have been equivalent to finding a shiny Pokemon. Why does he do this then? Because all other forms of playing as "the villain" have been nerfed to the ground.

Snail is effectively offering Jorbtar QA and consultation for free, and they are mostly ignoring him. (Granted, this seems to be common practice in Swedish video game developers; Paradox Interactive had tradition of paying for QA department and ignoring almost everything they say. This has been confirmed by DDRJake, who worked both as QA tester and Game Director for Europa Universalis 4. Eventually the came to their senses and listened to fired the QA department entirely.)

[VDZ]

Now we're at the point where you simply cannot die short of DC or bugs, and you need to spend "some amount of precious metal" and guard a ram that can be destroyed in 5 minutes for 24 hours to destroy a Pclaim that can be made with no outside help within 5 minutes of spawning a fresh character.

It's ridiculous, and it's what happens when there's no direction from the top down, and the people in charge are constantly convinced by emotional arguments from people only considering avoiding loss.

While I agree the world shouldn't be too large and interaction is good (even hostile interaction to some degree), siege should require significant investment. That base took a long time to create; why shouldn't it take a long time to destroy?

As mentioned by others before, the main issue is that the only outcomes of siege are 'the attacker accomplished nothing' and 'everything the defender owned gets irrevocably destroyed'. The latter option is not fair unless equivalent risk or investment is required for the attacker, and nobody is going to spend the same amount of effort required to build a base in order to destroy it. (In that sense, even in the current system it takes much less investment to destroy a base than to build it, even without cheesing. It's still not feasible because 'complete annihilation' is such an unfun outcome it simply cannot be balanced to still be fun to the attacker.)

Sieges are the worst, No one sieges someone stronger, There are barely any instances of siege against somewhat equal opponent, so it leaves it as a tool to grief weaker players, where even if attacker wins he basically gains nothing because all there is to actually loot is trash for them, yet some people think of siege as an apex of haven.

I'm a ~500 stat boi this world, and I fought people with 5k a couple times. Even if it usually only amounted to kiting them while KOing their friends, or bullying them by breaking their shit then escaping because I'd go horizontal if they ever got to touch me for long.

Are you intentionally misinterpreting the question to avoid answering it? Okocim wasn't asking about combat but about siege. When does anyone ever siege a stronger player or group?

Building a mega-project/public work is a lot more impressive/cool within the context of a PVP game.
Exploring the world is a lot more exciting when something dangerous that requires mechanical or social skill to avoid could be around any corner.

There are a lot (A LOT) of games that do all of these things better than haven outside of the danger.

Tell me: which games? Because things like Minecraft, Terraria and the like don't have nearly the depth Haven has, and stuff like Valheim and Rust only have a fraction of Haven's content (in addition to still having less depth). The only game I know of with more depth is UnReal World which accurately simulates how stubbing your toe affects your woodworking efforts but is quite minimalistic in content as a result. I don't know of any game with non-trivial crafting/building progression with nearly as much content as Haven. (I suppose Dwarf Fortress could count but it's a very different game.)

[Potjeh]

"Mid" content? The content is the good part about this game! It's the game mechanics that suck. That's why the pop drops off so fast after people get through all the reasonably accessible content. Sure, some people quit because they got killed or raided, but that's a tiny fraction of the quitters. The vast majority quits because of burnout, because the game mechanics are forcing you to do repetitive chores daily and don't let you take breaks. PvP is irrelevant, it's something that a tiny minority of players do for a tiny fraction of their playtime. So yeah, adding more content does a lot more to increase longevity of the game than wasting time on tweaking PvP. Plus, at no point since 2009 have the devs managed to come anywhere close to making PvP fun and balanced, so it's well past time to give up on that since it obviously ain't happening.

[SpacePig]

I have healthy amount of dislike towards Snail but unfortunately what he said in past three posts in this thread checks out.

For the millionth time, I bring up this tactic. I may have mis-represented it as super easy way to grief people, but considering the target has to be online at the same time as Snail, the amount of time spent to find those victims was non-trovial, possibly quite massive. The guy without visitor gate might have been equivalent to finding a shiny Pokemon. Why does he do this then? Because all other forms of playing as "the villain" have been nerfed to the ground.

Snail is effectively offering Jorbtar QA and consultation for free, and they are mostly ignoring him. (Granted, this seems to be common practice in Swedish video game developers; Paradox Interactive had tradition of paying for QA department and ignoring almost everything they say. This has been confirmed by DDRJake, who worked both as QA tester and Game Director for Europa Universalis 4. Eventually the came to their senses and listened to fired the QA department entirely.)

I don’t have any dislike for the snail, I would probably do something similar myself if I were more immersed in this game. And I didn’t get bored with the routine ahead of time.
I simply shared the observation that perhaps his preferences are not the main ones for most players, they plan their gaming experience and progress from a different perspective.

[SnuggleSnail]

Practically nobody would be willing to put in the effort to herd animals or farm for quality in haven's style for year(s) straight if it were a single-player game.

The repetitive tasks that cause burnout are the mid content, and it exists primarily as a thing to do during the 99% of the time where nothing cool is happening, so you're online for that 1% of the time where something cool is happening. The primary function of this content should be to not be so tedious, complicated, or time consuming that people burnout.

In my experience all of the extra steps that get added just for the sake of complexity make the activity worse beyond the novelty of doing it once or twice. Who the fuck is happy about glass needing lye? Yes there's some cool shit you can do like paveart, mega projects, designing villages, but for the most part the main industry/content the game intends you to do is pretty boring on its own.

[Potjeh]

Practically nobody does herd animals or farm for quality for years straight. Those two in fact are probably *the* worst game mechanics. It's why you have like 2k players at reset, and like 50 players a year into a world.

[SnuggleSnail]

There's also lots of risk/interesting stuff happening at the beginning of the world, and no risk/interesting stuff happening at the end of the world. You can chicken and egg me if you want, but at least people from my group would play all world without question if there were a huge siege or somebody important dying every week.

[Potjeh]

Sure, but you guys are still a tiny minority when you look at the playerbase at a world reset. What would keep a lot more people playing is axing all the mandatory maintenance shit, which is made necessary by the game's character and quality progression mechanics. Imagine being able to log in and decide what you want to do, like go craft some hard to get item or go do a dungeon, without being forced to do a million maintenance chores first. Or heck, even being able to not log in at at all if you don't feel like it, and still being able to pick up right where you left after a week or month long break. Most people start playing at world reset to see all the new content that came out since they last played. They don't log in to check out new content as it's released because getting to it requires running through a lot of basic content first, and they'd have to do it all from scratch every time because all the progress from playing previously has been lost to decay.