Prelude: World 15

[VDZ]

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.

It may not be fun enough to treat as a PvP game, but I at least get the opportunity to run away properly now, in contrast to 2011 when a single punch knocked me out and guaranteed permadeath. There have definitely been improvements.

[Okocim]

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.

I'm pretty sure most players do not care about others being sieged or killed. I do agree that most people quit when they hit the tedium stage of only rising animals and quality.

[VDZ]

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.

You blame this on progression mechanics, but isn't this mainly caused by failure timers? If you don't refuel your steel in time, the process fails. If you don't feed your animals in time, they die. And so on. If the penalty for not doing certain activities were removed, the only disadvantage would be that you don't progress as fast as the top players, which for the vast majority of players wasn't going to be the case anyways.

[SnuggleSnail]

I'm pretty sure most players do not care about others being sieged or killed.

It mightn't be everybody who cares about specifically these things, but they emanate life through the game regardless.

Maybe you don't care that somebody is getting sieged, but you like to cook for your village and suddenly there's a big demand for food because somebody else wants to help.
Maybe the person getting sieged is in trouble, so they're paying a token per LC of brimstone.
Maybe somebody's village got razed and now they want to come live with you.
Maybe somebody got razed and now your village is spooked, so it's time to add an extra wall.
Maybe somebody killed Snail, and you get a nice jolt of schadenfreude.

Go take a look at some old legacy PVP threads and check out how much engagement/interest there was from people who clearly didn't PVP.
Go check out EVE's concurrent players verse a timeline of when giant battles are happening, or somebody did some rly cool shady shit.

Games like this THRIVE on cool shit happening, not the moment to moment gameplay.

[vatas]

You blame this on progression mechanics, but isn't this mainly caused by failure timers? If you don't refuel your steel in time, the process fails. If you don't feed your animals in time, they die. And so on. If the penalty for not doing certain activities were removed, the only disadvantage would be that you don't progress as fast as the top players, which for the vast majority of players wasn't going to be the case anyways.

Something as simple as Hearth Magic that puts livestock in suspended animation, until woken up, would make it so much smoother to return to your hermitage after a month-long break.

Steel crucible needs to be 24 hour or at least 18 hour fuel capacity if you want least devtime-intensive fix, more complicated ones would be to give it latent heat bar (like Fireplace) that stays for X hours after fire goes out, doesn't make steel progress but prevents complete reset.

[Dawidio123]

Something as simple as Hearth Magic that puts livestock in suspended animation, until woken up, would make it so much smoother to return to your hermitage after a month-long break.
Steel crucible needs to be 24 hour or at least 18 hour fuel capacity if you want least devtime-intensive fix, more complicated ones would be to give it latent heat bar (like Fireplace) that stays for X hours after fire goes out, doesn't make steel progress but prevents complete reset.

Tbh just make animals eat less and make breeding less retarded (idk maybe just let them raise their ql as long as their eat better food, and delete all those quality increase % stats so you can only breed them for numbers/looks/horse stats and not for autistic ql gains), our great leader spent half the world (that we played) looking for someone to breed them and ended up doing it himself since nobody wanted to do that shit (I wish we had bots), and you NEED pigs and cows to grind stats. Having them eat a metric ton of food is not an engaging mechanic either since farming is either botted or done semi-afk.

Steel crucibles should just allow you to fill them up for the entire duration at once, i don't think anyone considers refilling them a fun or skillful mechanic, as a group it's not that bad since everyone can just go and refill it when they log in, but as a solo player you are basically put on a schedule with no real point to it.

Basically when i see a mechanic i ask myself, is this fun/engaging/skillbased in any way, and if the answer is no then my solution would be just to yeet it.

[telum12]

This is an MMO where player engagement is a net positive. Trying to reduce player engagement seems antithetical to the spirit of them game. A smaller map and more PvP equalization could result in very fun engagement of sprucecaps coming to the aid of each other against griefers, or fighting against them.

If people were not as spread out, they could help each other when sieged or attacked. Right now, you run around a huge map and kill or steal from or grief lonely, isolated villagers -- no one can hear them scream.

The only (fun) solution to griefers and sprucecap-hunting is allowing for policing of factions. This is only possible with a smaller map.

[SpacePig]

The main reason for the low interest in PvP is the cost of losing a character and the impossibility of an industrial comeback. The death of pets and the loss of things that you cannot get yourself pushes you back in quality forever.
There are quite simple ways to revive the PvP game:
- Hardcap quality of weapons and armor.
- Hardcap skills and stats
- Limit on the amount of water (10 liters) or remove the water mechanic completely for PvP.
If I can rebuild in 3-4 weeks. I can tame animals again and raise their quality to the maximum and get better equipment and food, then there are no problems with PvP.
But if I have to play for 3 months just to get back what I just had, while everyone else will go ahead and not only in stats but also in the quality of steel. I simply have no incentive to continue playing after the first death. Or after the first successful siege of my base. In this sense, it doesn’t matter whether I die or not, in any case it’s the end of the game if I consider PvP as the main gaming activity.

The peculiarity of this game is that its developers do not want to make this game PvP or PvE or Pv anything else.
After all, most PvE is almost as difficult to access and deadly as PvP.
Killing large animals - moose, bears, wolves, mammoths, whales, underground fish, trolls, clearing dungeons. Almost all of these things are done through bugs and exploits. A well-dressed, pumped-up character can even die from a bear, not to mention a troll or a whale; exploiting bugs is another matter.
The game doesn't care about the player, it doesn't set any goals for the player, doesn't care that he survives, or even that he gets access to most of the content that is in the game.

[SnuggleSnail]

You can't die if you're a PVPer, and death makes you stronger. Dipshit.

Look guys, it's a retard making a shortsighted argument for safety at the expense of the game being fun. I think. I didn't actually read past the second sentence.

[landreaum]

You can't die if you're a PVPer, and death makes you stronger. Dipshit.

Literally though, my farming was higher just after my death than it was before my death, post death I wasn't as scared of dieing so I tripled my stats in a month, I didn't even bother spending Numan points, takes long to collect them than it does to just eat and study.

Never be afraid of death, embrace it like an old friend.