Game Development: Darkwood Gilding

[Sephiron]

Our ambition has never been to create a PvP game. Our ambition has always been to create a game with PvP. There's a huge difference.

I have never claimed to be good at PvP, etc.

Probably one of the best down-to-earth responses you could have given. Reading it gave me a lot of insight into the kind of game I've been playing for the past 10+ years. Really could have said it sooner though.

[Reiber]

You can balance that by making a special category of armor specific gildings.

sure, youcan do that, i would think thats cool too. but in generall i fear there are two cases where this will go.

1. you give guidings for armour for non combat stats: armour just becomes the best in slot for any job, or if they suck, armourguilding becomes irelevant other than professions who already want too wear armour 24/7, wich then get +4surv+7masonry.

2. you limit armourguilding to combatstats, in wich case, armour just becomes more expensive, as your <6 gilded plates all are subpar trash.


.

on an entirely different topic, i would like the idea of armour on guilding , as an cheaper lighter armour option, maybe then we could talk about "reinforcing " armour in an limited manor.

[Sephiron]

You can balance that by making a special category of armor specific gildings.

sure, youcan do that, i would think thats cool too. but in generall i fear there are two cases where this will go.

1. you give guidings for armour for non combat stats: armour just becomes the best in slot for any job, or if they suck, armourguilding becomes irelevant other than professions who already want too wear armour 24/7, wich then get +4surv+7masonry.

2. you limit armourguilding to combatstats, in wich case, armour just becomes more expensive, as your <6 gilded plates all are subpar trash.


.

on an entirely different topic, i would like the idea of armour on guilding , as an cheaper lighter armour option, maybe then we could talk about "reinforcing " armour in an limited manor.

Dude... Thats a crazy good idea. Have some gildings give special properties to regular clothes, like one that makes any shoe have the 'bunny slipper' effect, a few that give varying amounts of armor, IDK, pocket gildings that allow you to right-click the clothing and open up a 2x2 inventory space, etc. Just limit the 'special gildings' to 1 per clothing and you've got a very interesting addition to tailoring.

[springyb]

Our ambition has never been to create a PvP game. Our ambition has always been to create a game with PvP.

I pretty much consider this game a roguelike every time I leave my base and meeting one of these PVP nerds is just like rolling a nat 1.

[noindyfikator]

Devs: Add armor gilding
Players: Don't want armor gilding
Devs: Remove armor gilding

Imagine firstly ask then implement
But well, wasting time for nothing is ok I guess

[SnuggleSnail]

Would the trick be to first lower the bar of entry by flattening the effort-to-advantage curve, but then add top tier drops in dangerous dungeons and such which could theoretically compensate for some part of that flattening?

When the biggest problem for PVPers is a lack of competitors, obviously any reduction in needing to spend time is good.

That said, I think the core issues for average players are more related to complexity, and lack of ///forced/// practice and lack of public clients.

If you asked 95% of the playerbase what they need to do in order to gear/develop a character to be top tier they won't even know. I've been autisming it up for years and I can't even describe it succinctly. Like, truffles, spices, drinks, whales, autisming out which recipes are good, making setups for 30 different kinds of food, managing hunger, using localized resources effectively, and that's before you even talk about gear which has always been harder than stats.

There are /a lot/ of people who play haven a lot more than the people with top stats and end up with nothing to show for it because they didn't figure it out. I feel like that's rly wasted potential. It's also a trap I think a lot of people fall into, thinking they need bigboi stats to PVP, so they spend all their time grinding and none PVPing so they never actually become a threat. I was like that for a while.

For the average player I don't think the stats matter at all, though. The skill difference between the worst vaguely competent PVPer and an average player is insane. Maybe stats-wise things being a bit more even would encourage people to git gud. It doesn't matter how strong their character is if they can't even move well. I don't know how to fix this rly, but IMO it is the single biggest balance issue. It is not ok that I can invite a friend to this game who has never played before, spar with him for a few hours, and he's already good enough to dunk on 99.5% of the haven player-base. Average players NEED to be FORCED to practice to run/fight a bit.

I'm not super sure how to force people to learn, but maybe if you want to shit out a new dungeon with valuable rewards focus on making the PVE somewhat emulate PVP. Iunno, loot goblins running around that click on kritters/take speedbuffs/drink that you need to down, ant queens trying to med you with worker ants fueling or something idk

[SnuggleSnail]

Also, I'd rly like to re-iterate that getting good gear has always been the hardest part of the game. I think the quantity of people who unironically enjoy and are good at autistic quality grinding is less than a dozen or two.

Especially with the reintroduction of spiraling, I guess it is not your intent for regular people to ever be able to have competitive gear, so this is rly kindof a pipe dream, but: I would personally fucking love it if trading were so easy, and there were enough people with competitive quality anvils and oreQ were static enough that fighters could legitimately not interact with industry at all and just buy topQ gear to die in.

I was too young to rly know what was happening back then, but that's how it felt in legacy. It seemed like you could just farm some pearls and some nerd would sell you near topQ gear. You could just live out of a vault and be fine, if you wanted. I rly think that's how it should be.

[Reiber]

When the biggest problem for PVPers is a lack of competitors, obviously any reduction in needing to spend time is good.

That said, I think the core issues for average players are more related to complexity, and lack of ///forced/// practice and lack of public clients.

If you asked 95% of the playerbase what they need to do in order to gear/develop a character to be top tier they won't even know. I've been autisming it up for years and I can't even describe it succinctly. Like, truffles, spices, drinks, whales, autisming out which recipes are good, making setups for 30 different kinds of food, managing hunger, using localized resources effectively, and that's before you even talk about gear which has always been harder than stats.

There are /a lot/ of people who play haven a lot more than the people with top stats and end up with nothing to show for it because they didn't figure it out. I feel like that's rly wasted potential. It's also a trap I think a lot of people fall into, thinking they need bigboi stats to PVP, so they spend all their time grinding and none PVPing so they never actually become a threat. I was like that for a while.

For the average player I don't think the stats matter at all, though. The skill difference between the worst vaguely competent PVPer and an average player is insane. Maybe stats-wise things being a bit more even would encourage people to git gud. It doesn't matter how strong their character is if they can't even move well. I don't know how to fix this rly, but IMO it is the single biggest balance issue. It is not ok that I can invite a friend to this game who has never played before, spar with him for a few hours, and he's already good enough to dunk on 99.5% of the haven player-base. Average players NEED to be FORCED to practice to run/fight a bit.

I'm not super sure how to force people to learn, but maybe if you want to shit out a new dungeon with valuable rewards focus on making the PVE somewhat emulate PVP. Iunno, loot goblins running around that click on kritters/take speedbuffs/drink that you need to down, ant queens trying to med you with worker ants fueling or something idk

thing is , you dont get any opportunity too learn"real combat" in the first place, sure, if you get lucky. you can find somebody to spar with , and maybe you learn an thing or two, but real combat is vastly differnt,
"little" players just are risking to loose everything they got, whenever they engage combat.whereas people actively planning for pvp probbably have the infrastructure and autism too replace anything on and in there character an few times over probbably.

[ChildhoodObesity]

I think steel should take way less long to finish. It's pretty annoying to lose your gear and be out of commission for like almost 3 days if you're not constantly stockpiling steel. A normal set of gear including a b12 is 24-26 steel which would be per character. Imagine a big fight where 10 people get koed and you need to regear them, that is a shit ton of steel, probably more than any faction even has sitting in their village at a given time (assuming high quality steel). Waiting almost 3 days to replace this on top of all the work to make it is so long that it's almost too demotivating and encourages playing like a pussy kind of.

[Zentetsuken]

Yet another thread devolves in to seasoned PVPers talking about how to fix the game for people who don't like or care about PVP.

It's like listening to wall street billionaire investor moguls giving advice to impoverished inner city wellfare families on how to spend their money.

There are tons of successful games that give a thrilling sense of difficulty and danger via PvE and other survival elements where PvP remains optional. You guys know damn well it is unrealistic to create some way to force or coerce 99% of the playerbase in to suddenly caring about PvP.

There is absolutely no incentive for any player to ever learn PvP. The only reason that any of the PvP-focused players do it is for the thrill of dickwaving in their own tiny PvP-focused groups and to get their short-lived yearly nostalgia fix. Every imaginable part of their gameplay is different from the average hermit or small villages. The game becomes incredibly small and unfun, ignoring entire industries, eating only certain foods, studying only certain curios.

There is absolutely no realistic way to incentivize this type of hyper minmaxing play for the majority of the population.

PvP for the average, vast majority player offers zero rewards for winning or engaging in it, and if you are not willing or able to put in the effort that a seasoned PvPer puts in with a faction full of tryhards (or even just very knowledgeable people) behind you, it is literally more effective to just stand still and allow yourself to get KO'd than it is to even attempt to fight back and lower your openings.


The most realistic way for Haven development to continue forward is to separate PvP from the core gameplay. Allow minmaxers, dickwavers and nostalgia-hungry players to continue to get their fix and stop bothering the rest of the players with this boring trash. Just like practically every other MMO that is worth playing or considering has.