Game Development: Truffle Snout

[jordancoles]

I volunteer as community manager
For only 5% of the weekly hat profits

[Ants]

Hmm. Combat has always been a cause for problems, hasn't it? I'm thinking it might be a good idea to have a public test server where changes to combat could be tested out by the players before going live. That way Jorb and Loftar could try out different fixes without accidentally wrecking the current world.

A wonderful idea, that has also been suggested multiple times.

I'm certainly not the sharpest knife in the Haven drawer, but I'm pretty sure #4 shows #3 and #5 are wrong, or at least nowhere near as severe as you imply.

The only reason #4 is happening is because people are forcing the communication down his throat, and it's still not working.

I'd say communication works alright, several of my small suggestions have been added to the game. I do agree that they devs are slow to make changes to game mechanics, though. I always assumed that was because they were afraid of breaking the world somehow.

Sweet, more useless content 5% of the player base will find fun and no fixes for actual issues.

What are the five biggest issues you are concerened about?

We need a testing server, por favor! Then you could try out drastic changes to game mechanics and it wouldn't affect the main world. It's probably the best way of solving the many problems with PVP.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

Sweet, more useless content 5% of the player base will find fun and no fixes for actual issues.

5. Community feedback is damn near pointless. The only way a suggestion gets any traction with you or Loftar is if either of you actually finds the suggestion appealing to your vision of what Haven should be. You don't care what the community thinks, you develop this game as if you are the only ones playing it and we're all just along for the ride. Somebody could post a suggestion thread that gathers 300 unique replies from 300 different players that want to see it added, and if you disagree on principle it never leaves the ground.

I have absolutely loved the fact that this game is their game, and is developed according to their vision. They seem remarkably uncompromising on that point and it's a thing I think gives HnH promise in the long-term. Games that are ruled by player opinion tend to end up as dumbed-down muted and frankly disgustingly disappointing simulacrums of their former selves (See Everquest, Everquest II, and WoW). Sure they make the big bucks, but they utterly suck as games for the type of people HnH seems to attract. Don't like it? Move on. I'm annoyed with how integral fast-travel is to this game now, and it disappoints me on levels I can't explain every time I see them add a new type of fast-travel (Knarr FT was particularly annoying).

RE: This Update -> I absolutely love it, keep up the good work!

Edit: After a conversation with Ardennes, I rather see the point they were making. It does seem like certain issues form a sort of blind-spot for Jorb.

[linkfanpc]

I have absolutely loved the fact that this game is their game, and is developed according to their vision. They seem remarkably uncompromising on that point and it's a thing I think gives HnH promise in the long-term. Games that are ruled by player opinion tend to end up as dumbed-down muted and frankly disgustingly disappointing simulacrums of their former selves (See Everquest, Everquest II, and WoW). Sure they make the big bucks, but they utterly suck as games for the type of people HnH seems to attract. Don't like it? Move on. I'm annoyed with how integral fast-travel is to this game now, and it disappoints me on levels I can't explain every time I see them add a new type of fast-travel (Knarr FT was particularly annoying).

RE: This Update -> I absolutely love it, keep up the good work!

I agree, well said.

Anyway, are truffles plantable in garden pots, and if not, will they ever be?

[sabinati]

Sweet, more useless content 5% of the player base will find fun and no fixes for actual issues.

but lots of people were suggesting adding truffles and training pigs for a long time already.

Nice to see more tameable animals. Will we get to domesticate pigs as well?

Yupp. The plan is that they will have an expanded training mechanic with which you can teach them to search for truffles.

[sabinati]

lmao and someone's bitching because the thing from literally weeks ago isn't fixed yet

[Ardennesss]

lmao and someone's bitching because the thing from literally weeks ago isn't fixed yet

For Oak Stance, Death or Glory, Combat Meditation and Bloodlust, inverted the effect of disparity in combat stats between you and the opponent(s), so that you get a better effect from them the better your opponent is, rather than the other way around. This primarily to reduce the effectiveness of alts.

Months

[PastTime]

It is good Jorb and Loftar don't follow their community's demands blindly. I've seen too many promising games getting destroyed by the community input that put the strongest and the most influential ones in supremity until they eventually got bored and left the game with shit they've spread all over the place. Combat and siege was never HnH's best aspect but I don't see why would we enjoy making it an utter crap like Tree of Life or anything else you probably have on your mind. Name a game that has mechanics ideally compatibile with HnH or at least come up with complex ideas, calculations and solutions to whatever seems to make this game unattractive in our opinion.

If you can code it and make it happen, you're on a good way to create the game of your vivid dreams and give a try keeping it alive for half HnH's lifespan.

[jorb]

1. Maneuver changes ruining combat balance, higher stats literally put you at a disadvantage.
a) Bat Caves as "endgame content" are effectively impossible because of this.

A change we made in an attempt to alleviate oft recurring player complaints about the abuse of the combat maneuvers, i.e. trying to listen to feedback. I agree that this is sub-optimal, and perhaps it should simply be reversed, but our plan is also to try adressing combat more generally again, which make adjustments back and forth less appealing. A broader approach to combat is a somewhat bigger project, however, and one which we have tried and failed at before, which is currently being blocked by the client rendering rewrite.

2. Sieges are still a useless mechanic that nobody bothers to engage in because it's almost never worth the time investment.

I agree, and we intend to abolish shields alltoghether in favor of a more naive system more akin to Legacy's. This is a somewhat bigger project, however, which ...

3. Low to nil actual communication with the community. "Will consider" is basically a meme at this point and if I see that response I just write it off as "maybe next year." Publicize your development consideration list so people can at least see what might potentially be in the pipeline at any given time.

Oh fuck off. I have the ambition to respond to every damn C&I and bug thread -- I realize that I have a massive backlog -- and I try to respond to every PM I get in somewhat of a timely fashion. I may miss some, but poke me again if I do. I do a monthly two hour stream where you can ask and have discussed live any question you dare ask. I have a massive list that I maintain of nothing but player suggestions, and on an average patch at least 50% of the changes are player driven. I'm sure we could do more, and be more timely, but give me a break. I cannot write a full page essay on every thing I comment on, and most ideas are simple enough not to merit more input. "Will consider" literally means I put it on my list and bring it up to our discussion table during some dev session. Realize that you are asking me to spend more time on meta-work that does nothing to advance the cause of the actual game.

4. No prioritization of game ruining mechanics such as point 1 above. You've been told this multiple times over the past month, repeatedly, by multiple people. I told you on stream during July's stream, and you acknowledged it in front of everyone and wrote it on "the list" that you were very concerned to hear that people were literally taking gilded gear off in order to LOWER their combat stats due to the changes that you put in place, and yet here we are, weeks later, and we get truffles.

Presently we are focusing on another oft recurring player complaint, which ruined a significant portion of the experience at the beginning of this world, namely client performance. Perhaps that is wrong, and perhaps we could do something about the thing you return to -- reverse it if nothing else -- but what you have top of mind and what I have top of mind are bound to be two different things. I think of the game in terms of broad scope development, and when I know I will have to look over the entire fighting system again, and when I for that matter do not grind bat dungeons, those things are not my biggest concern, and I frankly don't think that they can or should be. I have to triage pretty hard among the things I want to do with the game. This thing you're hung up on is on my list, and since you've asked so nicely I'll even try to remember to look at it.

5. Community feedback is damn near pointless. The only way a suggestion gets any traction with you or Loftar is if either of you actually finds the suggestion appealing to your vision of what Haven should be. You don't care what the community thinks, you develop this game as if you are the only ones playing it and we're all just along for the ride. Somebody could post a suggestion thread that gathers 300 unique replies from 300 different players that want to see it added, and if you disagree on principle it never leaves the ground.

Same complaint as number two. Again, 50% of the items on a patch list a player inputs. I mean, I agree that I will never implement a thing if I disagree with it on principle regardless of how much democracy is arrayed against me, but it is not true that I do not care what people think or say. This is certainly our creative venture, however, and I don't think you have any conception of what the alternative would even be.

[MagicManICT]

Months

Hmm... two people, one of whom is involved in a very deep project at the moment, should be able to fix something in a short period that teams more than 10x Seatribe's size have issues fixing in half a year or more? May I sprinkle some realism into your thought process?

I'm not going to speak for jorb and loftar here, just my experience with pen and paper games as I don't have any published video games, but combat is probably one of the hardest things to develop. I can say from experience, if it is easy to fix and balance, the system is probably overly simplistic, i.e. Risk. If the system has any real depth or breadth, like most RPGs, then the fixes are going to be extremely complex and nuanced... and they're going to take a significant amount of time. Any small change ripples throughout the whole of the game.

To go back to video games and a bit of history of player "suggestions and complaints," take DOTA, LOL or another moba with more than a handful of characters. Players have been known to light up the complaint board for months if not years before an effective change (usually a reasonable buff, sometimes a complete character redesign) is put in. Nerfs usually are small steps and still take months. And then you're talking a development team of multiple programmers and designers just to work on the mechanics. For MMOs, I can site EVE as an example. Read up on their history and success and fails at combat balance... also with a large development team. I can say that some of their balances have taken quite some time to come about, like 18-24 months, longer in at least one case I can think of.


As far as a "test server," this is what Valhalla can be used for. Unfortunately, it needs some fixing if it's going to be a combat test area.