Game Development: Starboard Bough

[mulamishne]

Criminal : "Imprisonment is unnecessary and just wasting time. Remove it."
Government : "It really seems. Now imprisonment and prison was banned."

Are you really saying this?

Imprisonment only happens if you get caught, no officer is ever showing up though.

[steelman]

Criminal : "Imprisonment is unnecessary and just wasting time. Remove it."
Government : "It really seems. Now imprisonment and prison was banned."

Are you really saying this?

Imprisonment only happens if you get caught, no officer is ever showing up though.

That's true. No officers in this game, but no teleport to safe place in RL too. The game is just a game, not RL.

[noxking1234]

Punishment is not intended to suffer criminals.
Punishment is intended to protect crime victims.

And you guys did not play PVP.
Rob and Kill noobs does not PVP.
Faction fighters does not consider about red-handed when they gathered for PVP.
That is because you are just noob robber.

[telum12]

As Loftar mentioned earlier, this game is meant to be a survival game. In particular, it's a survival game with perma-death and open-world pvp. I personally came into this game knowing this. I knew there were people with stats I could not compete with, I knew there were organized groups of villages I could never catch up to. And there is nothing wrong with that.

I'm going to tell a story of why I love this game, but it is not necessarily important so you can skip it if you just want my point about the redhand et al. discussion.

# === BEGIN STORY ===

I joined a village of a few people a few grids away from Snail's village. I spent a few days there learning the ropes. One day, the leader of the village took my out to teach me how to hunt. We were riding along in a wagon and mate said we should check on the nearby uber-village to see if they wanted to trade bearmeat for water. When we arrived, Garen (I think, not 100% it was him) came running out, screamed something I can't remember, and KO'd the both of us. It was a lot of fun, though my friend malded a bit from losing high-gilded stuff.

Because of this, we moved and lost all of the stuff we'd built. You can say hurrdurr, bad Garen killing nabs and ruining our progress; instead, however, you could just view it as a hilarious encounter in the journey you're partaking in by playing Haven. It's exactly this type of interaction and tension that makes this game so great.

We merged with a village in Whatever realm after that. We spent about 2-3 weeks try-hard grinding—the vigor that Garen's attack brought us was no joke. Then the unthinkable happened. One day, my old village leader moved one of the beehives 3 times to cover a farmplot better. The new village leader's fiance was unhappy, and the village leader logged in for the first time in a week to tell us we (the people from the old village) were all kicked out for being tryhards. We were upset, and began a coup. Most of the village was on our side (largely because the village's fiance was trying to have one of the village members assassinated—she had an alt grinding LP for mrage and had even contacted Garen about doing it for payment), and we ended up killing the village leader by accident (he had woundstacks on him for some reason). We managed to bash their hearthfires, KO and chase out most everyone, and were preparing to bash the vidol. However, then 2 people from Whatever showed up and started sieging us. Ironically, it's Garen that shows up to help protect us, as he was a friend of a friend at this point. Eventually, we negotiated the following terms: Our old village leader would drown himself, and the rest of us (which included everyone in the village, hah) would leave. Garen took us to Arcanum, where we settled next to some friends and began grinding again. This all took place over hours and hours, and was a glorious clusterfuck of a mess, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

# === END STORY ===

Player interaction is beneficial to the game. Player interaction does not have to be positive. More often than not, negative events or close-calls are what define our journey in the game. We don't remember much about the random, dime-a-dozen trade we did, or the neighbour we said hi to. What truly defines the game is moments of strife, loss, and triumph. We should not shy away from those moments, nor should we put arbitrary barriers into the game to avoid those moments.

Redhand is a negative mechanic because it puts an arbitrary negative in the form of time-prison for the perpetrator of a "crime." Although the intent was different, that is what it has become in practice. Instead of spending all this energy arguing for a useless mechanic to prevent or punish people, we should be lowering the barrier of entry to these types of interactions. If people want to group together and fight back against the faux evils of players such as Snail, they should be able to do so. If people want to implement arbitrary mechanics to inconvenience or punish players such as Snail, we should not let them. This will inherently rob us players out of amazing experiences.

Fixing mechanics in the game that require botting (truffles, whales, pepper, etc.), equalizing pvp stats using e.g. diminishing returns (see e.g. AGI, which still scales linearly)—these are the types of changes we need. These are the types of changes that could lead to better, more interesting player interaction. Not some arbitrary time-prisons like redhanded.

Also make PVP mechanics such that you don't need a l33t pvp-er to teach you in order to live more than 10 seconds.

tl;dr: Don't implement mechanics that reduce player interaction (e.g. redhanded). Instead, make things that allow more people to participate: Make combat less aids, lower barrier of entry by e.g. removing bot-only content (truffles, whales, etc.), make AGI not scale linearly, etc.

[Massa]

Criminal : "Imprisonment is unnecessary and just wasting time. Remove it."
Government : "It really seems. Now imprisonment and prison was banned."

Are you really saying this?

This is a really weak false equivalence.

[ChildhoodObesity]

Player interaction is beneficial to the game. Player interaction does not have to be positive. More often than not, negative events or close-calls are what define our journey in the game. We don't remember much about the random, dime-a-dozen trade we did, or the neighbour we said hi to. What truly defines the game is moments of strife, loss, and triumph. We should not shy away from those moments, nor should we put arbitrary barriers into the game to avoid those moments.

Redhand is a negative mechanic because it puts an arbitrary negative in the form of time-prison for the perpetrator of a "crime." Although the intent was different, that is what it has become in practice. Instead of spending all this energy arguing for a useless mechanic to prevent or punish people, we should be lowering the barrier of entry to these types of interactions. If people want to group together and fight back against the faux evils of players such as Snail, they should be able to do so. If people want to implement arbitrary mechanics to inconvenience or punish players such as Snail, we should not let them. This will inherently rob us players out of amazing experiences.

Fixing mechanics in the game that require botting (truffles, whales, pepper, etc.), equalizing pvp stats using e.g. diminishing returns (see e.g. AGI, which still scales linearly)—these are the types of changes we need. These are the types of changes that could lead to better, more interesting player interaction. Not some arbitrary time-prisons like redhanded.

Also make PVP mechanics such that you don't need a l33t pvp-er to teach you in order to live more than 10 seconds.

tl;dr: Don't implement mechanics that reduce player interaction (e.g. redhanded). Instead, make things that allow more people to participate: Make combat less aids, lower barrier of entry by e.g. removing bot-only content (truffles, whales, etc.), make AGI not scale linearly, etc.

I agree with most of this, however, removing red handed before addressing all of this stuff basically just amplifies the existing problem even more. Removing red-handed should've come way after all of these other fixes. I still think there's a lot of good that comes to PVP from red-handed at the faction level though and I think it only seems like time-prison now because faction level PVP isn't happening anymore and the only cause of red-handed is these minor crimes or killing nabs. There's a lot of situations where you split off in a fight and if you weren't red handed you could've ported and then they find you and chase you down more.

[steelman]

Depending on the type of crime, make a difference in the duration of red-handed debuff, like outlaw debuff.

If the person demands the deletion of red-handed is not for bullying other players, but really for pvp, he wouldn't care even if the vandalism or siege penalty increased slightly than before.

[BigCountry]

I lived with you this world, and I'm PRETTY SURE you didn't track a red handed person a single time. Likewise, you spent A LOT of time complaining whenever we got to PVP and you'd get stuck afking in sacrear's village for an hour.

You spent years being that retard that kills every person you see, at a time when doing so was easier and had even less punishment. I think it's kinda hypocritical for you to be against this kinda change, especially if you're super in favor of new PVPers emerging.

Most people who get competitive in video games don't decide "I'm going to be competitive", and then just spend 3 years grinding league matches 16 hours a day until they're good. They have fun with the game, and slowly interact with the PVP elements more. It being autistic as fuck to commit minor crimes prolly disincentivizes a lot of new ppl with the PVP mindset from progressing. Have you not noticed how bad the nematode to person-who-might-attack-you-maybe ratio has gotten? You can't sit there and say there was no chance for people like Bleh and I from never entering the "real" PVP sphere if petty crime wasn't a stepping stone. IMO, anything that encourages more people to make a similar progression is rly good for the game.

I have definitely tracked down red handed people numerous times this world and in previous worlds. I don't think I did complain A LOT about this although I can see myself being annoyed by it sometimes, however, I never once thought that redhanded should be removed because of this inconvenience lol so I don't understand how it's relevant.

I spent world 6/7 killing noobs sometimes and most of W7 I was actually hunting down noob killers lol. Pretty much since then it's been pretty rare to kill random nabs and I just killed the odd one shit talking me or something. Most of the time I actually killed noobs I was newer to the game or attacking them to get something from them like tsacks/merch. I was never killing them because I'm a degen like you who gets off on ruining someones day.

There's a lot that should change regarding crime and red-handed sure. I think some crimes should have a smaller debuff than others perhaps, however, red-handed does a lot of good and has encouraged many fights and dissuaded many people from killing noobs (like me and MOST PVP players in top factions). You're not really fooling anyone (Other than Jorb), everyone can see that you're just trying to put up some shitty arguments to make it easier for you to kill nabs 24/7 and ruin the game for people. We just had a lengthy discussion in the HnH discord regarding this and the only people I can even think of who support this change are the ones who want to dunk nabs 24/7 and make them quit the game.

I think removing redhanded could be potentially good if there was a ton of other changes implemented before this to punish crime-committers and advocate for vigilantism. There should also be some restriction perhaps on how easy it is to escape a fight, although, that would likely affect normal PVP in a negative way. It's something that needs a lot more thought than "haha redhand bad i don't like wasting my time after i kill nabs"

ALSO I think the majority of new players interacting with PVP for the first time aren't seeing red-handed as some tedious waste of time but a period of time where they're scared they're going to be punished for their crimes and they're not safe. This obviously isn't the case in a dead world like now, however, when newer players commit crimes in a world where they know they're not at the top they are generally pretty excited during those moments.

[ChildhoodObesity]

don't read it then retard

[Pommfritz]

I think griefing is the actual problem but it's hard to differentiate between griefing and pvp vs other pvp'ers or for objectives (meteor etc) at least for some code that spits out scents.

I think one way to solve this so that nap griefing is discouraged is:
make some icon next to someones name or character (similiar to the mrage thing just not so obnoxious) that indicates if he is an outlaw or if he is not an outlaw (peaceful).
KO'ing/killing someone who is outlaw gives very little discouragement in form of redhanded or whatever you figure out. (troll eye scents with little uses + 5min red handed)
KO'ing/killing someone who is peaceful gives very heavy discouragement. (troll eye scents with normal amount of uses + 1h red handed)

probably can't do much about vandalism or stealing and I also think those crimes shouldn't be discouraged super hard since if you build your base propperly these crimes won't really be a problem and the issues is mostly solved by yourself. I'd think of 5min red handed + tracking scents for stealing and 5min red handed + troll eye scents or tracking scents for vandalism or something along those lines

well the last part is not super important the point of what I'm saying is make a difference between griefing naps and normal pvp