jorb wrote:
- Rageless fighters/Safepalis: I guess the point here is that we dislike the Rage change from 16.1, and fair enough, it was meant as experimental. I don't quite like the distinction between visitor gates and non-visitor gates, and should like to see that removed. Should we, quite simply, make all gates visitor gates, without further qualifiers? Is there no case to be made for a sprucecap protection program, and no conceivable, good, mechanic, by which noobs can be eased into the game? I love that the predatory gameplay exists, and consider it a core feature, but I feel that I struggle a bit to maintain a healthy eco-system. Tragedy of the commons and such! "If I don't kill this sprucecap, someone else will"! To be sure, alts being useful is also a problem, so new characters should arguably be trivial to kill proper. You see my design problem, I trust? Help me help you!
- Steel locks: Agree that locked buildings are prolly a bit cancerous, quite simply. I think this could be changed without too much controversy.
- Sleighs/skis/sleds: Mostly a winter problem, and I have found that to be a mitigating circumstance as I don't know that I mind that a part of the year is really dangerous. The obvious fix would be to have "Rawhide!" hit these badbois, and we have considered that a couple of times, but not acted on it. Could add a timer to mounting the sled in particular, or w/e.
- Thicket: No love for that change either, I take it? I quite enjoy this mechanic conceptually, and would love to see a good explanation of why it is bad.
I think you've got to figure out who you're pandering to, or not to pander to them at all. I was just outside smoking a cigarette after deleting the game again. I play specifically on steam to prop up your engagement numbers on there. I genuinely try to bring success to the game, getting new players in, all that. It's all to say that, even as a humble user, i do care. I played Darkfall back in the day, and i've had my toes in full PvP games for quite some time.
Anyways, while I was smoking, i realized that a few things genuinely at odds in this game: The value of life in Haven is less than none, the capacity for self-defense for 90% of the players is none, and there is permadeath. Any time I have been killed, my belongings have been thrown into the ocean in front of me. The only gain the other player experienced was a small dopaminergic surge brought about by schadenfreude. This is commonly called griefing. In Darkfall I was once griefed in this manner: In a neutral city, you could declare war on an unsuspecting clan, removing protections for both sides, allowing you to kill someone dumb enough to afk at a crafting station while guilded. This is called clandecking. I was one such a fellow. Lost loads of mats for my guild, plus my gear. I did not, however, lose my entire character, so it was experienced primarily as an inconvenience and a real sore moment, not as something genuinely game ruining. The smaller cost to PvP meant that i often found myself seeking out PvP, despite being undergeared and in a small clan. Full loot but not permadeath.
In this game, it is the opposite. PvP is rare but important. And importantly, it does not exist in the sense of "I and a player may fight," but rather in the sense of "I may be killed at some time by a player." Due to the super stats-based nature of the game, the vast majority of players cannot remotely defend themselves. One of the fellows who killed me, some weeks later, attacked another fellow that mines for his village. He also does some PvP on the side, or at least is open to it. With five times my strength and ten times my agility, he still was forced to flee and flee only. Self-defense is nonexistent. Whatever elements of nature you are hoping to shine through simply do not shine through. Because of this and despite loving PvP in any other mmo i've played, I despise PvP and hide incessently. Recently I deleted again, realizing that sunk cost fallacy had led me to continue playing. In the end, though, due to the cumulitive, iterative nature of q spiraling, I realized that when I was killed for that small minute of schadenfreude, what was destroyed there was not simply my character, but the potential for impacting 16.1 in any meaningful way. I wanted an orchard, a restaurant, anything at all to create something interested and social within the game. Someone who plays explicitly to reduce sociality came and stopped that, and stopped it so hard that it isn't possible to recover from it regardless of play time logged. After one thousand hours, my q will be lower than the one who was not killed and clocked one thousand and ten hours, and so on forever.
My point is this. The above dude bitching about safepalis is why the game cannot be meaninfully successful. Pandering to sixty antisocial dipshits might not be the move. What is a safepali, anyways? And genuinely, i've always read this game as a sandbox (necessarily including PvP), not as a PvP game (unfortunately including other elements.). Hilariously, every complaint he listed is one based of off "This takes me time to counter." but when the opposite is said (I did not invest the resources I had into PvP minmaxing), it is being a carebear? Locks can be picked. Walls can be sieged. Thickets effect the speed of who is being chased and the chaser. They can also use sleds. Every. Single. Point. is "make it so they stand still for me, dad!"
In the spirit of PvP mmos, and of mean-heartedness, and of honesty, this dude and many of the "PvP" dudes are, and i mean this, carebeared as fuck. They don't fight each other. They whine when a non-PvP oriented player has even the remotest possibility of escape. It's like saying the dogs that they kick ought also to not have legs to run, or teeth with which to bite, or mouths at all to make such loathsome crying sounds. They are asking you to make a dumb fucking game, jorb.
Sincerely, your biggest fan and someone who can't play your game until it is somehow fixed.
P.S. as proof that they don't want more PvP, just easier griefing, let me suggest PvP stat adjusting like in instanced PvP scenarios. And only in PvP, so that you don't have to rework your entire game. Turn stat differences into ratios and let that be reflected as your general capacity in that stat so that skilled spruces can put up a fight. Boom, now everyone can (and will) fight. That's all they want, right? "b-b-b-but i earned that 3000 strength, i should be able to 1 shot them, muh realism." I'm telling you dude, they do not want more PvP.

