rfxDarth wrote:jock wrote:open sourcing of the game
You think you do, but you don't™. The community hasn't even managed to have a consistently maintained client fork (with maybe the ender's being close), nevermind the alternative ones. I can't even imagine the mess going on on the back-end side. Open-sourcing it would split an already tiny playerbase across dozens of extremely buggy and inconsistent realms, probably with ads, pay2win and other shitty mods.
I don't buy the argument that "splitting a playerbase" is an exclusively bad thing. Maybe for a game that needs a minimum amount of players to play, like a BR. But a game like H&H can, from a design standpoint, be easily modified to be more suitable for smaller or larger scale communities, or for multiple communities. It has a lot of procedurally generated elements that could be adjusted to suit whatever needs a community wants, without much difficulty. Different map size, world generation parameters, reduced/increased resources/stat gain, animal/forageable spawn rates, etc. Also the current active playerbase fluctuates a lot based on the state of the game and the world, having multiple choice of worlds/servers/whatever would in theory make the overall playerbase more stable than currently. From what I've seen of games "splitting off" by creating more options to play, the combined playerbase usually goes up, not down.
Minecraft is a basic example of this. Thousands of custom servers, with anywhere from 2 to >50000 (Hypixel) active players in them. But the base survival/creative gamemode is still very popular and by far the most played. Granted it's a way more popular game and also not explicitly an MMORPG, but I think the point still stands.
Still, agree that open sourcing Haven is probably not in the devs' best interests and has a risk of just killing the game outright if there are no talented coders willing to support it. I don't know how the source code looks (obviously) but with how long this game's been around and the sheer number of updates, I imagine it's not pretty.