Finished

[Daktoria]

Yeah, the game is severely lacking in activities that don't feel like chores. Personally I don't think they should be working on combat at all right now, a good combat system won't retain the amount of players they need at the moment and really the only ones complaining about it continue to play anyways. I think you've managed to explain quite nicely the reasons why many other players tend to get bored or just fed up with the amount of work they end up being required to do.

Kingdoms would be really great at bringing in some new players if they didn't take weeks to refine the system after implementing it, for fucks sake I still can't even build any good buffs and I'd really like to know if anyone besides the "Beacon" kingdom has even bothered.

I think it's understandable. Here people laugh when immersion is brought up, but immersion leads to emotional engagement and that's what you seem to say is lacking.
So to put some of that into practical suggestions:

. give the ability to transcribe played music to parchment and autoplay it.
. make everything more immersive.
. give us the ability to customize stuff: villages, kingdoms, weapons, food, hair, tattoos.
. gameplay alternatives to stat grind
. achievement tokens for certains feats

Examples of industry plus culture could be: Weapons that show the name of their crafters. Customized weapons. Musical instruments that provide buff to stats/growth speed/FEP. Decoration of trees. Group buffs for parties wearing the same sketchbook pics. Different models for decaying architecture so that we rely more on visuals and less on numbers.

Thanks for understanding.

[Jacobian123]

Stat grinding isn't everything. I myself am not thrilled by staring at a stat sheet and looking at numbers go up very slowly from eating and studying curios. Interacting with people and building cool things are most interesting than leveling up at this point, but there's so few players that aren't obsessed with PvP or grinding that it's hard to find a peaceful group.

[Redlaw]

I am o[pen to add to my little group, but as many that play this gave for 4+ years you get paranoid. If any are open to spk them selves from the gorund up and all contact me. Just if I cant trust one even do not bother.

[DDDsDD999]

There's no story, narrative, or plot.

You expected this from a sandbox? That's the stuff that I played haven to avoid.

[The_Lich_King]

There's no story, narrative, or plot.

You expected this from a sandbox? That's the stuff that I played haven to avoid.

Exactly we make our own narrative, story and plot we don't need the game to do it for us.

[Ysh]

There's no story, narrative, or plot.

You expected this from a sandbox? That's the stuff that I played haven to avoid.

''If you are looks for good story go and watching the news.''

[Jacobian123]

There's no story, narrative, or plot.

You expected this from a sandbox? That's the stuff that I played haven to avoid.

''If you are looks for good story go and watching the news.''

Sorry, if I'm playing a game I'm not usually interested in turning the TV on and watching the 11:00 news.

[Jalpha]

I'm pretty convinced that there are two key reasons for hafen not becoming more popular. Publicity and the new player experience.

Just like any game at times I'm just bored with hafen and it's chores. I don't think that can be fixed. I don't think it should be either. But it's still a game I always come back to sooner or later.

[thirty7even]

I think we could all would from a higher player base. This question is raised in one way or another in every other thread. What worries me is that devs don't really address this issue directly.

Interaction with other people is the only thing that can give you any reason to play this kind of game, but it gets harder and harder. Expanding the player base would require advertising and early game rework and I don't think this will happen. In fact, the only thing that is really really good in this game is craft/resource system, and it hasn't really changed much over the years. Things that receive full attention of developers, have relatively low impact on the game whereas big issues keep being swept under the rug.

In my opinion, two areas that have a lot of space for improvement are new players experience and competitiveness.

I have personally recommended this game to literally everyone I met. After hearing from me about the game, most of them get very excited and they can't wait to try it out but nobody lasts more than a couple of days. I study computer science and there are 300 nerds in my course. They just don't want to play something like this and they should be the target group.

[Adder1234]

One way that I have found to avoid the monotony of everyday chores is to form a village and have different people doing different jobs. For instance, one person could hunt, another could farm and another could be a miner or smith. I was part of a village that operated like this and it was the most enjoyable time I've had in this game. Of course, you could always do other things in your spare time, but you specialised in one field, for instance a smithy and a hunter work together by the smithy selling the hunter gear and the hunter selling the smithy food and skins. This also allows casual players to participate. The only issue was that it required a sustainable economy, but other than that it was a very successful. I myself was the harbour master, which meant that I was paid for building and maintaining a small settlement on the edge of the river, but in my spare time I was able to explore and do pretty much whatever I felt like.