Why Haven & Hearth isn't popular?

[Granger]

It was not intuitive enough how to get friends to spawn in your location, it took over a week of playing to figure out that you can build a Wilderness Beacon that lets someone enter a password to spawn there in the character creation room

Unfortunately, we can't have people spawning at each others' hearth fires because of alt abuse. Long term, we do have charter stones for established villages. The downside to this is that those that establish villages early usually don't want random people spawning there, and public spawning points usually aren't safe. We do have newer rules on this, and I'm not sure anyone has set up this sort of public spawning since the "visitor" rule was added.

The surest way to destroy an area (visually and from an usability standpoint) is to have new players spawn in it: They clearcut the area and litter it with garbage, build cabins on roads, put up claims in the most inconvenient places... then get bored and abandon the game to leave the cleanup to someone else (as the broken decay system dosn't do the job).

Regarding usability: there needs to be a manual for the game and it should be developer made (to be always up to date). Some Javadoc style system (where the manual is auto generated from comments in the code) would help to keep it current when mechanics are introduced or change - I'm confident they could come up with something that dosn't get in the way of coding if they really wanted to.

[ChildhoodObesity]

We need more ways to communicate with people in the game that we don't know, often times many people are running away from eachother, if there is some sort of intuitive global chat that fit into the game somehow or other such thing it would be beneficial.

We used to have a global chat. Not sure why it went away... (Used to be a dev comment on this, but I think it was lost with the forum data pre-w8)

wasnt it not even in the default client though? i thought it was just the haven irc and ender made it so u could talk in it from ender client xd

[_Gunnar]

wasnt it not even in the default client though? i thought it was just the haven irc and ender made it so u could talk in it from ender client xd

Before that, there was a global chat in the game, but j&l removed it for larpy reasons or something.

[LadyGoo]

Some of my friends gave it a try. They've voiced a couple of problems:
- the game is way too slow and requires too much time before any action happens;
- not my type of the game;
- click-action response is very slow. Something about the character movement and the clicks they've made, the delay did irritate one of them greatly.

[MagicManICT]

- click-action response is very slow. Something about the character movement and the clicks they've made, the delay did irritate one of them greatly.

This is a good point, and one that isn't easy to resolve. Faster network hardware only improves this so much. More processing power and beefier servers again can help, but only goes so far. It's a code optimization thing for the most part, and is one that's hard to nail down from the reading I've done it.

Personally, it makes me a bit nostalgic and reminds me of the early days of MMOs like EQ and UO. I can definitely see how it could be an issue to a person more accustomed to modern action games and MMOs.

[sMartins]

- click-action response is very slow. Something about the character movement and the clicks they've made, the delay did irritate one of them greatly.

Not a problem for me, I think this is a problem only for non European people cause the ping.
From italy the game is very responsive, like a normal game .... only the stutters that occours sometime is not normal.
I don't think this game will ever have global servers, so I'm sorry for you.

P.S. maybe some netcode optimization could improve that ... but never like being near to the server .... i beleive.

[Granger]

P.S. maybe some netcode optimization could improve that ... but never like being near to the server .... i beleive.

Unless someone comes up with something that makes the speed of light limit irrelevant this is unlikely to happen.

Global distributed servers are not straightforward for a one-instance world, but possible. This could help with actions that involve only one character but it gets tricky as soon as several (connected to different servers) get involved, when these interact the delay between them couldn't be hidden anymore. Apart from problems with item duplication.

[LadyGoo]

Not a problem for me, I think this is a problem only for non European people cause the ping.

The test mouse...kmh... guy is English. With the great Internet, nice PC, got programming degree and work experience.

I don't think this game will ever have global servers, so I'm sorry for you.

Erm, glad to hear you being sorry?

[Robben_DuMarsch]

... allow a character to retire once they've reached 300 in any skill/attribute, and gain a permanent +10 in a single attribute/skill they've reached 300 in for future generations, which ignores the softcap. (Perhaps find a nice way to tie this generational system to credos as well).

Couldn't I just make a character, grind str/ua to 300 and then 'retire' to get 310 and then kill myself to eat again and repeat?

You could stay in the safe 'retired' range which would be exempt from permadeath while grinding up over maxed stats in chunks of 10
It would be more cost effective for lp/fep as well

Einhar is back in the game as well so that would give a reason to boost stats as well

Yes, by design.
People that want to grind will continue to get bonuses for doing so.
However, creating truly monstrous characters (5k combat abilities) would be nearly impossible.

The LP/FP cost effectiveness of killing and re-leveling a character 60 times to get to 600 stats should favor the "quest and permadeath" variation.

[Myrgard]

Yes, by design.
People that want to grind will continue to get bonuses for doing so.

However, creating truly monstrous characters (5k combat abilities) would be nearly impossible.

...and this will impact the game popularity how exactly?

Factions will still be stronger than normal villages and normal villages will still be stronger than hermits... only some more of the grinders will quit since it will become to occultic to be satisfying... and new players won't even be aware of any such innuendos.