Will hafen ever be popular or did it miss its chance?

[Zentetsuken]

Well here is what I don't understand. I am in favour of capping shit in some way or another. But what happens if a world lasts for this long and there was a cap at 200 for example. Starting at 6 months or less people would hit it, and then the rest of the population would slowly trickle towards the 200 mark. After a year anybody who played even casually for a fair part of the world would be at max stats. What happens now? Is the game more about going to siege and destroy your neighbours so his quality spiral is hopefully hindered and he has to start stockpiling again? Wouldn't everybody have mostly everything they need after a certain point? All people would need to do is keep a bit of metal stockpiled to make new armours when something breaks. Is it even possible to destroy somebody enough that they would legitimately have to start over from scratch? Why would I want to risk my character dying if there is absolutely no point in stealing stuff from other villages? If I'm max stat and have a fair village and most of our crafts are max stat then what exactly do you do then?

[Potjeh]

Average lifespan of a village should be like four to six months. Average lifespan of a character should be one to two months. Basically Rust on a longer scale. Everything eventually gets lost to PvP. I think it's more fun to go out with a bang rather than slowly fade out due to everyone in the village borequitting. And this style facilitates people joining and quitting mid-world, and then maybe rejoining after a hiatus, so it's much better suited to the infinite world design goal than the current system.

[shubla]

Average lifespan of a village should be like four to six months. Average lifespan of a character should be one to two months. Basically Rust on a longer scale. Everything eventually gets lost to PvP. I think it's more fun to go out with a bang rather than slowly fade out due to everyone in the village borequitting. And this style facilitates people joining and quitting mid-world, and then maybe rejoining after a hiatus, so it's much better suited to the infinite world design goal than the current system.

I somehow agree that there should be something that prevents you from getting like 10 000 constitution. For example, over time your character gets older and weaker, more prone to deadly illnesses and injuries. And inheritance should be nerfed.

[MightySheep]

grindy open world pvp games are never massively popular

and haven is one which historically stay fresh with world restarts but for some reason they refuse to do that now so there is no return of players

[jorb]

grindy open world pvp games are never massively popular

EVE?

[Granger]

grindy open world pvp games are never massively popular

EVE?

EVE is special because they were the first practical SciFi MMO (or Excel in space, depending on who you ask) so they gained traction.

They also managed to pull off endless growth through adding more and even bigger stuff so you can continue to train - while at the same time using the trick that bigger vessels are completely ineffective against reasonably smaller ones so that newer (= less developed) players are neither stomped upon like ants nor irrelevant (as they sadly are in Haven, caused by the quality and combat mechanics) but play vital roles in massive battles (as the capital ships of the day need need smaller support ships, which need smaller support ships, ...).

They also have high-sec, so the ability for PvP oriented players to fuck with the experience of carebears is limited to can flipping (and through this trying to tease the newbies to initiate combat). That one can't burn down the village equivalent of a pure high-sec player certainly helps to explain why so many of them kept playing...

Well here is what I don't understand. I am in favour of capping shit in some way or another. But what happens if a world lasts for this long and there was a cap at 200 for example. Starting at 6 months or less people would hit it, and then the rest of the population would slowly trickle towards the 200 mark. After a year anybody who played even casually for a fair part of the world would be at max stats. What happens now? Is the game more about going to siege and destroy your neighbours so his quality spiral is hopefully hindered and he has to start stockpiling again? Wouldn't everybody have mostly everything they need after a certain point? All people would need to do is keep a bit of metal stockpiled to make new armours when something breaks. Is it even possible to destroy somebody enough that they would legitimately have to start over from scratch? Why would I want to risk my character dying if there is absolutely no point in stealing stuff from other villages? If I'm max stat and have a fair village and most of our crafts are max stat then what exactly do you do then?

That's why I suggested to have the players work against a ceiling that pushes back (stat decay), but such ideas seem to have the same problem that parties as here in germany that are genuinely interested in making politics for the 90% have: everyone seems to be seeing himself as on the king of hill so any stuff that's remotely bad for the top 1% must be bad in general.

[Zentetsuken]

That's why I suggested to have the players work against a ceiling that pushes back (stat decay), but such ideas seem to have the same problem that parties as here in germany that are genuinely interested in making politics for the 90% have: everyone seems to be seeing himself as on the king of hill so any stuff that's remotely bad for the top 1% must be bad in general.

This might be cool if it was implemented the same way as HP. Like each stat has a hard and soft value. Maybe the goal would be to push your stats to the hard cap but make it so any crafting or fighting or work is based on your soft stat. It's like working out, if you hit the gym for a few months you get super strong, but if you stop you get weak again. This way you could even make it so players could push and maintain a stat BEYOND the hard cap with their soft value maybe but have most activities still weighted on the hard in this case.

Example, max stat for str is 200, 2 players hit max STR so on this day their Hard STR and Soft STR are both 200.

Player 1 continues to eat and do activities that prevent S-STR from falling, and the next day he achieves 205 S-STR, H-STR remains at 200. Crafts and activities for him will be weighted at having 200 STR.

Player 2 doesn't log in, or simply afks and fucks around for a day, maybe does activities that make you weaker, doesn't eat when he should?? the next day his S-STR is back to 195, H-STR remains at 200. Crafts and activities for him will be weighted at having 195 STR.

This way it can still be semi-rewarding to continue the nolife grind, and maybe like I said previously, some crafts or activities could potentially still use the soft value and take additional bonuses?

EDIT - also, maybe hard could decay as well but much slower, and ofcourse significant hard stats can be lost on death

[Granger]

It's like working out, if you hit the gym for a few months you get super strong, but if you stop you get weak again.

My suggestion was boiling down to modeling something like that, with the decay getting stronger the harder you grind (resulting in an upper point where you simply can't grind any harder, giving an absolute upper end of the range to balance PvP and such against) while being weaker the lower you are (making it easy to maintain a 'normal' level through average gameplay, giving a baseline to balance PvE and such against).
Yes, numbers in the character sheet that shrink suck - but the resulting effects from them endlessly growing suck even worse.

[sMartins]

grindy open world pvp games are never massively popular

EVE?

You should talk with them, maybe.

[ChildhoodObesity]

World 8's horrendous payment model has to be mentioned. Massive amount of people were hyped for Hafen and were then turned off by effectively having to pay to play. They may not know it has been since (more or less) fixed. I think we at least lost many Legacy veterans who haven't returned.

1 of our legacy bros who we played with for like 2-3 years was so hyped for hafen and when he saw the payment model he said like "wow what the fuck" and we never heard from him again.. quite sad...