Moving forward: Thoughts about the Sandbox

[Sevenless]

This is coming up a lot in debates about kingdoms, and this is not meant to be a discussion about that specific idea. I want to talk about the concept of players restriction other player action through game mechanics. Many people are claiming (if I may paraphrase) that this betrays the concept of a sandbox. I'm throwing this to the inn because quite a few players who have these issues don't visit C&I to my knowledge, and I'd like everyone to be involved in the discussion.

The issue we're coming to is a philosophical limitation on pure sandbox game play. If you truly cannot restrict the action of another player, inevitably the other player has the ability to kick over your castle. And while that form of game play is acceptable to some, ultimately it limits what can feasibly be built in said game. I feel it's a matter of being realistic. In theory, players could construct an open city and patrol it with guards 24/7 to prevent any wrongdoings from happening. In reality, this is utterly impossible. People have jobs and need to sleep. The cost of projecting order, to protect what you've created, in a purely 24/7 pvp environment becomes completely prohibitive.

This in particular applies to our siege system. Right now, the game has almost zero limits on what you can do if you break through the walls. This inability to limit players in any way beyond keeping them out of an area has shaped the game in massive ways. Raiders are used to hunting prey out in the wild, and occasionally gutting a wall shell they manage to find a crack in. We cannot have other interesting forms of banditry and outlaw (such as mugging, thieving, resource sabotage etc) for the same reason. Moving forward does not have to mean "no fun" for these types of players, in fact many interesting dynamics could be implemented with control zones. But in order to move from here to there, the ability to be restricted by the actions of other players is a necessity.

To such an order: I'd like to propose a change of paradigm. I feel if we want to form civilizations instead of little clans, we need to consider the word Sandbox to mean "Players are free to take actions within the world, including the use of reasonable game mechanics that allow them to restrict other player actions within an area of control. Control of an area can be contested and they will be small enough that there is always room to claim new areas somewhere in the world". Ultimately, this fits perfectly with the core values of Sandbox game play. Developers giving the tools for players to interact in meaningful emergent ways. All laws imposed by these control zones can be overturned through control contests, in whatever form they may appear.


I think this is an important discussion to separate from any particular suggested system. If we're going to have opposition to any system, lets get it out here. That way we can hopefully keep comments about suggested systems as pertaining to how good they are, not just arguing over what they're fundamentally attempting to do. As always, feel free to discuss and criticize, but lets keep it civil

[Lorefin]

To move from barbarism into civilized player structures Devs must force something about creating larger factions and they must add more PvE aspects to the game.
First one, I am not sure about kingdoms - I didn't read about it but creating a larger territory with a list of village that joined it and aditional options attached to it - for example, members of the kingdom can recognize each other, villages pay taxes to the capitol, there's an option to conquer the village who's not willing to join by peace and force taxes, there can be a rebellion and new kingdom can be made etc.
Second task is raids - defenders and attackers should set 1 hour to do the battle. However how raids currently look like? Noone's taking the risk of losing, it's mostly during the time the opposite village is inactive and they can't organise, log on and stuff because they will get killed on login. So during such a battle, death penalty would be too scary that noone would take the risk of attack. That's why for such battles, LP and stats regain after death should be around 30% for both sides.
Third things is that there's nothing to do beside PvP later on. Inb4 there's crafting. There are players who will enjoy the farmville aspect of the game even in WoW. Most people are looking for a challenge. Why don't we have some kind of PvE fights, dungeons for example to party with your mates and have fun. Haven can have some combat strategies so bosses and PvE would be fun, and even more funnier with some combat extension. So you've got something to do in your kingdom instead of fighting with others. If you're a vasal you can travel to the capitol to look for mates to do a dungeon or join other party.
Second cool thing beside PvE is trading but it's currently impossible. It would require different atmospheric parts of the world - like cold north with mountains and metal, ironless but good for farming centre of the map, forests with bigger animals. Basically Devs would have to change the map from: mass of small biomes spawned randomly to: large, realistic world with climatic zones. It would create the need for different products or for resources with higher quality because you can't have it there. With some kind of river/road system the trading would work then and BANDITRY would still work because you could attack people transporting the goods.

I'd like to add that if Devs are planning the change of the map, they would have to add more details into each biome because currently, the map is a bit complicated only because of large amount of biomes not because the terrain has a lot of details.
The one thing the Devs CANNOT do is stickiking to the current, shitty 8 years old HnH meta (which quarantes 250 players and not 2250 ) and think: look this thing would change the game to X and Y, we cannot do that. There need to be more imagination and creativity in Haven, not eternal balancing the numbers.
Sorry for my english but I think that's all.

[venatorvenator]

I think one problem is that people think we had sandbox before, and compare the current systems with the ones they are familiar with. It's worth asking if they would still feel that way if they just started playing today. That's an important question because the game needs new players, and features that seem both interesting and fair to them, and not just maintenance of old players.

As for freedom and sandbox in regard to the latest update, I don't see much difference between the new and old systems. You already had restrictions before in the form of debuffs, expensive criminal skills, strength limitation due to wall soak, ram drying time, and there are very good arguments against all of them from a pure sandbox perspective because they indeed limit our freedom of action. The complaint about infiltration being harder now is pointless, in my opinion, since that was an exploit and not a mechanic. And the devs already mentioned they will implement siege engines, which means we will actually have more, and not fewer ways to raid a village.

The issue we're coming to is a philosophical limitation on pure sandbox game play.

I'd like to propose a change of paradigm. I feel if we want to form civilizations instead of little clans, we need to consider the word Sandbox to mean "Players are free to take actions within the world, including the use of reasonable game mechanics that allow them to restrict other player actions within an area of control. Control of an area can be contested and they will be small enough that there is always room to claim new areas somewhere in the world". Ultimately, this fits perfectly with the core values of Sandbox game play. Developers giving the tools for players to interact in meaningful emergent ways. All laws imposed by these control zones can be overturned through control contests, in whatever form they may appear.

I think that's a good suggestion.
What needs to be worked on, however, is the matter of absolute restrictions. I believe a better solution would be scalable limitations instead of a simple crime/no-crime zone of control.
For example, crimes commited against villages are more serious than those commited against hermitages, and crimes against kingdoms are even worse. Scents and debuffs should be scaled accordingly: serious crimes carry harsher consequences for the perpetrator, crime damage should be higher, scents should last longer, red handed debuff too. This because everyone should be free to commit crimes, but they should face the consequences of that, and these consequences should be proportional to the damage they attempt to cause to the target player/village/kingdom.
Zones of control are an interesting idea. I just think restrictions shouldn't be absolute, but rather dependent on some metric (for example, crime debuffs depending on the targets authority).