Is haven and hearth player base really that bad?

[dunno6988]

I really like this game, but too bad it has only mere 200-300 plays online, which sucks, because this game is awesome (even though not for everyone [By that I mean not for edgy minecraft kids] and that's okay). But one looking only at "popular" MMO's which you can find over 100ks videos on youtube they don't really have big numbers as I have expected. Since there's a difference between registered players and currently playing players. Since sure there can be 1 million registered, but only 1000 playing. So I found this website and surprisingly they barely even go up to 20x of what haven and hearth has currently. Sure it's only for 2016, but they are still alive and well known games to begin with.
https://mmos.com/editorials/popular-mmo ... -june-2016
Let me know what you lot think about this and do you guys think that Haven and Hearth currently playing numbers are bad or not so much (besides bots, since in these mmos those numbers might as well be for bots as well).

Also what could devs do to increase the player count? From free and easy to taxing and hard.

[GenghisKhan44]

This is a good question to revisit from time to time. Here are some of my observations.

For one thing it has little marketing. Aside from the few videos on YouTube and a few articles on the web there is no marketing at all for this game. This is not so for most other games, with have many more fan videos and articles, and many also have ads, are available on websites and platforms like gog.com or Steam, and a few even game cards you can buy in stores, not to mention swag. It takes press to make press.

For another, it is owned and run by exactly two Swedish men. Most other games have at least a few more people working on a project. I don't think people aren't coming because there ARE only two devs. But when more come, we might have a Moses-getting-worn-out-by-the-people-Israel situation, and that is another problem.

I think all things considered, the playerbase is pretty large, since it is only jorb and loftar working on it. If it were me, and I wanted to expand the playerbase, and were confident I could, I would hire more people who had marketing sense for video games, and perhaps some administrators or coders who would be willing to be trained in maintaining the servers. But that's just me farting in the wind.

[xTrainx]

i played wit some friends who got interested in the game, and they all basically quit, not in the sense of they said "a quit" and gg, but rather, they just played less and less frequently , until they didnt bother to log in again.

From that experience this is what i figured was the reason why it happened:

1. extremly little documentaion: although the liked the fact they had to discover what they could do, the fact is that they got lost a lot. Haven is the kind of game you can't really play without having the ring of brodgar wiki nearby. I honestly think a lot more people would stick to the game if there was some sort of ingame documentation method, maybe even a way to integrate the RoB wiki into the client would be enough.

2. Wounds: Currently wounds in this game meant downtime, for them, as soon as they got attacked by some animal, or got a wound somehow, they would look to get to base and just log out, and wait for the wounds to heal. Im not really sure how would this be fixed, maybe if there was something to do that you can do with wounds, or inside your base, But honestly this could have been avoid a bit by my part had i told them to use alts, but since they were begginer i didnt want to bother them with that, or complicate their gameplay with managing multiple accounts.

3. Movement: a very big turn off apparently, they discribed the movement in the game as not really intuitive and hard to manage. im pretty sure the floating point coordinate is aiming to fix that as well, also they were using custom client but never got around to turn on the path lines, wich makes it easier.

4. Little to no player encounters: they felt they were the only ones on the world for a while, only one of them got to encounter other players, and it was when we were about to claim a decaying village and someone stopped us from doing it and they were never seem again. This have been an issue for all the 9 worlds of the game, and there have been attemps to fix it, but in the current world, there's no easy way to visit places that are far away where you know there are people. The problem is the interest of one group (people who want to play with other people nearby) contrasts with the interest of other groups (hermits). one of the idea i had to address this issue was to create "natural charterstones" through out the world map, places where you could spawn, travel to and meet with other players, while they could be npc cities, it could just be made in a plain and people could naturally convert them into cities. While it's possible they would need to be some kind of pvp protection, either dev made or player made, the objective would be met, provide people means to move themselve and meet other players, trade and such. maybe they could be used for war somehow.

5. "nothing to do, just farming" to be fair, this have a lot to do with the no documetation part, since they really didn't see all the things they could do. instead they felt all there was to do was try to get better crops. Keep in mind they were still new, so hunting was extremely hard for them and they usually returned with wounds, that didnt let them get back to it soon enough, fishing waiting time was kinda obnoxious, and one of them cut a tree down when it asked him to greet another tree for the 5th time. While this itself is resolved with a little more documentaion, there could also be more specified quest, wich include defending the npcs from certain enemies (ant swarm, bats, evil foxes). Building specific things, and also making quests interact in certain areas/structures, like an npc city. This also provide people with oportunity to meet each other (also promote people to settle nearby).

This is all i can think about right now, but the number one problem this game have imo is documentation. it's one of the things that push people away: not knowing what to do/ what you can do

[Shadow7168]

I think it'd be nice to have a "tutorial island" of sorts for the nubs. Have a stat cap and maybe a quality cap, spawn them in the same area. That way they can get a feel for the game around other newbies rather than hardened vets.

Integrating the wiki into the vanilla client like how Amber does it would be great, plus maybe some links to starter resources like How Do I, the IRC and Sevenless' guide. I know a lot of players don't even look at the forums when they first start(To be fair, I don't either in most games) A world chat would also make it feel a lot less empty, though I know it was a bit quiet last time someone tried it.

I know J&L don't like marketing, and I'd tend to agree with them, in the current state this game is definitely not ready for a huge influx of newbies, but I can see potential.

[MrPunchers]

We need more noobs in this game so we have a bunch of dispensable warriors in factions so that there's actually fights.

[joojoo1975]

We need more noobs in this game so we have a bunch of dispensable warriors in factions so that there's actually fights.

quite honestly, if any "noob" checks the forums, I believe they would be ran off. first off, the game is not noob friendly. second, though it's prolly like lightening hitting people(as in it's

mostly a fluke incident and bad timing/luck on the victim) the forums don't go a week or so without some post of "bad Stronk guy killt me and I am noob" that can't help. as as already

mentioned game mechanics and whatnot and lack of marketing all add to the "woes of H&H"

and I didn't even begin to talk about the botting

[GenghisKhan44]

Not to be a pooh-pooher, but doesn't hunting bigger and bigger animals eventually become a quality grind in the end, anyway?

What we need is an animal guaranteed to be impossible to defeat without cooperation between at least three people. Perhaps something that can threaten houses and villages. A real challenge that even skill grinding can't solve.

I like this idea. ...But then, that kind of further penalizes hermits like me. Sure, it's my choice to play the game casually with just a few friends who aren't always around when I am, but it puts me at an even greater disadvantage when a village is able to hunt much higher quality animals. I'm not really sure how to mitigate that disparity or if it would even be fair to try, since in an MMO, cooperation should be rewarded.

Along with what joojoo said - that the game is not really noob friendly at all - and the question of how to be more forgiving to casuals/noobs while not depriving veterans of their fun...

I think the grind factor of HnH is kinda weighing it down, too. Anyone can kill a bear with enough time and patience. Anyone can kill ten bears. Twenty. A hundred. What, then, is next to accomplish? A mammoth. Ten, twenty of those. Then? Noobs can get rekt, and problems feed into other problems.

Tree quests are an interesting start. Player maintained interactive villages are a start. But the question is: how do we get people off of the grind track and onto something more lasting and satisfying? Is that possible?