Are devs happy/okay/satisfied with the player numbers?

[VDZ]

they are mostly completely indifferent to the player numbers and the last decade of development is all the proof anybody could ever need of this.

It's literally the second post in this thread.

I think the current user numbers are a pretty damning indictment of our development and/or management, or perhaps of the game itself, tbqh, but -- while I can certainly speculate -- I don't know with any perfect certainty what the big problem(tm) is. I am concerned that recurring resets is an addiction that we're feeding which prevents any longer term commitments to the game.

Continued development is the best I've got.

They care, but aren't competent enough to fix the problems.

[joojoo1975]

15 pages later And I only saw one post from J&L


Why don't you compile all the suggestions into a Straw poll and then promise you fix the top 2 problems instead of "creating" more content?

[SnuggleSnail]

15 pages later And I only saw one post from J&L


Why don't you compile all the suggestions into a Straw poll and then promise you fix the top 2 problems instead of "creating" more content?

Like 6 months ago PVP got /completely/ broken and all pre-existing characters were made obsolete because somebody who doesn't even PVP messaged Loftar and said they liked the idea of swords in PVP while giving him nearly random insanely overpowered numbers. After many complaints from actual PVPers in spite of fixing the problem being changing one number somewhere it remains broken.

Sleds made PVP during winter neigh unplayable, and instead of it being fixed the addition of Skiis made it worse while enabling the same knarr vs. snekkja paradigm (something that I'm sure some PVP nerds already tried very hard to explain to them) except on land. Genuinely not hyperbole to say PVP is unplayable in winter, but I don't think anybody has actually managed to convince Jorbtar it's a problem yet(probably because everybody outright refuses to fight in winter, so it's just a forced break instead of in-your-face frustrating).

The quality grind is utterly broken RN because quality ~800+ bones/rocks/hide/compostables exist in the world from day 1 for no reason. You gain 90% of your potential max quality for the world in 1-2 months then there's nothing to do for grinders. Despite things like animal quality node variance/quality being a common complaint for years, they remain unchanged - while the only thing that does progress with world age, crops, have had the rate at which their progress slowed multiple times(even if I love that farming "competitively" is a lot more reasonable now).

The satiation system/FEP distribution system/hunger make it so the thing most people probably spend the most time on, actually developing your character, is 0% guided by dev intention and 100% RNG machine goes BRRR every time they decide to add a new food leading to absolute autism like killing whales/pelicans 16 hours a day being the optimal way to play the game. Yet after this being pointed out 100 times every few patches another random food Jorb read a wikipedia article about gets added with random stats that may or may not completely fuck the meta for character development.

In world 10 there were talks every day in C&I about pepper and how as an unrestricted FEP multiplier it's awful for balance, with both developers agreeing multiple times it needs to be changed - meanwhile a few days after they added truffles, which is just reskinned pepper that is multiplicative with regular pepper showing they either never really understood the issue OR they just don't think about the consequences of new content they add AT ALL. After however many years both are still needed in insane quantities / require bots when simple number changes could fix this.

These aren't my biggest examples of things that are wrong. These are the better examples of things that could be fixed, or at very least heavily mitigated easily just by changing some numbers. However, most of these have been in the game for months/years, and are more likely to be exacerbated than addressed by the same mistake being made again and again and again needlessly.

Jorbtar are both very bad at haven, like not experienced enough to even identify who is experienced. I will nvr4get when in world 11 Jordan Coles managed to single-handedly make archery the most broken garbage in the game, to the point I've had to run from ~100 stat hermits with no combat experience as a group of like 5 people with topQ gear and 1k+ stats because there's genuinely no counter-play no matter how perfectly we do the thing, probably off the back of 5 minutes of PMing Jorbtar. Meanwhile, after several years I'm pretty sure those mechanics remain and JC is still bad enough to be a laughing stock that was only in one fight this world, which he lost 6v1 and his opinion is probably taken seriously by Jorbtar.

I flip-flop between being sympathetic for Jorbtar for having to deal like absolutely retarded autistic screeching retards(like me!) regardless of how competent they are or not, and being insanely frustrated that half the patches for my favorite game horribly break it without being fixed for months/years. I'm not sure what led to this, I don't really think it's fair to make assertions but I'm pretty sure Jorbtar are aware of it themselves and nobody else can fix it for them. It's not like there aren't 100 autistic retards that know every aspect of the game ready to help them out with whatever, as intolerable as they may be during.

TL;DR

These examples are very end game, but I'm sure more regular player experience similar. Strawpolling the current big problems won't work because most people along with the devs don't know how the game works, and won't understand/think about the overarching implications of mechanics. Tree conversations.

[bumfrog]

ugh snail but you’re a known bad actor so NOTHING you say can be taken at face value or should even be given a second thought, smh

Just ignore the fact that Haven and Hearth is an insanely complex, competitive PVP mmo, full of tedious (ie months of work to even earn the ability to engage with) and obfuscated systems, the perfect confluence of factors wherein the only players committed enough to posses a working knowledge of how all this insane content bloat interacts to form a competitive “meta,” are also the players with the most to lose were they to be fully honest in their feedback since it would cost them their competitive advantage were their broken strats widely known or worse, “nerfed” by having the unintentional-via-incompetence bad consequences of poorly-thought-out systems reined in. There’s surely no meaningful correlation between “players who want to win bad enough to put up with a mountain of tedium and learn the game” and “players who want to win bad enough to hide their hard-earned knowledge,” and even if there were, all responsibility would lie on those lying meanie poopoo heads and not the incentives created by building a game a certain way.

It’s not as though the developers could recruit trusted individuals to play the game to the fullest and give honest feedback, perhaps with knowledgable community manager(s) to serve as a liaison/filter between them and the players’ feedback. Imagine how silly and frivolous it would be to think about all the possible logical endpoints of all the insane mechanics before they’re haphazardly flung into the game, or if a more practical effort was made find realistic issues with said mechanics by conducting a modicum of meaningful **TESTING** before they’re made public. Say by running a test server, and/or appointing beta testers who, again, will interact with the mechanics as a hafen player would. And considering how impossible that bare minimum measure would be I’m sure it would be completely ridiculous to follow up on fixing <dumb broken system number 17> within a month or two of its release, since it’s far more important to devote dev time to <dumb broken system number 18>‘s half-baked creation.

Better to allow a situation to persist where even intermediate players know infinitely more than the developers about the user-facing game and how gameplay happens in practice, and only even try to correct that inequity for a few months at the start of each world. That way we have more time to add more broken, intentionally hard-to-understand-so-as-to-hide-their-brokenness, incongruent mechanics and play an eternal game of ‘c&i cat-and-mouse’ with a few hapless noobs who still buy into the sandbox larping game the devs can only make in theory, and an ever-shrinking group jaded minmaxers who are playing the game as it is and have therefore been strongly encouraged to lie. Might be neat!

[SnuggleSnail]

To be fair, there is A LOT of noise, and it does genuinely seem very hard to distinguish good feedback from bad feedback. If I were in a similar situation for another game I doubt I could do much better while maintaining my normal life. I get the impression they've tried a lot of methods to filter, like the old inner circle, but for whatever reason never really nailed it. Plus it's not like PVPers are the only people who need to be developed around. There's a dozen different play-styles, and of them PVPers are a tiny minority(partially because they get fucked over so bad, but mostly because it's just niche).

I suspect the only real solutions involve them playing the game /a lot/ at higher levels, or at least being very active in talking to people to fully understand how systems are interacted with instead of just how one """competent""" guy thinks they should be. Not trying to bootlick but I unironically don't know if that's a reasonable expectation.

That said, if it's not a reasonable expectation and the development method will always be throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, while taking 2 years to clean the carpet... Please don't mess with things that are already working/fun. B12 PVP meta is really the only skill based/fun combat in the game. So many big names literally only play the game for that, and every other week it's obsoleted by a random change to bows or swords or an addition of new combat vehicles. Do random things to stuff that isn't working already. Likewise, so many people I know who spent all of their time mining world 9/10 basically don't want to play the game now because of boulders/mine supports taking damage/slime spawn quantities balanced around a time when everybody had 20k strength and Q2k B12s.

[bumfrog]

True, but the overarching problem I’ve tried to address here is that they’ve consistently made these problems harder on themselves rather than easier.

It’s hard enough to make one complex gameplay system fun and “balanced” but hafen as it currently stands has at least twenty that all interact with each other in exponentially complex ways. And they didn’t need to add any of them, but instead of committing to one or a few gameplay systems that form a coherent core game, or ensuring each gameplay system makes sense w.r.t. all others before adding it, or stopping after each new addition to retool if need be, they just keep adding more. More new birds, alchemy, oceans, seasons, realms, credos, all awful in their own way to maybe be bandaid-fixed years from now. They’re often working against each other or themselves (credos seasons and realms), making past additions completely obsolete (happens with food and curios often), or themselves being useless from day one (also common with any given food/curio). And next year there’ll be another one that’s just as awful.

Building “wide” instead of “tall” like that all but ensures feedback will feel like noise because if every gameplay system incentivizes something different, then you’ll attract thirty different types of players that all want something different based on the often-contradictory value systems supported or discouraged by a plethora of disparate features.


jfc tho if they don’t change boulders to being opt-in like everyone’s been suggesting for the past year as if mining wasn’t already tarded enough

[pawnchito]

... Likewise, so many people I know who spent all of their time mining world 9/10 basically don't want to play the game now because of boulders/mine supports taking

Dont even get me started.

[Ferinex]

thread tldr: snail is really butthurt the world doesn't revolve around his insane and niche style of playing the game, and expects it to conform to some model it very clearly is not designed to conform to. You talk a lot about other people being bad at the game, but your metrics are self-defined and self-righteous. It's very clear that by the only metric which matters in an online role-playing game--enjoyment--you are unspeakably bad at the game. Eat some magic mushrooms and chill the fuck out. If something as trivial as adding a new food completely derails your ability to function, it seems really clear to me and hopefully everyone else that the rails were of your own design in the first place, and the consequences righteous.

[SnuggleSnail]

You were trying to dox people and threatening to kill their children IRL over us dunking you in game or whatever like a month ago. Maybe if you cared about the meta a bit you wouldn't need to care so much about getting shit on.

Also, would you believe that my play-style was once upon a time the norm, or at least very common. Changes made to the game have done a very good job alienating all of the people who cared to engage with it beyond walking around picking blueberries for an hour a week, though.

[alioli]

I always found the game really fun to play alone

up until you need metal, because that's when i hit a brick-wall.
I also enjoy hermitting pretty hard, and at the moment the world is entirely settled, you walk like 1 minute to any direction and you'll find a claim

I do think the fact that most of the world is settled is putting poeple off, and i can imagine the difficulty of progress beyond a certain point quite off putting. But I do think a lot of people are like me, we play [solo], until we die - then we take half a year - a year breaks
I don't really have any solution to that.