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

[joojoo1975]

I believe there is a lot of Good and a lot of Dross(or slag for all you irons out there) in this thread.

But it will never matter until J&L does something about it.



To be quite honest, If Devs in general were more open about the product and see the player base more like family than minions, Gaming would be so much better off.

[Sevenless]

I believe there is a lot of Good and a lot of Dross(or slag for all you irons out there) in this thread.

But it will never matter until J&L does something about it.



To be quite honest, If Devs in general were more open about the product and see the player base more like family than minions, Gaming would be so much better off.

Having been involved/watched a lot of indie games with limited dev resources and rabid or at least intense fanbases, I'm not sure I agree. Players only want openness and communication when things happen exactly the way they want. But with a community that is literally at odds with each other due to the pvp/pve/hermit/village/faction stuff, that's nearly impossible. Also, fanbases for open world pvp games tend to be incredibly toxic and demoralizing when they're even slightly unhappy. It won't encourage the devs in the slightest.

Communication has been a bit too sparse lately, but I don't think open dev tracking happy family type stuff would be good for haven. I also hold that about world resets: People who want more openness don't realize how badly it hurt the game when the devs were open about it in the past.

[VDZ]

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.

This thread started with stating the commonly agreed on problem that most of the playerbase stops playing within the first couple of months after world start. There are obviously problems not limited to just Snail and similar players; at the very least, current player behavior is contrary to what developers intended for the game. (That is: a wipe -> inactivity cycle could be considered to be a normal part of the game, but the game has not been designed - and continues not to be designed - with that pattern of activity in mind.) Snail is entirely right in that post, though (despite the unhelpfully sarcastic wording) I do agree with Bumfrog's addendum that the players with the most expertise also cannot be trusted to give honest feedback, which makes it a hard problem to solve.

I also hold that about world resets: People who want more openness don't realize how badly it hurt the game when the devs were open about it in the past.

Is this a 'repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth' kind of thing? As I pointed out last time you claimed this, to my knowledge this never actually happened:

We've done preplanned wipes before. It slaughters population. 90-160? Try like 10-20. With a wipe 3 months out.

When was this? World 2/3/4? Because 5 -> 6 was very sudden (server crash) and I don't recall 6->7 very well but I'm fairly sure it wasn't announced three months beforehand. And in none of the Hafen worlds has the time between announcement and wipe ever been three months:
9: Feb 4th -> Feb 18th (14 days)
10: Dec 28th -> Jan 7th (10 days)
11: Jan 18th -> Feb 1st (14 days)
12: Feb 23rd -> March 6th (12 days, leap year)
13 March 21st -> April 2nd (12 days)

Obviously, the population does collapse when the new world is announced. But that's because in a game of this timescale, there's not all that much you can still do in less than two weeks. Three months is enough to get all of your industries up from scratch with time to spare (especially in a late-game world).

But you never responded to that, despite posting later in that thread.

[lordgrunt]

the problem. the hardship, the grind, the hardness, the competition. none of these are a problem for a player that enjoys those. the real problem is the game design that assumes those things are desired by players.
1) players leave after seeing they will *have* to brings 17 boars and 11 bears this day.
2) they leave because they tamed 12 horses and they are not usable in any way untill (few months ahead) stats.
3) they planted shitton of flax and noone benefits from it in fresh village cause all of it goes to banners.
4) miners left bc 3 of them dies due to slimes and rest got buried under fallen rocks
5) our crafter was supposed to make 3 fantastic sets of useless linen cloth gear sets that amazingly brought stupendous +3 to str for miners gear sets. but they had a busy weekend so...
6) ppl have lives.
7) ppl get bored
8) those that didnt, stayed. they grinded hard. they calculated, managed and crafted. and got +12 to overall quality of produced metals/boards/meals/whathaveyou. rejoice. what? everyone else left the game? how comes.
9) now they gotta deal with whole other industries that they didnt even plan to get down with, husbandry, field plowing & seeding. do they have to mine now as well? sure, why not dump on them curio collection too...
10) that brings us to *always* diminishing lp/h. at the begining its quite fun to optimize your study. then its gets a bit hard, this and that it forces you to use lower and lower study fuel, comes down to growing feeling of *zero* satisfaction. But diehards know that if they grind and keep it up, those nuumber will go up. there is the hook... that ppl hang themselves on
11) then comes the winter and 99% of population drops. remaining 1% hesitates upon spring where there is little to do, little to gain and a wholebunch of waiting for summer to go

(edit) this is in list forrm so its easy to shit on by shit players. bring it on, shit is good for fertilizing my fields

[WowGain]

Communication has been a bit too sparse lately

Just a little bit? Just a teeny tiny widdle bit? A smidgen?

[Ferinex]

the problem. the hardship, the grind, the hardness, the competition. none of these are a problem for a player that enjoys those. the real problem is the game design that assumes those things are desired by players.
1) players leave after seeing they will *have* to brings 17 boars and 11 bears this day.
2) they leave because they tamed 12 horses and they are not usable in any way untill (few months ahead) stats.
3) they planted shitton of flax and noone benefits from it in fresh village cause all of it goes to banners.
4) miners left bc 3 of them dies due to slimes and rest got buried under fallen rocks
5) our crafter was supposed to make 3 fantastic sets of useless linen cloth gear sets that amazingly brought stupendous +3 to str for miners gear sets. but they had a busy weekend so...
6) ppl have lives.
7) ppl get bored
8) those that didnt, stayed. they grinded hard. they calculated, managed and crafted. and got +12 to overall quality of produced metals/boards/meals/whathaveyou. rejoice. what? everyone else left the game? how comes.
9) now they gotta deal with whole other industries that they didnt even plan to get down with, husbandry, field plowing & seeding. do they have to mine now as well? sure, why not dump on them curio collection too...
10) that brings us to *always* diminishing lp/h. at the begining its quite fun to optimize your study. then its gets a bit hard, this and that it forces you to use lower and lower study fuel, comes down to growing feeling of *zero* satisfaction. But diehards know that if they grind and keep it up, those nuumber will go up. there is the hook... that ppl hang themselves on
11) then comes the winter and 99% of population drops. remaining 1% hesitates upon spring where there is little to do, little to gain and a wholebunch of waiting for summer to go

(edit) this is in list forrm so its easy to shit on by shit players. bring it on, shit is good for fertilizing my fields

certainly something to be said here about those things and reasons for quitting, and then add on top of it the few extremely incel players spewing the n-slur and r-slur and f-slur in the chat and normal and casual people just don't have an interest in playing with such conditions, there has been more than one thread about it. brainrot. when the normie casual players come to the realization that these people with such vulgar toxicity in fact hold permissions to the realms and are some of the most highly-online players (actually, not that surprising, for anyone familiar with highly-online culture), they are repulsed

[bumfrog]

r-slur very bad, but threatening to kill the developer of a game I lost? Totally normal, sane, and adult-like

[Sevenless]

But you never responded to that, despite posting later in that thread.

Sorry for missing that.

Looking back, definitely it was pre-hafen days. If I'm remembering correctly: W6 was a bit of a strange world, and unusually short. At the time the devs had moved the majority of their attention to developing Salem. W6>W7 seems to be the most likely world for it to have happened, it wasn't a Salem world for sure. I seem to recall it being mentioned as an experiment by the devs at the time. I'm also vaguely remembering the rubber banding bug getting fixed in haven, which might have been what required the weirdly timed world reboot.

I've looked where I can to provide proper evidence, but every tracker/forums I can find stops shortly before hafen launched.

[VDZ]

But you never responded to that, despite posting later in that thread.

Sorry for missing that.

Looking back, definitely it was pre-hafen days. If I'm remembering correctly: W6 was a bit of a strange world, and unusually short. At the time the devs had moved the majority of their attention to developing Salem. W6>W7 seems to be the most likely world for it to have happened, it wasn't a Salem world for sure. I seem to recall it being mentioned as an experiment by the devs at the time. I'm also vaguely remembering the rubber banding bug getting fixed in haven, which might have been what required the weirdly timed world reboot.

I've looked where I can to provide proper evidence, but every tracker/forums I can find stops shortly before hafen launched.

World 6 was definitely not short. I looked it up, and it ran for 1 year and 7 months - where no previous world had lasted even a year by that point. I know world 5 -> world 6 happened suddenly due to data corruption, and according to the wiki world 4 lasted less than three months and world 3 ended suddenly due to data corruption like world 5.

World 7 was announced only four days in advance, so that leaves only 1->2 and 2->3 (unlikely due to both being only 5 months in total and the game being super-new) and legacy->hafen which is not at all comparable to any world reset (and which never actually ended world 7; it runs to this day).

There is no point in time where your claimed situation plausibly could have happened.

[Sevenless]

But you never responded to that, despite posting later in that thread.

Sorry for missing that.

Looking back, definitely it was pre-hafen days. If I'm remembering correctly: W6 was a bit of a strange world, and unusually short. At the time the devs had moved the majority of their attention to developing Salem. W6>W7 seems to be the most likely world for it to have happened, it wasn't a Salem world for sure. I seem to recall it being mentioned as an experiment by the devs at the time. I'm also vaguely remembering the rubber banding bug getting fixed in haven, which might have been what required the weirdly timed world reboot.

I've looked where I can to provide proper evidence, but every tracker/forums I can find stops shortly before hafen launched.

World 6 was definitely not short. I looked it up, and it ran for 1 year and 7 months - where no previous world had lasted even a year by that point. I know world 5 -> world 6 happened suddenly due to data corruption, and according to the wiki world 4 lasted less than three months and world 3 ended suddenly due to data corruption like world 5.

World 7 was announced only four days in advance, so that leaves only 1->2 and 2->3 (unlikely due to both being only 5 months in total and the game being super-new) and legacy->hafen which is not at all comparable to any world reset (and which never actually ended world 7; it runs to this day).

There is no point in time where your claimed situation plausibly could have happened.

I must have been confusing it (length wise) with the bug killed world then. You've left me a real stumper, I didn't play worlds before 4, and only the bare edge of it. I'm absolutely certain this is my memory of it happening, it wasn't something I was told about. Only possibility I can think of is it's from a different game, but that's not what I've been claiming.

I cede the point and unless I can dig up what the hell I'm specifically remembering. I'll stop making the claim even if I still believe it personally. The 2 week announcements definitely crater population, that much we can see.