World 12 or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the..."

[Archiplex]

...Wipe." Title was too long.

This is a large, multi-part suggestion for a formula that I believe combines Hafen's greatest strengths, smooths out it's weaknesses, and creates a good gameplay loop that can be expanded on in the next worlds- but because I know some of you have peanut brains, here's a TL;DR
1. Rhythmic world resets. A set system so we know, generally, when the next wipe will be.
2. A map to encourage conflict: A quality system that encourages people to live closer to the center of the world and leave their comfortable brick walls will encourage good conflict, while allowing hermits and pacifists to focus on their own internal quality grind.
3. A more grandeur quest system and new biomes introduced specifically to provide challenges to players rather than tedium- quests should be 'hard', not idle-fests or boring, and the world is currently not dangerous enough (But danger everywhere is bad too; so tying this into 2. with more dangerous monsters and biomes the closer you reach the center of the map)
4. Digestion and Active learning to be added to smooth the line between players that can only afford to play on weekends or only a couple of hours a day, vs players who can play 8 hours a day.
5. An anti-decay system that speeds up the progression of all characters as the world approaches it's doom- new characters would start with slightly higher stats, and all FEP/LP gain increases the older a world is.
6. A stance against bots. Self explanatory.

IMPORTANT: This suggestion is for the next world, primarily. I'm posting it now because I feel like this world is sputtering in its deathbed, and because I know jorb and loftar are doing two major changes right now (object carrying objects + new combat/health system). This suggestion, for the most part, assumes that a new combat system is made and that works well enough, and that siege mechanics can be changed slightly to suit the coming world.

With that out of the way, let's move into the meat.
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Point one: The death of the World

While this begs the question of the developer's vision for the game: whether they wish for an 'infinite' world, or are fine with periodic resets, I will first make an argument as to why wipes are GOOD and why a system that revolves around them should exist.
Currently, the game has inconsistent and variable wipes; this can cause quite a lot of confusion in the playerbase and settle a sense of unease in players- since Hafen doesn't utilize emails very much (and even those can be missed), this means players who are 'done' with a world who would normally return in the future might miss the note, or just simply become uninterested by then. It also adds a bit of pressure on current players who never know when all of their hard work will be, well, gone. Infinite worlds also mean infinite grind, which no matter how many systems are introduced to stop it (other than stat caps), means that there will be an ever-growing gap between new and old players.
A system where wipes are expected, however, improves on many of these points; It also allows for people to 'try' a certain world, and if they dislike it, know when to return to try the next rendition. Lots of other titles use the concept of recurring wipes (crowfall, rust, scum, etc etc) and most of them benefit from a highly engaged playerbase who continually rejoin, even if they quit at the end of a previous world. It does have the downside of things feeling pointless since people know it will eventually be wiped, and large project creators might stop producing large projects due to this, but I think that exists in the current system anyhow- no world has ever promised an infinite duration, and it often feels like it's a whim of the gods of when all will be lost.

With that done, let's talk about the system I had in mind:
Time in hafen is a granted assumption, not a commodity. Nobody worries about doing anything 'in time'- they just worry about 'how long will it take' to do things. Curios, tree growth, localized resources and all the more scale off this assumption of granted time, which is also what causes the game to feel tedious. While lots of the playerbase has this time, not all do- and it's an everpresent point of contention in the community. You have all the time in the world to do anything, and you never feel rushed. I feel like this is a mistake. Seasons was a good first step to this, but I feel like there needs to be an overarching 'time' to Hafen; an idea that as the months go by, the world itself changes greatly.

Thus, one thing that solves both the issue of infinite uncertainty and timelessness, is a periodic world reset. At the birth of a world, the develepors (depending on their plans for that dev cycle) should propose a base length to the world; from as short as 6 months, to as long as 24 (or whatever; the actual length doesn't matter, but the idea that each world has an idealized length is good. Not that it has to abide by the lengths, but a period of time determined by dev plans for the year and the 'intended length' of a world if all goes well. Emergency wipes or "the game died again" wipes are fine.) months. This period of time would be split into "Eras", which can be any period of time, although I found the timespan of a Hafen year (2 months) to fit, meaning a single, year-long world would approximately be 6 ingame years. Cool.

Eras should, however, also have mechanics tied to them. In short; Eras should be created to battle against the difficulty of how hard it is to 'enter' the game at later stages and become relevant. As an era passes, all hearthlings should receive a bonus to all FEP and LP gains they recieve; this system can be a flat multiplier (+1x per year), or scaled based off the most powerful of hearthlings (top 10 characters averaged out in each stat/skill, increased gains until you hit that level), or simply be a flat number everyone gains increased feps/lp until they reach.
In addition, Eras should represent the growing difficulties and chaos of a world. Detailed in a later section, the map would be split up into circular 'layers' from the midpoint of the world (the Ring of Brodgar), with the outermost layer functioning more or less equally to how the current game works, and inner layers being more dangerous, but having higher quality goods. As the world ages on, however, the baseline quality of all things should steadily increase- Eras should function not only to bridge the gap between stats and abilities, but also to present a good 'starting' point in quality for items. This baseline increase should not be so massive as to completely make quality increases irrelevant, but it should scale in such a way to allow new players to pick up at a decent point (+5-10ql baseline for everything per Era, for example, seems decent at the current rate of quality spiraling in the game)
Eras also serve as a way to allow village (aka, player-factories) to produce higher end characters more often; as a world that has a lot of intended conflict will also mean the death of many players- meaning that in the end, it's a win-win for everyone. More people can fight, new players aren't screwed, and top end villages still benefit too, even if not as much due to reduced gains (referring to the Jorb suggestion for combat stats and whatnot). All of this because in this proposed world, individual deaths should not as matter as much as the loss of a battle or objective, which will be clarified soon.
In addition; as the Eras progress, the frequency of unique world events (Meteors is what we have, although we need more) should increase as well. Monsters should spawn in more places, and the world should generally get more dangerous- signalling the impending death of the world.
As the world approaches its death, the magic of the world that upholds the hearthlaw should, also, decay. Scents last shorter, the outlaw buff is eventually removed, and even the power that grants totems the ability to stop players from committing crimes should decay too- siege weapons dry faster, and the world turns chaotic during its final days.
At the very end of it all; the Ring of Brodgar, located at the center of the world, should be host to some epic event similar to the end times event with a sacrificial player. The ring of brodgar should be host to all the statues of players that have won previous worlds, perhaps also naming the village they came from. I would also suggest unique cosmetics to be granted to the 'winner' of a world- and such an event at the center of the world. Cool hats for an entire village. Nice.
As a minor suggestion, the aging of hearthlings over the eras would be cool, too. A visible way to see how long someone has 'survived' the world for, essentially.

Addendum: Forgot to include this section on quests:
Quests as currently exists are more of a mission of tedium and stamina; that is, they aren't often difficult, and are more about "What do I have on hand?" and "How much time do I feel like I want to waste trying to find a certain tree/study curios/cave hermit myself to death?". While I think quests like that have a place, I think there should be a much more grandeur, communal focus. Essentially, there should be a village/realm-wide quest system that asks for the realm to do specific deeds; This could be things such as building a large monument in a dangerous part of the world to defeat a unique monster that has spawned in the world, or to locate large, slowly moving vehicles and to bring them back under your realm/claim for a specific amount of time. These quests should be competitive- realms or villages should have to compete to fulfil them, and the village/realm that succeeds should be granted a special reward based upon the world: This could be stuff like Meteorites, being rare materials that can be used to create rarer items, or more importantly- a decision that could impact the world: The ability to 'hasten' or 'delay' the death of the world. Each time such a mission is succeeded, the 'timer' until the end of the world would be able to be changed, if desired, by the completing village or realm, simply put.
This encourages a real, widely impacting system for completing quests that many players would be interested in participating in- allowing players to end or extend a world for periods of time as they desire.
It also means that since the death of the world is not a specific, set time- that the developers have more or less free reign to 'push' this timer around if a situation calls for it; whether it's testing out certain mechanics, or ending a world early due to a massive bug

Point two: Centralized conflicts, and the Onion World

World generation is just as important to the game as the mechanics of it, as we have seen very much in the past. Hafen has always generated random maps, and I believe that's good and should stay- but there needs to be more rhythm to the chaos of the world's generation. In this case, a centralized system that encourages conflict and adventure!.

The world should be consisted of several layers; the innermost circle would be the Ring of Brodgar, where nothing can be built, and no claims can be made. The ring should be surrounded by dangerous new monsters added for the sake of protecting the ring; monsters that won't leave too far from it, and will only serve to ensure nobody gets too close. There should be some sort of reward at the center, much like a localized resource- save that it should grant something exotic and unique, such as unique armos, weapons and tools of significant quality compared to the current world 'era'. This zone should expand to be about 200x200 in size.
From there, the next 'layer' would be a lawless layer. No claims or crimes can be committed here (no scents would be left, simply), but buildings can be. This layer should be large enough in size so that blocking entrance to the inner layer is not viable- or perhaps just filled with creatures that break palisades and whatnot. Siege weapons here should be able to 'work' instantly as well. This is a layer that while temporary living is possible in, nobody should be safe inside. A no mans land, if you would.
The third layer should be a risky layer to live in; Crimes and claims are possible again, but authority drains rather quickly (meaning only small settlements should be viable), and crimes expire much faster when committed here than when committed elsewhere; Murder, for example, would expire after just 24 hours rather than 9 days. Beasties should still be common and dangerous, but it is a 'liveable' area for those who are active and can protect themselves. Siege weapons should probably dry after 16 hours or so here
The final and fourth layer is where players spawn; the outermost corners of the world. This layer functions just like Hafen does today, and should probably be the largest layer.

Now, other than the brief descriptions above, layers should have more mechanics to them. Firstly; there should be new 'dangerous' biome types generated that produce dangerous monsters, highly aggressive animals and whatnot in high frequency- these can be unique versions of current biomes, or just some sort of structure inside biomes. For example, a biome or structure called the Wolf's den should spawn wolves in a very high frequency around it, although the wolves should not roam too far past the biome/structure. These biome types should occur in higher frequencies the closer you are to the center of the world. Additionally, the baseline quality of most things should increase as you visit closer to the center of the world- encouraging people to visit the same general area as they hunt for high quality ore, trees and similar (which of course means CONFLICT!). Nodes should occur in higher frequencies, and players are incentivized to travel into these dangerous areas in order to attain decent quality resources, all at the risk of encountering other players, or encountering dangerous monsters they cannot handle.
There should also be some very large, 'boss'-like monsters that roam around the inner regions, acting as a large deterrent from staying around the same spot for too long. These monsters should require large groups of very well equipped people to take out, destroying all structures they come across, but not leaving the inner layers they spawn in.
Localized resources should spawn in greater frequencies the closer to the center of the world you travel, and regenerate faster, as well.
There might be a good drawback to failing in this region; for example, death might only perserve your body for a short duration when inside the inner regions, decaying after a matter of hours if you die within. There should be great risks to being inside the center regions, to make up for the benefits from it.

All in all, a centralized difficulty scaling adds a point of conflict for those who wish to risk it, provides great rewards for success, and is purely optional; hugbears can still stay on the outer edges of the world as they desire (and in fact, is viable; as the safest place to be is the outermost layer). As bonus points, if players are expected to handle frequent aggressive animals in order to succeed, the effectiveness of botting is reduced!

Point three: Fast intake, slow intake.

The classic dilemma this game holds is the sheer amount of time needed to actually 'play' it. While some solutions in the Era plan were presented, this is another system that expands upon the curiosity and FEP system to allow players to both, play more often and advance themselves, but also enable people who cannot play quite as often to still keep up.

The first is 'Active Learning'. Simply put, curiosities are a painful and dreadful system early in the game, and only become bearable by the time you have a perfect formula for curios on a daily basis (Something that I think is kind of lame, as well). There is no interaction beyond slipping one on and waiting, unless you have EXP to burn on some large duration curiosities.
Thus, I propose a system that mixes curiosities with the quest system as an optional system that lets you play the game more in order to gain more LP:

Essentially, 'active' learning is the process of actively performing deeds to help yourself learn the mysteries of a curiosity. Each curiosity should have an active learning limit, a percentage of the total amount of time it takes to study the curiosity, and a few 'tasks' that are randomized each time you create (not begin to study!) a curiosity. Perfoming these deeds should, by a scaling factor based off your Charisma, reduce the total amount of time needed to study the curiosity by the TOTAL time (not current). For example, Leather balls require 43 hours and are, frankly, a piss awful curiosity. Leather ball could have a maximum active learning cap of 50% (Meaning the most you can ever reduce, no matter what, is half of it's maximum duration). The deeds could be simple, such as "kill x animals" and whatnot, very similar to our current system, and upon completing the task, would reduce the duration based off a factor between our charisma, the quality of the curiosity, and the base active learning ratio (Let's pretend it totals out to 10% for now). If we achieved 10/50%, the duration left would be reduced by 4.3 hours. This means that we could study a leather ball for 40 hours, complete one task, and 'save' the final 3 hours left by doing the task, completing the curiosity in that moment.

Each curiosity would, of course, have a different maximum active learning cap, ratio, and quest type applied to it. Quick curiosities might only be able to be reduced by 15%, but doing a single task would reduce that amount. Long term curiosities might have up to a 75% decrease, but require many tasks to reduce it that much. Eventually, a player could have so many curiosities that simply by playing the game they are chipping away lightly at the various things they are studying- it also encourages studying curiosities gained from whatever 'job' you do- a Miner would be more encouraged to study fossils, strange crystals and cat gold if the quests are all related to mining, even if its not a very effective curiosity for those who do not mine often.

Next, is Digestion. Much like curiosities are the 'slow intake' of LP to Active learning/quests/etc being the 'fast' intake to LP, Digestion is the slow intake of Feps to 'eating' being the fast intake.

Simply put, players should have an internal stomach capacity of feps gained that are stored separately from the current fep system. The stomach capacity should be your highest stat *10, although it could be different; the idea is to be able to store a lot of feps in here, as you do not gain them quickly. When you eat any food, in addition to going to your 'active' FEP event bar, it should go into your 'digestion' FEP event bar- but the digestion FEP event bar does not grant a FEP when it is full. Instead, the digestion FEP event bar slowly empties itself out into your active FEP event bar as time goes on, a % of the current amount filled being placed into your FEP event every few hours.

Since it's hard to explain, let me provide an example:

I have 20 str, meaning I need 20 feps to get a +1 to any stat. It also means I have a stomach capacity of 200.
Let's say I eat food that gives me 20 int feps. This would give me +1 int, and also add to my stomach, currently at 20/200. Let's say I do that 4 more times, and I also eat 5 foods that give me 20 wil feps. In the end, I will have gained +5 int and +5 wil.

Now, my stomach is at 200/200, 100 int and 100 wil. Every few hours, a percentage of the CURRENT (not total) feps that I have will 'digest', removing it from my stomach capacity, but putting it into my active feps. The amount granted should be equal parts of all that I have eaten; meaning that it must be balanced accordingly in order to provide the feps I want. Lets say that by the time I next log in, 50% of the stomach capacity has digested. As only 10% of it is needed, this means that by the next time I log in, I will have triggers 5 fep events, and since my diet was balanced 50/50 between int and wil, each fep event would have had a 50% chance to grant either or fep. I would log in to, likely +2 int/+2 wil and +1 of either, and to my stomach capacity being 100/200, still half and half.

Overeating would cause the 'oldest' feps gained to be booted out, simply put. If I ate 50 feps of Dex in the above example before logging out, I would lose 50 int feps, and my end total would be 100 wil, 50 dex, 50 int.

The above system proposed would add a slow drip of FEPS to players who can only manage to get on every now and then, while still benefiting (infact, the slow drip is not quite as good if you can afford to just eat a lot of food in a short time while reducing the hunger value) players who play actively more, and not punishing them any more for what they currently do. Possible stat inflation is curbed the proposed stat system by jorb from his thread.

Point four: Active involvement
This one will get some shit, but it needs to be said.

Bots need to be handled. Too many things are botted and I think it worsens the experience for everyone (even the botters; the fact they are botting means others will bot, and it spirals out of control from being a convenience thing, to being a necessary requirement in being competitive).
Some of my above suggestions help combat botting, but ultimately I think a firm stance needs to be made on it.

You guys don't want to implement hard barriers to botting (tracking movements, actions, etc; automatic detection) because it would sap dev hours and can still be defeated. I agree, but I still think a baseline against botting is needed.
Additionally; there is no verbal, rule-formatted stance against botting. While this is partially because you dislike taking action ingame to fight it, I think that since after so long of working on this game that no viable solution has been made against the effectiveness of bots, that it becomes necessary to take a stance. Outline what sort of bots are acceptable and which ones are not, and encourage players to report others, with solid evidence, for botting.
If you don't wish to manually check these instances, I would suggest accepting volunteers to do it for you (a trust gambit in a community like this, I know), while reserving the final 'hammer' for yourself.
Having players that can spectate others and ensure everything is proper would serve well to fix this game.

Now, of course, another big problem is that the community needs to change, too- but I don't think that will ever happen without a proper beating stick to do it with. This also includes being more harsh on bug abuse.
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That's all. Thanks for reading, if you did; this took me a couple of days to formulate and might be some crazy ideas, but I think Hafen could use some crazy ideas. Hope jorb/loftar read it and at least are interested in bits of it.

[Aceb]

Wipes happened only because of system error or development stage being so serious, the continuation of current instance of the world, would be against changes.
That's the most serious argument there is for why wipes shouldn't be scheduled. Currently I don't feel like jorbtar is pressed by any deadlines and this one would surely put them into deadline. Not to say how big riots could be when they announce WORLD 12 LASTS 6 MONTHS ONLY, then it expands actually to 12 months because of development rate / issues.

Second issue with this post is that You want to flat out top and bottom playerbase so "everybody" can participate in "everything". It might defeat the purpouse of grinding (or instead, I should say being competetive), because why should I push myself with my people to reach the top if it's takes a little effort to be "equally the same" ? While it is true, that later join would encourage still getting into fight, making it too easy will rise carebear cries and screams and that, You don't need a lot of effort to kill old warrior with freshborn warrior. But then againt, maybe some conclusion would be born there how to make old warriors be "un-skip-able" for new warriors too fast and easy.

Third issue, if there's a world reset date known, people might quit A LOT FASTER and wait for it to happen. Especially competetive people who will lose and will rather "wait" so everybody start fresh instead of trying to make a comeback (which to a certain degree, happens everyworld anyway, but that might bring that to bigger scale).

Forth issue, again, seems like You want to flat a lot of things then add some "layers" to not make it completely flat. I can't agree with those zones, rather would have vortexes to transport You to foreign land where You can't live (or can You?), but can fight for greater goods.

All for all, nice effort, but I'm not sure You really thought about possible consequences here, only about vision that fits and has almost no problems.

As for bots, believe me, jorbtars are too small to deal with it and I doubt any of their statements will gonna change it. People are too far, without deploying trusted GMs, it is impossible to happen for them to do anything that would have REAL impact on bots. Also, people overreact as well.

[borka]

Age: 22 Occupation: Student

Geesh ... hopefully there's some other students with loads of time around for reading ...

TL;DR ... just came home from RL work, did some housework, a short look over the forums and going to do some ingame work before i go sleeping to repeat tomorrow ...

sidenote: with all this ideas around there must be a load of great games out there

[Archiplex]

Wipes happened only because of system error or development stage being so serious, the continuation of current instance of the world, would be against changes.
That's the most serious argument there is for why wipes shouldn't be scheduled. Currently I don't feel like jorbtar is pressed by any deadlines and this one would surely put them into deadline. Not to say how big riots could be when they announce WORLD 12 LASTS 6 MONTHS ONLY, then it expands actually to 12 months because of development rate / issues.

This made me realize that I'd actually missed a section when transcribing this over from a google doc! I agree it might add a bit of pressure, but I don't think it would be quite as punishing as it might seem; although I said 6 months was possible, realistically I think most worlds should aim for 12-24 months anyhow, which more or less fits with how the trend has gone in Hafen.

I'll add this to the OP, but here's the other section I'd missed, belonging in the first point (about Eras)

"Quests as currently exists are more of a mission of tedium and stamina; that is, they aren't often difficult, and are more about "What do I have on hand?" and "How much time do I feel like I want to waste trying to find a certain tree/study curios/cave hermit myself to death?". While I think quests like that have a place, I think there should be a much more grandeur, communal focus. Essentially, there should be a village/realm-wide quest system that asks for the realm to do specific deeds; This could be things such as building a large monument in a dangerous part of the world to defeat a unique monster that has spawned in the world, or to locate large, slowly moving vehicles and to bring them back under your realm/claim for a specific amount of time. These quests should be competitive- realms or villages should have to compete to fulfil them, and the village/realm that succeeds should be granted a special reward based upon the world: This could be stuff like Meteorites, being rare materials that can be used to create rarer items, or more importantly- a decision that could impact the world: The ability to 'hasten' or 'delay' the death of the world. Each time such a mission is succeeded, the 'timer' until the end of the world would be able to be changed, if desired, by the completing village or realm, simply put.
This encourages a real, widely impacting system for completing quests that many players would be interested in participating in- allowing players to end or extend a world for periods of time as they desire.
It also means that since the death of the world is not a specific, set time- that the developers have more or less free reign to 'push' this timer around if a situation calls for it; whether it's testing out certain mechanics, or ending a world early due to a massive bug."

Second issue with this post is that You want to flat out top and bottom playerbase so "everybody" can participate in "everything". It might defeat the purpouse of grinding (or instead, I should say being competetive), because why should I push myself with my people to reach the top if it's takes a little effort to be "equally the same" ? While it is true, that later join would encourage still getting into fight, making it too easy will rise carebear cries and screams and that, You don't need a lot of effort to kill old warrior with freshborn warrior. But then againt, maybe some conclusion would be born there how to make old warriors be "un-skip-able" for new warriors too fast and easy.

The "flattening" is something that's already been requested in a way; In this case, I'm trying to encourage a difference between 'infinite grind' and 'benefiting from risks taken'. I avoided specific numbers for a most part because 'making it too easy' is a matter of tuning, not conceptualization. Im not honestly sure what the last sentence here was meant to convey.

I do agree that it shouldn't be extremely easy; I'm advocating for 'closing the gap a little' and not just squishing everything together to the same level of effectiveness. Players who invest more time should always have an advantage, but players who join late or are crushed should not be so crippled as to be pushed into irrelevancy.

Third issue, if there's a world reset date known, people might quit A LOT FASTER and wait for it to happen. Especially competetive people who will lose and will rather "wait" so everybody start fresh instead of trying to make a comeback (which to a certain degree, happens everyworld anyway, but that might bring that to bigger scale).

This is true, but ultimately I think people will 'stick' to a world until the end, and providing more rewards (an experience can be a reward too; just doing something cool that's only available later in the world is incentive). I think there is a bigger problem that currently exists right now, as someone who has 'won' the world is hard to dethrone, and in a system like I've suggested above, a possibility of fighting back even in the end would encourage people to stay.[/quote]

Forth issue, again, seems like You want to flat a lot of things then add some "layers" to not make it completely flat. I can't agree with those zones, rather would have vortexes to transport You to foreign land where You can't live (or can You?), but can fight for greater goods.

Frankly, the exact implementation of 'layers' is irrelevant to the concept. The onion layer idea was just my idea, but having portals you have to go through to enter 'deeper' layers works just as fine!

All for all, nice effort, but I'm not sure You really thought about possible consequences here, only about vision that fits and has almost no problems.

As for bots, believe me, jorbtars are too small to deal with it and I doubt any of their statements will gonna change it. People are too far, without deploying trusted GMs, it is impossible to happen for them to do anything that would have REAL impact on bots. Also, people overreact as well.

Just because something cannot be fixed in it's entirety does not mean no attempt to fix it should be attempted. Bots and the requirement of them to maintain competence is a huge issue and a big factor in many players leaving the game; SOMETHING needs to be done, and if no perfect solution can be made, then even half-functional solutions should be taken.

Age: 22 Occupation: Student

Geesh ... hopefully there's some other students with loads of time around for reading ...

TL;DR ... just came home from RL work, did some housework, a short look over the forums and going to do some ingame work before i go sleeping to repeat tomorrow ...

sidenote: with all this ideas around there must be a load of great games out there

I don't know if this is an insult or not but it doesn't seem relevant. I'm both a student and a freelance writer for Pathfinder supplements, so I have a pretty decent background of dealing with system designs for games and appealing to a widely split community on what's good and what's not- plus, I love this game. Why wouldn't I put in some effort to suggest something for it?

[MagicManICT]

Wipes happened only because of system error or development stage being so serious, the continuation of current instance of the world, would be against changes.

This discussion has come up multiple times, and it all comes down to jorb and loftar repeatedly saying this. I'm not sure what is special about this thread.

This is a large, multi-part suggestion for a formula that I believe combines Hafen's greatest strengths, smooths out it's weaknesses, and creates a good gameplay loop that can be expanded on in the next worlds- but because I know some of you have peanut brains, here's a TL;DR[...]

I have some opinions on the essay. I like it overall, and is well thought out. I think some of it is an exercise in futility as jorb and/or loftar doesn't seem open to change on a few points of their "long term goals," but maybe you make some strong enough points to get them to think about it.

For now, I'm going to just agree with Aceb in the point that development (and the world) just isn't stable enough to work around the primary point of "stable, regular restarts." I think this holistic view of the game is what is needed, though, when it comes to debate on what direction the game should go, and if things should be different than the current status quo.

[Archiplex]

Wipes happened only because of system error or development stage being so serious, the continuation of current instance of the world, would be against changes.

This discussion has come up multiple times, and it all comes down to jorb and loftar repeatedly saying this. I'm not sure what is special about this thread.

This is a large, multi-part suggestion for a formula that I believe combines Hafen's greatest strengths, smooths out it's weaknesses, and creates a good gameplay loop that can be expanded on in the next worlds- but because I know some of you have peanut brains, here's a TL;DR[...]

I have some opinions on the essay. I like it overall, and is well thought out. I think some of it is an exercise in futility as jorb and/or loftar doesn't seem open to change on a few points of their "long term goals," but maybe you make some strong enough points to get them to think about it.

For now, I'm going to just agree with Aceb in the point that development (and the world) just isn't stable enough to work around the primary point of "stable, regular restarts." I think this holistic view of the game is what is needed, though, when it comes to debate on what direction the game should go, and if things should be different than the current status quo.

Ultimately the point of the thread is to say 'embrace world resets', as it's fertile soil for very good game mechanics (and frankly, I don't really see a future where world resets don't happen given the trends of the game).

I do agree that it's definitely too encompassing, but I'd much rather detail out a fully fleshed idea that the game should work towards to than unfinished half-suggestions that are only cogpieces- I think this game suffers sometimes simply because it's a very 'ground up' approach with various different mechanics that are made to work together, rather than a top-down approach of having an idealized vision for the game and working to create the various pieces.

Admittedly, I don't know what jorb/loftar's ideal vision for the game is- I don't know for sure if they really despise the idea of resets and think it cant be worked around, or if they just want to make a stable, infinite-progression game, or what. We don't often get too much info from them after all.

I do, however, think that since this is a multi-part suggestion, that a lot of it's supporting pillars can be taken apart and used independent of the entire idea as well. I'd certainly support the active learning/digestion suggestion as a separate thing for example. Ultimately I just hope jorb/loftar read over it and at least agree or like some pieces of it, even though I think it works best as a a complete package. As you said, getting them to think about it is half the goal anyhow.

[MagicManICT]

Ultimately the point of the thread is to say 'embrace world resets', as it's fertile soil for very good game mechanics (and frankly, I don't really see a future where world resets don't happen given the trends of the game).

Either the underlying concepts need to become unified around an "eternal world" or the "occasional reset" needs to be taken up as a core principle. It doesn't even have to be a hard scheduled reset and can depend somewhat on the players (though it has been shown they will screw with that to as many degrees as are allowed).

Admittedly, I don't know what jorb/loftar's ideal vision for the game is- I don't know for sure if they really despise the idea of resets and think it cant be worked around, or if they just want to make a stable, infinite-progression game, or what. We don't often get too much info from them after all.

Every time I've seen it asked (streams, forums, chat), jorb is usually discussing the idea to get a stable world that doesn't need a reset. Take that for hearsay, though. I'm not sure I could dig up a proper quote or reference for it. I'm not sure they have a "proper vision" for the game like you'd see with AAA title--design documents, dev roadmaps, etc. In a way, that is one of the charms of Haven to me.

[borka]

Age: 22 Occupation: Student

Geesh ... hopefully there's some other students with loads of time around for reading ...

TL;DR ... just came home from RL work, did some housework, a short look over the forums and going to do some ingame work before i go sleeping to repeat tomorrow ...

sidenote: with all this ideas around there must be a load of great games out there

I don't know if this is an insult or not but it doesn't seem relevant. I'm both a student and a freelance writer for Pathfinder supplements, so I have a pretty decent background of dealing with system designs for games and appealing to a widely split community on what's good and what's not- plus, I love this game. Why wouldn't I put in some effort to suggest something for it?

Oh noes ... just a reminder from a peanut brain:

Please avoid making grab bag threads with multiple unrelated suggestions. Give each idea its own thread so posters can discuss its merits, so that ideas aren't overshadowed by more popular ideas, and so that they might be found later using the search tool.

http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... 48&t=41858

btw. Paizo is hiring ... and i guess you may have your own blog there ...

[Tamalak]

Personally I would really dislike "scheduled" resets or resets as a core principle. To me part of the pull of the game is it could last for years from this moment. If I knew it was going to be reset in, say, 6 months, I'd probably quit, even though there's plenty I can accomplish in that time and there's a pretty strong likelihood that it will be reset by a 6 month mark from now anyway.

To me the current ad hoc system is perfect, worlds 'feel' like they'll last forever, but they don't.

[Granger]

Personally I would really dislike "scheduled" resets or resets as a core principle.

This. The causes for resets (apart from additions to the game mechanics that require data structures that incompatible with the current running world that there is no way to convert them) should be removed instead, the cancer of endless growing numbers has to end.