Each year wipe - good or bad?

[fallout]

I think the best part of the new worlds has been finding new content,
and that the content throws everyone's idea of "the best starting plan" out the window.

Something that might happen after loftar gets the "major features" out of the way,
but it's has been just around the corner for a few months/years now

soon

[Shri]

Most of payers/players is not good enough to keep server up, even. Its like peanuts to developers. But in longer terms ... to keep developers alive ( wich is my main goal), we need em to push towards some normal standards,, you know...

I don't know what you mean exactly, but more frequent resets help the developers financially at least, since it brings back players.

Non one wanna such resets.. on such huge worlds .. and efforts.. exept those old farts... why do I wana pay for a game, who is like sentence... for fu. single year, man....
It's redicelous.
From my point of view..ofcourse.

I thought the same when I originally joined. Why play a game that could get randomly wiped at any time? But the truth is that it is fun, you learn more about the game every world and you can then use that knowledge to do better in the next world. And since everyone is in the same situation of having lost their progress, it doesn't feel that bad.

The problem with long-running worlds is that it is currently not possible to take a break from the game. If you need a break or want to go on holidays for a few weeks, all your animals will die, your plot/village will begin to decay and it gets robbed. So you basically have to quit.
If that fundamental problem of the game is ever fixed, then I'd be all for long-running worlds. But I doubt it will change.

Thx for
reasonable comment.
I don't agree.. in short worlds 'time' like this one, of course there is no break, expecialy if you builded base, close to a sea. Thats why this game time time, is like 'run'. I dont fu like it. That was my point.
And building farms and animals are last of the problem to be considered after a brake tho.

But still. Thx for opinion without insults Duly noted.

[bumfrog]

nobody’s saying you “can’t have an opinion”. Only that your opinion will change after the 2 years you say the game needs to be experienced in full (for a sprucecap larper such as yourself, perhaps that time frame is accurate). Presuming you can actually bring yourself to log in consistently for a two year span, more power to you if you enjoy that slow progress.


It is the stated intention of the developers to reset as little as possible, and to someday let the world run permanently. And that’s all well and good, but neither the gameplay nor the community attracted to it really support that ambition (yet). Quality grind just isn’t very engaging gameplay, especially as you interact with more demanding progression systems which reward with time efficiency but are in practice basically chores (curios, farming, domestic animals, cheese, steel, etc) that require daily effort without providing much fulfillment. Many gameplay systems, due to their insanely complex interconnectedness and the slow and ramshackle nature of development where adding or “fixing” one feature often breaks others ad infinitum, are at best unfinished and at worst completely broken/incoherent/pointless. The tedium’s likely already started to seep into your experience, considering you’ve spent a ton of time writing here on the forums instead of playing the game.

In a permadeath, persistent, pvp sandbox MMO players are strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible (because being less powerful than others could be a death sentence) and therefore the best players (or even intermediately competent ones) go hard and burn out rather quickly, in a few months even. And since this is an MMO most follow suit soon after, because each player who stops playing makes the multiplayer nature of the game less engaging. The slow death of “wipe hype” seems to even affect our dear developers, and as patches become less regular the player population death spiral only accelerates. Were there to be a confirmed indefinite world, some players who are willing to take gameplay systems to their logical (and usually unintended) conclusions would pick up the game again, destroy your spruce camp in 5 seconds just for the fuck of it, and cause you to whine here even more because you’ve chosen to play a game which theoretically supports and in practice strongly discourages the meandering larpery you’re content to wallow in. Whether or not you or the developers like it, the “old farts” who play the game to completion in 4 months or less are playing the game as the game intends itself to be played.

The players you call old or dumb or jaded or whatever are the only ones willing to put up with all the bullshit the game has to offer for years on end, and that says something about the game itself: what has been valued in its development, what flaws have been left in by apathy or sheer blindness, the way it as a game has been shaped by time and mutual effort. The game is what it is, and you have not played it enough to see the full picture. With your mindset, you will not make it through even half of the two years you say, from your ass, the world needs between resets.

[VDZ]

if you come back after a year of even semi-active play and say the same thing maybe people won’t call you a sprucecap retard with no perspective worth considering

No point in goin ad hominem. It is a legit question to raise.

While ad hominem is often a logical fallacy, sometimes it is a genuine and valid argument. How can someone with only one month of experience and lacking basic knowledge about many aspects of the game have any reasonable grasp on the long-term consequences of yearly wipes on his own play experience, let alone the game as a whole? I could write a wall of text refuting point-by-point how "mak[ing] top quality in everything in each productive way and .. for example .. digging to lvl9 mine .. having huge village and marketing... roads and shit'z .. to hav[ing] whole map discovered" does not take a full year especially when accounting for the world being in a late-game state (hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an abandoned level 9 mine hole somewhere that you can just use; you'll definitely get close to it if you explore enough) and how "fighting other villages for area dominance" is just not going to happen even if he gets three years for it, but this is all blatantly obvious to everyone except OP. To save us all some time it's faster to just point out OP has no idea what he's talking about, just in case it wasn't obvious from the post itself.

Case in point--

Atleast i can go on 3 month vacation not thinking about fu game.

If you ever go on a 3 months vacation and do not touch the game at all during that time, most of your village will likely be gone by the time you come back. If you have anything worth stealing people will siege you upon noticing you went inactive, and even if you don't have anything of value your claim will eventually expire and the stuff on your claim will decay. Even if by some miracle your claim is entirely untouched, at the very least all of your animals will be dead. Even if you're playing with others and think they'll just take care of stuff, it's rare for village mates to stay around for more than 3 months. Wipes or not, you can't go on vacation for 3 months and expect to find everything still intact.

The game does not work the way you think it works. When you make suggestions about parts of the game you barely understand your suggestions will be full of holes, in this case too full of holes to even bother properly arguing against. Your opinions on things like how some parts of the game may feel unintuitive or how it's hard to learn certain things are as valuable as anyone else's - arguably more valuable even - but you'll have a hard time convincing anyone of your opinions on things you've barely (or not at all!) experienced yourself, based purely on speculation and assumptions while others have lots practical experience. You've never experienced a world reset even once, so it's hard to take your opinion on them seriously.

[DonVelD]

It is the stated intention of the developers to reset as little as possible, and to someday let the world run permanently. And that’s all well and good, but neither the gameplay nor the community attracted to it really support that ambition (yet).

A permanent world is a great idea but until jorb and loftar get an angel investor to cover their living expenses while they create their masterpiece, they'll have to restrict themselves to short working schedules. Such is a fact of life. I'd love to live in a utopian society where we can all pursue our dreams*, but we don't, and our overlords demand of us a certain amount of labor a week to maintain sustenance and shelter. Everyone has to make their own decisions on how to best fulfill their lives. Sometimes that's making a grand work of art, other times that's having family or career.

I think that ideas should be in the realm of practical. I don't know how jorb and loftar's thoughts have changed over the years on working with a team on Haven, but it's always been "their project." It's not the first and not going to be the last indie game like this. I think ideas should respect such decisions--if there isn't a desire to expand the team, then ideas should reflect that value and be supportive of it.

I don't want to discourage anyone's ideas. Sometimes the greatest spark for inspiration can come from the strangest places. Some folks, me being one of them, holds themselves back for "what's practical." Others can aim for the stars and be happy when they just get ahead a few steps.



*not... this is what got us some of the worst societal systems. Capitalism, much like democracy, sucks for creating stable, peaceful societies, but there isn't a better system currently in existence that still allows the level of freedom to pursue one's dreams.

[VDZ]

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).

especially as you interact with more demanding progression systems which reward with time efficiency but are in practice basically chores (curios [...]) that require daily effort without providing much fulfillment.

For the rest of the list (and the rest of the post) I agree, but unless you insist on going for 100% maximum efficiency (which is simply not necessary as LP will not be the bottleneck in your progress (perhaps early-game is an exception for factions, don't know exactly how fast faction industry develops)) most of the curio system is actually really varied and fun, as there's a bazillion ways to get okay-ish curios (and even if you insist on getting only actually good curios, there's still plenty of those unless you restrict yourself to only the top tier curios). The only parts where the curio system feels tedious are
1) The limited space on Study Desks with zero upgrade options which requires frequent refills, which involves manual work to get the right curios on them,
2) Storage; as the number of curios in the game increases so does the amount of storage you need for them, and nowadays I have a dedicated curio house just to store them which frankly is a bit ridiculous, and
3) Crafting, specifically having to get all the right items from your storage together (especially if it involves a crafting station, in which case you're limited to inventory capacity) and having to repeat that a bazillion times because of how many curios you need to craft.
Still, compared to the other systems you mentioned I think the curio tedium is mild and overall I find the curio system to be very fun in spite of the tedious aspects. I think the biggest problem is that it heavily discourages playing for only a bit a day, as the work involved remains more or less constant per real-life day regardless of how much you play, meaning the less you play the more of it is spent managing curios. As long as you're spending a lot of time on the game every day curios aren't really an issue.

[bumfrog]

First of all, based Zadek.

I agree[!]

So you’re saying you agree that curios are a chore that require daily upkeep to maintain claim pres/auth and rewards only LP which isn’t very exciting once all skills are bought? Neat, also study desks can be upgraded btw it just requires fuckin Scholar cr*do

[VDZ]

So you’re saying you agree that curios are a chore that require daily upkeep

Only the repeated studying of them, which is only one part of the system. The rest of the system (acquiring them, item diversity, the 'passive LP over time depending on items' mechanic, etc) is fine.

and rewards only LP which isn’t very exciting once all skills are bought?

While at that point it's no longer as exciting as when you're still unlocking skills (during which time every bit of LP feels like a huge bonus), it does still feel useful. It no longer has the 'wow' factor, but it's still nice to have, unlike e.g. quality growth where after a certain point I can hardly distinguish between my q67 carrots and my q82 carrots which took multiple additional cycles to get.

Neat, also study desks can be upgraded btw it just requires fuckin Scholar cr*do

Technically you're right, but it's a stupid amount of effort for a tiny upgrade which doesn't even begin to solve the problem.

[Ferinex]

there are 2 distinct categories of players in HnH. LARPers, and meteorite monkeys.

For larpers, the sandbox players, they set their own goals, they engage in industry and socialization and derive entertainment from the ambiance and artwork. This is the vast majority of people you will actually encounter in-game, but they often do not engage on the forums and especially less so on discord. Often hermits, but not always. Combative PvP for these people is done in context usually and PvP is often undertaken in the more meta economic sense. For these players there is no win scenario, a win is derived from another successful social or economic connection.

Meteorite monkeys, these are the people who B-line (often with bots) as quickly as possible to the few items and stats that make them beasts in the realm of combat PvP. They see winning the meteor competition as a sort of end game and spend most of their time in-between meteors wandering the world killing sandbox players randomly. These people are the loudest on discord and the forums but are from what I can tell a small minority of the playerbase. They are easily bored and need goals set for them.

As time goes on, the sandbox players are comfortable with and want the world to continue pretty much as long as empty land exists. The player numbers gradually decline over time as sandbox players are killed by the meteorite players, and leave the game. The meteorite players get very bored as the player numbers dwindle and they've established a winner for the meteorite and other localized resources. For whatever reason, these players seem uninterested in conquest, expansion of realms, or setting their own industrial goals. They need to be provided more direction to enjoy themselves than the sandbox players.

[VDZ]

As time goes on, the sandbox players are comfortable with and want the world to continue pretty much as long as empty land exists. The player numbers gradually decline over time as sandbox players are killed by the meteorite players, and leave the game.

Yeah, no. As a peaceful player myself, that's just not how it works. (Nor is the roleplaying part really accurate - while I appreciate the theme, I'm just playing it as a building-crafting game, trying to gradually grow more advanced by upgrading stuff to obtain stuff more efficiently to upgrade more stuff.) I quit when I run out of things to do, not when someone happens to steal my gear. (Actually killing players is pretty damn hard nowadays, and I haven't been killed since Legacy.) Every friendly neighbor I've noticed quitting also just quit because they were bored, not because they got into a PvP encounter. This 'newbies quit because of PvP' narrative is bullshit; I'm not sure if it even still happens to any significant degree anymore (in Legacy killing was trivial, in Hafen you can typically do no more than inconvenience a player), but if it does happen it's only to first-time players (who may have eventually quit and never come back either way), not the people who have played before and are no longer shocked by getting stomped out of nowhere every now and then. Peaceful players grow bored, quit, and when they feel like playing again they want a reset because you can't play the 'real' early game without a new world.