by Lotyc » Tue Jul 21, 2026 7:53 am
I think you are absolutely right, but the masses won’t understand. I would go even further and completely remove PvP.
Take Stardew Valley, for example. It is a somewhat similar game, and I would even argue that H&H is a better farming game in many ways. Stardew Valley still averages a massive amount of daily players (100k checked today), and that game released in 2016. So why is this game, which in my opinion is a better farming game and also an MMO with all the social aspects people usually love, only averaging around 150 daily players?
A lot of people will do mental gymnastics to tell you this is not true, but PVP is the issue. It is the reason this game does not have more players. How many people started playing, made one small mistake, and had their whole base raided, stolen, or destroyed? Then when they try to understand what happened, they are met with toxicity and “your fault, git gud.” Do you really think a new player keeps playing after that?
And then the same people say that without PvP, players would be even more toxic. They use examples like someone dropping dirt outside another player’s base as toxic behavior (real case, btw). But the PvP community in this game does the most autistic cringe shit you will never see in any other game. Port camping, hard locking people with palisades, abusing village creation to block terrain, dropping so many logs around a thingwall that you can’t even see where it ends, filling palisade doors with tiki torches so it takes hours to remove them, extorting new players for items that cost real money... just to name a few.
And as always, and you cannot tell me this is a lie, after a maximum of three months, most of the PvP community is gone. The best worlds I have played are the late ones, where people actually trade and play the game instead of acting like murder hobos. But by then, the damage is already done. New players who joined at the start of a world and got killed probably quit, and new players who see an already developed world usually don’t want to join either.
This game has a very small loyal community that has been playing for decades. The devs keep trying to appease that community, but I honestly don’t think they understand the game or play it enough. They seem to have taken the wrong lessons from a loud minority within the community. They tried so hard to push the game in the wrong direction that they killed it in the process. And they are not even close to realizing it, because in the last stream they said they kind of wanted the world to be more dangerous than it is now. Yes, really.
PvP is the problem. People can make excuses and twist what I’m saying, but it does not make it any less true. If this game didn’t have PvP, or if it had a similar approach to other games where casual gameplay is embraced instead of punished, the community would be much bigger than 150 daily players.
