Before I even state anything more, most people are going to have strong opinions about what I am about to post, but please understand, what I am about to say I am not doing because I hate the game, but because I want it to improve.
That being said, I do not believe Haven and Hearth is being updated with it's future in mind. To put it bluntly, I don't think the developers have the vision, talent or just the desire to make big, meaningful changes to the game. When I (and my friends) see a new update, I feel disappointment. It's a list of tiny changes and fixes, and sometimes a new thing (item or some such) that feels incredibly underdeveloped. It feels like a minimal amount of effort is being put into these updates, and as time goes on less effort is being put into them.
Now I understand, making a game is difficult, it takes a lot of time and effort (I've made games before) and although lots of people will say they love doing it, large parts of it are just a chore to do. If this was a free game, I'd be fine with the way development is, but this is a game with a subscription fee and various other things you can pay for. If a game has a subscription fee, I strongly believe the game needs continued and active development to justify such a fee. I do not feel the development on this game justifies paying for such a subscription.
Just to make my point, I will point out a few examples of what I am talking about.
The most obvious is the localized resources added with this most recent update. They're structures randomly dotted around the map. This is probably the laziest way it could have been implemented. When I heard "localized resources", I expected a world with different regions, each with their own types resources. I expected something like part of the world being a desert, with desert flora and fauna, and another part to be a tundra, with tundra flora and fauna and so on. I didn't expect randomly placed structures that are entirely too easy to claim and add very little in the way of forcing player interaction to the game.
Following on from this. The map generator in legacy was pretty bad, the current map generator is essentially an extension of this badness. You took the exact same formula, and just added more to it. It's still bad, now it just has more to do badly. I've played with random map generation, it's easy to google this and learn about it. Diamond square, fractals, voronoi diagrams, these are all easy things to learn, but can all be used to make interesting looking worlds. If I can learn these, and generate maps using them, anyone can.
Another thing that always bothered me (and I'm picking up hints that you might be trying to change or add extra tiers to) is quality and the quality grind. In my opinion, quality should simply not exist. You either have an item, or you don't. It's essentially a lazy (the laziest) way of prolonging the game. In other games, I start of with a stick, then I make it pointy, then I make pointy stones and fasten them to the stick, eventually I've got metals, then I'm using metallurgy to manipulate metals into better forms and eventually I'm implementing chemistry and physics to make devastating weapons. In Haven and Hearth, I have a sharp stick, then I make it sharper, and then I make it even sharper, and I just keep making it sharper.
I know both of these are big changes and cannot just me implemented without making a new world, but as I said, these are the kinds of things you need to be developing towards sometime in the future (they don't need to be these things exactly, they're examples, but get the point across).
Even smaller updates seem to be lacking in effort. On Mondays update I saw rafts and chives were added. One should have been there at the release of the game, the other seems like an afterthought, like it took the whole of 5 minutes to make and add and it essentially amounts to nothing. I'm sure sometime in the future chives will have some kind of use, but at the moment they're a 1.5 agi food I don't care about. I know I sound harsh when I'm saying this, but you get the point I'm making right? The developers said chives were part of an attempt to make each biome unique, which is fine, this is what you should be doing. But where is the rest of this attempt? Am I suppose to believe a single food item is the best you could come up with?
I know what I've said is going to make some people angry, people are going to disagree and what not, but it needs to be said. There is a reason Haven and Hearth can barely break 500 concurrent players (which we all know is mostly bots and in coming weeks/months will dwindle), while another, similar game of the same genre made with the same language became one of the best selling video games ever and it's creator sold it for a hefty $2.5 billion.
To the creators of Haven and Hearth; I don't know whether you're just lazy, if you lack the vision to take the game any further, don't have the skill/talent required to do so, or there is some other factors I cannot think of right now, but whatever the reason is, you need to address it and fix it. I want to like and support the game, but your current development practices make this increasingly hard to do.
by Garfy » Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:10 am 
