Harsh truths > Comforting lies

[axus]

Separate from that, having a "Study Desk" type solution for the parts of the game people bot would be great.

I have a write-up on this for farming already. http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=71303

Yeah I'm all on board with making farming even easier. Auto-replant was a good solution on another game I played. I wasn't around for crop circles, but some kind of permanent building in owner and village plots that automatically gains quality (feed LP or something) would work.

For PvE, add basic programmability as part of your combat set, so you only need to toggle fight/flee. Set it up, and then your options are just fight or run. Turn off fighting animals from boats, but stop armor taking damage from animals.

[MadNomad]

You don't really need bots, grind..............to be good at the game.....................

at least one out of these two things is neccessary to be good in this game

how are you going to get any stats or have any production otherwise?

[VDZ]

You know, I haven't played nearly as long as most other people on here, I started during the last few worlds of the OG H&H, yet when I look at this forum year after year, it's the same people here. I can unironically count on 1 hand the amount of new posters I see who I don't recognize or haven't seen posting before. Does that not highlight the problem here? I'm not suggesting that the loyal older players being here is bad, but no new players staying around is. The community, despite the game being updated so much, remains stagnant. Know why? Because of everything I've brought up here in this post. It's the truth.

You wanna know why you hemorrhage players every world? There's your reasons.

Anyway, I'm not even gonna bother arguing anymore, the proof is in the pudding, just look at the player count. You wanna bury your head in the sand? That's on you. Same shit has been happening for like 10 years now, if you haven't been able to figure this out yet, you never will.

There's actually an upwards trend in start-of-world player count:



It just consistently happens that player count gradually drops as a world gets older. This is not a new thing, but a trend that's been going on since at least W8 (not sure if W6/W7 had it too; I know W5 had a lot of people discovering the game mid-world). The reason you keep seeing familiar faces is because a lot of people stick around for many years, which is a very positive thing. If you actually look at when everybody joined you'll find that many actually joined at different points in the game's history, but all have stuck with the game since.

3. Endless grind
It's not gonna change, like nothing I say will, but people, including myself, just get burned out by the quality grind (worst part of the game bar non). It's endless, it's boring, it's when I hang up my character and think 'yeah, nah, fuck that, I've got better things to do with my time'
Endless stat and skill grinding is not appealing. Neither is endless quality grinding.
I'll outright say it now, when a new world does happen, I may come back again for a few months, but I don't kid myself, I know that once everything is set up how I like it, the grind begins and I endure it for however long I can but then after that, I'm out.

It's not the grind that's the problem here, it's the lack of any meaningful activities to do after a certain point. I enjoy seeing my numbers go up while I'm also progressing in other ways, gaining access to new resources, unlocking more options etc. The grind only becomes a problem once there's no longer anything left to do other than grind to make numbers go up. That may make it feel like the grind is the problem, but it's actually the sole part that isn't the problem; the lack of incentive for non-grind activities is what makes it boring.

During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire.[16] The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor to the areas that showed the least damage. This contradicted the US military's conclusion that the most-hit areas of the plane needed additional armor.[17][18][19] Wald noted that the military only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions – ignoring any bombers that had been shot down or otherwise lost, and thus also been rendered unavailable for assessment. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed,[16]: 88  inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost.

The grinding gameplay still works. It's every other part of the gameplay that stops being interesting at that point.

Harsh truth -

this game is actually really, really objectively bad. The community makes it worse still, the devs make it worse still.

Comforting lies -

There is enough content in this game that is enjoyable that it really feels like it is possible to turn it in to something good

this is the lie we all tell ourselves, every year

Then why are you here? If you feel the game is "objectively bad" and really have no hope of it ever improving, you're better off just leaving rather than staying on the forum of game you dislike only to complain about how bad the game is. You're wasting your own and our time.

It's more of a walking around and absorbing the atmosphere game for them, as far as I can tell.

This game is totally great for walking around and absorbing the atmosphere, they did a good job on that part.

I disagree. The game design actively discourages journeying through its mechanics. While exploration is a lot of fun, your inventory while traveling is very limited (unless you're in a Snekkja/Knarr or Wagon, both of which place significant restrictions on travel (bridges when?)), and the open PvP (in the broad sense) means you can only store your items in your claimed walled compound home or you'll lose them. This means every single journey starts from your base and you frequently have to return to it. (Fortunately 'Travel to Hearth' allows for easy returning which does encourage some degree of exploration; without it traveling would be really tedious.) Thingwalls have significantly improved this matter by allowing you to 'resume' your journey from 'checkpoints' (which I've found particularly useful for Snekkja travel, as it allows you to go back for a bit to eat, switch curios etc without aborting your journey), but overall the game still encourages you to mainly stay around your base. The game has a credo called 'Nomad', but nomadism is not actually a viable playstyle in Haven & Hearth.

[MagicManICT]

This is not a new thing, but a trend that's been going on since at least W8 (not sure if W6/W7 had it too; I know W5 had a lot of people discovering the game mid-world).

W6 was down around 100 or less people on at any one time because the lag was just horrendous. W7 was a bit better as some of the lag issues were fixed, but it was still sub 200 consistently after about 6-9 months. The next prior world to last more than a couple of months was w3, and when I started (not quite six months after world start) there were only a couple hundred people playing at any given time. (w4 only lasted about 7 weeks, w5 only lasted about 5 months)

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Also, what I had missed before: only about 10-20% of players become active on a game's forum, and that's a high estimate. If you see a few new posters during a world and they continue on to next worlds and continue to stay active, you're not seeing at least 5-10 people who have started playing and don't post. I can't say any I've seen any specific marketing research on this aspect of game development and community management, but I've certainly seen discussions about it in game dev circles. (If anyone knows of any specific articles, I'd be interested in reading them.)

[dafels]

just learn2code noobs