haven is missing something to show off for all your effort

[abt79]

+1 would make the game more fun for players who already play competitively (an overwhelming proportion of people who actually play the game with friends)

Top Secret Hint to enjoy the forums more:

block the paragraph spammers above this post xd

[VDZ]

For most people who engage in play, whether with sports, games, or toys, the goal is not the illusion of material progress. That makes it more of a insidious substitute for work than a form of play. Instead, their "productive outcome" (which rather defies the definition of "productive") is having fun by engaging in play.

The progress does not have to be material, and in fact it usually isn't (typically it lies in overcoming a challenge you previously were unable to).

Humans are "wired" to enjoy doing things that are relaxing or stimulating, that help them unwind or sharpen the skills they use elsewhere, because it's a survival advantage.

But why are they relaxing or stimulating? It's because they are beneficial or necessitate action, or resemble things that are or do. It would make no sense for things to trigger these reactions for no reason other than to trigger those reactions.

the game world is not out to get the hearthlings.

What are you talking about? There's animals everywhere that will maul you to death, you can drown, you can starve, you can die to cave-ins and there are various other ways to get wounds or die, in addition to the design allowing players to hurt each other (to the point of death and complete annihilation of all possessions). Sure, most dangers are trivial to avoid, but there are tons and tons of major failure conditions, not even counting the bazillion minor failure conditions (e.g. crafting with the wrong items or with insufficient skills and getting a bad result item).

Players are punished by the game rules sometimes, but not very often

But they are very, very, very often rewarded by the game rules. When you start, you can only walk around in the boring character creation room. If you neatly follow the instructions you will gain access to the actual game world, but even then your possible actions are very limited. Only by performing the actions the game rewards you for do you get the ability to build and craft all kinds of stuff, and get increasingly better results the more you do as the game rules tell you to level up your skills and stats.

In many games that are played, the rules are made up on the fly, and I don't think this is an exception.

This is very rarely the case for games played in large groups. You can't go to a chess tournament and go 'nuh-uh, my knight is a lancer, it moves straight forward!'. The shared ruleset (which by necessity must be pre-defined, with mutations decided upon centrally) gives meaning to the shared game and, importantly for the concept of achievements, your accomplishment within the game. Nobody gives a fuck if you win a game of self-made 'lancer chess', even if you manage to convince a bunch of friends to 'play a tournament'. Only when you win an actual chess tournament will others acknowledge your chess prowess, providing you a reward (and thus motivation) for excelling at chess. Similarly, you can grow a Leech to q250, but if no system is in place to make people acknowledge this accomplishment it will feel meaningless.

Most of the rewards and punishments in a game are the result of player decisions, not developer decisions. What form of competition there is, and even how competitive it ought to be in the first place, are defined more by the behavior and culture of players than by the design of the game.

It's entirely shaped by the design of the game. If I bugraid someone, I get punished by the developers*. I cannot attack a player without buying Rage. I cannot steal a claimed item without being punished by the debuff and scent. I cannot do anything other than what the game rules explicitly permit me to do. And in most video games, house rules do not exist; as the Haven server is not FOSS we players are unable to change/fork the game rules, we can only petition the developers to do so.

H&H has more in common with toys like LEGO, especially if you look at how players use it, than it does with most games.

This is simply not true. Look at any noob camp you come across; it's all the same beginner items the design funnels players towards, spread out without any artistic intent. There are players who try to build aesthetically pleasing things, but they are in the minority, and for most the aesthetic options alone will not be sufficient to keep them engaged.

For those who don't care about aesthetic achievements, there's lots of room for the game to have rules and goals that are laid down on them by villages and other in-game leaders, and that in itself is a source of motivation for those who disagree and want to pursue their own vision instead.

And for the reason I just described, this will not work. There are not enough aesthetic-focused players, fewer still are leaders, and much of the game design does not build up to increased aesthetic options (why bake food if you're only interested in paving?). Games like Minecraft are much better for this.

Expending energy jumping through hoops is not fun, and only resembles it the niche case where one is conditioned to do it through a system of extrinsic rewards until those simply become assumed.

Would you rather have Super Mario Bros.'s classic 1-1 be a straight flat route with no gaps or enemies, only holding right to admire the landscape as you walk to the exit? It's precisely the 'jumping through hoops' that makes games fun. Remove the useless energy expenditure, and you remove any sense of reward for accomplishing the goal. Why can't I just have one of my pieces teleport to your king instantly putting you in checkmate? It's precisely the meaningless challenge that makes in-game success feel meaningful.



* (Ideally, that is. Let's ignore how this part of the system does not always work correctly; it is the vision of the game, and the risk of punishment for breaking the game rules does at least exist.)

[Aerona]

Your first question, I already answered, VDZ. The existence of personal preferences is a consequence of natural selection. They don't have to make sense... it's just that they can only continue to be expressed at scale if it's not too much of a problem. People do seek stimulation for its own sake even when it may be more harmful than beneficial; this is, for instance, what artificial sweeteners are for. Resembling something else (as in that example) is a possible reason, but it's not necessary. This is why getting numb to a stimulus that's received too often - getting bored or feeling overwhelmed and tuning out - is a survival mechanism all on its own. Without it, people could get stuck performing the same repetitive activity until they have no chance to survive. Like other survival mechanisms, it doesn't always work...

Next question. Yes, in H&H there are animals here and there that will attack if your hearthling gets too close. But they're far from 'everywhere'. They're not even in most places, and don't actively seek out players to hunt. Likewise, water in-game stays where it's put, it doesn't come after you, or even rise and fall in flood events. Starvation is almost impossible because food is everywhere, and expending energy can be deferred indefinitely. Hitting the game's failure conditions - the ones that actually reverse progress rather than just slow it down somewhat - is harder than not even for the average new player with no prior understanding of the game and no interest in researching it. So it takes effort from another player to stop a player from progressing, unlike many other games where that can happen by accident, or may even be certain to happen unless players work together to survive. So, in H&H, players work together not to survive, but to compete with other players and achieve their goals in spite of them. There's lots of room in H&H for solo players who just want to build, so much of it that a thriving hatedom exists of players who dedicate dozens of hours of playtime just to disrupting them.

You're correct, the game rewards players for playing it. Any game that doesn't is a game without content, so... that's not really something on the table!

This is very rarely the case for games played in large groups. You can't go to a chess tournament and go 'nuh-uh, my knight is a lancer, it moves straight forward!'. The shared ruleset (which by necessity must be pre-defined, with mutations decided upon centrally) gives meaning to the shared game and, importantly for the concept of achievements, your accomplishment within the game. Nobody gives a fuck if you win a game of self-made 'lancer chess', even if you manage to convince a bunch of friends to 'play a tournament'. Only when you win an actual chess tournament will others acknowledge your chess prowess, providing you a reward (and thus motivation) for excelling at chess. Similarly, you can grow a Leech to q250, but if no system is in place to make people acknowledge this accomplishment it will feel meaningless.

You've successfully made an argument for why Haven and Hearth is different from the majority of games played by many people at once. It's different from a chess tournament by design: What are and aren't legal moves is up for debate and subject to testing. It's not all pre-written, and every time the world resets many of the old world's rules have to be rewritten as part of the new world's story. That's rather the point.

Yes, even you may not care if you win a game-within-the-game you made up yourself; it has to have some legitimacy. But that legitimacy comes from other players, not from the game system. Before everything, it came even when the first proto-board game was played before the invention of writing, before any authority on how to play existed or could exist other than who else was at the table. Even here, people are stuck making all sorts of emotional appeals trying to give legitimacy to some conception of the game or another.

For most of its history, chess didn't have mutations on its shared ruleset decided on centrally, but rather by consensus, with regional variants and experimentation all over the world. Not every game that's ever been played had all the rules pre-defined in advance, especially since games weren't always played between players of equal knowledge and skill and some of them used that to their advantage.

H&H is in that same place both by design and by necessity. So are many other systems in the world, including ones much more important than any games. I'd be bored with the game if it had a pre-defined shared ruleset where everything was decided on centrally, and Jorb and Loftar would have lost interest in it before that could happen, too. Especially since they're the ones who'd have to do all the maintenance, and so much of their fun comes from seeing what people come up with when given the freedom to do what they want outside the control of a rigid top-down structure that's constantly judging them. I really don't think they want to be the conduit through which the players' wishes are fulfilled; they'd rather provide tools for emergent gameplay and leave players to build their own moral and philosophical frameworks for how to play. (At least when those don't blow it all up.)

Look at any noob camp you come across; it's all the same beginner items the design funnels players towards, spread out without any artistic intent. There are players who try to build aesthetically pleasing things, but they are in the minority, and for most the aesthetic options alone will not be sufficient to keep them engaged.

Have you seen people who have never played with LEGO before playing with their bricks? It follows the same pattern you just described. Refinement, interest, and creativity all take time to develop. Some just slap together bricks no matter what colour they are early on while they get a feel for how to use them, others simply follow instructions and only later begin experimenting with combinations no instructions exist for. Yes, not everyone is interested in building elaborate creations, so those toys aren't for everyone. H&H is an MMO, so it foundationally needs to appeal to many different people, not just one subset, otherwise it can't survive. Doing that is a lot of work, which is why emergent gameplay mechanics are such a good means to achieve this - not unlike the emergent properties of LEGO bricks that permit creations to be more than the sum of their parts.

It's much, much, much more work to keep people entertained with a series of specific objectives than to give them the means to make some up on their own. Haven & Hearth is never going to give players a theme park ride-style gameplay experience like the most popular MMORPGs and their knock-offs do. Instead, it gives us more freedom and agency. Hearthlings are more capable of shaping and leaving a mark on the world they (at least temporarily) live in than any max level EQ2 clone character, or even some Whatever Online guildmaster. That's what makes H&H special, an elaboration on what made vintage MMORPGs special before the success of that subgenre made the new tradition one where "everyone is a hero" with shared questlines.

***

Last point, mostly just semantics: Players don't play Super Mario because they like pushing the A button and seeing what happens, they do it because they like the challenge of pushing it the right way, at the right time, to get the results they want. I suppose the ambiguity there is because it's a game where jumping through the level is an actual challenge, not just an arbitrary hurdle. (One can imagine a game like Mario Brothers without pits, spikes, or enemies, instead having just walls to jump over in sequence and the occasional slippery floor. It would not be well-known.)

Idiomatically, 'jumping through hoops' refers to tasks that are unnecessary, annoying, or frustrating, things that may be difficult but are not, in themselves, fun to do. Makes it a poor choice of words when discussing video games, I suppose, since so many of them (especially by Nintendo) have fun jumping puzzles, though they usually reserve literal hoops for games where the player character can fly through them. (It wouldn't be fun trying to keep Mario's limbs from getting caught on the edge of a hoop while he's jumping through it, so they don't include that kind of object.)

***

Philosophy is exhausting.

[VDZ]

At this point you're just harping on pedantry, Shubla, purposely avoiding and ignoring the central arguments to shit up the thread with specifically the parts not related to the suggestion. Refute the central premise or shut up:

In Haven & Hearth, having more arbitrary goals acknowledged by the game in some way would make accomplishing those goals (and by extension the game itself) more fun.

[Aerona]

Hostility, paranoia, hypocrisy, and obliviousness aside, you're asking for the developers to do work for no reason other than because you want to offload the core responsibilities that players have onto them. Maybe it would make it more fun if the game did what you're suggesting. Then again, so would it make the game more fun if it gave everyone free ice cream. That doesn't mean Jorb and Loftar should give us free ice cream.

No specific proposal exists, so you might as well be asking "Should we be able to access the sky?" ("What does that mean in practice?" "That's a definite 'Maybe'!") Broadly speaking, and certainly based on the examples posted from other games, it would be thematically inappropriate, inefficient, and not as good for the player base as the alternatives if the developers coded in some way to let players show off how deeply they invested in grinding or how many times they performed tasks they don't find intrinsically rewarding. You can refer back to my first post in my thread for my thoughts on this, stripped of any detail.

In detail: Not only does everything the developers work on have an opportunity cost in that they can't work on something else, anything they do to define what "achievements" players should pursue in-game deprives players of the oxygen to do that themselves, and takes away from the society-building aspect that makes the game so uncommon and interesting in the first place. It seem you're complaining that players can't give legitimacy their own achievements because "no one cares about them". To put it simply, that's not a Jorb and Loftar problem; that's a "you" problem. I for one would much rather they work on increasing the scope of what's possible in the game rather than deepen the grooves that grinding has worn into it.

[HasseKebab]

Theres so much shit in this game that could just have meaning to it if there was any kind of a leaderboard tracking or achievement system in place tbh. Its just a shame we can't have nice things because somehow we as a community will create achievements and leaderboards for everything. You heard it here, theres just no point for developers to ever make anything meaningful or award players for doing extraordinary things in their in video games.

You've successfully made an argument for why Haven and Hearth is different from the majority of games played by many people at once. It's different from a chess tournament by design: What are and aren't legal moves is up for debate and subject to testing. It's not all pre-written, and every time the world resets many of the old world's rules have to be rewritten as part of the new world's story. That's rather the point.

Yes, even you may not care if you win a game-within-the-game you made up yourself; it has to have some legitimacy. But that legitimacy comes from other players, not from the game system. Before everything, it came even when the first proto-board game was played before the invention of writing, before any authority on how to play existed or could exist other than who else was at the table. Even here, people are stuck making all sorts of emotional appeals trying to give legitimacy to some conception of the game or another.

For most of its history, chess didn't have mutations on its shared ruleset decided on centrally, but rather by consensus, with regional variants and experimentation all over the world. Not every game that's ever been played had all the rules pre-defined in advance, especially since games weren't always played between players of equal knowledge and skill and some of them used that to their advantage.

H&H is in that same place both by design and by necessity. So are many other systems in the world, including ones much more important than any games. I'd be bored with the game if it had a pre-defined shared ruleset where everything was decided on centrally, and Jorb and Loftar would have lost interest in it before that could happen, too. Especially since they're the ones who'd have to do all the maintenance, and so much of their fun comes from seeing what people come up with when given the freedom to do what they want outside the control of a rigid top-down structure that's constantly judging them. I really don't think they want to be the conduit through which the players' wishes are fulfilled; they'd rather provide tools for emergent gameplay and leave players to build their own moral and philosophical frameworks for how to play. (At least when those don't blow it all up.)

This kind of a take is just so retarded, you know you can just choose to not care about their pre defined shared ruleset and your gameplay wouldn't be impacted no fucking bit right? Like what does anyone here on the forums have to even show off right now from this emergent gameplay to others, literally nothing besides some old fuckin thread from 7 years ago showing off a base thats completely irrelevant and unknown to the majority to the playerbase. IF we had a system that would actually show that art creation or give them some kind of an achievement that you can actually look at and say "wow thats pretty cool" is a gazillion times more relevant and impactful to the vast majority of the playerbase than we have right now; which is absolutely nothing. And guess what you can just do your own emergent gameplay still because some arbitrary achievement system isn't going to hider anyone from creating emergent gameplay achievements and show them off.

[Aerona]

It's something you can do yourself. In the words of VDZ, you're ignoring the central argument. Explain why the developers should give us something we're better equipped to give ourselves. Explain why they should work on this instead of improving the game so that more people can play it for fun. Explain why you can't show off or brag unless you have some sort of "official sanction" to do so. There's a lot of ways to do it, just like there's a lot of ways to play.

[HasseKebab]

It's something you can do yourself. In the words of VDZ, you're ignoring the central argument. Explain why the developers should give us something we're better equipped to give ourselves. Explain why they should work on this instead of improving the game so that more people can play it for fun. Explain why you can't show off or brag unless you have some sort of "official sanction" to do so. There's a lot of ways to do it, just like there's a lot of ways to play.

What kind of a deranged stance is that? If we were "better equipped" we would've already have done this, this suggestion would be a moot point because the community has gotten togheter and made all of this utopia of yours true. Get a grip.

[VDZ]

anything they do to define what "achievements" players should pursue in-game deprives players of the oxygen to do that themselves

It seem you're complaining that players can't give legitimacy their own achievements because "no one cares about them". To put it simply, that's not a Jorb and Loftar problem; that's a "you" problem.

How is this any different from current progression gating? (If anything, progression gating has a far stronger such effect; I've forced myself through the tedious steel-making process to be able to make coins, for example.) The game is full of 'you must do X' challenges (sometimes very directly, as in quests; notably required for credos). 'The game shouldn't mandate goals' is not a convincing argument when the game is already full of mandated goals.

Not only does everything the developers work on have an opportunity cost in that they can't work on something else

The wonderful thing about achievements, implemented in the classic manner, is that they have very little development cost relative to the game experience impact they have. (The disadvantage is that this may make them feel 'cheap', particularly if there are too many.) Simple ideas (get 500 STR) are accepted by gamers as achievements, as is repetition (get 500 INT, get 500 CON, get 500 DEX...) making it a matter of a few simple if-statements (and in this case one-time UI work, as Haven isn't on a platform with built-in achievement support). Achievements are a prime example of a quick win.

No specific proposal exists, so you might as well be asking "Should we be able to access the sky?" ("What does that mean in practice?" "That's a definite 'Maybe'!")

I suppose this should be the focus of the discussion now then, as Jorb was positive towards the general idea. Typically you want something you can showcase to show off to others. Forum badges as suggested in the first post would fit the criterion and be relatively easy to make, but they'd only be relevant for forum posters. Similar to forum badges, I really like what F-Zero 99 does with its pilot cards:



When you see information on a player (e.g. when your four rivals are listed at the start of a race, or when you're spectating someone) you see their pilot card. It shows their rank, name and current machine, but the other elements can be customized, and the elements used for customization (background, border and most notably the three displayed badges) must be unlocked by achieving certain challenges (perform X spin attacks, be the first to KO someone in a race, finish in the top 20 in a Grand Prix, etc). The player then gets to choose which specific things to show off in a compact way. They can just focus on showing off the rarest/hardest badges, they can arrange them in a creative way (mine essentially reads "I'm coming to kill you" to F-Zero 99 players), or pick some other combination they find interesting. I think a similar thing could be added to Haven's kin list, letting players show off their proudest accomplishments (or just being funny/interesting) to their companions and friendly strangers.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that badges in F-Zero 99 can be leveled up. As seen in the screenshot, I already have 'boost 999 times' (which probably is already an upgrade from 'boost 99 times') but the badge will change by a few pixels if I accomplish 'boost 9999 times'. The reward is a trivial difference, but it still gives players something to work towards.

[VDZ]

This kind of a take is just so retarded

If a take is sufficiently retarded, don't grace it with a response. Note how he talked about everything except the core (that recognition requires the shared ruleset), only going on about evolution of game rules which I had already refuted in the previous post (game without rules is a toy, we can't change the server so we have no say in this game's rules). You'll just go in circles if you argue with someone who re-asserts things that were already refuted and does not acknowledge the refutation.