Long Term Development Goals

[Garfy]

The following are ideas for more long term goals in development. These are not suppose to be simple things that can be added in a patch, but over a period of time and/or may need a new world to be fully added. The purpose of these ideas are to help give the game a solid direction to go in the future.

Character Skill Trees/Specializations

This would be the easiest of the ideas to add. Essentially, give characters a skill tree with options that are unlocked AND cut off based on previous decisions. With this you would not be able to unlock every skill in the game, but would have to pick and choose what to specialize in.
An example, when you learn blacksmithing, it would unlock several other skills. Weapon, Armor, Tool and Jewelry specialization, each with their own unique craftable items and such. You can pick one of these and when you do, the others are locked away from you, without making a new character (or even new account), you wouldn't be able to pick the other options. If you pick weapon specialization, you can further advance this into sword, axe or spear specialization, again you can only pick one of these. Each of these may also unlock more specializations, which also unlock more and so on.
The end result being you have a unique build that very few other people in the game would have (if any) with your own range of craftable items with their own unique properties.

The upside to this is, every character would be truly unique, and without making 500 alts (which I wouldn't put past people here) would allow you to offer villages things they didn't have before if you join them, or things to trade. The downside is it would require massively increasing the amount of content in the game. Whereas now there is 3 swords, with this new system, the game might need 30 swords.


Culture

This would be taking the above, and applying it to a village. Basically, a village would have it's own skill tree, and gain LP like players do. As the village ages and gains more LP, the leaders could spend LP to develop a culture for the village. This culture would effect what the village as a whole specializes in and give them access to new buildings, tools and so on.
As an example, if you build your village near a lake, you could turn it into a fishing village. Once this is done you cannot revert the change but gain access to various new village skills that let you do things like make fishing related buildings, bigger boats, new fishing tools (like nets and harpoons) and so on that would allow you to catch both more fish and a larger variety and to create various fish related goods like food and curios.
Another example in the opposite direction would be a village of raiders. This might let a village learn new combat techniques, make new weapons, armor, combat related items and so on, and maybe eventually let them make new siege engines and even make them quicker.

This again has the upside of making villages somewhat more unique, and would increase the need to trade and world related politics. It would also give players a long term goal outside of just grind quality. Once again, the downside is that it would require a massive amount of new content be added to the game.


World Generation/Localized Resources

As it stands right now, the world generator used in HnH isn't that great. It does the job but it's one of the underlying problems with why a lot of issues exist in the game (such as lack of trade and politics). My proposal is to simply redesign it entirely, specifically to generate worlds in such a way that the world would have unique regions and biomes, and not the small random blots they are right now, but actual regions such as the top part of the map being a desert, while the bottom part is tundra, and over there is swamp land and so on. Maybe it could even be huge islands separated by seas that require larger ships to cross. The point is, each area of the world would be unique and not just randomly placed biomes.
To add to this, each region would have it's own unique resources. Not just localized resources like we have right now, a desert might grow cactus and have unique animals like scorpions and snakes, while the tundra has it's own unique trees, foragables and animals, meanwhile the swamp has alligators and so on.

Again, the upside of this is pretty obvious. Based on where you decide to live, you end up with unique resources and it opens up trade options and politics. The downside is that again, it requires a huge amount of new content to be added, but would also require the world to be reset.

Metagaming

I wasn't sure of what to call this. I was debating on "Assholes who want to ruin everyone elses fun". But the problem is simple, people using outside tools, or abusing various mechanics to gain ingame advantages. I know this is hard to track, and some of these things exist for a good reason (such as the default client lacking a lot of options and in general being not that great), but there is a certain point when you just wonder why are people allowed to get away with using those kind of things? Who needs 200 fucking alts (altitis has gotten so bad people have fucking forum alts to back themselves up and shit post against other people)? Why are people allowed to bot? Why do custom clients have night vision xray scopes that can pin point and highlight every little detail in the world?
Like I said, I know this stuff is hard to stamp out, but when half the game is basically bots, it does not make the game attractive for lots of people to play. But I also know if you just say botting is outright banned and start handing out bans for it, you'll piss off just as many people.
The ideal fix is simply to make the game less tedious and less passive to play. For most people, once they get set up, they essentially play the game very little. They login, do their assigned task, then log out. Whether this is the tedious like harvesting and replanting a thousand crops, of the passive like adding fuel to the crucibles. The result is the same, people who're not really playing anymore so just get a bot to do it for them so they're still making progress. Changes need to be made to the game that dissuade this kind of play, and make the overall experience more involving while harder to make functional bots for. Likewise, features in custom clients that increase functionality or make the game easier to play, need to be implemented in the game in such as way as it's part of the actual game. I shouldn't have a radar that shows me where every animal in my vicinity is, I should be able to catch their scent on the wind, or see their foot prints.

I know these kind of things would take a lot of thought to even come up with the ideas, and implementing them would be even harder, but it's not fun to know there are some assholes in the game who're always out to ruin it for everyone else by exploiting these kind of things. There is a point where you need to start taking steps to reign these kinds of players in, and that point was years ago.


As I said, I know these ideas are not things that can be implemented overnight, and a lot of them sound like dreams, but they're the kind of long term design goals I feel the game needs. Things that will actually address the core issues with the game and not act as bandaid patches. If I think of anything else, I'll add it, but the game has to start going somewhere at some point, otherwise in a month or two we're going to have 20 players who're just complaining they've got nothing to do and are asking for another world reset which has been a problem with pretty much every iteration of the game.

[stya]

The following are ideas for more long term goals in development. These are not suppose to be simple things that can be added in a patch, but over a period of time and/or may need a new world to be fully added. The purpose of these ideas are to help give the game a solid direction to go in the future.

Character Skill Trees/Specializations

This would be the easiest of the ideas to add. Essentially, give characters a skill tree with options that are unlocked AND cut off based on previous decisions. With this you would not be able to unlock every skill in the game, but would have to pick and choose what to specialize in.
An example, when you learn blacksmithing, it would unlock several other skills. Weapon, Armor, Tool and Jewelry specialization, each with their own unique craftable items and such. You can pick one of these and when you do, the others are locked away from you, without making a new character (or even new account), you wouldn't be able to pick the other options.

Didn't even read the rest, prob wasn't worth my attention, please think before writing. If I want to hermit, I need to make 4 characters just to be able to handle smithing, prob more for sewing, carpentry, etc...? Please. And in a village I need my miner / blacksmith to have 4 smithing characters... bullshit honestly, bad design and it doesn't even make sense. That plus some people like to have only one character.

[Garfy]

Didn't even read the rest, prob wasn't worth my attention, please think before writing. If I want to hermit, I need to make 4 characters just to be able to handle smithing, prob more for sewing, carpentry, etc...? Please. And in a village I need my miner / blacksmith to have 4 smithing characters... bullshit honestly, bad design and it doesn't even make sense. That plus some people like to have only one character.

If you can't bother reading you shouldn't bother replying.

The entire point is, you don't have access to everything. So you have to go out and trade with people or form a village and organize it so everyone has a speciality. That is literally the point. LITERALLY.

[Granger]

Garfy, this would destroy hermiting.

Also, where is the fun in 30+ swords?
There will be one that works best and it'll be the only one produced, and all who specialized on one of the other can suicide.

Also 'My proposal is to simply redesign it entirely' usually leads to a LOL from the devs, and righfully so.
In case you want to know why, learn coding (in case you can't already) and build something similar - then you'll know...

For the rest of the stuff, do a search on posts of Jorb and Loftar for certain keywords (like 'custom client', 'botting') to get the idea.

[basuranephilim]

If you can't bother reading you shouldn't bother replying.

Not saying your ideas are THE way to go. But people are too juvenile and self important, or downright ARROGANT on the forums to actually bother to think for a moment, or read properly xD

My idea thoughts though: I know that the specialization would theoretically promote player interaction for trading, BUT.
You can not trade with a completely self sufficient village that can produce everything themselves. Let alone if you happen to have the same skillset as a hermit as somebody else in the villages nearby.
You might be unable to compete in variety of items due them having more easy access to different ones, and probably higher quality.
Also, in combination with your biome suggestions, this means everybody in the same biome, would basically have the same specialisation, because THOSE resources are only found NEAR there.

I understand your ideas, and in theory they sound fun, but in practicality they might even stagnate trade and the gameplayer harder than the current situation.
Or even worse, make some resources just unaquirable for others! If the south is a desert, and the north a snow mountain, the desert would never be able to have coldpacks to treat concussions, and visa versa.

[Jalpha]

I liked the town skill tree idea but hated the rest. Hermits are a part of the game and that part should stay. I'd also prefer not to have to spend an hour or two boating to a terrain type that has the spawns I want. Even if you mention trade there, travel is still required.

[Amanda44]

Not saying your ideas are THE way to go. But people are too juvenile and self important, or downright ARROGANT on the forums to actually bother to think for a moment, or read properly xD

Pls don't generalize ... I hate it when ppl do that! Or do you think you are the only person 'on the forums' to whom none of these things apply ...

@ Garfy - I've always strongly been opposed to any form of specialization, it's part of the reason I wasn't keen on living in villages in legacy where you were expected to choose a profession and then unless you make alts, that's it, that is your game play day in and day out, it's no wonder ppl get bored and quit. I don't want to have whole sections of the game cut off from me and as Granger says it would also totally destroy hermit life.
The whole point of removing the nature/industry slider was to make it possible for players to not have to run multiple chars and to be able to enjoy all aspects of the game and compete on a single character.

I'm not as opposed to your biome and localized resources ideas but again they do bring forth problems and regions shouldn't be so far apart that the resources become unobtainable or only obtainable by trade.

If you go down the path of limiting players game play then you simply end up with limited players.

[Garfy]

One of the reasons for these suggestions is that it would actually make hermiting more viable. Not less viable.

When I (or anyone in a decently sized village) see a hermit, all we see is a potential target (I'll steal your stuff if I think it's worth it, but I'm not trading with you). Let's be realistic here. My moderately sized village has access to every resource in the game, and as a hermit you have nothing to offer us for trade. Infact, no village in the game could offer my village a trade we'd accept. We just have everything, why do we need more of what we've already got? Infact, the only times I will ever consider a trade are either at the beginning of the world just to speed things up a little bit, or simply when I need someone to do slave labour and I'm too lazy to set up a bot to do it (but if bots are so acceptable, I'm making bots to do everything).

This is a core, fundamental issue with the way the game is designed. You cannot fix this without making actual changes to the game at a basic level. My suggestions mean no one has access to everything, and such if you want access to something you do not have, you have to go and trade with other people.

As for the issue of "well I cannot do everything and I don't like that". This isn't bad design, this is just bad player mindset. When I play a MMO and pick a DPS class, I do not complain I cannot tank or heal, likewise my tank doesn't complain about his lack of damage or healing, and our healer isn't complaining about lack of DPS or tanking ability. We're all different and bring something unique to the group and have to work together to achieve a common goal. If we could all do everything, we'd all just do everything and never play together. Last I checked, HnH IS a multiplayer game, emphasis should be put on player to player interactions.

[DDDsDD999]

Most of these ideas suck. I don't get how you want to discourage alting but also add in these things that prevent characters or villages from doing things without just making separate versions of them.

[basuranephilim]

Not saying your ideas are THE way to go. But people are too juvenile and self important, or downright ARROGANT on the forums to actually bother to think for a moment, or read properly xD

Pls don't generalize ... I hate it when ppl do that! Or do you think you are the only person 'on the forums' to whom none of these things apply ...

It said people, that is not an all inclusive term. Feel free on the honor initiative if you belong to this group or not.


As for Garfy's post:
I think it will make hermitting and trading resources even more unviable.
To repeat myself: If you're stuck in the same biome as a hermit, with a village, you can not offer that village anything they don't already have, or have in better quality. (same as current situation)
The only thing this would lead to, is people having to travel LONG distance, towards other biome's or villages, to get mandatory resources that don't appear in their own.
That, or the border territory of important biomes would become hotspots for bases / conflict.

Could you please shed your vision on the problems I see with your suggestion?