Most changes to hunting since w8 have been terrible

[bmjclark]

Quality Nodes on Animals
I understand the intent here was probably to encourage people to go around and find better quality animals to kill but in practice it just lead to people finding high quality animal spots and then using bots to reload them until an animal spawns. The fact that a bears base quality is 60 but it can go up to well over 300 is completely ridiculous. If not for sausages, I'd likely ignore every animal outside of the ones the bots spot because the quality difference is so insane

Survival Hard Capping Animal Quality
In legacy, we'd pretty commonly kill animals together while boating around as a group. Now if you have low survival you get to sit in the boat and watch while the adults kill the animals. This problem is made even worse if you're a new player and you can contribute absolutely nothing to a village because any animal you kill is completely worthless. In legacy, I had a noob friend who would hunt bears with a sling and bring them back to the village. If he played now, he'd probably just sit on his hands for 2 weeks and then quit because he'd essentially be hermitting within the village, unable to contribute much outside of cycling hides on the racks and cycling leather.

Hunting animals was a good, noob activity in legacy to help a village out. Now it's completely out of their reach. I'm guessing this change was meant to slow the game down a bit but god did it miss the fucking mark by a mile

Armor On Animals
I don't even really know what the intent of this was but people still cheese animals easily and it accomplished nothing except making animals take slightly longer to kill

[The_Lich_King]

-1 i utterly hated how in legacy all it took was a sling and 20 MM to fell a freaking bear. It's such a breach of progression and honestly at the start of w8 it was absolutely apocalyptic because of how terrible the animal hunting was due to no hardcap. People would get 10 MM right off the bat and start killing the largest beasts in the game.

Making animals harder to kill so newbies can't kill them is a good thing and so is Survival Hardcapping despite the botting issue because at least we wouldn't have bears or even worse, maybe mammoths being felled on day 1 of a world and at least new players entering the world wouldn't be able to massively influx trade with high Q pelts they killed with 15 MM. Any method of more clearly defining your progression through animal hunting from fox to mammoth should be encouraged so you can't just skip right to the end.

What i do believe should be done though, is calculating the base quality of an animal upon spon (independant of node, every animal having an independantly calculated quality) and then once a Hunter engages the animal, the animal's quality gets hardcapped or softcapped by the hunter's survival so that you can't bot high quality animals, the hunter actually killing them needs to have high survival.

But yeah definately don't make it easier to hunt animals with low stats and don't make it so low stat players can bolster the same quality animals as their high stat counterparts, if nothing else to at least slow down the Quality grind at the start of the game.

As for the newbie issue, No matter what Newbie's will not be relevant in the world

For instance i started late in this world. I only rejoined about 6 days ago. I will never be relevant to any village ever, never be relevant in hearthling politics i will never be able to contribute in the grand scheme of things outside of menial labor (which is why i have chosen to just hermit this world) but i don't think that's a problem. Even if we were to change hunting back to how it was in legacy this would still be the same because at the end of the day hunting for that newbie would be another menial task as he spent 30+ minutes slinging a stone at a bear with 10 MM as we all did in legacy.

No matter how you change the world, Newbies will always be grabbed up by villages only for the purpose of menial labor and eventually as they contribue in that way and have their stats raised they will become relevant to the village, or they won't and never will be. This has always been the case and honestly its not a problem.

This is in the same vein of posts from previous worlds that wanted their to be scaling with quality grinding so that everything curves towards the highest quality in order to let newbies or latecomers to the world catchup, but if we start trying to alter the game to make it easier on newbies the hardcore players will see less point to progress the world so far as they have, as they would be effectively punished to do so, since they would be making it easier for everyone else than themselves.

[bmjclark]

-1 i utterly hated how in legacy all it took was a sling and 20 MM to fell a freaking bear. It's such a breach of progression and honestly at the start of w8 it was absolutely apocalyptic because of how terrible the animal hunting was due to no hardcap. People would get 10 MM right off the bat and start killing the largest beasts in the game.

Yup. Needing 1 MC and a bronze sword is so much better. Nothing is ever going to stop people from cheesing the animals. This current system does very little to halt progression in any meaningful way. People probably gilded to 300 survival like a week and a half in. It's just a stupid roadbump in the way of being able to hunt animals that aren't complete garbage

[The_Lich_King]

-1 i utterly hated how in legacy all it took was a sling and 20 MM to fell a freaking bear. It's such a breach of progression and honestly at the start of w8 it was absolutely apocalyptic because of how terrible the animal hunting was due to no hardcap. People would get 10 MM right off the bat and start killing the largest beasts in the game.

Yup. Needing 1 MC and a bronze sword is so much better

I know this is sarcasm but i agree with the intent behind it, being that its ridicilous to hunt with low stats and 1 piece of half decent gear, which is why we should reduce the pierce of swords and other weapons and instead scale pierce with stats so in order to reasonably be able to damage powerful animals you need powerful stats.

[VDZ]

[long mistaken rant]

You appear to be under the impression don't cheese top-quality animals to death from the very start of the world. They still do, and none of the measures prevent them from doing so (with only the survival hardcap very slightly slowing them while disadvantaging legit hunters even more).

I do like that legit hunting is viable now, which it never was in Legacy, and the most cheesing I personally do is using a horse/sled/boat/Snekkja (and very rarely cave entrances) to gain enough distance to recover before going back to punching them in the face. But the meta is still to cheese animals to death and none of the changes made to prevent it have changed that.

[jordancoles]

I've run into this same problem with people I've invited to the game. There is a long period of time before a newbie can become somewhat useful to the village and before that point they're basically digger alts and hide rack slaves. It's hard to get them to keep logging on when you have a hard time coming up with tasks for them to do, and when you think of something, it usually isn't fun.

The survival quality cap for hitting animals missed the mark and I think that softcapping it by your surv and tool quality while butchering was already enough.

Trolls are a good example of where this mechanic falls flat.

Trolls used to be a challenge for everyone in your village who wanted to participate. Now, even if you have 7+ villagers online, you might only have 2 or 3 that could actually fight the troll without capping it.

Here is an example of a time when more fighters were needed at the cost of quality (all because of 1 person(who also died btw))

[springyb]

Quality Nodes on Animals
I understand the intent here was probably to encourage people to go around and find better quality animals to kill but in practice it just lead to people finding high quality animal spots and then using bots to reload them until an animal spawns. The fact that a bears base quality is 60 but it can go up to well over 300 is completely ridiculous. If not for sausages, I'd likely ignore every animal outside of the ones the bots spot because the quality difference is so insane

Survival Hard Capping Animal Quality
In legacy, we'd pretty commonly kill animals together while boating around as a group. Now if you have low survival you get to sit in the boat and watch while the adults kill the animals. This problem is made even worse if you're a new player and you can contribute absolutely nothing to a village because any animal you kill is completely worthless. In legacy, I had a noob friend who would hunt bears with a sling and bring them back to the village. If he played now, he'd probably just sit on his hands for 2 weeks and then quit because he'd essentially be hermitting within the village, unable to contribute much outside of cycling hides on the racks and cycling leather.

Hunting animals was a good, noob activity in legacy to help a village out. Now it's completely out of their reach. I'm guessing this change was meant to slow the game down a bit but god did it miss the fucking mark by a mile

The alternative of being able to craft a q10 sling with 20 MM and have your first animal you kill be q300 doesn't make for good long term game play either. Group hunting is basically the same issue because only one person needs enough combat stats to create openings. Give your new players a sword and have them chop whenever there's an opening, it doesn't require any LP into combat just a few discoveries and works well. Requiring survival offers at least something resembling progression. I also think that without the survival cap, max animal quality would have to be lowered and that would really suck because without 300q bears average players will never have high quality animal parts unless they start exploiting end game stuff.

Gildings allow new players to catch up very quickly. Getting a fresh spawn to 200+ survival doesn't take that long.

Armor On Animals
I don't even really know what the intent of this was but people still cheese animals easily and it accomplished nothing except making animals take slightly longer to kill

It accomplished it's intent of stopping people from killing everything with a sling, so now animal cheesing is gated behind making a spear instead of a sling. It honestly made things worse than just having animals take longer to kill, it made it harder to fight animals legitimately, with the added effect of actually encouraging you to exploit them because you have no way of knowing how much armor an animal has and therefore have no way of knowing if you're about to aggro an animal that you can do nothing but watch it kill you.

[bmjclark]

The alternative of being able to craft a q10 sling with 20 MM and have your first animal you kill be q300 doesn't make for good long term game play either. Group hunting is basically the same issue because only one person needs enough combat stats to create openings. Give your new players a sword and have them chop whenever there's an opening, it doesn't require any LP into combat just a few discoveries and works well. Requiring survival offers at least something resembling progression. I also think that without the survival cap, max animal quality would have to be lowered and that would really suck because without 300q bears average players will never have high quality animal parts unless they start exploiting end game stuff.

The hardcap could be moved to when the animal is actually skinned or the softcap could remain there. We still wouldn't get insane quality animals, we'd just be allowed to have lower survival characters hunt and bring animals back to have stronger characters skin/cut up like in legacy.

[jordancoles]

The alternative of being able to craft a q10 sling with 20 MM and have your first animal you kill be q300 doesn't make for good long term game play either. Group hunting is basically the same issue because only one person needs enough combat stats to create openings. Give your new players a sword and have them chop whenever there's an opening, it doesn't require any LP into combat just a few discoveries and works well. Requiring survival offers at least something resembling progression. I also think that without the survival cap, max animal quality would have to be lowered and that would really suck because without 300q bears average players will never have high quality animal parts unless they start exploiting end game stuff.

You're glossing over the fact that even if you kill a q300 animal, without a q300+ cutting tool and 300+ survival you would still be lowering the quality significantly. It's not like 1 ua 1 mc 1 survival noob with a sword that wanders into an animal node will be rolling in high quality materials instantly. The progression comes from grinding out the cutting tool and the butcher character. The butcher doesn't necessarily have to be the hunter as well.

[springyb]

-1 i utterly hated how in legacy all it took was a sling and 20 MM to fell a freaking bear. It's such a breach of progression and honestly at the start of w8 it was absolutely apocalyptic because of how terrible the animal hunting was due to no hardcap. People would get 10 MM right off the bat and start killing the largest beasts in the game.

Yup. Needing 1 MC and a bronze sword is so much better

I know this is sarcasm but i agree with the intent behind it, being that its ridicilous to hunt with low stats and 1 piece of half decent gear, which is why we should reduce the pierce of swords and other weapons and instead scale pierce with stats so in order to reasonably be able to damage powerful animals you need powerful stats.

There is nothing wrong with being able to damage animals with high Q weapons. Progressing weapon quality is just as valid as progressing strength.