List of suggestions/criticism from a filthy casual

[banok]

I big have nostalgia from past worlds when I had more freetime, but now every new world I play the first few days and quit, and every world the game actually feels worse than before when I somehow keep expecting it to have improved.

It feels like none of the flaws of this diamond in the rough have been polished/worked on at all. Mostly seems like over years new animals and fluff content but game still feels alpha as fuck, and seemingly designed exclusively for those which have no life. I can only think of a few things which have been added to improve user experience in the last decade (like the ingame mapping), but overall its not really progressed, at least 2d haven had smoother performance and cleaner, easy read visuals.

Haven probably just isnt for me, but here are some constructive criticisms and suggestions from someone trying to play casually, and who has relived how unuserfriendly the game is after trying and failing to introduce it to a friend.

• The entire bottom corner of the UI needs to be DELETED from the game, replaced and never spoked of again;
• We need a proper build/craft UI window with lists of recipes under categories, a favourites list, recents list etc.
• Actions (dig, lift, attack etc.) need to be bound to keybinds or contextual (ie shift rightclick to lift)
• Remove objectives from tutorial requests that require luck, long time, or lots of wikipedia reading; ie study fish eye (rare), study chariot (too long but craft chariot is OK)
• Still no tooltips for attributes & abilities to explain what they actually do. Still requires reading a wiki. (also for learning points, experience points)
• When you spot animals it should open a bestiary with entries which could suggest how to kill, vaguely what stats you should have to attempt, how many moves you have left to unlock from it.
• Performance; 60 fps should feel smooth, currently feels like ~20 fps, some of this is server load but even still performance is not close to what you expect in other games.
• Alot of the game and design doesnt respect my time:
• 8 hours for a pclaim to dry is too much, previous worlds I believe I set an alarm maybe even woke up, this world after losing my pclaims because I have to go to work… just CBA. it should be something a person could in a single normal afterwork play session.
• I dont want to cut 80 blocks of wood, 40 boards etc. for a shitty little starter hut. Half this would still be several trees worth with a stone axe. And like what does 45 clay for kiln instead of like 20 really achieve?
• Drying frame inventory could be like 4x4 or fuck it 8x8, drying time is something like crops which is fine to time-gate, but why make us need 20 drying frames filling our base with clutter and making them tedious to use.
• Spit roast; try hards just make like 5-10 fires and never manually turn. Make it require manual turn but its MUCH faster only taking like 5 seconds.
• Burning things. Why though? Do we need real life alarms or look on wiki to put exact branches to avoid? Is that fun or necessary?
• I killed like 40 ants and didnt get take aim yet, why? I can kill bats more easily but cant use new moves from bats because they need IP. Why should a player need to kill more than ~20 ants? Why not just give a new move on every animal instead of every ~10 or more? All the grind achieves is no lifers getting better combat moves sooner, ie KITO before anyone has red defense is the most 1 sided pvp ever seen.
• Ants should probably be weaker also because they wreck noobs, not a good tutorial. Infact most early animals should be weaker. Theres plenty of tough animals for later, make the earlygame require much less UA/AGI generally to ease people in.
• Take the whole curio table and just double the base LP and double the study time, so the balance is exactly the same but the grind to keep full study report is halved.
• Do we even need purchaseable skills anymore? Feels like unnecessary complication when explaining the game to a new player. For example not having a recipe or action because they haven’t bought some obscure skill can feel abrasive or like a bug, having the discovery system alone is fine to gate recipes. Other skills could be unlocked by quests/credos
• Remove death from drowning unless on deep sea water, let players float and hearth after being knocked out. prevents abuse of killing sprucecaps without murder scents.

I think like this list could go on indefinitely but I will stop here. I recomend JLo actually try to play their game with someone new and explain it to them, they might realise the problems this way because currently they do not have an outside view.

[VDZ]

No offense, but most of these suggestions boil down to casualizing the game to give it broader appeal. Yes, the game requires you to work hard to accomplish things. This is not Minecraft where you go from punching trees to building a home in a matter of minutes.

I dont want to cut 80 blocks of wood, 40 boards etc. for a shitty little starter hut. Half this would still be several trees worth with a stone axe. And like what does 45 clay for kiln instead of like 20 really achieve?

Imagine the following situation: every time you eat a piece of food, you gain 50 of the related stat, every curiosity completes within seconds and gives you a hundred times the LP they give you now, and every structure and craftable item only requires 1 of each type of input (e.g. 1 clay for a kiln). Would Haven be a fun game under those rules? There may be some 'LARPers' who would still enjoy it, but for the vast majority of the playerbase that would be horribly unfun. The amount of effort required to accomplish something directly relates to the feeling of accomplishment gained from it. Part of why building a house feels rewarding is precisely because it's such a hassle.

I absolutely agree with you that Haven is a game that can't be played casually. And perhaps some people would be more interested in a more casualized Haven. But the current playerbase loves the hardcore Haven, which is unique in a genre where most games hand you everything you want for relatively minimal effort. Making a game less appealing for the core playerbase to attract a broader playerbase could be commercially viable (which is why it happens so often in gaming, especially when high budgets are involved), but it makes it lose part of its uniqueness. Haven has already lost a small part of its uniqueness (I can no longer really describe it as 'merciless' like Legacy used to be) through concessions made to address the biggest problems many players had with Haven, and taking off the edge a bit here and there is fine, but radical changes (like making everything significantly easier) would radically alter the identity of the game and its appeal to its current playerbase.

8 hours for a pclaim to dry is too much, previous worlds I believe I set an alarm maybe even woke up, this world after losing my pclaims because I have to go to work… just CBA. it should be something a person could in a single normal afterwork play session.

This is a necessary evil due to the multiplayer aspect of the game. You do not have the right to claim an area unless it's uncontested. You can't just build your claim right to a starting village's and get to keep it (vclaim can't remove pclaim unless the vclaim is older); other players must get a fair chance to contest your claim. The requirement to touch it was added at some point to prevent players from claiming random areas they wouldn't be revisiting any time soon.

Burning things. Why though? Do we need real life alarms or look on wiki to put exact branches to avoid? Is that fun or necessary?

Failure timers are one aspect of the game I do feel should be made less harsh. For things like drying times it's inevitable because otherwise griefing shenanigans would occur, but PvE-based failure timers require you to plan your life around the game just because. Cooking is still acceptable IMO (both because the timer is super short for the followup action (~20 minutes) while long for the failure (~60 minutes after that I think?) and because there's a workaround (use just enough branches to make the fire go out before burning); no objection to removal of failure timers there though), but failure timers without workaround on shit that spans multiple days like taming or steelmaking is just bullshit. Why must the process terminate and eliminate all of your prior investment? It's fine that such processes take ages, and that's where their value comes from, but just make it take even longer (due to not progressing without the checkup interaction) rather than making it literally inaccessible to people who can't plan their lives around it.

I killed like 40 ants and didnt get take aim yet, why? I can kill bats more easily but cant use new moves from bats because they need IP. Why should a player need to kill more than ~20 ants? Why not just give a new move on every animal instead of every ~10 or more? All the grind achieves is no lifers getting better combat moves sooner, ie KITO before anyone has red defense is the most 1 sided pvp ever seen.

I think this is happening precisely because you're only killing ants. Repeatedly fighting the same animal has a worse chance of giving you new moves than fighting different kinds of animals AFAIK. I got Watch Its Moves from bats, so try fighting those.

Ants should probably be weaker also because they wreck noobs, not a good tutorial.

I think it's an excellent tutorial, actually. Most MMOs go 'hey newbie, go kill ten of those monsters that would make grown men piss their pants and then report back to me' followed by 'ok not bad, anyways here's the actual thing we're dealing with'. In Haven, wildlife will fuck your shit up if you disturb them. Getting your ass kicked by ants is a great eye-opening experience that shows you Haven is not a 'kill 10 orcs' kind of game. A newbie can defeat ants if they put some effort into it, and failure is essentially free (Antcid Burns are only an issue due to Allergic Reaction (which is bullshit), Concussion heals quickly enough; no risk of death). In the process they'll learn you can't just pick up a sword and start bashing like you do in other games.

[Sevenless]

I will agree that spitroasting feels bad, I'd rather it roast at a reasonably active speed and just make us cook them. The rows of fireplaces feel... wrong.

Kinda like adding pitbakes to kilns to avoid 20 fireplaces for em.