Happiness and alts

[marbleveins]

I was quoting the "Stopping massive alt creating" thread and I realized that this was a different suggestion and it could lead to some nice replies so I made this post...

This "is" something I know at least a little about. You think I only play a single character on my entire account? Or only have 1 account? How hard is it to log onto an alt, grab some curios, and then log off? Log on the next day and spend your points, study more curios, log off. MAN! What a concept! Of course, I had to wiki that because an inexperienced player like me wouldn't know that otherwise right?

My biggest issue with the curiosity system in H&H (didnt have chance to play Salem) is the fact, that it promote "nonplaying" (passivity) over "playing" (activity). I dont currently have any problems (besides lag) to collect/craft in 2 hrs enough curiosities to for next 2-3 days only log in to put new ones into study and not to play otherwise at all.
What I would do would be keeping curiosity sytem as is, but expanding the discovery one:
1. every "action" in the game would give discovery, not only collecting/creating material, but also makign final item, building, even using skill for the first time.
2. different actions/crafts/builds would have different LP weight - while first digging or harvesting branch would still give only low lp, building a house or a mine would give a lot.
3. you would actually not get LPs only the first time, but each time you would get baseLP/(2^how_many_times_you_already_did_this)

first of all, I'm new and I like to play and learn while playing, I won't read the whole wiki to spoil the fun, I just to play and mistake and die.

since I read somewhere that the happiness isn't being used, I thought it will be a nice idea to use it to DEPRESS the alts or bots TO DEATH...
every repetitive action will depress you more and the more unhappy you are would be more difficult to revert.

the more unhappy you are would increse the unhappiness that studing gives (maybe depressed time should too?)

being hurt should decrease happiness too (and that way I don't full my self of leeches and run without shoes for fast eating cause healing increases hungry)
being hungry too..


I don't know if there is another plan yet for this system.
Please help to make the suggested system better.
I will be updating it as ideas come to my damaged brain.


edit: some spelling mistakes, my main language is spanish.

[Dondy]

I believe the main reason we switched to the curiosity system from earning lp from doing things is because people were designing and using macros to get points and people were complaining that to advance you had to do nothing but grinding. J & L have said the curiosity system is here to stay. They like it much better and I can see it does have a bunch of advantages, as well as disadvantages. I think the system still needs some tinkering with to make it optimal.

The happiness system did originally work much like you say - if you did lots of boring repetitive work you became very unhappy. But since the game was in development nothing resulted if your character was in a state of deep misery over if he or she was blissfully happy and they've never gone further with the coding - it looks like it might have been intended as a tool to stop macroing or grinding, or as you say, alt training. Your ideas are good, and valid. But until Jorb and Loftar come back...

I feel like I am a member of a cargo cult, waiting for the magical devs to come back out of the sky, bring largess and cause miracles to happen!

[marbleveins]

I love the curosity system.
haaaaaa, so, the happiness was thought to be similar to the suggestion, thats great!
The only thing i don't like about this is the waiting. they are working and the reasons are obvious.

I think that having developed Salem polished a lot of ideas and tested a lot of stuff they were thinking about H&H.
in my opinion, the developing of Salem will result in a much much better H&H.

they wil lend with salem developing this year, am I right?

[TeckXKnight]

Happiness has never done anything. You get happiness from arbitrary things, such as murdering small animals, and you lose happiness from arbitrary things such as being next to dead bodies.

The curiosity system was implemented because people were performing actions for LP rather than to perform those actions. World 4 was the world of buckets. If you didn't grind buckets then you weren't competitive. Rather than grand villages, politics, and trade, we had bucket factories. Whoever produced and threw away more buckets won at everything. When this was nerfed it became dream catchers and dream catcher factories. The cycle was endless, thus making the error of the old system apparent.

You make an iron bar for an iron bar, not for the lp. The iron can then be used to earn lp by being made into a curiosity, traded for curiosities, or turned into tools that help you get curiosities, but that is inherently different.

At its core, your suggestion is a nerf on all players in a way to limit and regulate bots. While I think you'd be rather successful in hurting bots by attaching them to such an arbitrary system, you'd be hurting farmers, miners, newbies, hunters, and most everyone else in the process too.

[marbleveins]

I never wanted to talk about the curiosity / LP farming.

it isn't made or even thought, how can you judge it?


do you have some idea to not nerf the "professions" and still make a plus to the reality?
I'm trying to get ideas for making a nice system to propose, i didn't say anything.. instead of throwing to trash my desire and willingness to contribute, please contribute.


doing a lot of stuff while is studying should prevent the misery of studying all day and mantain happiness.

[LadyV]

Happiness is a very difficult thing to implement because it is all relative to the person. You mentioned repetitive tasks making you unhappy. If your farming doing the same thing over and over again that not being unhappy that's surviving to feed yourself. The same can be said with mining or smithing... What makes a farmer happy? What makes a warrior happy? A one catchall system can't work Besides we are looking into a different time when if you didnt do it you would probably be dead.

Yes the system has flaws as you mentioned but happiness is a tricky road to go down with many different paths.

[TeckXKnight]

Alright, so your idea is to use happiness to kill players who may or may not be bots/alts. The idea being that an active player can increase their happiness while a bot cannot. In its current state, the happiness system provides very few meaningful ways to become happy. You'd essentially be condemning new players to death or to be crippled at start unless you altered the system to include a simple, cheap way to increase happiness faster than activities decrease it. If you do that, bots can very easily be programmed to exploit it too.

Alts are another thing entirely. Most alts are offline 99% of the time. They have no reason to be online, it doesn't benefit them. Combat alts eat curios, drink tea, and go offline. Storage alts grab items and stay offline for safety. Keyalts better be offline or you're going to get raided.

If you apply the idea to someone performing the same action repeatedly or who is hurt, this screws anyone trying to mine, farm, hunt, or who was in a fight. It hurts nearly every single core action in the game.

Unfortunately there is no simple way to solve this problem. You'd need to redesign some crux aspect of the game, such as logging out leaves your character online. That opens up another bag of worms entirely though.

As for the lp/happiness history, I wasn't entirely sure why you two were discussing the curiosity system but I wanted to interject with the facts of the situation.

[Yolan]

Unfortunately there is no simple way to solve this problem. You'd need to redesign some crux aspect of the game, such as logging out leaves your character online. That opens up another bag of worms entirely though.

Now that is one very interesting bag of worms. What if... your character was always in the world? I demand a discussion of this idea!!!

[Slaya15]

I was quoting the "Stopping massive alt creating" thread and I realized that this was a different suggestion and it could lead to some nice replies so I made this post...

This "is" something I know at least a little about. You think I only play a single character on my entire account? Or only have 1 account? How hard is it to log onto an alt, grab some curios, and then log off? Log on the next day and spend your points, study more curios, log off. MAN! What a concept! Of course, I had to wiki that because an inexperienced player like me wouldn't know that otherwise right?

first of all, I'm new and I like to play and learn while playing, I won't read the whole wiki to spoil the fun, I just to play and mistake and die.

since I read somewhere that the happiness isn't being used, I thought it will be a nice idea to use it to DEPRESS the alts or bots TO DEATH...
every repetitive action will depress you more and the more unhappy you are would be more difficult to revert.

the more unhappy you are would increse the unhappiness that studing gives (maybe depressed time should too?)

being hurt should decrease happiness too (and that way I don't full my self of leeches and run without shoes for fast eating cause healing increases hungry)
being hungry too..


I don't know if there is another plan yet for this system.
Please help to make the suggested system better.
I will be updating it as ideas come to my damaged brain.


edit: some spelling mistakes, my main language is spanish.

Doing something with happiness isn't a bad idea, but killing characters because of unhappiness? You do realize that if your idea were implemented, you would effectively need MORE alts right? You couldn't farm very large fields, you couldn't cook food from the fields your 10 alts just farmed, you couldn't mine very much metal. Everything would be limited. The upside however is that villages would have more members, and people in a village would actually be needed, in order to replace the alt spam. However on the downside again... You can't do very much of anything. Imagine a sheep who's meat quantity is 300, meaning it has in a ballpark range of 150 intestines and 150 meats. No one person could butcher the entire sheep, or cow, or pig once their quality gets so high. You would need large villages or tons of alts with high survival / farming etc, just to perform daily tasks.
Edit: Also, reading wiki isn't cheating. There are a LOT of things you could learn by reading the wiki lol. When I first started, I spent 90% of my time fishing AFK on wiki. That combined with having a good teacher (Phaen) I learned a lot in a relatively short amount of time. Wiki is your friend.

[Tonkyhonk]

I think that having developed Salem polished a lot of ideas and tested a lot of stuff they were thinking about H&H.
in my opinion, the developing of Salem will result in a much much better H&H.

i believe salem's "inspirational" system is one of the results from fixing the current curiosity issue. as in, you need to be online to be consuming the inspirationals(curiosities) you study and studying drains some energy that you need to feed your char while studying. that probably made it harder to mass-produce alts by just one player, at least to some extent.
well, salem still met quite a few players who didnt mind engaging in alt productions iirc. maybe it has changed since i left, maybe it hasnt. its purity (like quality) system and gluttony system (to build up char stats) and the combination may have given very different influences to people's motivations for alt productions there and we cannot simply compare salem and hnh in that respect anyways. i personally dont really know how to compare the both systems, but i hope devs do.

im not sure if devs mentioned whether they have found the inspirational system of salem to be successful enough to replant in HnH as the new lp system. (they did say they would use some features succeeded in salem back into haven.) maybe they have not decided yet, maybe they have. either way, im not really sure if it is fruitful enough to solely discuss "new systems" without knowing what devs have on their table. if you really want to suggest something core to implement a big change, id recommend you to play salem and see what they have done there yourself.

oh hi, jorb