Discussion - The Quality System

[SuperNoob]

Well, I suppose my friends and I must be the worst players this game has ever seen since we've been playing close to a month this time (with past experience and most stuff from the wiki memorized) and I still haven't been able to rank up from "complete newbie" to "inadequate shit".

I guess playing the game for 4-8 hours a day isn't good enough unless you sell yourself as a slave to a powerful village in exchange for food that gives high stats very fast.

weird question Danno, how did you create a character in 2011(the day this world started) thats 4 weeks old?

[borka]

accumulated playtime

i got this char :

Character created at
2011-11-03 12:50
Last played at
2013-05-17 11:46
Direct ancestor
None
Learning points collected
105764 (211524 total)
Age
1 days

[SuperNoob]

accumulated playtime

shhh I wanted him to think about it. the point I was making is that in 1.5 years hes played less than a month and complains about quality...

character I'm currently playing:
Character created at 2013-05-01 05:44
Last played at 2013-05-18 03:20
Direct ancestor None
Learning points collected 11232 (543882 total)
Age 1 weeks, 2 days

[Danno]

The way curiosities work and the growth times on most things, playing more does not mean you're getting the most out of your time.

By the sounds of it, you're railing more against the fact that you can be raided than against any one system in particular.

I've never really been raided and I'm not particularly paranoid about it, hence why I haven't bothered to get materials for a brickwall nor build one. It can happen, and I'm not so much against that as I'm against the lack of fairness or actual interaction with players. If a couple of thugs in my league knocked on my door, I wouldn't mind stepping out for a little brawl even if it meant dying and losing all my stuff. If I see someone wearing all the most expensive gear and they start punching holes through my palisade, to hell with that. I also dislike the idea of someone doing it while you're offline and you have no chance to retaliate whatsoever. Again, not paranoid about my belongings since I could just stick all my pearls on an alt for 100% safety.

I know how to get the "most" out of my time:
1. Use custom client.
2. Forage/craft the best curiosities possible. Keep well stocked.
3. Stock a lot of food on well decorated tables. Perhaps use third party tools for farming since it is tedious.
4. Plow the ground by hand and drink high quality water so you can feast more.
5. Drink tea before logging off.

We can also include steps such as not bothering to play much until you get 500 farming so you can make good use of the high quality seeds you trade for. Thing is, I don't play as a calculating robot whose goal in life is absolute efficiency and high numbers.

Fighting an animal and fighting a human are entirely two different things. Foxes always does the same thing on different conditions so results are rather static. Humans are more dynamic.

I have under 400 HP. Sling deals 200 damage on me with one hit. I'm sure there's lots of room to be dynamic there and I'm just blind like a fox.

A lot of the game is knowing what to do is progress that a higher level of a sort. This is partially the reason why veterans have an edge when reset occurs. This is not just on Haven and Hearth alone but prevalent on all MMOs and not strictly RPG either. It seems a lot of your problems are from elements not from the quality system but from other elements that is around many different player games.

It does give them a little edge if they know to look for high quality resources or to get a mine up ASAP. It also helps knowing little tips and tricks like turning worthless hides into hide straps for rope, or putting tanning tubs into a boat for the 92% thing. High quality resources have a pretty huge impact on growth rate, but at least they have a cap, so they don't spiral out of control. I mean, just imagine how insane your stats would be if you were able to make a q1000 oven. With high quality products, the worth of effort is reduced. Maybe my character seems abysmal to you because you can just eat some of your village's spare q100 food to get my stats within a week, but I've been doing my best on my own as part of a simple and independent village. As I said before, this only results in forcing players to grind more before they can start doing other things.

There are many good people in this game who can help or advise you how to do things better.

Haven is a wonderful game with many different challenges and options that should be able to sustain you for a very long time. It's up to you to set those for yourself. Do you want to be a great farmer? A raiding warrior? Maybe a profitable trader? Maybe you just want the best apples in the world. All of those are possible.

I set challenges for myself that do not revolve around stats and grinding. For example, paving fancy roads in my village with black bricks, paving particular shapes beneath permanent constructions with bricks (e.g. a heart beneath a stone mansion), planting crops and paving bricks over them as a base for my palisade, paving art in grassy areas, maintaining a cemetery for my villagers, planting flax or poppies as "flowers" around the village, planting crops underneath the village idol, keeping my village organized, promoting/maintaining a "free for all" house that we all give and take from, working my way up the ladder to defeat all animals unarmed (either alone or with friends), etc.
I have had other goals in the game, such as creating an elaborate maze, thinking up minigames and hosting some "Haven Olympics" type thing, creating a nice looking open village to be used as a regional trade center, and having wars/raids with sportsmanship (e.g. not killing weak opponents, not ruining their homes, declaring war before attacking, being willing to negotiate peace treaties or taxes, etc.).

Alas, my goals are cut short by my requirement to become a great farmer so that I can feed my village with food that will allow them to survive in this cold world... or my requirement to have 300 str/agi/con and 400 unarmed combat before I can be considered a warrior to be reckoned with at all. Currently, quality and stats matter too much to ignore them (unless you want to just get killed by anyone or anything).

shhh I wanted him to think about it. the point I was making is that in 1.5 years hes played less than a month and complains about quality...

Obviously I haven't been playing for a few minutes here and there throughout 1.5 years.
My friends and I were playing when the last world ended and we started again when this world started. We played for about a month and found grinding for quality to be boring (as we had already discovered from previous worlds). One of our main villagers also died and it takes forever to rebuild a character, so we lost the will to play.
We play this game occasionally since it's fun... until you establish yourself and realize that you can never hope to compete with the hardcore players unless you become a hardcore player, yourself. It's all about the quality, which is tedious and repetitive. I understand how to play efficiently, but why bother? I'm here to have fun, not work a second job.

[TeckXKnight]

I've never really been raided and I'm not particularly paranoid about it, hence why I haven't bothered to get materials for a brickwall nor build one. It can happen, and I'm not so much against that as I'm against the lack of fairness or actual interaction with players. If a couple of thugs in my league knocked on my door, I wouldn't mind stepping out for a little brawl even if it meant dying and losing all my stuff. If I see someone wearing all the most expensive gear and they start punching holes through my palisade, to hell with that. I also dislike the idea of someone doing it while you're offline and you have no chance to retaliate whatsoever. Again, not paranoid about my belongings since I could just stick all my pearls on an alt for 100% safety.

You're railing against raiding and defenses as they currently are... without any personal, second-hand, or conceptual experience with it; just supposed boogeymen somewhere out there. All in the name of 'fairness' which is supposed to mean a fair fight between you and peers who are perfectly or near perfectly mirrored, apparently. I give up.

[Patchouli_Knowledge]

I have under 400 HP. Sling deals 200 damage on me with one hit. I'm sure there's lots of room to be dynamic there and I'm just blind like a fox.

Are you not aware that if you have either decent leather set and/or metal armor, slings are virtually useless against you since the deflect will shrug off the low damage?

It does give them a little edge if they know to look for high quality resources or to get a mine up ASAP. It also helps knowing little tips and tricks like turning worthless hides into hide straps for rope, or putting tanning tubs into a boat for the 92% thing. High quality resources have a pretty huge impact on growth rate, but at least they have a cap, so they don't spiral out of control. I mean, just imagine how insane your stats would be if you were able to make a q1000 oven. With high quality products, the worth of effort is reduced. Maybe my character seems abysmal to you because you can just eat some of your village's spare q100 food to get my stats within a week, but I've been doing my best on my own as part of a simple and independent village. As I said before, this only results in forcing players to grind more before they can start doing other things.

First of all, q1000 is a huge exaggeration to the point that it is virtually irrelevant. Second, I am not part of a village aside from my own personal one in my home and my stats are fairly decent for the game time I've spent. It is because I create a layout that reduces the amount of work and travel from one point to another as well as know what items/food to craft that maximizes the stat/effort for each stat (it may be outdated now though) and I know how to fight animals up close. I had to grind somewhat for perc/explore so my stats on my forager so I can find mussels at a fairly decent rate but once I hit that, I've opened up another avenue to develop my place such as trading pearls or bear corpses for high quality tools/bricks or even pixel art material. How much grind did it take me? 50 explore.

I set challenges for myself that do not revolve around stats and grinding. For example, paving fancy roads in my village with black bricks, paving particular shapes beneath permanent constructions with bricks (e.g. a heart beneath a stone mansion), planting crops and paving bricks over them as a base for my palisade, paving art in grassy areas, maintaining a cemetery for my villagers, planting flax or poppies as "flowers" around the village, planting crops underneath the village idol, keeping my village organized, promoting/maintaining a "free for all" house that we all give and take from, working my way up the ladder to defeat all animals unarmed (either alone or with friends), etc.

I have had other goals in the game, such as creating an elaborate maze, thinking up minigames and hosting some "Haven Olympics" type thing, creating a nice looking open village to be used as a regional trade center, and having wars/raids with sportsmanship (e.g. not killing weak opponents, not ruining their homes, declaring war before attacking, being willing to negotiate peace treaties or taxes, etc.).

Alas, my goals are cut short by my requirement to become a great farmer so that I can feed my village with food that will allow them to survive in this cold world... or my requirement to have 300 str/agi/con and 400 unarmed combat before I can be considered a warrior to be reckoned with at all. Currently, quality and stats matter too much to ignore them (unless you want to just get killed by anyone or anything).

Paving requires stonework and farming (to plow forest) which takes very minimal amount of LP. Palisaide requires some more LP for other skills like Yeomanry. Paving a trollface in the mudflat takes time and an anticipation of people's reaction (problem?). Reading from all of the things that you want, it seems that you want not only to cap quality but eliminate it altogether because even if it is capped, it will take quite a while to get to the point where you can be able to liberally do all of those things you wanted included recovering from death. In such case, Haven is not the game for you. I should suggest Terraria or Minecraft.

We play this game occasionally since it's fun... until you establish yourself and realize that you can never hope to compete with the hardcore players unless you become a hardcore player, yourself. It's all about the quality, which is tedious and repetitive. I understand how to play efficiently, but why bother? I'm here to have fun, not work a second job.

Welcome to multiplayer with RPG elements...

[TheTylerLee]

(I'm sure that there are plenty of past discussions on this, but I don't want to necro them, and maybe parties involved can quote past points. Also, as time goes on, and other people play, we have new perspectives and things to add.)

So, I am interested in knowing more about people's thoughts on the current quality system, what is working well and what not so much.

A few questions to get things going:

- Do you think the system as it stands is functioning well in promoting the development of team work in the game?
- Does the system overly penalize newer people, or does it fail to reward developed people enough?
- Is it the case that the gap in quality between beginning items and advanced items is too large, or not large enough?
- I am saying this as somebody without solid experience, but I am surprised to hear about quality 300 seeds, or quality 500 cows. Does the existence of these objects unbalance the game? For example, does it put many people in a state of 'waiting for the next world' to really play, so that they can have a hope of competing again?

I'm waiting for the next world to get a competetive edge.
The quality system itself is fine though imo

[NOOBY93]

All I'm thinking while reading this thread is "Tl;dr"
But judging by the title, my say of the quality system is that the 'nerf' for high Q stuff (you don't get double at Q20) is too bad.
It should be unlimited, it shouldn't have a cap it becomes a waste of time to buff at.

[fanit937]

It should be unlimited, it shouldn't have a cap it becomes a waste of time to buff at.

Technically there's no cap.

my say of the quality system is that the 'nerf' for high Q stuff (you don't get double at Q20) is too bad.

You do realize that if you get double at Q20, triple at Q30 etc... there'll be a big gap between newbies and old players? Ex. A Q200 sling can deal 1200 damage and instant kill any newbies. The current system is just like traditional RPG games, the higher level you are, the more experience points you need to level.

[borka]

yeah it's: "oh great i just cashed in 450k Lp now let's raise farming ... 5 points more now"