The Curiosity System and What Went Wrong

[YoukaiMori]

Disclaimer: I'm aware that Jorbtar have said there will be no revert to the old LP system. This is just a thread full of what is most likely going to be vitriol, at the very least, brutally honest and "unpopular" opinions here on the forum. This forum section is for both critique and ideas, but it would seem like any critique is immediately discarded, so if in the event this thread ends up locked and removed, you can be certain this section is not for critique at all and if you disagree with anything you better get out.

Chapter 1: A History

In the beginning, there was Haven & Hearth. An open world, open PVP, open construction world where you could choose to do whatever you wanted, however you wanted to do it, and still advance your characters stats and skills. Perhaps not as quickly as somebody who picked a different way to play the game, but in the end, you were still always advancing whenever you played, regardless of what you wanted to do.

Back in the land before time, every action was rewarded based on the difficulty of the performed action. Easy things such as cutting trees or creating boards got you a small amount of LP, though done in a mass quantity, while time consuming, it added up to a lot of LP that could be obtained fairly easily. Harder actions, such as killing bears or trolls, gave you a respectable amount of LP for the effort put in, while the total was fairly large, bears and trolls were uncommon and somewhat hard to kill, unless you were well established already. This led to a difference in LP between new players, and older, more established players.

While anybody could reach a high level of stats and skills with a time investment, like the "hardcore players", some other players chose alternate paths.

The casuals; This group of people thought that it was unfair that they could not become as well established or high skilled as somebody who invested two or three times as much time per day. This group of players was the most vocal on the forums as they didn't spend a lot of time playing the game, and spent a lot of time on the "social" aspect as opposed to the gameplay aspect. Speaking on the forums, IRC, or just sitting around in game talking to their friends or other people in their village.

The botters: This group just didn't care about the game, they just wanted to be high "level" or they wanted alts but didn't want to invest the time in to training them.

Soon, Jorbtar announced a new game, Salem, as well as a new system for gaining LP in H&H, the official reason being "To combat bots".

Chapter 2: Causality

The game had gotten popular, players were at a high, as well as activity in IRC and the forums being at a high.

This lead to a skewed number of "bot" reports. That is, people would complain about bots deforesting areas to make buckets to gain LP. I am not saying bots never existed, of course they do, bots exist for nearly every multiplayer game there is. Bots exist today in H&H as well. In this case, however, a lot of the people being reported as "bots" were not actually bots. Forests being deforested were often done by people in their off time, by new players, and in fact whenever new players would ask how to gain LP fast, people would suggest "Make buckets", leading to most new players immediately crafting piles of buckets to gain easy LP. Most players, at one point, had done this.

This is the cause. This is the reason Jorbtar decided on a new system for LP, they had increased complaints about bots, the vocal part of the community then attached themselves to the same idea that it's bots that are the reason they aren't at the top of the LP food chain, it's bots that are the reason other people are more well established, if you're not botting, you can't possibly have that much LP, this is unfair, this needs to be changed. Remove bots, remove kebab, remove LP. An example of this outrageous complaint can be seen even within the past week in a discussion that was deleted wherein one party, the one against the old LP system, claimed "99% of players were botting" and meant it in all seriousness.

The effect of this change was the introduction of the new LP system. They removed the LP gain from actions and instead added specific items you could "Study" to gain LP, this studying took a lot of time but was also inefficient to "bot" because of the time you needed to study each item. However, this new system limited what you could do in order to advance your character, you had to find curiosities, or choose a specific craft that let you create them. In order to get higher quality ones, you had to personally invest in the craft needed to make them. If you didn't choose those crafts for your character, you were limited on your choices for LP gain. Be it because you can't produce a high quality curiosity, or because your chosen craft's curiosity was more difficult to create.

Now botting was still possible, bots could gather these "curiosities" or craft them fairly easily, however, the bots didn't benefit as much, as stated earlier, because of the time required to "Study" these botted items. This made the casual playerbase happy, they no longer had to play for a long period of time to advance just as quickly as somebody who invested a lot of time into the game. They could queue up some curiosities and then go to work, come back and somebody who had been playing that entire time will have made just as much LP as them.

The people who continued playing after this point then looked at the player numbers, which had gone down, and they said to themselves on the forums "Good, all of the players that have left were bots. This has worked. This was a complete success. All hail Jorbtar, all hail the mighty Curio."

However, the truth is, a large amount of bots still exist in the game, and an even larger number of players who quit playing were not bots, but in fact just people who didn't like the fact they can't advance at their own pace and have to wait hours on end for a small amount of LP.

Early curiosities at best give a couple hundred LP for over 6-24+ hours spent studying them, meaning that in a six hour time frame you can learn a couple minor starter skills, advance a skill two or three times, or maybe less. While this is fine for the players who don't play for that six hours, and are instead doing other things like playing World of Warcraft, or working, or in school, they don't feel that this is a problem, the "hardcore" players suffer, they are forced to either create their own fun in the game or to take a break until they get the LP from studying.

On the other hand, another common argument is that, in the old LP system, people would create hundreds of the same item in order to gain LP, not because they needed the item or wanted to sell it, but purely because they gained LP from it. However, entire settlements and villagers are dedicated solely to the production of curiosities, not because they are needed, wanted, or are going to be sold, but because these are the best possible curiosities you can use to gain LP. In the end, the same argument can be used for both LP systems.

Chapter 3: Death by Asphyxiation

Today, as of world 7 H&H, it's pretty unlikely to ever encounter another player for almost the entire time you are playing, unless actively posting on the forum trying to trade. Some players here on the forum have said this is a good thing, there's no chance they'll be raided or robbed, they can continue to play at their pace and don't need to invest time into the game in order to protect their homestead. The world feels like a wasteland, you can spend hours exploring and encounter nothing but decayed village claims, rotted palisades, and empty hovels void of any human life.

Most materials that can't be used to produce curiosities are thrown away, never picked up in the first place, and otherwise ignored. As it was put, "The old system rewarded pointless actions", yet the new system punishes those "pointless actions", there is no reason to create things, to use these materials, because in the end they don't lead to character advancement. You are wasting your time and effort, to gain nothing.

But that brings me back to what the players consider, in their opinion, a "pointless action". It was stated in that same deleted argument, in all seriousness, that "building" is a waste of time. That is, housing, walls, etc, were and are considered pointless by these people. These used to be rewarded actions, however, now if it does not immediately benefit you it is indeed a pointless action, and since you only gain LP from curiosities, more and more pointless actions exist.

Player numbers continue to decline, and in the other game, Salem, it was stated by Jorbtar that the player numbers were dropping to the single digits in off peak hours so they merged all servers into one. Even then, if you say 9 players were lowest it ever went at off peak hours, that would be only 27 players on at those times. That is dead. Especially for games with worlds as large as H&H's or Salem's.

Chapter 4: Conclusion

If a newer and more advertised game has even fewer players than this, and the only major differences between the two games come down to the equipment system, where Salem has no stats on equipment and only slots for stat increasing items, and H&H has equipment quality, and the study system being different, where in H&H you spend hours getting general LP you can put into whatever you want, and Salem has it to where each curiosity gives you specific skill points instantly, you would have to think that the reason for both games dying has to be one of these two, correct?

And since nobody has once complained about equipment balance being their reason for quitting, that leads me to the conclusion that the decision to make characters advance solely through the "study" of a pre-determined set of objects is largely considered unappealing. Will you see this on the forum? You will, and do, but anybody who posts their opinion on it is shunned by the more vocal players, ridiculed, their posts deleted, or people quote the same Jorb post saying "It will never be changed back because of reasons".

This curiosity system may have been a band-aid fix for what Jorbtar believed to be a botting pandemic, and yes, it stopped some bots, however it also stopped a lot more people from continuing or beginning to play. Take a gander at the forums, and look at the people who shun new players who make even the slightest complaint, quite literally telling them to "fuck off". There were other ways to have reduced the complaints about "crafting the same thing repeatedly", but this was the decision that was made and it is final. This is why the game is dying slowly, gaining no new players, and why Salem is already dead.

The end.

Credits:
YoukaiMori - Producer
Everybody who quit playing in world 4 - References
The forum posters - References
Jorbtar - Game Developers
The forum moderators - Thread deletion technicians

[MrFreed]

I love the curiosity/discovery system its quite unique and pushs players to actualy play rather then bot/pay others to grind
grinding is bad
discovering/curiosities is awesome

[Anon9k]

For people who does not want to waste a couple of minutes on reading pointless text:
Another noob whining about how funny it was back in w3 to fuck buckets and how boring is to establish actual infrastructure to get LP now.
Move along.

[YoukaiMori]

For people who does not want to waste a couple of minutes on reading pointless text:
Another noob whining about how funny it was back in w3 to fuck buckets and how boring is to establish actual infrastructure to get LP now.
Move along.

Very good points, I will take these into consideration. Your scholarly advice is well put and in no way was it an unnecessary reply. Great sage, why are you not teaching debate classes?

[GrapefruitV]

I just hate you more than anyone else at this forum. Regardless you're being serious or spreading this nonsense intentionally.
I'll only answer to this one:

It was stated in that same deleted argument, in all seriousness, that "building" is a waste of time. That is, housing, walls, etc, were and are considered pointless by these people.

It was nothing more than a slip of the tongue. I meant "spend", not "waste" and it was pretty obvious from context. "Spend" and "waste" are the same word in my native language, so, you know, such things happen.

[YoukaiMori]

I just hate you more than anyone else at this forum. Regardless you're being serious or spreading this nonsense intentionally.
I'll only answer to this one:

It was stated in that same deleted argument, in all seriousness, that "building" is a waste of time. That is, housing, walls, etc, were and are considered pointless by these people.

It was nothing more than a slip of the tongue. I meant "spend", not "waste" and it was pretty obvious from context. "Spend" and "waste" are the same word in my native language, so, you know, such things happen.

Now you can do anything you want without worrying about amount of lp it would give you. You're free to waste your time on building and roleplaying without being forced to go hunt bears, when you don't want to, because your neighbour just replanted a huge wheat field and most likely did it to get enough lp to kill you and take your land.

You are the kind of player I am referring to when I say "Those kind of players". You claim major parts of the game as wastes of time, you claim that you were forced to do things for LP when you were never forced to considering hunting a bear is one of thousands of actions that used to give LP, and you think even the most basic action, like FARMING, was a hostile action intended to lead toward your murder. However, you think none of this exists anymore, that you aren't forced to scrounge up or grind curiosities, that building is no longer a waste of time, or that your neighbor no longer plans to murder you for your land. While I'll give you the last one, you have no neighbors now so nobody is going to kill you, the rest is bollocks.

[Tonkyhonk]

You claim major parts of the game as wastes of time, you claim that you were forced to do things for LP when you were never forced to considering hunting a bear is one of thousands of actions that used to give LP, and you think even the most basic action, like FARMING, was a hostile action intended to lead toward your murder. However, you think none of this exists anymore, that you aren't forced to scrounge up or grind curiosities, that building is no longer a waste of time, or that your neighbor no longer plans to murder you for your land. While I'll give you the last one, you have no neighbors now so nobody is going to kill you, the rest is bollocks.

you have never been a leader of a big enough town, have you?

[TeckXKnight]

I have no interest in reading the tl;dr that is this thread as it brings nothing new or interesting to the table, I'd just like to point out the fallacy of saying this world and others post w4 have been bare of life. Quite the contrary, this is the average world population post 3-months for a world. Sure, early on you see a trend towards 4-digit player sizes but that has been true since w4. Mind you, w4 was the shortest world spanning only weeks before being wiped. If anything, the population trend is indicative to the type of game Haven is and how strong the early game is and the how the late game needs more content/work. But I digress.

[MrFreed]

I have no interest in reading the tl;dr that is this thread as it brings nothing new or interesting to the table, I'd just like to point out the fallacy of saying this world and others post w4 have been bare of life. Quite the contrary, this is the average world population post 3-months for a world. Sure, early on you see a trend towards 4-digit player sizes but that has been true since w4. Mind you, w4 was the shortest world spanning only weeks before being wiped. If anything, the population trend is indicative to the type of game Haven is and how strong the early game is and the how the late game needs more content/work. But I digress.

Abra, Abra abra?

[YoukaiMori]

Ah, of course, let's not read anything, let's just throw our opinions in and call every point or differing opinion invalid and a "fallacy".

Good of you, green name. Very good points you made there. Glad people like you are in the community making the game a better place.

It's not like you're covering your ears and closing your eyes saying "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or anything.

Basically I am calling you immature, is I suppose the gist of what I am saying.