What most of us love about this game is the complexity, social nature and freedom of it. Also relaxing activities such as harvesting wheat or murdering your enemies and friends. So why not step it up a notch and remove some of the more abstract gaming concepts in favour of more intuitive realism:
- remove offline summoning from the game, make scents last longer, and dont let the expiry timer work while the char is offline (so no more staying offline for a week or more to let scents expire)
- remove soak values on walls, make them take like 2-3 hours to break by a char with a sledgehammer and ~100 strength.
What would this achieve? Well, more pvp. More production, because one would assume one would get robbed anyway while sleeping and then the next logical step would be more people grouping together and more social behaviour. Now if one wants to steal, walls and timezones won't be a problem. A large active settlement will. More pvp for everyone! Less worries that you can be summoned while offline. Scents will still be used to track you online. And they should last 10x longer!
Alright, fellow loved hearthlings, let's hear some constructive criticism! (If you mention alt vaulting, it's already a problem now anyway)
edited op also