Prelude: Happy New World!

[chocolaterain]

One must really wonder if anyone here arguing for 'it must be free' would work for (at times really ungrateful) others free of compensation themselves.

Would really like to see the outcome of hard pay2play (without freebies to exploit, give legitimate new users a free, but limited, demo world to testdrive the first hour or two but no access to the real thing), since should the ones who wouldn't pay or won't play without being able to alt away the consequences of their behaviour for free all really quit it would IMHO be a better world for the ones whos primary goal isn't to bathe in blood. I think would be a good step towards killing alting and throwaway characters, plus nuking accounts for botting would then have some teeth...

+11110000

Well said my friend. I have seen far too many games cater to the loudest ranters in the forums (which coincidently happen to be the voice of the fewest) and make huge changes that completely ruin the game.
Darkfall comes to mind the fastest. Started out pure awesomeness, then devs completely ruined it trying to cater to a few super loud obnoxious grief loving morons. And those changes made the majority of fun loving
normal people leave the game, only the derelicts remained which caused the game to fold because the derelicts generally are not the supporters.

I am a big fan of choices in everything. I would love to see a free to play version, but honestly speaking I do not think a pvp game, especially with perma death, can withstand f2p. If you really want consequences for actions then you have to have a sub. I agree that a $5 per month fee per account (one char only per acct) would be a good thing. Then throw in lots of cash shop items (small convenience and cosmetics only) and you should get funded enough that you can devote more time to making the game we play even better.

The problem, especially in a "competitive" game like this is that the top fanatics would have a crapton of accounts going for $5 a month each while the not so fanatic people are at a disadvantage because they don't want to pay that much for a game and are now limited to one account. I don't see what problem you solve with a system like this.

[iamahh]

here's an idea for micro transactions: "unlock material texture"

so when you build anything that has variable textures, if you didn't unlock those materials you get a generic texture for that building/vehicle/etc... for every texture a micro transaction... promotional packs for woods, tiles, etc...

i remember warframe had "color packs" for customizing your warrior... i actually bought a few...

so I guess customizing your village looks would now cost you some bucks

so these trolls who complain about how the devs make their efforts worthy in the adult world would have to suck it up of stfu or gtfo

[Tamalak]

Jorb, how big is this new world going to be?

(I hope it's SMALL! Small world = more player interaction = more drama!)

[KatoKhan]

It added the benefit of this game being permadeath. There's almost no games like this and it makes you way more connected with your character, as well as making pvp competitive and simple things like foraging exciting. I've died many times, also when I was a huge noob and I don't think because I have less time now or whatever one of core mechanics needs to change for everyone.

This answer to why perma death should be kept is exactly the problem.

1. Having something just for the sake of having it is not a reason. Nullified
2. The fact that there is almost no games like this should explain itself. Majority of people do not want it. Nullified
3. It makes you feel more connected with your character ? How so ? If you spend all your time on one of 7 alts, and your "main" is hiding and never actually leaves the safety of his walls, how are you more connected ??? Nullified
4. Makes simple tasks like foraging more exciting ? well I guess if you are the one slaughtering people because you can, but for the majority of sane people the excitement comes from the possibility of PvP and of
possibly losing your inventory, not so much with losing your whole character. Semi Nullified
5. Understanding why so many noobs quit and do not return should be a priority. I know for a fact many people have quit because of the permadeath because I learned how to read and have read, on many forums, people hate on this game and others for the permadeath. I also know that many people refuse to try this game because of permadeath. I am in several guilds ranging from small 10-50 players to large 250+ players and I cant get one single person from any of them to play this game with me when I have played over 50 games with these people and they tend to try everything. The one most common reason is permadeath.

Now, all this being said, I do not dislike permadeath in and of itself, its kind of adds a flair for me. BUT what I do detest is the fact that because of when I started and/or the amount of time I play and/or where i happen to settle, everything i worked for can be instantly gone simply because another individual decided it would be fun to shit on a noobie and ruin his day.

[DaniAngione]

@iamahh
Actually, no, not lock the variable materials behind a paywall...

Buuuuut selling an item (for like... 5 dollars a pack of 2) that would allow you to "re-customize" a building without having to build it again could be interesting.

Like... you use the item on the building and a menu appears asking me "Board 1, Board 2, Block 1, Stone 1..." etc. And you can only pick materials you've discovered already.

I'd buy that.

[strpk0]

Now, all this being said, I do not dislike permadeath in and of itself, its kind of adds a flair for me. BUT what I do detest is the fact that because of when I started and/or the amount of time I play and/or where i happen to settle, everything i worked for can be instantly gone simply because another individual decided it would be fun to shit on a noobie and ruin his day.

Except it can't? You do realize how difficult and labor-intensive it is to raid a palisade these days?
You do know nidbanes, redhanded and outlawed debuffs are all a thing, right? Also burials that can return 60-90% of your original stats, no questions asked.

The developers have taken many steps towards protecting newer players and making sure they have the means to defend themselves even against the top players.
It is the player's duty, however, to take some steps in order to protect their stuff.

I think you shouldn't suggest things out of the "what-if", without even looking at the facts beforehand.

[Amanda44]

@ Jorb ... that was a very interesting read and it's good to have an insight into your thoughts on the situation.

You address the pay2win model but you make no mention of the idea of a pay2play model, so I'm assuming it is not an option for you but I am curious as to why? I have a couple of reasons why I think maybe you would not see it as an option but only one of them is valid and ofc it's only guess work.

It's nice to hear that Haven will still be around ten years from now, I didn't really expect it not to be ... when I said 'giving' up I meant it more in the way of giving up trying to make it a bigger commercial success, not in giving it up altogether exactly ...

Anyway, w/e ... everyone has ideas and some of them I think are worth considering, Avu always speaks it like it is for example, among others. I'm just glad there is a Haven at all and although I would love to see it become a popular game among many, as I'm sure you guys do too, it has to be your decision ofc how, when or if to go about that.

[KatoKhan]

I have to think that the fundamental reason the game isn't bigger lies in the minute-to-minute gameplay, rather than in implementational case details that only show up once under a blue moon. I've played every world ever, and only had a handful of hostile experiences with other players, of which even fewer resulted in my death.

I return to the relative staleness of the world. I think it's a problem that there isn't enough things going on in it for me to interact with, and be affected by, especially so after I get my walls up.

I think you are correct on this to a certain extent. True that the instances of being killed are not that frequent, BUT the idea of it is always there.
Most of my guildmates refuse to even try this game simply because of Permadeath. They know that gamers can be far too sadistic to resist griefing. Granted that % of players is small but it is always the
few that ruin things for the many.

My personal iteration of this: I played, and financially backed, Salem for quite awhile until I
got bored of my hermit life and decided to be social and accept a guys offer to trade with me. Once out of the safe area he proceeded to kill me very quickly and advised me he did it solely because he was bored.
I then stopped playing and backing the game because I thought the concept was flawed. Giving one player so much power over another in today's gaming world is paramount to self destruction. I really missed certain
aspects of the game (building, crafting, exploring) so after going through 20+ crappy games like Ark and LiF I finally decided to give HnH a try. And I love it, but that thought of leaving is still there the first time
my whole reason for playing is shit on by someone I have no chance at standing up to decides he is in the mood to flex his Epeen.

[ven]

Executive summary / TLDR: We're good -- you're good!

Add more cosmetics

Hats and sketches both sell very little, by orders of magnitude less than subscriptions and verifications, and nothing we've seen indicates that cosmetics is a viable alternative. What cosmetics do guarantee, however, is a ton of work not only in producing, but in maintaining them, their resources, their account statuses with buying players, &c. We have a fair bit of work cut out for us with the hats alone, and I don't mind that, as I kind of enjoy making the odd hat, and whatnot, but it's not something we can use to drive development. We've sold 21 units of the Campaign cap, for example, and that's one of the better ones we've added.

Now, perhaps, it is true that fancy wardrobes or tattoos, or whatever -- some cosmetic option that we haven't tried -- would really be the shit, and would sell a ton, but the problem is that I have zero indication that they would, and I have no leads in that direction. Every cosmetic approach we've tried -- both here and in Salem -- have more or less flopped. What people have been consistently willing to pay for are, dislike it though I may, tangible advantages.

Now, a lot of you have said, "Well, just try it", but that's easier said than done. Every time we try out some new means of monetization we create future dependencies that we will have to honor to one extent or another. If we sell tattoos, sell five units of them, and then decide that they weren't all that, then we still have five customers whose purchases we have to honor in one way or another. Not saying that we couldn't compensate them, or whatnot, but it has to be handled one way or another, and certainly carries a cost in both maintenance and implementation.

No one would be happier than I if we could live off of selling hats and colorful balloons, but I have to call that a pipe-dream.

Pay2win. Try some other payment model.

Fun fact: Salem, which uses "microtransactions" to sell ingame stuff on a per-item basis, outsells or breaks about even with Haven, with less than a third of Haven's population.

We have chosen this model because we consider it less intrusive, and less pay2win. Perhaps we are wrong, and you'd rather see a more dedicated item shop instead?

It could certainly be argued that a problem with the present model is that it allows too few options for "whales" to sink lots of money into the game, to perhaps compensate for a large base of players not using the shop at all.

I realize fully that there is a very real sense in which a shop never adds anything to any game. It's there only because it has the hope of adding development time to the game, and not because anyone particularly likes it. I do not enjoy fighting over shekels, but only death is truly a respite from that.

Lower the price

We have no indication that lower prices lead to significantly boosted sales. Our statistics speak in the opposite direction, in fact, suggesting that the biggest hurdle is not price, but using the store at all. The $5 hats have, for example, as a general rule pulled in about half of what the $10 hats have, and we did not see much of a boost in sales when we went from $10 subs to $7 either. We can certainly lower the price, that's easy, but raising it is extremely difficult. Given the nature of inflation -- $7 loses purchasing power every year -- color me skeptical.

I hope it's not another game because Haven is at its best right now and if you swap to some shitty Salem-like abomination you must be braindead, honestly.

I agree that Haven is the best it's ever been, and there are zero plans for other MMOs, at the very least. If we can't make this idea reasonably profitable with three attempts, over ten years, we're certainly not going to try it again from scratch.

(Developing neatly contained single-player games, limited in scope, and with clear end- and cutoff-points, however, feels appealing from time to time. One of the downsides of MMOs is all the maintenance that comes with them. We spend a fair amount of time just fixing exploits, account problems, and shit that, were this a single player game, wouldn't matter in the slightest, or would only break the game for the person using them. We also -- and this is perhaps one of our bigger failings -- have a great deal of responsibility in actually maintaining the game world(s) -- deciding when to start new games, and such -- and actually managing the fundamentals of how the game is played. In a single player game that is entirely at the player's discretion. I'm often quite the jelly of people who build single player games, and all the whatnot they get away with that would never fly in an MMO environment.)

Barring that we could always get real jobs. The world certainly doesn't owe us a living.

Giving up

No one is really considering a hard halt to development, so I don't think we're giving up. On the contrary we are still making new plans for future development. I want to have both grit and perseverance -- I'm pretty sure the forums, and the game, will still be here ten years from now -- but I also want to have reasonable expectations, and engage in productive work. We have spent ten years on this idea in total, and three-ish years on this particular incarnation of Haven. The project can hardly be said to be in the green -- we worked on it for two years without seeing a centavo -- so if you want to be crass about it, we're arguably out money on it as well. If you want to be really crass about it, we spent three years building the first incarnation of Haven entirely for free, and there are opportunity costs as well. At some point we have to take some sort of stock of how we spend our time, and scale our efforts to what the game actually motivates. Do note that I don't think that number is zero.

We are blessed and fortunate to have been so well received as we have been. I am in a fundamental sense very happy about what we have here, and hope to keep it going for years to come. Maintaining the server costs peanuts, so the running costs are very low, and the bottom line is that we like the game and enjoy working on it. I've played more in this world than any world previously, and the game has -- objectively -- never been better!

Bad updates

The project grows with each thing we add to it, and each update is, as a percentage of the total, smaller than the last. As I've stated in the OP, there is certainly a sense in which we ourselves feel the same way. A lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the really impactful changes we'd like to spend time doing are bigger projects, and even they will probably seem small in comparison to the whole. We could spend the three odd months -- or whatever it would take -- working on object-controlled objects, but at the end of that we'd have, perhaps, a slightly more fun raft as the immediate, visible result, and I can only imagine the great feedback we'd get on that. Adding freeform building and bridges would then take additional time, and be projects in their own right. I believe there is plenty of room for the game to grow, develop, and become better -- there is no shortage of things to work on -- but, again, the low-hanging, fat fruits have to a large extent been picked. Almost by definition our returns on more development will grow more marginal, and that equation is hard to square with the economic realities. I'm not excluding that there are enormous break-throughs that could happen, at very low costs in development time, but I do not know of any such options. I do, for example, not see any single update that would increase interest in the game by an order of magnitude.

I'd love to spend time fleshing out the quest system with dialogue and deeper motivations for the quest-givers, but that's a month's work of development effort, with no guarantee of success, and I'm not sure it'd be a week before it was old news. I'd love to add real waterfalls and other "pixie-dust" things like footsteps or kicking up sand when the player walks across the beach. Seasons. More qualitative kingdom buffs. Fixing the barter stands finally. Go really deep on the siege system again. Adding wolves and pack animal-AI. &c&c.

I think the single biggest failing of the game is that it does not generate enough of an event stream for players to interact in and with. The idea has been that PvP, and other social interactions, would drive the game, but that hasn't worked as well as anyone would have liked it to, for various reasons. It works in the early game, until people hunker down behind walls which they are never incentivized to leave. (I might also add that when we do create content which players have to fight over, that hasn't been particularly well received either, as it's suddenly then not fair that not everyone can have everything, and blablabla). Perhaps that is an argument -- and some have made it -- to be more aggressive with world resets. That, however, reduces the incentives to really commit, or return, to presently running worlds, and also seems like feeding an addiction.

All that being said, I'd like to point out that we have delivered at least a couple of updates lately that have addressed some pretty big things. We've added the ability to travel with livestock, pack-racks, quests, kingdoms have certainly not decreased the amount of stuff happening in the game, ability to grow herbs, windmills, maps, tool belts, the new fighting system, &c&c. I stand by a lot of those updates and priorities, and I'm not sure anyone has suggested any well-defined, single things that would have been better uses of our time.

Not enough to motivate a world reset

We're going to try our best to make it interesting!

I agree with this, in the sense that the decision is not strictly and exclusively motivated by development reasons -- there are real issues we intend to fix with the map generation, mind you -- but it is nevertheless the single biggest, easiest and most impactful thing we can do for the game, and by our measurements, it needs a shakeup. World 9 has been one of the longer running worlds, and one legitimate purpose we have here is to see what kind of longer-term interest we can attract and maintain with a fresh world, running with all the stuff we've added over the odd year since the last reset. World 9 did a lot better than World 8, so I am certainly optimistic.

... and if you want to argue that our efforts over the past year won't make a difference, you are effectively telling us to go do something else, so I'd be careful with that.

A rare smiley. I'll end on that note.

Haven is a great and beautiful game, I am very proud of it, and I enjoy working on it, and I hope you all will continue to enjoy playing it! We are very grateful to everyone who has supported us in any capacity, ever, and hope only to continue to deliver whatever value you have found with us in the past.

We can't let UrW beat us.

Happy New Year's!

Genuine question: do you think increasing the playerbase would solve any of the points you've made? I mean, you seem to be drawing conclusions about what works and what doesn't based on current data, but the current data, I'm assuming, is based on a tiny playerbase, so it wouldn't be necessarily valid with a large population. I'm asking this because almost everything you've said here seems to have focused on core development. But couldn't it be a good strategy, too, to direct efforts toward increasing player count? I don't know the answer, really, but I'm wondering.

You could subsidize your work and let the players act in a way that helps the game commercially and encourages promotion. For example, by

.Adding visual poses to characters, so that we can make creative videos and eventually promote the game through them.
.Contacting sevenless to ask for help with a game manual for noobs (not a wiki or a forum post, but a real manual). This is actually a major barrier for new players.
.Creating events that result in more in-game content while costing you almost nothing in terms of effort, like a "5 sub tokens prize for the player who builds the most grandiose structure", or "who writes the most interesting story in parchments", or "who builds the most interesting dungeon/maze/gauntlet".
.Or even creating a system that makes it easier for players to make quests for other players. I think you're against the idea of having level editors because the world is supposed to be created by the players. But if we have to create content ourselves, we need better tools.
.Implementing special gifts or sub discounts for people who manage to bring other paying people into the game. That's exploitable, but I'm sure there are ways to counter it.


I don't see the problem with microtransactions either. If the issue with the shoppe is having to keep track of purchased items forever, why not implement cheaper but disposable microtransaction items? As one the posts above suggested, additional options for village and character customization could work really well. Say we can buy a lantern with purple ambient light, a prancing horse statue, or a creepy impaling stake for $ 0.15 each: we buy it once, install it, and you never have to worry about that again. It doesn't pass over to a new world, we don't get it back if it's destroyed, and other people can steal and use it if they want.
The same should work for tattoos, skin color, hats, armor skins etc. I don't even see the problem with shop items that give some advantage, like more unique gilding items, faster butchering tools, or old weapon requests like daggers. $ 0.40 for a single-use dagger recipe doesn't seem unbalanced or pay to win to me.

[strpk0]

I have to think that the fundamental reason the game isn't bigger lies in the minute-to-minute gameplay, rather than in implementational case details that only show up once under a blue moon. I've played every world ever, and only had a handful of hostile experiences with other players, of which even fewer resulted in my death.

I return to the relative staleness of the world. I think it's a problem that there isn't enough things going on in it for me to interact with, and be affected by, especially so after I get my walls up.

I think you are correct on this to a certain extent. True that the instances of being killed are not that frequent, BUT the idea of it is always there.
Most of my guildmates refuse to even try this game simply because of Permadeath. They know that gamers can be far too sadistic to resist griefing. Granted that % of players is small but it is always the
few that ruin things for the many.

My personal iteration of this: I played, and financially backed, Salem for quite awhile until I
got bored of my hermit life and decided to be social and accept a guys offer to trade with me. Once out of the safe area he proceeded to kill me very quickly and advised me he did it solely because he was bored.
I then stopped playing and backing the game because I thought the concept was flawed. Giving one player so much power over another in today's gaming world is paramount to self destruction. I really missed certain
aspects of the game (building, crafting, exploring) so after going through 20+ crappy games like Ark and LiF I finally decided to give HnH a try. And I love it, but that thought of leaving is still there the first time
my whole reason for playing is shit on by someone I have no chance at standing up to decides he is in the mood to flex his Epeen.

Would you rather:

a) Play smart and become strong so that nobody can kill you
b) Have the developers babysit you and make you invulnerable

Feel free to respond something else if you want, of course.