Game Development: Welcome, Have a Seat

[Mushibag]

What would be interesting was to just cut out the gluttony/humour system and set everyone to equal physical strength. It would be more realistic, because I dont think there were many supermen in colonial America that could tear through walls with a showel. Make the game more geared towards know how (technology/development) and shear numbers. In cave men days you might be considered a leader/alpha male if you were stronger than your fellows, but not in colonial times. Maybe you could be revered as a boxer or circus freak, but not much more. I say nerf the humours and make technology and tactics count most.

So hidebehinds, squonks, and witchcraft are realistic, but humours and the gluttony system are not? I think you are forgetting one important factor, this is a game. While it may, at times, feel like a walking simulator, you must remember that it is not a colonial experience simulator, and as such, gtfo with your realism.

[Mushibag]

after a month solid work leveling and building 1000 stone walls 1 raider with 300 biles can come and break all those stones in under 5minutes :/

You seem to have missed the update where walls and braziers were buffed back up.

[Mereni]

We definitely do not need 'equal humors'. Every online RPG I've ever played has leveling up and older players are a Lot stronger than new players. That's just how it is. Except that in this game, even the strong can perma die and lose all their hard work. If you don't want to die, don't do stupid things like go afk in your base for 8 hours or follow some random stranger off the Boston Claim. There's really no reason even a weak player should ever be killed by a strong one if they're smart.

[darnokpl]

So hidebehinds, squonks, and witchcraft are realistic, but humours and the gluttony system are not? I think you are forgetting one important factor, this is a game. While it may, at times, feel like a walking simulator, you must remember that it is not a colonial experience simulator, and as such, gtfo with your realism.

I have to agree, we should look for realism in human reactions when they understand this is very dangerous world and they have to make larger groups to make in safer... but there is something wrong with it right now, people doesn't care or they are more afraid of spy than raid of server largest faction.

[robert]

after a month solid work leveling and building 1000 stone walls 1 raider with 300 biles can come and break all those stones in under 5minutes :/

You seem to have missed the update where walls and braziers were buffed back up.

no i saw the last update. and still watched a russian player break 3 stone walls in under 5minutes each time without much stoppage for regen, in a game where people spam upwards of 10 stone walls a single person who can breach multiple stone walls in darkness without stopping pretty much makes such wall spam near moot. factoring in the fact people do not suffer crime debuff for tresspass on village claims. and blazers are easy to disable without ever attacking the walls directly. it really makes you have to stop and thinking just how much balance goes in to wall testing :/

as you know full well your self, how to disable blazers im sure. while i dont want hnh heart vaults i would rather like to see some balances ya know lol. right now the last few updates in jan have not shown me any honest effort to balance the mechanics. only bandaid :/

[JeffGV]

First of all raiding does come with high risk. Have you even ever tried it? Making a raider alt takes high purity lockets, old logs, cloud of latter.... and massive, truly massive amounts of end game food, start to finish it's a 100 hours or more and if you get careless and get ko-ed by braziers then 9 times out of 10 you can kiss your alt goodbye and thats not even mentioning the fact some ranger can brake into your vault and summon/kill you.

There is no risk when all is known. Every defense is visible, the range of braziers is known and even if someone log on at sudden, even if he has got the skills to retaliate, doing that puts him at risk (hi,castle doctrine anyone?). You can plan without problems what to do just by seeing the enemy camp. Hell, even a bot could do that, assuming he has got a good enough pathfinding algorithm.
Beside that, the only thing needed is some time for the initial set-up (for crops) and a good enough mine at home. The first is something many people already do anyway, even if they don't raid.
Give players hidden traps and castle doctrine, then we can talk about risks.

Second this game isn't hard, it's hardcore. Salem is advertised as being for only a small group of players. If your a carebear then you SHOULD rage/quit after a few days.

There is quite a difference in being an hardcore game or being balanced. And here the balance is all in favor of the raiders.
And being able to destroy in 5 seconds a crop field that needed many weeks of work to get enough influence isn't hardcore, is just *****.

On a different note if the raiding mechanics would truly get nerfed further along with the ability to kill people found in the wilderness I would quit as the game would no longer be interesting to me, and I expect I'm not alone in this thought. I still fondly remember h&h were you could be permanently killed by animals (a guy goes to raid an ant hill, suddenly there's a lag spike, he's out for 5-10 seconds, comes back and he's unconscious and the ants are killing him - have a nice day) that was an exiting environment.

More like a bandaid than a nerf. They buffed the walls in H&H too, didn't change anything in the long run. And raiders are protected by the same walls as the others, anyway. Regarding villages and waste protection, people simply shouldn't be able to afford a village with just a couple of real people playing, that's the whole matter.

[darnokpl]

There is no risk when all is known. Every defense is visible, the range of braziers is known and even if someone log on at sudden, even if he has got the skills to retaliate, doing that puts him at risk (hi,castle doctrine anyone?). You can plan without problems what to do just by seeing the enemy camp. Hell, even a bot could do that, assuming he has got a good enough pathfinding algorithm.
Beside that, the only thing needed is some time for the initial set-up (for crops) and a good enough mine at home. The first is something many people already do anyway, even if they don't raid.
Give players hidden traps and castle doctrine, then we can talk about risks.

God damn it, it should be about fight!!! Traps are nice, but it would be fraking stupid to rely only on static defences!!!
We shouldn't stand and watch how braziers are shooting at trapped raiders, we should go and fight with them, but for that we need to have some armors to do not lose char in 5 secs and we need some limitation on how many people can raid your town at once.
We need lowered yb/slotted items dmg and increased armor/dmg absorption to make fights little longer even 3vs1.

There is quite a difference in being an hardcore game or being balanced. And here the balance is all in favor of the raiders.
And being able to destroy in 5 seconds a crop field that needed many weeks of work to get enough influence isn't hardcore, is just *****.

True, fields are too valuable and too easy to destroy right now.

More like a bandaid than a nerf. They buffed the walls in H&H too, didn't change anything in the long run. And raiders are protected by the same walls as the others, anyway. Regarding villages and waste protection, people simply shouldn't be able to afford a village with just a couple of real people playing, that's the whole matter.

I guess that is caused by lack of content in Salem, in HnH you had many different jobs and each job required different set of highest possible skills, here single character can do almost everything right now, well only limitation is time.
Maybe it should be changed, if I got 100 s&c then getting 100 h&n should be harder for me than for character that doesn't have any prof higher than 30?

[JeffGV]

God damn it, it should be about fight!!! Traps are nice, but it would be fraking stupid to rely only on static defences!!!
We shouldn't stand and watch how braziers are shooting at trapped raiders, we should go and fight with them, but for that we need to have some armors to do not lose char in 5 secs and we need some limitation on how many people can raid your town at once.
We need lowered yb/slotted items dmg and increased armor/dmg absorption to make fights little longer even 3vs1.

Realistically speaking, people won't be online all the time. Or most the time, for that regard. Unless we're talking of large communities (but as we said before, having one makes also prone to traitors and spies) there will be hours when no one is playing, assuming there aren't people who schedule their life based on this game. Why should a raider attack someone that is online, rather than a camp where no one is present, at least when he started attacking? If they are interested just in pillaging, they have no reason to search for combat, after all.

[Aisteraina]

after a month solid work leveling and building 1000 stone walls 1 raider with 300 biles can come and break all those stones in under 5minutes :/

You seem to have missed the update where walls and braziers were buffed back up.

I wish that were true, still seeing people chew through stone hedges in 5 minutes or less comfortably.

Robert got it right although, the game is essentially the older game pop preying on the younger before they mature, repeatably killing them off. You'd face extinction irl if you did that, the same is kinda applying here, its just the same groups running around killing everything else before it grows to be able to hold out against any of these factory-suicide-alts yet alone their mains and that's why the game pop is stagnant at best.

[darnokpl]

Realistically speaking, people won't be online all the time. Or most the time, for that regard. Unless we're talking of large communities (but as we said before, having one makes also prone to traitors and spies) there will be hours when no one is playing, assuming there aren't people who schedule their life based on this game. Why should a raider attack someone that is online, rather than a camp where no one is present, at least when he started attacking? If they are interested just in pillaging, they have no reason to search for combat, after all.

That is why we have waste-claims and time based raids? I should help to organise defences and be online for at least 1-2 defenders.