constructive discussion about haven and salem

[DemonEyes]

I am with dageir with this, I agree with all of his points.

H&H is buggy as hell, those bugs have become so engrained it would probably become much harder if they were fixed and less enjoyable to most people. the tanning bug, the cooking bug (and more that I have yet to exploit) make the game very very simple mechanics wise. The grind is lessend by the fact you can just pile your oven full and then add 1 branch to cook everything perfectly, rather than the intended different timed cooking recipes. Leather tanning takes a matter of minutes rather than hours, means building that palisade is reduced to minimal time investment.

Are the simplifying bugs in Haven the reason for its popularity? Probably not but they help.. I really enjoy the fact that a starter player can do the same amount of work as a seasoned player, I can do stuff without having to eat every 5 seconds. I really enjoy the fact that LP's can be earned extremely easily all the time andeven when offline and LP's are the lifeblood of the game. I enjoy the fact there is a pretty clear scaling of difficulty from farming to produce better crops and hunting from foxes to bears. Alts are reidiculously easy to make and starting up from a loss is childsplay.

Salem.. is monetized.. Silver is the life blood and if you cant play a lot you cant make a lot.. and if you cant make a lot.. things slow... right ... down. Dallane said it becomes easy to get once you can hunt argopelters.. but probably hasnt tried to level an unassisted character up in the last 6 months.. its slow.. it gets slower and you need to invest massive amounts of time to get rewards which are very shortlived.. I cant plant and farm 200 fields with my current play style.. So I cant get the hay needed to fast tier my fields.. I cant generate the amount of coal needed for speedy crops.. All fo that takes more time than i realisicly have available..

H&H is so much more forgiving on a time table and I feel this is a massive attraction.

[darnokpl]

Every item in hnh can have value to someone.

True, question is why?
Imo because in hnh is more content and almost every low and medium level item is only ingredient to something better and bigger...
and because in hnh you need to make specialization on your character or you will suck in quality race it is more interesting to have a choice and see how your char stats can improve your work (quality/purity) than simply I can do everything and got bored after 3 weeks when you build and craft everything.

Everything you do is rewarding and goes toward something.

True, in Salem purity cap 100% is wrong as it is now... because at start it is too slow and later (if you add alchemy) it goes faster, it should be opposite.
At start when it is important to show progress to players, purity should jump faster, but the higher you go it should be harder to level up your trees and crops.

Characters are more focused and better developed.

As for characters in both games I would see cap... in Salem I would love to see biles cap... but not something like ok cap is 600 biles bye.
More like server-age should increase cap... at start, first 24h cap would be 25 (5 base biles + 20 you can get), and each next 24h of servers age would increase cap by 5.

Why something like this?
Simply early on roa I had 100 biles while russians had 200-250, my and many people I knew morale was lowered by this info.
I think that if we would get cap then after you reach it you would stop to be afraid of combat or raids.
I wrote about this some time ago and Dallane said that pros would get more chars with max biles than I do, but this is fine.
You can have 20 chars with max biles vs my single char with max biles and it will be easier for me to defend my claim vs single player with 20 chars than vs single player with 3xmore biles single char.

I think that fear of losing char in unfair (vs someone who got 3x higher biles and much more free time) combat is what makes salem zero fun for most of players, only dominating faction members can have fun and this is very wrong. You may say you should negotate, make politics and alliances... I say this is BS people doesn't trust each other and it is not going to change, but you may add same level of fun for all players with this simple biles cap.

Getting +5 biles each day would also be day-quest for people and should motivate them to play Salem daily to do not stay behind, but even if they will it should be easy to catch up with basic trade something<->food.

Right now main problem in biles without cap is that people who have most free time wins. Doesn't matter if you are noob or a smart person, if you can play more you won and even smarter and more combat-skilled guy won't be able to KO you, if you had more free time
From Devs that likes using their brains to make game that requires more that simple +,-,*,/ operations (look items slotting) I would require game design that would force me to use brain more to find clever ways in combat, better tactic, not just spend more time online and cook + eat all the time.

[Dallane]

Capping is a terrible ideas. It makes character development stupid and not fun and promotes alts more then ever.

[dageir]

Also HnH has wipes so the world does not get "stale" like Plymouth did.

[Thor]

Also HnH has wipes so the world does not get "stale" like Plymouth did.

I too like the wipe concept.
Even though you lose everything you build, you get another beginning and another story to play.

[Procne]

World 6 in HnH lasted 1.5 year. World 5 a bit longer I think. Plymouth is 10 months old so far. The argument that HnH is wiped and Salem is not is kinda invalid. If anything HnH worlds lasted longer without wipe.

As for all items having value in HnH - that's also not true. There are many kinds of trash items in both games. I can understand the argument that there is more variety in types of items being traded in HnH. But that's more related to quality mechanics and availability of goods.

In HnH you have quality nodes and only few villages have really high quality resources like clay / soil / metal / water. There are also resources available only in certain areas (which are not available to everyone), mostly foragables from mountain / cave region. Quality mechanics are attached to more goods - not only crops but also clay, wood, silk, cloth, meat, milk, fish, metal and most of their products. So people trade for higher quality goods. We have less of this in Salem, or rather had. We can trade purity wood and its products, as well as some purity resources to a lesser degree. But I think that people who stopped playing some time ago tend to forget about those.

Also, I think that people, not silver, are the bigger problem in trade system. People want to sell stuff at too high prices and want to buy stuff at too low prices. And they try to sell wrong stuff.

[dageir]

Plymouth did get stale in a short ammount of time. Im not sure how that is an argument for Salem.

[darnokpl]

Capping is a terrible ideas. It makes character development stupid and not fun and promotes alts more then ever.

Show me one hardcore faction that didn't used many alts in salem or hnh. Cap or no cap doesn't matter at all, pros will get as many alts as they need and noobs will die with their singler farmer character. With cap at least medium experienced people should have chance and courage to defend their camps.

Right now char development is very stupid, we are playing open pvp game where in average 10 raided camps only single person was trying to stomp me over walls, other just took most valuable items and logged out, so we have no open pvp in open pvp and perma death game without cap. Only I can see this is broken?

[Procne]

Right now char development is very stupid, we are playing open pvp game where in average 10 raided camps only single person was trying to stomp me over walls, other just took most valuable items and logged out, so we have no open pvp in open pvp and perma death game without cap. Only I can see this is broken?

What does char development have to do with it?
Situation you described is pretty obvious in a permadeath game. There is no open PvP. If you want open PvP go to WoW battlegrounds or something. In a game where you can completely lose your char and progress nobody will enter open PvP if there is a slight chance they will die. So zerging and ganking is all you can get.

[dageir]

The removal of alts in both game would encourage team play and make raiding a more sobering experience. Only way to at least limit the usage of alts is to demand monthly payment. No doubt this would result in the loss of some players in HnH. In Salem I guess those who still play would pay since they still hang on to it.