Game Development: Project Mayhem

[the_pilgrim]

That said, don't ask about my past. What happens in HnH stays in HnH. I've come to the New World to start a new life, so to speak.

Seriously, though, compared to EVE and a few other games I've played, HnH and Salem both are simplistic, so it's hard for me to judge properly. The best rule of thumb I can use on comparing a game with how hard it may be for a new player is how quickly are all the rules and depth thrown at a player. EVE hits you like a brick wall and you have to deal with 90% of the rules set before you even fly out of the station the first time. Compare this with old school Dungeons & Dragons. Tons of rules, but they were presented in modules. With the Basic set, you just had to get familiar with the basics of magic, a few spells, the basic combat rules (roll a d20, look up a chart for your armor, etc), and so on. Each module added a few more rules and more spells and abilities. Most of your MMORPGs work the same way.

With Salem, the only thing you have to deal with early on is foraging, skilling, and gluttony (we'll leave confronting possibly hostile players out for this discussion).

Gluttony is hard to understand. Certain players will grasp it much faster than others, but overall, it is one of the hardest core concepts in the game if not the hardest. I don't see any way to make it easier, though. Maybe someone will come up with the right questions to ask for someone else to come up with a near perfect guide for explaining it. I enjoy it now that I understand it, and I like that there is an eventual hardcap to the max humor a player can get (based on mathematical formula of diminishing returns, penalties, and "consumption rate") compared to HnH's no set max (in theory, there should be a cap on attributes there, too, but a discussion for another place).

Skilling gets boring fast, though. I think part of it is the complexity of the skill system and having to look things up constantly. Part of it is just having to constantly find more food to fill up BB. I know the devs have done a lot to speed this up and make it less cumbersome (love the recent changes). I think my biggest annoyance is having to look things up on the wiki all the time when I need those few points in this particular proficiency. I just don't play enough to have the list of easily obtained items that give a hundred or so points in Prof X memorized. (Might make for a useful page on the wiki, though.) I know jorb and loftar like calling it the Starcraft menu, so make it more like the Starcraft menu: show the materials required (for all) and the proficiencies given (for Inspirationals). Not my idea; just repeating it because I like it. I'm sure the original source can be tracked down. This would help with part of the tedium, but not sure it would resolve it completely. Another thing to try would be decreasing amount of BB consumed per proficiency gain, or at least rebalancing it a bit. Berries are easy to come across, but when I'm eating them all for skills, I have less food in my limited inventory for gluttony, which in turn has an effect on my skill up rate (SP gain/tick is based on current BB).

I agree that most MMORPGs discuss mechanics on a module basis to pace themselves with the learning rate of the average new player. Since Salem is (hopefully) planned to be a financially viable game in the MMO space, I'd hope that they do something similar in order to encourage newcomers. Perma-death PVP can and will always be brutal the first time around, but if newcomers can recover to a reasonable level, I'd think that they would stay to rebuild and learn from their mistakes rather than quit right away. Note that this doesn't reduce the overall complexity of the game, but it does space the complexity out so as not to scare new players away. Same thing with the difficulty and the time it takes to recover back to a "base" or "first tier" level.

I actually found the Salem skills system fairly easy to understand, and a "Starcraft" type tool tip should help the players get used to it. There are opportunities of improvement here and there, but it seems workable enough. Gluttony, on the other hand, is damn confusing. I already have experience from HnH, so I can only imagine how other newcomers would figure it out. Maybe they could make early Humours leveling a bit more forgiving and recoverable? Or they could tier the 4 humours so that players would build a little bit of each one in order to perform a certain basic tasks (foraging, hunting, building, learning, etc.)?

[Vedmak02]

I actually found the Salem skills system fairly easy to understand, and a "Starcraft" type tool tip should help the players get used to it. There are opportunities of improvement here and there, but it seems workable enough. Gluttony, on the other hand, is damn confusing. I already have experience from HnH, so I can only imagine how other newcomers would figure it out. Maybe they could make early Humours leveling a bit more forgiving and recoverable? Or they could tier the 4 humours so that players would build a little bit of each one in order to perform a certain basic tasks (foraging, hunting, building, learning, etc.)?

Wanna see your face when you will try to understand farming here)) gluttony is childish thing compare to farming

[MagicManICT]

The basics of farming are quite simple. You can't ***** it up like you can gluttony. It does get complex, but the complexity is taken on by the player as they understand the system better. Gluttony is thrown at you immediately and in full force. For those that aren't used to working with numbers (like mathematicians, accountants, engineers, etc.), reading a spreadsheet to extract values isn't an innate skill, which is why there is a special UI for the task now. Unfortunately, the UI doesn't do much to resolve figuring out everything.

[colesie]

I'll suspend further judgement on whether this is a completely good or bad thing, but Salem definitely feels a lot more grindy than HnH.

Right because getting 800 ua or palibasher-level str is not insane grind in hnh

I got 1k ua by casually throwing studies into and alt and I was able to get a palibasher with 2 loads of cheese with my cheese production. 1 load if I were to just be going for base levels to palibash. I could feed my cows in about an hour and a half, milk them in 20 minutes, swap out trays in under an hour and feast the cheese in 2 or so hours. If you had an evening to play you could have it accomplished.

[Yourgrandmother]

No one gives a **** about HnH.

Stop derailing or I will have to report you to the authorities.

[MagicManICT]

No one gives a **** about HnH.

Stop derailing or I will have to report you to the authorities.

The discussion is relevant as long as it pertains to ways of making Salem a better game. Many of the players here are vets of HnH. Part of the existence of Salem is because Paradox liked the concept of HnH and contacted Seatribe about creating a commercial version of HnH or another game similar to it. A relative comparison of what players experienced is what jorb asked for in his post several pages back.

Please desist with the derails or you can meet Mr. Banhammer. If you have an issue, report it. Don't spam up the forum with useless posts.

[Spazzmaticus]

I'll suspend further judgement on whether this is a completely good or bad thing, but Salem definitely feels a lot more grindy than HnH.

Right because getting 800 ua or palibasher-level str is not insane grind in hnh

I got 1k ua by casually throwing studies into and alt and I was able to get a palibasher with 2 loads of cheese with my cheese production. 1 load if I were to just be going for base levels to palibash. I could feed my cows in about an hour and a half, milk them in 20 minutes, swap out trays in under an hour and feast the cheese in 2 or so hours. If you had an evening to play you could have it accomplished.

If anything that just proves that HnH has an even bigger beginner-veteran gap than Salem. It makes palisades totally obsolete as a form of defense and in a well developed world (like the present world 6) iron for a brick wall can be pretty hard to come by. Not to mention getting the skills and the place to build such a wall (which takes a lot longer than 2 days. Let's just be realistic about that.). Say what you will about braziers but at least they offer an active defense against any attacker.
The general idea is to make sure that bases aren't inpenetrable but that you need to take an active part in defending them if you are indeed attacked. To tilt the odds in favour of a defender, not an attacker. In this regard I consider the brazier and totem system superior to building walls that do nothing but advertise your raiding value.

EDIT: I will concede, however, that getting good stats seems a lot easier in Hnh. All you need is a well defended, high player base town with high quality cows for an end-game cheesemaking facility. Never realized getting all those things were easy for a beginner. Just shows you the difference, I guess.

[Shizen]

I did not play HnH, but I wouldn't have described Salem as "complex". Gluttony isn't hard to understand, although some of the interface for it was confusing for a little while. Proffing was quite easy to understand, although, again, the UI used to display incorrect values consistantly, which made truly understanding certain aspects (like resetting) require attention. The exact algorithm for elemental combination is perhaps hard to nail down (I haven't really tried tbh), but it's not hard to grasp in concept. Neither are the %ages for artifacting. Learning tricks of the interface, shift + mousewheel, alt+shift, using the level meter, etc. (some of these are Ender's only UI, but I'm pretty sure that it or its deritives represent the majority) took a little time (as did discovering the need to use a 3rd party client). I don't really feel like any of these things are "problems" with the game. Might people get confused or stymied by one or more of these and quit? Sure, but if they were not tenacious enough to get past those issues, they were never going to last in Salem anyway. Personally, I think this thread of discussion is pointless :/.

Salem is not hard to start out, either. Your profs are all low enough you can easily prof while walking with what you forage. You can easily glut off foraged food, and for a while after that, you can glut easily in a session using a temporary base camp of hollow logs, etc. Silver is not hard to get at all, it's quite trivial to amass enough silver for most purposes via a variety of means. The early game is really quite easy, and this also has been discussed in great detail before. I do not think this issue is a cause for Salem's troubles, either.

The troubles start when you hit the early mid-game and realize you need to build a "permanent" base. Here the troubles are not ones of complexity at all, but game design flaws having to do with the balance of offense vs. defense and time investment. And tedium. Not enough fluff, not enough whimsy, not enough interesting things to do other than raid/grief other players lower on the grind curve than you (and in significant part, in the hopes of short cutting your own grind).

The handling of Legacy issues with recent patches has been atrocious for any game that anyone would take seriously or try to play competitively. And yet, Salem is such a grind, with so few amusing things to do in the mid to end-game, I don't see why anyone would play it otherwise. Of the ~35 players I've watched quit since the infamous purity patch, the resounding theme has been this issue and none other.

My personal pet peeves have more to do with the quality of recent devwork. For instance, after the "whimsy" of inspirationals and the prof/skill setup, the secret recipes factor with substituted materials in combines, the implementation of Alchemy, by historical myth, a whimsical art full of secret recipes was... A really underwhelming, slipshod, banal number grind. And that is me self-editing for politeness. But at least it's nigh useless.

But in the end (and to summarize), I think the long term issues with Salem are basically three-fold. It is a very slow-paced game requiring hundreds of hours to build up, much of which is not terribly fun except for the achievement/competitive aspect of it (and to a certain extent by design/flavor). And yet for the all the time it takes to build up, characters die in combat without a great deal of user input (numbers, both of players and humors/gear, trump skill entirely). Walls are rendered useless in no time compared to the time it took to construct them, the higher the quality of wall, the worse the ratio. The brazier deterrent mechanic is a clear failure. Everything other than terraforming is completely ephemeral, designed to disappear without a trace for the push of a button and a brief pause. The Scent system is a failure, based on a premise of reprisal, revenge and deterrent. And the dramatic, whiplash patch methodology which repeatedly redefines the value and goals of so many aspects of the game without warning (or semblance of balance or continuity) has left people unwilling to invest in a grind system whose mechanics may utterly change tomorrow in any variety of ways. Various pieces of the game get valued and devalued willy nilly, such that optimal play becomes sub optimal and stupid play becomes enlightened. All systems, it should be recalled, that players have invested dozens or more hours in using. Compounded Legacy material issues subsequently break emerging systems, creating even more Legacy issues. Taken together, these are the set of issues that are strangling Salem. (That is--large grind for ephemeral reward, failed crime system, horrid patch philosophy/methodology). And they all flow from the Jorbtar. Some religions, I suppose, are doomed to failure. Like Manichaeism. Or maybe we're all Sabians, doomed to obscurity. History will tell, I suppose.

[Jalpha]

I was raped pretty hard, several times, in hnh until I joined my first town. I guess I was just way too industrious, or settled in the wrong part of the map, the palli-bashers came in swarms. Rebuilding was like... A thousand times more pleasant an experience in hnh. I don't think it was necessarily "easy", especially getting a town claim up for the first time... It was however, aside from the waiting time for that first palli post to dry, many times faster, and there was no digging. Buff digging. It's the same in Wurm online, digging is singularly the most boring, time consuming labour intensive and slow process. Why does it matter that the landscape gets covered in big flattened squares, why are you trying to stop us?!?!!1

Not everyone wants to live on a 20x20 patch of half levelled ground with uneven fences and too many braziers to make the space you have claimed productive. Which is what I'm guessing Lee does.

I had no idea so many people were confused about the gluttony system, but then... I had someone to guide my first baby steps into Salem. It's a shame that game mechanics and infinite alts make talking to newbish looking characters such a risk.

[Dallane]

If anything that just proves that HnH has an even bigger beginner-veteran gap than Salem. It makes palisades totally obsolete as a form of defense and in a well developed world (like the present world 6) iron for a brick wall can be pretty hard to come by. Not to mention getting the skills and the place to build such a wall (which takes a lot longer than 2 days. Let's just be realistic about that.). Say what you will about braziers but at least they offer an active defense against any attacker.
The general idea is to make sure that bases aren't inpenetrable but that you need to take an active part in defending them if you are indeed attacked. To tilt the odds in favour of a defender, not an attacker. In this regard I consider the brazier and totem system superior to building walls that do nothing but advertise your raiding value.

EDIT: I will concede, however, that getting good stats seems a lot easier in Hnh. All you need is a well defended, high player base town with high quality cows for an end-game cheesemaking facility. Never realized getting all those things were easy for a beginner. Just shows you the difference, I guess.

Steel is very easy to come by with trading. Edels are very easy to get and everyone wants those and pearls along with the other internationals being traded. Pally works very well for a majority of people. Not everyone is running around with a palli basher. If i wanted to make a basher now I could after getting cheese production up but hit stats would blow ass. Defense/attacking in hnh I feel was alot more fun. Shooting someone with a Rbow trying to ram you or you firing on them was fun as all hell. Having that sweet sound of a hit was just amazing and a rush that only some people can experience.

Speaking of trade I think that is another major issue in salem. Silver really doesn't have a value here. I never did any big trading other then a little foray into the metal market which was successful. With the week of selling iron I had more then enough to fuel multi places for some time and I had nothing else to do with it other then storing it on a alt. Silver just doesn't have the same value as the point system in hnh. It's to easy to come by and it just sits there doing nothing waiting for the next payment on a claim. In hnh you are trading for LP along with other needed goods. Everything you trade for has actual value and can be used at any time. As a noob in hnh my village was able to take a massive jump in production after I went up the river, our other explorer/hunter type characters went the other way and into the mountains and swamps. We collected pearls edels and bluebells mostly and went from being in the 40-50 area of quality into the 100+ quality area after a night of collecting inspirational. We were doing this while replenishing our own inspiration stocks. There is always a need to forage and getting paid in inspirational is great. Getting paid in silver just didn't have the same accomplished feeling to me. I just threw it in a purse on my trade alt and forgot about it basically.

With how the current industry works aint nobody got time to grind the goods to improve their own industry and selling it at the same time. We can't pick up and trade old lower quality bins so we have to destroy them. The grind just isn't worth the time to sell to others when silver does nothing for you.

Buying goods in salem just isn't worth it when you can make it yourself and have the exact same quality as the people selling. The exception there is of course wood,food,humus and iron with their quality but your average person doesn't have a major need for most of that. Food is arguable since it does improve your stats but anyone who isn't interested in combat can play this game at a comfortable level in that they don't need to regen all the time at around 60 humors. With that example they don't even need to buy the food at all since that is attainable on day one/two proven by bait.

People will complain about the trade barrels but I really don't see a problem with them because I don't trade with any ******* shouting in town without them having a active trade thread. Anyone can make a alt, dress them up a bit and start spamming waiting for a trade. You have no idea how easy it is now to scam someone out of buying a snake skull because they didn't confirm my ID on the forums with a PM and seeing a trade thread. The amount of skulls I have "sold" to a certain group of people is just amazing because they couldn't take the time to see who the ***** I was. In the case of gallient after scamming him TWICE his replies were always the same. It was along the lines of 'silver means nothing, I can spend a few hours argopelter hunting'. Which is very true. 2-4 hours of hunting those gets you 1k+ a hour in silver depending on how the loot drops. That silver in the mean time just sits there doing nothing since there isn't a huge need to buy anything, stalls are empty, **** items, or filled with overpriced broken clothing. Someone is better off just making the items themselves and keeping their claim full for a longer period of time.

One thing I just really hated about salem is the glutton system. Eating your ass off and getting stats I understand but eating food normally does nothing but regen stats. You had to plan out your meals alot better in hnh because everything you ate went towards your stats. You didn't have to eat every 10 seconds while doing hard labor or running around. There was a glutton mode in salem giving a bonus on eating with a table but the table itself was another part of the industries that you made silverware and napkins for the bonus eating with of course better items made a better bonus. I understand why you don't get stats in salem with normal eating because you have to eat so often you are basically in glutton mode just from that but it still bothers me with the whole system. Mass producing food for glutton and normal work is just a annoyance to me.

The crafting is this game is fun....for awhile. Then you get to a point where you have any item you want in game that isn't any better then anyone else. Industry takes way to long to hold a person's attention that isn't involved in the politics of the game. Characters for the normal player are also basically worthless other then the time they spent getting the skills. Skills don't really do alot for you after a certain point and humors are not needed for a crafting character. There isn't any depth to characters at all for the average person. If they end up losing that character there isn't any drive to make another because after a week or two of normal play you have basically seen it all. I think this is were the major loss of players come from(not including the major dive in players from the latest changes).