Game Development: Project Mayhem

[the_pilgrim]

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.

This was pretty much the point I was trying to highlight regarding the difficulty and complexity of early game. Note that I consider early game as the time from when you start up as a newcomer to the point when you have your first permanent base. If it takes a significantly disproportionate amount of time to rebuild and start over, most players would be immediately discouraged and quit. The idea is to ease up the difficulty and learning curve during this early game period before making things steeper and steeper as you reach end-game. I'd think that this would allow new players to feel that they have a "fighting chance" against established factions for as long as they are willing to put the work into it.

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.

While I haven't yet experienced much trade in Salem, I've observed in most other MMOs that currency inflation is a given challenge. As more players join in, more Silver goes into the economy and the value of Silver goes down in relative nature to useful goods. One method that seems to keep the end-game players interested is to regularly increase the amount of content, with better improvements costing more and more Silver-only materials or reagents. This would help stimulate the economy in that end-game players would actually have motivation to sell goods to mid-game and early-game folk, while the later can use trade to speed their own development.

I'm sure that end-game players would love to grind up Silver to summon rare monsters which have unique loot, to buy equipment and consumables with slightly improved (but not game-breaking) attributes, to build unique Silver-only buildings and structures, to rent more buildings in the Capital Cities or just to buy that epic-looking hat that no one else in the server can afford. Just my two cents, but if Silver is made more relevant as a currency, most players would use it for trade and industry.

[Dallane]

I'm sure that end-game players would love to grind up Silver to summon rare monsters which have unique loot, to buy equipment and consumables with slightly improved (but not game-breaking) attributes, to build unique Silver-only buildings and structures, to rent more buildings in the Capital Cities or just to buy that epic-looking hat that no one else in the server can afford. Just my two cents, but if Silver is made more relevant as a currency, most players would use it for trade and industry.

That doesn't sound fun or good at all for anyone.

[the_pilgrim]

I'm sure that end-game players would love to grind up Silver to summon rare monsters which have unique loot, to buy equipment and consumables with slightly improved (but not game-breaking) attributes, to build unique Silver-only buildings and structures, to rent more buildings in the Capital Cities or just to buy that epic-looking hat that no one else in the server can afford. Just my two cents, but if Silver is made more relevant as a currency, most players would use it for trade and industry.

That doesn't sound fun or good at all for anyone.

Care to expound? Salem needs some means to keep it financially viable, and by making Silver more relevant it encourages players to buy Silver (and other things) from their cash shop. While all the established players here would certainly want to indefinitely maintain their advantages over the rest of the playerbase, somebody has to pay the Piper, so to speak. I don't believe jorbtar are running a charity around here.

[Shizen]

I'm sure that end-game players would love to grind up Silver to summon rare monsters which have unique loot, to buy equipment and consumables with slightly improved (but not game-breaking) attributes, to build unique Silver-only buildings and structures, to rent more buildings in the Capital Cities or just to buy that epic-looking hat that no one else in the server can afford. Just my two cents, but if Silver is made more relevant as a currency, most players would use it for trade and industry.

That doesn't sound fun or good at all for anyone.

Care to expound? Salem needs some means to keep it financially viable, and by making Silver more relevant it encourages players to buy Silver (and other things) from their cash shop. While all the established players here would certainly want to indefinitely maintain their advantages over the rest of the playerbase, somebody has to pay the Piper, so to speak. I don't believe jorbtar are running a charity around here.

Grinding silver to summon rare monsters which you kill for unique loot is sort of the epitome of what Salem is attempting to not be. There are literally countless (for me) games that have variations on this mechanic. And yet I don't play any of them.

[the_pilgrim]

Grinding silver to summon rare monsters which you kill for unique loot is sort of the epitome of what Salem is attempting to not be. There are literally countless (for me) games that have variations on this mechanic. And yet I don't play any of them.

I was just using that as an example. The point I'm trying to make is that Silver can be used to unlock more game content. Perhaps a more interesting suggestion would be to create a skill/profession tree that requires materials that need to be bought with Silver.

Currently, Silver isn't relevant enough as a currency to motivate a bustling economy of trade and industry. That said, this isn't the only thing that can be changed and some other mechanics may certainly be tweaked to help encourage trade. But for now, my two cents goes into making currency more relevant. After all, Salem takes place during the discovery and development of the New World. Currency already existed at this point in history, and there was much trade both within the colonies and the countries back in Europe.

The system-made methods of creating Silver via NPCs can be used as some sort of simulation of the later type of trade, which jorbtar would understandably have direct control on. We're essentially interacting with jorbtar as the kingdom back in Europe anyway, and we would be paying taxes (and real cash) to them appropriately as they actually keep this game running.

[dageir]

Silver would be more relevant if those who owned the stalls actually cared to place useful things in the stalls at reasonable prices. (Not just soot-flakes...) This might get a little better when (if?) the player numbers increase.

[Potjeh]

Silver would be a lot more useful if we could have stalls that buy stuff for silver, and they weren't limited to ~5 people per server.

[jwhitehorn]

Silver would be more relevant if those who owned the stalls actually cared to place useful things in the stalls at reasonable prices. (Not just soot-flakes...) This might get a little better when (if?) the player numbers increase.

Just out of curiosity. What would you consider useful things?

Chief PeePooKaKa
MM Tribe

[Borgins]

No one gives a **** about HnH.

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

While I might not have put it the same way he has a point.

Jorb asked for a comparison of the grind which is fine, but this game isn't H&H it's something else and it needs to find its own niche. Every time I see someone say we had (x) in H&H we should have it in Salem I shudder, maybe it's that most of the current players came from H&H but it seems to restrict the quality of the feedback bigtime.

Salem will never be mainstream it's only ever going to have a limited player base so I can't help feeling that anybody that will play it for any decent period of time isn't going to be put off by a difficult learning curve, in fact I would expect that most of the current player base has played Eve and that learning curve is almost vertical at the start. In short don't make the game easier to get into if people are only going to leave anyway, if I remember correctly, its been a few years, in Eve we called it natural selection.

[Jalpha]

Decreasing potential income is harmful to newer players, I felt the grind to get my first claim was comfortably difficult and I made most of my first silvers selling skins I found in stumps and hay, because I didn't need drying racks. At a point though you can't really spend as much silver as you can make, even if you delay this stage by making a big house and buying a ton of cupboards to fill it, which I don't bother with so I get there pretty fast. Home decorations are a nice idea but with raiding so powerful... Who will take that risk.

There should be more to end-game money sinks than just upkeep, and increasing upkeep simply upsets people without the time to hit critical mass where income is concerned. The store isn't really an option as it stands because the items sold there are overpriced to newbies and unappealing to established players (what even is that fertilizer for aside from poisoning my fields, and who uses a gun when they will make less money from killing an animal than they would spend on ammunition).

There simply aren't enough vendor items which appeal to the end-game player who has so many opportunities to make more silver than they can use.

And if you are talking about us being able to make our own coins someday... Inflation is just going to become absolutely terrible. If we could turn coins into silver though, and make something useful and consumable from it, preferably numerous things, which are useful to the player with endgame issues at the forefront of their mind, that would be practical.

I've liked it in other games where I could play newer players to do labour tasks for me. It worked fairly well, but the problems were travel time, which many weren't willing to spend, and in Salem... Who is going to trust someone to come and flatten a base for you, so I discount that idea at this stage. Removing claim and upkeep costs, as well as the main sources of income is a step backwards in my opinion. I just wish I could turn my silver into something I would actually find useful and wouldn't just get destroyed by the first raider that happens across my home, yet is still consumable either via the store or my own crafting abilities.

This topic sure has taken an interesting route.

Also Peep, from time to time when waiting on my own crops I have purchased decent quality foodstuffs from the stalls. The irony of paying you silvers I could make so easily to glutt more than I could produce myself appealed to me. I'm sure even newer players would at least consider buying a few bags of flour that isn't oats or higher tier vegetables if they were reasonably priced, which your goods often simply aren't.