Discussion, Favor, temporary items, Wild hunt

[Lykaia]

With the dropping player count, I think now is a good time to talk about the issues with this iteration that I have heard come up repeatedly.

The first is the Wild Hunt. It is far too costly. Tier decrease, massive karma hit. It just does not seem worth it and I do think Doom timer was objectively better in comparison. Perhaps the compromise could be that it takes someone from the grid for a full month instead. Doom functioned, in my opinion, much better to cycle out characters. People that want to play would create a new character and then end up finding out that they enjoyed that character much more and then moved on. the fact that they would regain all their karma would help it now. Remove the karma loss. It just does not do anything but punish people, a tiny reward to encourage cycling characters would probably be good. If there was a need to give characters an absolute finish line, then it could just be set to be two years. After that, the character cannot return to the grid, but this is plenty of time to finish a character’s story and communicates to everyone outright that, hey, someday your character needs to go.

The second is favor maintenance and acquisition. Nearly everyone I have seen talk about it and speak about it, both IC and OOC, has been completely unhappy with it. The general feeling is that it gets to a point of exhaustion and people also really do not like that the items and goodies they purchase for favor, will just disappear on an undisclosed timer. I was not happy either when the game told me that HEY YOUR GEMSTONE WILL BE EXPIRING SOON. This is even more difficult with how hard it can be for some people to acquire favor. I do not know what the best solution for this would be, but it could be that Boroughs are just permanently controlled as long as they are maintained and that successive boroughs, that is, a group controlling more than one borough, just starts to receive debuffs for possessing them. A standard income of favor for every member of something like 100 per week independent from the favor the borough gives, that is, favor for just controlling it, would come a long way. Perhaps owning shops and property in the borough gives a boost to your contributions there, and each borough can give some sort of bonus to the one controlling it.

Combat was mentioned elsewhere. As someone playing a soldier, I had tremendous fun at the start before soldier abilities were also gated behind the three turn cooldown. Nothing of the kit is worth using and no one wants to play human, so even cycling out from a teamwork perspective is just not going to happen. The Temple needs a re-write. It is, right now, basically the Vigil, but the sole difference being that it refuses to use supernatural means to achieve its goals while the Vigil is willing to do so. This makes the two practically the exact same. The reason the three turn cooldown does not work well for Soldier abilities is that they cost money. A smoke grenade is worthless, the circumstance where it is used are rare. Teargas can easily be countered with gas masks, people just refused to bring them. Grenades and Landmines turn out to be duds, but they can countered much more on top with super jumping, which is far more accessible with a major artifact and grenades need a turn before they explode which gives people time to just back away. The problem at its core is that they are all very circumstantial in use, and you will have used something else that you can use instead by the time most of them become options.

I switched from a carbine to a rifle at one point and rifles are also entirely worthless. The theory is cool, you can shoot people from afar. But they will catch up and become able to shoot you. Moving for optimal range is generally not worth it. And if a supernatural can approach you faster than you can run, you are pretty much done for. Most supernaturals are likely to be faster than you are as a human. You also need very temporary modifications to use rifles in any reasonable fashion. Modifications that are, again, secretly temporary.

I don’t know what the obsession is with so much being secretly temporary, but I absolutely hate and despise it, if alone because it is secret and messes with my ability to make reasonable choices. If I invest knowing it is temporary, then it is an investment. If I pay for it not knowing it is temporary, I am being scammed. One feels fine, the other just feels punishing. Why does this need to be necessary?

On the good side, I do very much like that some of the annoying bits were taken out and removed. I still wish rusty was not a thing, because maintenance is maintenance and with the trend of battle passes in the modern gaming industry, I’ve grown exhausted with anything that says maintenance.

The favor items are all pretty cool. Gear(Help gear) is pretty awesome for plots, and I wish more people would use it. The charms are wonderful, the magical tattoos, gemstones, fae cloth. The pets were lovely at the start, though they have kind of been skimped into not being much now. Mine does not find me when I leave without it. And I have not seen it do any emotes since that stopped being the case.

These are all just things that need improvement. Conceptually, they are neat. Practically, the way they exist right now is exhausting. Almost half the player-base also exclusively exists on whoinvis. Without naming anyone, there are people you never see on the list, and with how massive the grid is, this is just hurting the ability to find roleplay.

[Entropy]

When the game stops being fun and there is literally no way to progress, people eventually get off the hamster wheel. Even an avid storyrunner cannot make back enough karma to make up for dropping from T3 to T2 in time. The release of Personal Karma helps make up for that, but I am not even gonna bother trying to make a T4 or T5 when personal karma is no longer enough to cover the cost of the tier down. And as an avid villain and higher tier player, that pretty much ruins the game for me. Knowing everything I do manage to SCRIMP favor for will eventually poof makes me reluctant to even spend it. And if I had known my gemstone was only temporary, I would never have even bought it. And this temporary status makes the drive REQUIRED to gather favor to begin with evaporate. When H7 first started, I was putting effort to get favor every day. When I realized that effort was not only not rewarded but in some cases, completely ignored, I just stopped. I get the minimum payout for boroughs across my characters and call it good. But since it’s super rare for me, I have literally zero desire to spend any of it on temporary things.

[Calk]

I don’t know that there’s any evidence Nova reads this section of the forum.

I’d suggest doing a shortened version of this in a petition. There’s a “suggestion” subject in the petition modes I believe.

For what it’s worth, while there’s a lot of things I don’t like about the game, the thing that completely killed it for me was the maintenance grind stemming from the Wild Hunt frequency. Like that was the one turning point that I just decided ‘nah’.

[Dream]

I think its absurd to have to pretend that we didn’t hate Doom or didn’t hate Secrecy just because we hate the wild hunt even more than those mind-bendingly stupid mechanics.

I think the player base has voted with their time and stepped away from Haven because Haven doesn’t respect any of our time. Of all the stupid ass ‘turnover’ mechanics that have been tried. We’ve truly topped it this time.

In h8 maybe we just have our characters spontaneously vanish after 500 hours. Or our accounts get locked out for 6 months of a year to ensure ‘turnover’.

[Lykaia]

If there is a need for turnover mechanics, then Doom was much better than this. This, the wild hunt, is currently killing this mud.

[Evermore]

One of those new players here, who sadly joined just before the latest Hunt happened but only became active after it.

This mechanic and its effect on the state of the game/playerbase is very concerning. And with another Hunt possibly right around the corner, which I’ve learned I already qualify for (I’ve only really been active on grid for a month, but made the mistake of making a character months before I did so), it might just kill the few active people around. For one, I might get absolutely shafted by it, at which point I don’t know I can pretend to still be motivated to be a tier 1 for 2.5 months, unable to own the shop(s) I want to make let alone pay for my house or any items.

Should we start posting petitions about this, as suggested in this post? The playercount has been so low, I’m seriously considering leaving the game behind and trying out what few other MU*s around that still pique my curiosity and interest, especially if another Hunt in March will snag the few characters that have been around.

[Calk]

If you want your opinion to be read, it’s basically going to need to go in a petition. Nova does read Ask the Staff, but only in so far as they’re questions. They’ve openly stated they won’t read posts that aren’t questions.

There should be a suggestion option. What I’d recommend is simply stating the problem you personally are having and keep it as succinct as possible while giving full coverage to your issue. (Also, be polite).

[Ouroboros]

I’ve never said I won’t read posts that aren’t questions, I sometimes skim over a post if it seems particularly obnoxious.

I’m sympathetic in general to it feeling bad when you get stuff but know you can’t keep it, like I spent this karma for thisr tier, now I’m losing it. That’s a very human thing for that to feel not great.

I also think though that you can’t in a RP game very easily do the MMO thing of releasing a new gear tier every 6 months, it’s less of a pain than yearly pwipes and if you do none of the above the game just slowly dwindles anyway.

I think people are also being a bit doomery, like most favor items last for 9 months and can be rechaged for 75% of their cost, if you’re playing regularly for nine months you’re not reasonably going to have problems keeping a load of cool favor items active.

I’ve extended the time before wild hunt a bit, and one thing I will say I could’ve done better is add more rewards around it, like I probably should give some bonuses for a while after a fresh wild hunt or the like to help encourage people making use of the soft reset.

[Dream]

The wild hunt was 60 days ago. I think if you would’ve mentioned something to the effect that you just mentioned now. Maybe the harm would’ve been lessened.

A lot of the stress and doomery has come about through the sense that it was going to happen again and no one was on the staff side hearing the pain..for 60 days.

I’m sure you have the metrics on pbase, I’m sure you saw that before the wild hunt we were steadily 20+ pbase throughout the day and 40+ for good calendar events. These days we’re sub 10 and on a good event we might push 15.

I think haven 7 is the best iteration thus far. I think the content system is a great way to handle all the crap that previously freaked out people, now it actively encourages people seeking the same content to find each other. I think without the wild hunt we could have easily got another year of good times and good activity before we started to feel a bit of a bleeding in interest.

[Author]

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