Favour

[MojoJojo]

What is the deal with this? It’s been a hot topic of debate, so let’s continue that here.

To me, by the looks of it, Favour is what might push actively shoving people out of a society/faction. It promotes exclusivity, it promotes being unfriendly/untoward, it promotes isolationist gameplay ’cause you don’t want fellow soc-mates to nick that slice of the pie off your weekly cd. You want to have as few people as possible in your soc/faction, ’cause the more you have, the worse those returns are going to be. You do not want people to look at your society and be like ‘these people are inclusive and provide and promote a lot of engaging RP’ – no. You need to actively repel people preemptively almost, and probably end up being very harsh on the banishing too.

That is unless you want to rake in a measly 40-50 favour a week, despite you investing 10+ hours just on patrols alone. Not to mention all the time sunk in the other activities to try curry some political capital.

Sure, you need enough people to earn the political influence, but by the looks of it that is not even going to be enough. Judging by polling as of recent, even two weeks of a 20+ man society doing constant patrols and raids, attending events, hunting and contributing, you can barely earn 5% of polling favour. The 63rd will probably be taking a lot of, if not, every borough.

Tell me this system isn’t a self-destructive system that deters societal growth, that deters working outside of your currently owned borough (it might take MONTHS to win over a single borough, which is months of wasted week-long cooldowns on patrols in boroughs that’ll net you zilch in terms of favour). Dividing 1k between 20 people means you’ll net a whopping 50 favour for those many hours invested – that’s a whole ass 50 karma, or a whole tenth of a charm that provides nothing aside from some RP flavour (which you can’t even show off, far as I can tell. People just have to trust your word for it?)

It is a system that practically mocks your time investment in the game, to engage with the LLM’s new mechanics, to further your society’s image and appeal via grid-wide interactions and adventures. It wants you to bunker up and exclude yourself to a single borough only. Everything done outside that borough seems an absolute waste of time and effort.

When a new system is introduced, regard it with the worst kind of use in mind. This is why I’m leaping to these conclusions. People are going to want to game this.

What’s your own thoughts on this system?

I’d like to see some changes.
1 – Reduce that week-long cooldown on patrols/predators/couriers. Make it a few days at best.

2 – Bump up that favour number, maybe make it somehow representative to active players in the society too. A 4-man society doing 1 patrol per person a week will get 250 a head. A 30 man society doing 5 patrols per person a week will get 33-34 a head. Balance this more fairly…

3 – Reward pushing your political capital and influence outside your current borough, outside your bubble. Incentivization is something Haven is always rather lacking in.

4 –

[Thomas]

Is there a 1-week cooldown on predatory patrols and courier patrols? That’s not in the files anywhere. It’s unfortunate if so, since predatory patrols (for me) have always been a way to organically engage with people who want to be victims, many of whom aren’t members of societies at all.

In general, favor seems to come very slowly. The Hollow Conclave, at least, started the game with no boroughs, and so I’ve not ever been able to see favor come in. Consequently, I don’t know how much favor people are actually seeing.

Looking at favor pricing, I don’t know what the right amount of favor coming in is, since things are kind of all over the place. One favor is worth $5 in items; charms cost around 100 favor in the market, and charon coins are 100 favor. I think my gut is that an average player should earn 50ish favor a week, and maybe a really active player around 100, but I just don’t know.

[Anonymous]

To me, by the looks of it, Favour is what might push actively shoving people out of a society/faction. It promotes exclusivity, it promotes being unfriendly/untoward, it promotes isolationist gameplay ’cause you don’t want fellow soc-mates to nick that slice of the pie off your weekly cd. You want to have as few people as possible in your soc/faction, ’cause the more you have, the worse those returns are going to be. You do not want people to look at your society and be like ‘these people are inclusive and provide and promote a lot of engaging RP’ – no. You need to actively repel people preemptively almost, and probably end up being very harsh on the banishing too.

I think it’s way too early to be making a claim that anyone is being actively pushed out of societies and factions when the game has been open for two weeks, and players are only just now starting to really get a feel for the things they want to do to earn political capital. I think there’s still a lot of confusion on how political capital and favor is working, but we can’t really do anything about the fact that – as of writing this – the Order, Hand, and Illusium Court are currently holding a massive proportion of the players. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the system’s brand new, and growing pains are kind of inevitable at this stage, especially as we’re still figuring out how everything is working. Stuff can be tweaked and changed.

Nova had the following to say about the favor system, which was posted in the New Haven Info thread on the old forums. The first is the overview of favors and how the different activities are designed to work to fit a lot of different playstyles, so nobody should be feeling like they can’t do anything.

Almost all activities in the game contribute to helping win control of a borough, encounters, patrol events, running events etc all contribute to the area they’re in, while killing monsters, going on plots, running schemes etc give rewards which can be donated to your political warchest in that area by taking them to a dropbox in an owned shop in the area. Dropboxes have passcodes to use and if an enemy finds out the passcode they can rob you, people could also intercept you on your way to drop off resources and steal them.

Different types of activities are normalized, so that the more people do a certain type of thing to gain influence the less effective it becomes. There is also an antagonist faction which also competes for the boroughs and is stronger the less competitive they are. Residents have anti-majoritarian tendencies so the more boroughs you control the harder it is to win the next one, and also anti-incumbency tendencies so the longer you’ve held a borough the harder it is to keep a hold of it.

If your faction takes over a borough every week all members will get some of a resource called favor with the distribution being based on how much each player has been contributing to their political control, generally. Some things can reduce the health of a borough which reduces the amount of favor it gives out each week.

This is his entire explanation for how the system is designed to work, where he specifically says it’s not going to help you to kick out less productive people, since favor is automatically relatively weighted to give the split of favor to people who are more active and stuff.

The political system is helpful because it lets us tie everything into that one system, even things which are more abstract like throwing a party or doing an encounter can help since they’re boosting your reputation in that area. By making everything relative, it’s also a lot easier to balance with people not really able to find one optimal thing and just do it to death, you’re rewarded for being more diverse which is also what’s more interesting generally. And because boroughs all produce the same amount of favor at the end that’s also a lot easier to balance, and counter-balances huge factions since they’ll have to split their favor more ways.

But because favor is auto-split based on activity it also isn’t the case that it’s smart to kick less productive people out or anything, since they if they’re less productive they aren’t going to be taking much or any of the favor. The antagonist faction helps to balance the game for different pop levels, if the pop level is smaller the antag group will take over potentially a lot of the grid and make it more of a pve, playing the underdogs sort of thing, but at higher levels they’re pushed back and it’s more pvp. They also make it so people can’t win a borough by just making other people not want to compete with them for it.

Favor is designed to provide all the cool things so there’s always a good incentive to want it, with the relics in particular serving a similar role to the offworld potions in giving cool, unique powers that should almost always be in demand.

[MojoJojo]

“This is his entire explanation for how the system is designed to work, where he specifically says it’s not going to help you to kick out less productive people, since favor is automatically relatively weighted to give the split of favor to people who are more active and stuff.”

Sadly, I don’t think this is what works. I polled on top of every single activity, week one, in my soc. Between 10+ patrols, two hunts, two events… And that week, I got a whole ass 54 favour in a 24-big soc. And I think this is because, out of all those events, not a lot of them happened in the right borough. Which, you know… is a massive deterrent to RPing outside your bubble.

I agree it is too early to lay heavy judgement on the system yet, but this isn’t heavy judgement. I’m giving my perspective, my feedback, on the system with some doom-thinking about the possibility of it. You can’t tell me that, in a game that now requires you to even spend favour to investigate plots, and which now forces you to kind of solely focus all your society’s cooldowns (encounters, couriers, patrols, etc) in a single borough to even see any kind of reward, having such a tiny pool get divvied out between 20+ people is looking to promote communal RP. Sure, it might incentivize people to join those lower-pop socs, but then those already in lower-pop socs are meanwhile being ‘incentivized’ not to let people in, as any activity of new people would slice into their cuts of the already limited favour pie.

[Stitch]

I don’t really see that as happening. I see the current Favor system as likely needing some tweaks in terms of costs, but it’s a good thing to incentivize people to have PCs in other orgs on grid, because there’s literally no other disadvantage towards having a ton of people.

Also, as someone in a smaller organization, I would absolutely NOT deter anyone from joining or kicking them out. I can’t speak for every small group, but we’d be happy to have more people to get involved and RP with.

Some of these orgs just have way too many people who are all very active right now, so the favor accumulation is going to be low.

[Luka]

54 Favor is actually a lot of favor for a society with 24 players in it. In a society with 8 players in it, the most favor I saw people getting was 120-140. It seems like you got a pretty good number.

[Luka]

Whilst I’m sure the game is designed to encourage pushing people out of a society or faction in most instances, I do think the situation we currently have with one speccific society is very much an outlier. I do not think the idea that an entire quarter of the playebase would all converge on society was something Nova intended to happen, and if the mechanics as written resolve in such a way that players are punished for doing that … Well, “down with the court” is all I’ve gotta say. Go join other societies.

[Stitch]

I don’t really think everyone has the same mentality in game-ifying Haven. Sure, the abuse potential exists and this may wholly anecdotal, but I’ve yet to see anyone join smaller organizations with the intent of doing nothing, interacting with no one, and so forth with the express purpose of just currying favor rewards.

Also, I disagree that everyone starts in the Hand in every new iteration. Generally, and historically, it’s the Temple that gets the most amount of activity and people because everyone is T2 or T3-1 and the Temple historically favored orgs like that. I’d say we have a lot of Hand this go-around because we have a lot of newer players due to Content Warning existing, and I’ve noticed that a lot of newer players tend to play in The Hand. With the Order allowing T3s, this has also likely taken some of the shine off of the Temple, since they were historically the only alternative for T3s outside of the Hand.

In essence, I think orgs having some kind of favor malus if they are way too large is okay. There is literally no other drawback to stacking a ton of people in one place, and more people means that you can feasibly hold more boroughs, do more activity, etc.. I think the potential for abuse is greater if the amount of favoir is increased to people with a ton of people in their org because that means things like charon coins are going to become horribly stockpiled and there will be no sense of finality for some people’s characters as a result. Being in a large organization already confers pretty massive advantages as far as literally all of Haven’s systems are concerned, plus a ton of roleplay opportunities. Favor being more prolific among characters in small organizations is the one thing that encourages people to make PCs in smaller organizations, and I think that’s a good thing.

[MojoJojo]

This would be a fair point if there was some actual choice in societies. Currently, there.. kind of isn’t. The five societies are rather inflexible excl the Court, though that alone is a slice of pie not any character can just fit into, too. What would incentivize players splitting up was more diversity to begin with. Then again, maybe this is where cults fit in – but them being hidden is not at all helpful for that, and it requiring Eidolon stuff also isn’t. To play the smaller socs, you’d have to essentially create a char from scrap with a rather specific concept already in mind just to fit. That is kind of against the spirit of making characters in roleplay-heavy environments to me.

I wouldn’t play a DnD campaign if I only get to play the Human Male Fighter archetype exclusively, or only get to play the perfect Goody Two-Shoes types of Paladins.

Right now, it seems like people pick a B3 + a soc ’cause what’s the drawback? Two sources of favour income, yay! More people to call for in case of rescue, yay! More people to hopefully help chip in charon coins, yay! The big numbers aren’t a guarantee of roleplay and interaction – A good few of those people could just be sitting in it, comms off, and not interacting at all, while maining another soc. This has happened, and this will happen (and likely already is happening to some degree).

I say get rid of this. Pick a faction, or join a society. That alone would help massively with dividing the playerbase into smaller groups. Other than Vigil and Temple, there is very little overlap between the groups as is. And, hopefully, cults can list themselves as public – I think some variety is direly needed.

[Mourningstar]

Cults can conquer boroughs and are hidden off faction list. If you want a ‘society’ that fits you completely, create a cult and focus on that Eidolon instead.

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