Haven And Hearth Gets Badgers, Party Arrows, Store Concerns Addressed

Haven and Hearth had an undoubtedly rocky launch, with a thread dedicated to discussion of the new pay-to-play system spanning a stunning 95 pages of disgruntled player opinions as of this writing. And that isn't the only one. Dozens of others like it exist in the Critique forum.

Yesterday, the two-man team behind the game released a patch they call "A Sound Badgering" in order to address some of the more common concerns. Of course, there are also badgers. Who doesn't want badgers? Personally, I would like to run a badger farm.

...I'm getting off-track. Other than badgers, poultices, and the usual fixes, this new patch brings with it a myriad of changes to the more common concerns that players have had since the launch of the Hafen server on the 28th. The most important change that I am seeing, personally, is that party arrows have now been "restored to full functionality," meaning that they will show the direction of the other player(s) in your party from anywhere, allowing you to find your friends in the absence of hearth fire teleportation. No longer do you have to waste hours of your free time per month looking for friends. You can just walk right towards each other.

Speaking of hours per month, they have changed that. You now get 7 hours per week, or approximately one hour per day, as a completely free user, refilled once every Monday at midnight UTC. Verified users that have paid the $15 fee will get 14 hours per week.

The Store has also receive an overhaul, as Subscriptions are now labeled "Game Time." The previous "Game Time" is now labeled "Subscription Token." Personally, I would have gone for "Subscription" and "Subscription Token," but this is still a bit better. However, the developer known as "Jorb" does say, "We will continue to iterate on the monetization until we have something fair and balanced, and we want to make it a priority to implement alternative payment providers. One topic for discussion could be, "Should we sell Play Time?"... at all? Instead of, or as an alternative to Subscriptions? Let us know what you think." Should they go the route of selling time as a set of hours that can be refilled, having both "Game Time" and "Play Time," or even just changing the meaning of "Game Time" yet again, could get confusing.

Jorb also takes some time to address concerns about the Store in the following quote.

Sooo... that went over well.

In hindsight, I suppose we should have figured that introducing a store would cause a stir. Call us naive, but we were focusing entirely on the game, and did not imagine that what in our perception was a small thing, would completely overshadow everything else we'd done on the game, i.e. completely overhaul it.

Our intention was never to keep the store a "secret" as something to be "sprung" on anyone. It's more that we weren't really pushing or talking about the game in general, so announcing any specific thing, about what we saw as a whole that we weren't talking much about, didn't cross our minds. The store was added late in the process, and two weeks before launch we had only loose ideas.

Our intentions were also not really to make the game "pay-2-play". The idea behind the payment solution, though I can see how it was lost in the general perception, and in some poor layout/setup and whatnot on our part, was to create a soft pay wall which could be negotiated with, and which gave you choice and smooth transitions in terms of how and when you chose to permeate it, and which did also not significantly impact ingame balance. That is what our discussions had been focusing on while we were implementing the thing. To this end, the store was also executed in a light-hearted fashion.

All of that, I guess, conspired with us to make us believe that the store was not a big deal(tm).

Apologies. We'll try to do better in the future.

Seems as if they had genuinely had good intentions, added it late, and didn't see it as a big deal, given that the majority of other MMOs monetize in some form or another. Should you disagree, you will be happy to know that there is an item made especially for you, the "Devs Suck! Sign," available for a mere $5 or a Gold-level subscription. They will be adding new items like this with every patch, and players can choose to show their support for the patch by paying for some additional cosmetics, should they want to.

Additionally, all cosmetic store items have been changed so that they can no longer drop on death. As Jorb puts it, "Hats/items were not intended as anything other than cosmetics. They have no other utility than their show-off value, and the problem with having them lootable is that they completely lose said show-off value, as wearing them paints a huge target on the wearer, making them essentially useless." It remains to be seen if this will cause backlash among the community but I imagine I was not the only one concerned about investing money in said items when they might have been dropped on death.

As a little bonus, Jorb has also posted a list of everything from the original Haven server that has not yet made it to Hafen. Bear in mind that not all will make it into Hafen, as Jorb notes that "Not all are relevant." Also noted is that there will be only one type of stand in the future, rather than having both barter and vending varieties.

So that was quite a lot but there's a lot going on. Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments.