Teaser: 4th Anniversary of HWS! HWS turns 4 year old on 1st March! Join the Event! | Talking about the Future

HWS Announcements
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Dear HWS Community,

this is actually my first big announcement in 2020 and I can tell a lot happened meanwhile.
I want to talk with you transparent about few things and especially invite you to our upcoming big birthday event on 1st March!

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4 Years HWS

It’s nostalgic but always incredible to think / talk about it. On 1st March 2016 I decided to open my own server called HWS. Jascha was kind enough to support my crazy idea and so our main intention was to create a fun and exploit free Multiplayer server.
Everything really started with A) Jascha and I played together on a PvP server before and I got addicted how Empyrion really works and B) I found out quick that items of players are stored in the .ply file and it could be “hacked” to found out what players have inside their backpack.
That was the birth of our EAH tool and since then, crazy features, ideas and actions followed until very now.

It’s also quite amazing that some people are still playing on HWS since that very beginning! We have a lot of players with over 6000 playhours on HWS and overall we managed to go through good times but also very bad times. An up and down really.
Yet we are here, still the most popular server and possible with two things:

  1. Dedication
  2. You, the Community

I will write more about Dedication at the end but regarding you, the Community I can’t thank you enough! No matter if old or new members, you helped and help us a lot and without you my insane idea of make my living of HWS would not be possible.
Especially our HWS Patrons are a new group of very thankful persons! :bowing_man:

The HWS Birthday Event

I could go on and on about thanking you guys but let’s just show my words in an action and so I invite all of you in our special Event on 1st March, around 8PM on HWS EU. I still have to figure out how I combine it with HWS NA maybe. If you have a better date where ALL of you can make it, please let me know in the comments below.

I will also make another announcement about the very details of the Event, so nobody forgets it in 1+ weeks but let me roughly explain my idea or let me tell you how it was last year.

So I don’t know if we reach 80 players participating in the event again challenge accepted but I learned my lessons out of it and try to hopefully improve the performance this time.

The event will take part in 2 turns.

Part 1

Jascha(?) and I will fly in a Party Disco CV in the Event Orbit.
Imagine something like this :grin:

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The CV is Admin Core = invincible except the Disco Ball, where inside is the Core you can and must destroy. (you see already that turrets are useless, manual aiming skill involved)
That Party Disco CV is filled with good stuff I can tell, so make sure to kill us before we reach the Event Planet!

Part 2

Once you were able to do that Jascha and I teleport to the Planet to our Disco Party House POI. We will invite also our Alien buddys to join the party, so your goal is to fight only with your handheld weapons through the Party rooms.
Your DJs Jascha and I will play some “music”, giving you good “vibes” meanwhile.
At the end you have to reach the DJ Party Room and try to kill the DJs :sweat_smile: (we could throw some discs at you as self defense)
But overall, many goodies are waiting for you :slight_smile:

More to be announced…

The future of HWS

As always such Birthdays are also a good time to reflect the past but especially think about the future.

As you know, I had the idea to host more games for the HWS Community, which means we had to pay for 2 month 3 servers:

I tried couple of games out, games I would also like to fiddle around with.
Space Engineers, 7DTD, Rust, Factorio but for now I have to say: sorry, it’s not possible for me to do.

  1. I would definitely need more people helping me out. Empyrion takes all of my time
  2. I don’t want to take away time from Empyrion just now. Empyrion is what HWS stands for and I feel responsible to spend all my dedication and time into it - still.
    Especially because Alpha 12 = HWS 12 will probably be mind blowing…
  3. I have to bring up money and I see honestly no way to get the 210+ Dollars per month for other games for that third server. I don’t want to create a pay to win Rust server or have the time to create an automated HWS Connect + API + other game packages right now.
    So the 2 “wasted” months do hurt a bit but it was still helpful to focus my intention and what I really want.

For those who were excited about HWS expanding to other games: don’t lose hope yet. It is still not out of the window but HWS is still not in the shape that it runs “passively”.
There are urgent topics poking me day and night to finish:

  • HWS Connect redesign
  • All Stargate Missions implemented in EGS HQ
  • HWS Feature + Origins rebalanced and proper implemented

If those 3 things are fully ready, I am relieved and free for new adventures. :slight_smile:

That being said, you can expect quite a lot from HWS in 2020.
My other big goal this year is also something you can help me with:

How can we reach the goal that we keep 170 players for 3 months?

This question is quite big for me right now and I am thinking heavily how we can achieve this as next big goal!
This season already was quite a change to different seasons here and there but I know we can do much much better!
Please, if you think about yourself and what you heard from others: at what point did they stop playing? Especially new players? In relation to HWS of course.
I am sure it’s something trivial we could fix easily IF we only knew it.

That’s it for now, I hope you will be there on the 1st March and see also more gifts from me to you at that day. I plan to prepare quite a lot of other things as well…

Thanks anyways for being around, reading everything and just spending your valuable time on HWS! We, I really appreciate that a lot!

Your HWS Team

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The long life of HWS is a testament to your fantastic work, your originality of ideas, and your resillience and ability to keep the dream alive! :beers:

Congratulations Rex! And thanks to Jascha and all those who have also supported you along the way! :slight_smile: Also thanks to those HWS Patrons who help finance it, and thanks to the amazing players for their participation.

I’ll carry around my fond memories of enormous fights and epic fun forever! :slight_smile:
Best regards,
Wise.

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Congrats on 4 years, and maintaning your dedication to your vision.

In my opinion, the biggest hurdle now, and the coming year is eleon and the direction they have choosen.

As always, wishing you and jascha best success.

Swiss

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Congratulations HWS, you have the best server going for Emp. I play here a lot and its because every 3 months things are different sometimes a lot sometimes a little. Keep changing things up! You will never make everyone happy thats just the way it is.

I see a lot of people play PVE before PVP so I think PVE should be big areas with lots of planets and stuff to do. PVP should be a smaller areas like GG and homeworld. I think smaller areas for PVP will just concentrate where players go to fight afterall they should be looking for that fight. Ultimately people should want to go into PVP to fight, so big rewards for fighting in PVP. A lot of new players go into PVP too early to ninja mine or they are just lost. they get killed and get mad and leave. Let the PVE side players build up their confidence and resources and go into PVP to hunt pirates once they are ready. Some payers may take a long time to PVP so let them have resources and POIs to kill in PVE so they get to know the game well or form factions capable of going against those big organized factions like TAW ABN OP4 and so on that makes it fun for everyone and with lots of resources who cares if your CV gets destroyed!. For the players who just PVE this season is good with so much more playfields so hopefully you keep adding content for them too. I dont see this server as either PVP or PVE I see a lot of players bouncing back and forth and a few staying on one side or the other. The best server needs both to be balanced.

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The HWS crew work diligently to keep this place thriving. Very special thanks for all your efforts @RexXxuS @Jascha @Ju @Hayawen and the rest of the behind the scenes crew that have helped make this our home. It is very much appreciated.

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Just send the noobies to the lobby boot camp. We can teach em how to die. The fun is seeing how long you can live before the next hazard gets you by surprise. The trick is learning what not to do and how to recover when you decide to do it anyway :wink:

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  • I agree that a solid pve set up will keep the new players around longer. (Even though I like to kill them;) )
  • I like how the pvp planets are set up where it takes several pvp warps to get out, makes you feel like you can chase people down, and have to work harder to get away.
  • a thought, not sure if it is a good idea… many people like building bigger things to show off their building skills. Maybe have one pve play field with higher class limits as a show off area… maybe.
  • more poi’s of different types I think is most important. You get board doing the same thing over and over. Maybe have a poi building contest. Even if they aren’t amazing, different is better
  • honestly more people like @Bob will keep more people, he has done an amazing job helping new people in hws chat. Also getting people to use hws discord is cool also.
  • A-12 will change everything, so excited!
  • I hope eleon notices my idea to implement an in game planet terraforming feature. With the new 15k+ systems, we should be able to discover, name, and terraform a planet to our liking. Would be a great end game feature. What do you think @RexXxuS?
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Some great ideas there I really like the POI building contest maybe they become missions or just a planet that you can try them out?

I could see some pois becoming death machines which would be a great challenge!

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We wait u BuS Rex :slight_smile:

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Rexxxus and Jasha wait u at Event
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REDs comming also :slight_smile:

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We are ready to celebrating

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I would be curious to understand why NA didn’t get the same quality event as EU server? The anniversary event on NA was pvp, which meant that the same couple of guilds camped the personal locker and stole everyone’s “rewards.” Great thank you and invitation to new players to see [ABN] and others luring newbies and the unsuspecting into the event to steal the contents of their lockers. I was thinking it was going to be the same as the EU event, so I had half the contents of my personal locker from EU in my bag when I found out the event on NA was pvp…when I was killed in the starting maze…

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EU had a misfire and was PvE, so it was basically a matter of survive the Zirax. It was also much shorter.

The NA Server was setup properly, and Rex let it go for extended hours because he wanted it too or want to go to sleep?

TLDR: EU was a mess up.

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not sure any specific faction should be singled out on this. i know for a fact that an ABN member was trying to help others grab their loot much later in the evening, well after after the prime start time and were met with a TAW member killing noobies trying to get their loot. all in all was PvP event and we all should know the rules of PvP zones by now. i was lucky enough to hop in, dodge the NPCs, zip straight to the personal locker, and quickly teleport back without taking too much damage. those that did not prepare or have an escort should not blame anyone.

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That’s fine. I’m a little triggered, but I’ll be okay. I don’t expect to “get my stuff back” or anything. But when those earnest messages come around about why people don’t stick around (and obviously, I’ll probably stick around, but some don’t)… The response to honest feedback related to situations such as this is always the same (and I’ve been playing for quite a few seasons). I would guess there are at least as many mostly PvE players on the servers as PvP players, and it seems silly to constantly tell them to go eff themselves when you get predictable feedback to things like an anniversary event where most of the PvE players basically walked away empty handed. It’s giving the finger to half of your player base.

You want some honest feedback that is bigger than the event it is this: my friend and I have been gaming together in MMOs for 20+ years. We’ve been playing this game for at least 3 years off and on. We both agree this game has the worst community of any we’ve ever played as far as helping newer / casual players. When you ask a question in chat, you are usually either ignored or given some kind of trolling or sarcastic response. Post critical feedback to the forum, the biggest trolls are the first to respond and taunt you…not just this most recent time.

The PvE vs. PvP economy is so imbalanced that many times the PvP players will leave your stuff because they don’t need your gold, etc. You balk at replacing anything for players who are preyed upon with scamming messages in chat, but you have no problem letting individuals acquire an unthinkable quantity of NPC cores, etc., by placing personal anniversary lockers in the middle of a pvp event. 95% of the server’s gold supply is controlled by a dozen people from the same two guilds. The precious materials are so concentrated that you cannot mine at any time of the day without being attacked by a gang of pvp’ers. You have multiple pvp playfields, but all but two are worthless as far as resources go.

This is constructive feedback. I love the game, and there is nothing that beats HWS and all the work Rex has put into it. I have to shout out to @gareth_8000 of the HWS “Police” who helped this stranded astronaut during the EU event. It is difficult to play on this server solo or with a single friend co-op, which is how I like to do it. The risk of PvP areas teaming with pirates makes this server fun, albeit it would be more fun if they had to look for you a bit and weren’t waiting at the gate/resource nodes every time you entered (you need to spread out the bait a little bit). As I said before, I appreciate the work Rex has put into this, but there is room for constructive feedback.

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This has been a big issue for a long time now. The entire reason behind my starting the discord lobby boot camp. I try to hop in every day to lend a helping hand to those in need. Hop in if anyone is needing assistance, advice, or even a good ball busting. I will be there :grin: