Used to enjoy getting on there and making Brodgars every time the world reset. When it was 2D I still enjoyed it juuust enough to put up with the 4-chan-ish player base and the devs. 3D finally killed it for me I guess.
You were talking about some changes in the community. Did pay to play do anything in that regard? Is that still a thing?
Yeah, pay to play changed. previously, free users had X amount of hours to play per week, with paying members having unlimited time. That was done away with entirely. In the current system, everyone has unlimited play time, with paying subscribers recieving about a 30% bonus on experience and LP gained.
For the most part, I would contribute the community shift to the age of the world, along with the kingdoms update. after the excitement and fun of the first few months, everything calms down alot. As for the kingdom update, each member of a kingdom gives a passive 'tax' of experience to the kingdom, so now large factions have a reason to protect the commoner, opposed to just raiding and ganking.
I have played HaH several times over the years, but could never get into it. Previously, yeah, the community sucked. Anyone who was stronger than anyone else would kill you just to raid the resources on your corpse, and with the permadeath you'd lose everything. That totally sucked. If you were offline for more than a few hours before you could stake a claim, then you'd likely end up losing everything in your camp as well, which was just as bad.
Not to mention the sheer amount of time it took to do everything. I like crafting and survival games, but theres a limit to how long I can sit there and stare at a screen while waiting for things to happen. Oh, and lugging stuff around was horrendous.
The final off-put though was the cash shop. Purchasing in-game silver for money in order to buy things needed to set up a house and whatnot was just crazy. Especially with the risk of someone coming along to kill you afterwards to take the silver and whatever else you had bought. Unless you were a bandit in a big group, you were basically screwed.
It's even worse when you're a solo player like myself who likes to dig into the meat of games. I want to be able to get into everything~
Anyway, end of rant there. Lol. If I hear that HaH has gotten better, I may give it another go.
As i've said previously, a lot of mecahnisms that enabled raiding + murdering have been changed. walls cannot be bashed down by hand for instance. in fact, it takes about 24 RL hours for a wall to be bashed down, so raiders must be _very_ invested to get into your base.
As for the cash shop, there is none. You're thinking of Salem. Nothing in game except cosmetic hats can be bought with real currency.