New Zones

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by oplek, Sep 1, 2021.

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  1. oplek

    oplek Avatar

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    Recently, I was hanging out in the overworld, near Central Brittany for 10-15 minutes.

    I was struck by just how ghost-town it felt, despite being surrounded by a zillion POTs. I spotted one person run by.... in the central town-infested region of the map. I suspect this is due to the new zones, and the new continent. Everyone was other there.

    I have maintained that continuing the "episodes" is a mistake. It was conceptualized around a larger team, and a larger playerbase. It no longer makes sense to do. Every new zone, and every new continent, (and every new POT) further subdivides the remaining playerbase.

    ... leaving the episode-1 content population even more sparse, giving a bad impression to new players.

    It's like cosmic inflation, where the galaxies are continually moving away from each other (where the "dark energy" here is, I assume, the Cabalists).

    Development of new zones and continents should wrap up anything in progress, and shift focus to augmenting/improving the existing zones and game mechanisms, to maybe try to have something greater than the sum of its parts, rather than a scattering of disconnected lego pieces.
     
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  2. Anpu

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    I believe the eventual plan is to implement the scene scaling tech for the existing scenes. So far it only scales creatures but nothing else that I’ve seen. Someday (?) when that tech is finally working.

    That may then breathe new life into many of the old existing scenes that are basically abandoned because the creatures and resources nodes there just aren’t worth it/too low.
     
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  3. Violet Ronso

    Violet Ronso Avatar

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    Isn't this the consequence of having 1000 different types of teleports allowing us to ignore the Overworld completely? I don't think the addition of scenes is the culprit here, I think the laziness of our past has led to this very specific result.

    To death with the teleports! #MakeTheOverworldGreatAgain!
     
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  4. macnlos

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    Actually this is not the case. It is not because we are lazy... It's because Portnip implemented the game in away that a) requires a lot of transitions, and b) the transition delays were brutal. Overworld to Town, Town to Basement, Basement to House, House to Dungeon, Dungeon to House, Sieges, the passes, etc...

    I said a long time ago that when they put in the option that you could bypass the Passes and Sieges that it was wrong. It was an admission that their implementation with the transitions had failed. Now, because of that failure, they have taken the problem of low populations and made it appears even worse by spreading it out. Remember when Sieges were created as a counterbalance for the Devotionals? You place a devotional and you attract the Cabalists. Then they just said... well... you can skip that now.

    Someone was talking about Parasitic Systems, systems that don't contribute to the main focus of the game and can be removed with very little to no impact to the game. When they removed the requirement of going through Sieges they basically made Sieges parasitic. Other than some nod to the narrative... they could simple be removed and the game would continue on. In fact, why don't they just remove it and make some static map area for those that want to hit them up.
     
  5. Time Lord

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    @oplek , I haven't seen this mentioned in the thread, so I'm asking what I think is the most relevent question before we begin compaining about how many other players we see in-game.

    • How large or small is your friends list?

    I ask because the larger your friends list is the more people on the map or anywhere you will see.

    How many you see also depends on which online mode they are playing in.

    It's a player's choice many times, of whether or not they want to see you in game or not.

    To my knowlege player friend player matching was never taken out of the game.

    You may get a random sighting, or a certian number of sightings.

    That part of our programing hasn't been mentioned much since it's implementation.

    One of my characters "TimeLord" has a large list, while my other accounts remain generally friendless and I can tell the diffference between them.

    One of my accounts only plays in online privet and has no friends and that chr sees no one unless I'm out of privet mode joining hunting parties.

    I often times wonder about our matching system and what's become of it. I don't think it's ever been modified or changed. Yet, if we did have open sight of everyone, this would endanger our game opening it up to group politics ruling playerbase. There's some clicks in-game and if those clicks decided to turn on our game, our game would suffer. So I'm sort of happy such social power isn't collectable here.

    It's only collectable for or against individual players because gossip is nasty stuff ;)

    [​IMG]
    ~Time Lord~
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2021
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  6. Alley Oop

    Alley Oop Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    to my knowledge, that was never implemented, only planned. for the forced multi scenes like towns and overworld, new instances should only be spawning when the existing ones are full or possibly for a version mismatch.
     
  7. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    I see sometimes glimmers of players who I've nevr or rarely seen before, yet have great skills. Maybe they are playing in "online privet mode" allot and like me, sometimes don't.
    It's a ptty if it wasn't, Dallas took allot of good psy classes :)
    ~Time Lord~
     
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  8. Scanphor

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    Yeah that's right - I frequently pass people on overworld that are not in my friends list (I also frequently prune that list of people who are always online in "hide location" mode :p )
     
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  9. Time Lord

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  10. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    I've been playing a lot the past month because for the first time in ages, I can actually do cool stuff and don't feel so completely useless as a solo player who is only AL 90.

    Having said that, on average I see anywhere between 12-20 people online from my friends list and it is easily in the hundreds (I friend anyone who asks, cause why not?). Now, many of those on my friends list have since moved on but still, I've never seen more than 35 active from my list. However, I do see a lot of random players out and about who aren't on my friends list and I seem to bump into @Elwyn all the time :). I think that's a good sign!

    I'm 50/50 on this because the new zones on Mistrendur (sp?) are great. At least, I am enjoying them, given that I can actually survive in them now. Yet, you're right that there are a lot of lower tier zones that go way underutilized in Novia. As someone who cares about quests, lore and the story I think there is a lot of merit to your idea of leveraging older zones to continue the story, given the small size of the development team. I would have to imagine that it is a lot easier to "revamp" an old scene than to create a brand new one.

    100% this. The transitions are brutal and I am constantly thinking of ways to minimize them in order to get to what I want to do. If they suddenly took those away, it would definitely hamper my desire to play.
     
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  11. Violet Ronso

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    You know what, the more I think about it, the more I come to disagree with this. Yes, load times were terrible back then, I'll give you that, BUT traveling from one zone to another was very short, I mean a quick sprint across the world map and under 30 seconds you've traveled the whole land. Meanwhile, take the majority of other games, and traveling from point A to point B can take a VERY long time, games like World of Warcraft added Griffons or stuff like that to "fast travel", but these fast travel "vehicles" could still take a couple minutes sometimes, we just traded sightseeing from the back of a bird for a loading screen, not as nice, but the end result is the same.

    So I think my argument still stands, players wanted a rulebook, to be able to constantly Teleport at the doorstep of every activity they desired, but got Teleport to zone scrolls instead, I still think this is a lazy behavior, and is the cause for our lack of activity on our world map.
     
  12. Lazlo

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    They should just put the entire game inside of a forced multiplayer single story row basement. Then it would really crackle with life energy.
     
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  13. Violet Ronso

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    Please not, I was hyperventilating last time we were 5 at the same crafting pavilion! :confused:
     
  14. Beaumaris

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    Yes, the overland map can be looked at as the first feature to allow us to skip zones. Given its small size and speed of travel, essentially it acts like an inefficient teleporter of sorts more than it does as a platform for true exploration or socialization.

    But the scenes are where the real game happens. And the number of scene transitions remains the root cause for needing that. I think Macnlos is right in that regard.
     
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  15. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    I mean, they could do this by just adding a lot of Overworld encounters, maybe some with bosses and special "only here" loot. Now, where did they put that dragon that was hanging outside Brittany one day?
     
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  16. Barugon

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    Encounters are one of the reasons that I avoid the overworld.
     
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  17. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    While not wrong, wouldn't a better approach maybe be to make them rare occurrences that hold special mean, forcing us to hunt one down if we wanted? I've no idea how to accomplish that other than RNG. In fact, that works...RNG, because we all know the feeling of not getting something we want on a loot roll. :)
     
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  18. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    LOL, well, then stop running your Avatar into one. :) With a horse or just a speed buff you can avoid them all, no?
     
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  19. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    This is definitely something that they should focus on in the coming months. I can't tell you how many level 2, 3 or 4 zones I haven't visited AT ALL. I imagine some of them hold little nuggets of treasure, but meh. I don't generally like to roll-stomp through a zone.
     
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  20. Owsley

    Owsley Bug Hunter

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    They actually had that with Troll’s Bridge. People would gather and run to the next troll to spawn. Then they removed it and made it just another adventure scene instead of an encounter.
     
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