Owl's Head looks like a homeless shelter

You know Smack - I have to agree with you. Drocis thank you , but from this day forward when I see you .... I think I may be joining the chant line.. it is nice to greet people by the nicknames they offer you or if they have a song .. ~grins~ Your right Smack, he so did it to himself

 

Hi Krellian and welcome. Oh smack beat me to it. So as he said you'll see their homes,
and you will see the games progression, you just wont' see other people. Right now
well at least last release and before you could zone to a person who is single player online
mode and they will see you and vice versa lol. That's cool to me though for pre alpha.

 

The City of Penshire will have at least 312 Row lots, not because I wanted to limit players ability to put throne of bones stacks on their front yards, but that is a welcome byproduct of my town layout decision.

I don't think this is such a big deal however. Variety is the spice of life, and as annoying as some of these player decorations can be, it's no more or less annoying than seeing the exact same knight house take over an entire landscape. I think we can relax knowing that birds of a feather will flock together and people will self regulate by moving to live around players with shared values and tastes.

 

There are restrictions already both on housing, and on what players can do in the game. For housing, you won't be able to stack objects miles high. I'm guessing you won't be able to plant crops on top of a carpet. For player behavior, they're greatly restricting open PvP, disallowing you from stealing someone else's loot, and disallowing you to move things on a person's lot without permission.

Saying there won't be restrictions in the game is just silly.

 

You read what I said completely out of context.

If you read the thread this is more to do with 'hiding' certain housing types or restricting the number housing types. this is to do with preventing players from putting 'junk' outside their houses because some players don't like it.

So now read back into what I said. For clarity sake........Is it likely for housing types to be restricted so a player cant place the same house as his neighbour?....I think the answer is no. Is it likely that there will be a clunky work around so that all houses will appear as something different from what they actually are in order please god knows how many different people with different tastes?......I think the answer will be no. Is it likely that there will be a restriction to stop a player making a double layered chessboard with some steps?......You guessed it, I think the answer is no.

 

I don't see the thread being about a single type of solution; its a complaint about a problem.

Some type of restrictions might be unreasonable restrictions on player freedom -- and just a matter of taste you have to put up with -- and others might be reasonable restrictions -- like not being able to stack things miles high. I don't necessarily agree with you that everything would be in the first category, that every restriction is unreasonable.

But I don't see people in the thread really discussing this on a practical level.

 

I would say that the OP was very much interested in searching for practical solutions:

My personal view are that there are no solutions on the multi-player level that are actually very practical in order to solve a very subjective observation.

 

While I do feel that some of the wackier lot decorating I've seen over the past few releases is less than pleasing to the eye, shall we say, I also feel that a large part of it is due to the current 'because I can' mentality. For example, right now anyone who gets hold of a village lot in-game can place a Knight's mini-castle on it if they choose and thus we see unfeasible rows of the things cluttering the dirt tracks of small villages. When the game goes live only those people who have purchased a Knight-level pledge or above will be able to place this style of home, so I suspect we'll see much less of this kind of thing.

The same goes for the lot decorations - I think that we see a lot of unusual things because people are pushing the boundaries and trying to find out what's possible. Just how high can you stack Oracle heads? How many Thrones of Bone can you fit onto one lot? What happens if I stack up all these things and then remove the bottom one? The mazes are a good example of this sort of thinking. I know a lot of people don't like them, but they are a good way of testing things like item limits and how much difficulty a crowded lot causes for other players due to graphical issues and so on. The creativity on display in some of these decorating efforts is really quite outstanding, regardless of whether or not you'd want to live next to it.

Again, I think that when the game goes live we'll see much less of the crazy stuff. People who are happy to fill their lot with 'junk' at the moment may not wish to actually live in a home like that once it's going to be their permanent residence. Oracle heads are something that have to be purchased from the Add On Store (possibly also available in-game in some way, I don't know) so we should also see fewer of those, and similar logic probably applies to some other items we see huge stacks of right now.

Whilst I would definitely prefer, personally, to see nicely-decorated lots, I realise that my concept of 'nicely-decorated' might not match someone else's. Player town owners would be able to impose their own views on their residents to a large extent, but outside of that players will have free rein to decorate as they wish. I really hope that people will not end up placing a dozen lighthouses along one stretch of coast, or six identical houses in a row, or spell out 'Buy my stuff!' in apples on their lawn, but if they do then I'll just have to sigh and pass them by. As others have said, in many cases it's just a matter of personal taste.

Whilst in the real world there can be restrictions on style and colour to avoid duplication and entire streets looking the same (I work in the construction industry so I know this first hand), or bylaws regarding what you can keep in your yard, I'm not sure that Portalarium would consider it reasonable or practical to enforce similar rules on their lot-owning player base in the name of variety or aesthetics. Perhaps they might choose to impose a few rules before launch, but we'll just have to wait and see! It seems to me that the team really enjoys the creativity of their players and seeing what they can achieve with the tools and objects they are given, so I wouldn't expect them to stifle that too much. I think we'll all just have to learn to live and let live.

 

I agree with most of this on the surface, but not the title. I hope this wont turn into Minecraft or Second Life. But at the same time, I like the player freedom. I was thinking that it might work better if lots required houses of the size that fit on them, but I don't know...

 

You have echoed my thoughts most eloquently!

 

anyone been to Detroit lately?

 

Back to the topic of the OP.

To the old farts... who remembers Alpha world way back then? Owls Head is starting to look like this. I love art but geesh I thought I was playing Shroud of The Avatar not Minecraft?

Sorry but this is visually ugly and a total immersion killer. City/Town/Village lots should have the same set of rules as the Row Lots and offer some temp housing with exterior item limits? I have a row house and cant put more than 8 or so items out front?

Give me a ghetto house over hot tubs suspended 20 meters in the air

 

Just putting my 2c in since everyone else has. I think it's great! Pre-alpha is a wonderful time to test the decoration systems by making the craziest things you can think of. I loved playing jumping games on Mahna Mahna's parkour course, and Karrin Murphy's house made out of walls and chess boards is fantastically creative use of the small resources we have available. Kudos to the decorators in Owl's Head, you guys rock!

 

How will you feel if it is like that when it is released....which was really my point.

 

This wouldn't happen if you showed everyone how to make enough gold, then everyone could put up a highrise building... Blocking the sun completely, like SF or NYC or Chicago.... You could always allow outside lighting (at a monthly fee) and make this town look like Las Vegas...

 

Owl's Head looks like crap... but who am I to judge so do I I just spend less time in the areas that I don't like and more time hunting/gathering. I do believe (hope) that there will be less junk yards after release though, Still it's not the end of the world.

 

I don't think earning capacity is an issue here. If you can afford the lot you can afford house.

 

Yea, especially because of the limited availability of lots.

Right now I have a lot in Ravensend, and for R12 there was a stress test, so everybody -- myself included -- junked up our lots with all sorts of piles of things. It was a stress test, and this is pre-alpha, so no sweat. However, though one could certainly hope against it, there's no reason why all your neighbors couldn't do the same thing in the release game -- simply because they don't care.

Now, lets say the only lots I find in the final game are by neighbors like this... I might skip getting a lot altogether, deciding its not worth it. It will be the same exact problem that existed in UO. In UO, I built up some money to buy a lot, in the end I found only really crappy lots, in bad locations, that the neighbors made even worse locations. Once I bought the lot, now I realized I would have to raise some money to build the house that I wanted. I just gave up -- I decided it wasn't worth doing. I got rid of my lot and converted it back to gold. That was even though I looked forward using the lot for role-playing purposes, simply because I thought it was a waste of time. So the community lost someone who wanted to role-play in favor of people who didn't want to role-play.

Which certainly didn't help the game.

 

See, you get the point of my topic....it isn't about taking away someones artistic ability...it's about stopping those that just don't care.

 

I think it's a false argument that people whose lots are really horrible are that way because of aesthetic preference.