Poll: What is more important? Housing or meaningful quest and choices with real consequences?

Yeah well with the difference that this is advertised as RPG and not as the Sims go medieval-steampunk online.

 

And still housing is a big part of roleplaying for many players, too. They are playing their role and having a suitable home and/or shop nicely decorated is part of their roleplaying experience as well...

 

Then the housing system maybe should have been done differently. Housing just in POTs or in some special housing-areas...
That it now has such a negative effect on choices and consequences, the quests, the story, the sieges etc. is too big a compromise imho.

 

Ffs we are not talking about lasting dmg to player property or something.
All we talk about is a little phasing to fluff up the world.
Really, everybody should be able to deal with it if his or her shop looks dmged every two weeks or so.
I am really not able to grasp the problem with that.

 

Great idea - I could live with this too. Externally every house would look something like this :



Inside, everything will be fine.

If you don't want to break your immersion of a town in flames - don't go into a player house.

 

I don't see why a wow-style (uh, that guy used that evil three letters again) instancing-system won't work here? If you are participating in an event that burns down a city, it's burned down for you... for everyone else there is no change, until they do that event, too...

That would work for me. But you should consider that much decoration is outside. That might cause some technical/graphical issues. That's why I propose an event-based instancing instead of a global one.

 

Darkmoon, you are awesome

 

You"re right - that is a big problem. And the pets

 

Rephrasing the question:
Whats more important to you:
40 hours of story gameplay or thousends of hours sandbox gameplay?
Dead towns after ending the story or towns filled with Avatars?

 

A nice world without a story is the same with a great story in a dull world... both not truely worth it, in my opinion. There needs to be a way to get both.

 

on the other hand UO had no story whatsoever and is doing very well basically two decades later based on player interaction alone.

 

It didn't work for everyone though (not for me for example) and SotA got that "story driven" thingy in it's game-description. So having the story drive the game experience forward seems to be part of the big plan here. So the devs (and we) have to face the task of finding a way satisfying for both parties here.

 

Yeah but this had two decades time to evolve, wasn't advertised as story driven rpg.... And let's be honest: those times are over. Usually the audience needs a little more entertainment than back in these days where the pure thrill of playing online was enough.

 

So long as we're being honest I don't think it's fair to say that UO is over when a freeshard has over 10,000 uniques per year logging in and can pull 800 players in to a weekend event without really advertising it beforehand.

As it stands, SotA has planned multiple episodes of a main storyline, which to me indicates the intention of a slow drip of storyline infused with an open world sandbox MMO. It's realistic. It fits the description. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to wake up every day and be immediately immersed in an epic, world saving adventure, being lead into various sieges by Lord British himself, but that's just not realistic. Can you imagine how left out people would feel who work for a living?

 

That's impressive for a free shard.
But a joke compared to 'real' mmos out there.
It's a niche and that's all cool and stuff.
But if SotA picks a niche it shouldn't pick the one blocked by UO ;-)

Sure. I fully agree.
But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about phasing to simulate lasting consequences.

 

Relative to the size of the map, it's as big as it can be. There's only so many housing plots, for example. They've even had to add new maps for housing to accommodate the size of the playerbase. 30 vs 30 field pvp battles every weekend for the last 4 years with a steady stream of new players. You can't ask for more than that. It also has real consequences. Like losing a pet that costed 20 mill lol if you're not careful, or at the very least your gear and dignity. If they turned SotA into a 3d version of UO:R era UO I can't imagine why anyone over the age of 12 wouldn't immediately drop those 'real' MMO's you mentioned for it.

 

So was your last poll just not getting you the response you wanted so you had to create this biased and sensationalized poll instead? Why not a third question of 'I want a balance where I can enjoy creating my space in the world and think that isn't mutual exclusive to fun and enjoyable quests'?

 

Sounds like a good call by the moderators.

No surprises there.

You really have no idea what funded this game in the first place, do you? Also, most people want both, not either/or, which is the usual diatribe of those with an agenda.

 

Like it or not, there are a lot of people who backed this game that did so purely (or at least mostly) for the social/housing/decorating/etc portions. And, for the most part, the majority of people that will buy items in the add-on store come from that group.

When you look at it like that, the apparent priorities in SotA are not really surprising. Portalarium has painted themselves into a not-very-enviable corner of always having to scrape more funds out of the players.

 

hilarious double-negatives aside, you're probably right.

meme's have no place on the internets, especially when there's precious debating to do.