230 Dots "POTs"

230 dots is cool!

 

oops yes you are right, sorry for the confusion. No wonder I was confused.

 

The more Ultima VII something will be, the less-sandbox it will be in my opinion. Sandbox can be a good thing, but it can be a bad thing. UO was too sandbox for my taste, there were zero Ultima style quests in UO and as far as I know it is still the case. Single player games have structure, we haven't been introduced to the NPC quests in SotA so far as far as I can see. Other than the Grand Tours. RG is holding back the lore quests so no one grinds them to death before launch day. He wants it to be a surprise I'm sure. Which for those that aren't fans of the testing process will assume this is the entire game. Now, I too am waiting for a single player game w/ online features. The single player side has been held back purposefully. The story has less to do with mechanics and doesn't need to be tested by the masses.

 

I agree for the most part, however the world needs a lot of work to make it more...interactive. It just doesn't feel like npc's are alive.

 

I am not saying don't question it or discuss. Thing is POTs are in the game and they won't ruin the game but add to it. New people will not know all of what is going on here. Yes some details get pointed out as to how they function and improved on and on. Some people request more things and abilities for their player owned towns. Fine request away and discuss away, but I am not saying this to you especially, but remembering while doing this we have them and we will have them and they are not going away. They don't have to be a horrible blight on the game and can just be part of the game in positives to having more game to play and that could be by players providing content that provides more to do and see and be outside of the part of the game that is developer added and then there is more content to do player made, since the developers said they want to give us tools to do that. Imagine the mysteries and interesting stuff. Ok now I'm leaving lol Thanks.

 

Imagine how a person will feel when they put a house in someone's PoT and he get's booted with no notice....because right now that is possible.

 

Albion Online looks exactly like DOTA, HON, HOTS. Very non-Ultima. It isn't even an MMORPG. Now SotA isn't an MMORPG, but it's more MMO than Albion which looks like a tiny map, tiny tiny battles, rinse repeat. I'm sorry but there is zero Ultima in that game from what I can see other than it's vaguely medieval yet very cartoony. SotA is a million times more Ultima than that game will ever be. By Ultima I refer to Ultima I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIIPart2,VIII,IX and I even throw UO in there. But UO doesn't consist of 99% of what Ultima means to me. It's closer to 1/16th, 6.25% of what Ultima means to me. I can tell UO is 99% of what Ultima means to you which is fine, but even by those standards I can't see any connection to UO and Albion, that game isn't even in the same universe or dimension as UO.

 

I see the problems with that as well. I mean, I have no idea how it will play out. We will have to see. I guess you have to really get to know the town owner, I'm sure there are a lot of great town owners. But, some may want to kick you out if you don't want to pay the new rent fees, will there be month to month contracts like the vendors in UO? I wonder. I have no idea how the POT mechanics work, I didn't even know there was a POT section to these forums heh.

 

And why would he get booted? We don't monitor our residence in Wizards Rest. Someones house fell yesterday, but he is still a resident and can just replace anywhere he would like that has an open lot. POTs are not nightmares that might happen. The developers made it so it is to your benefit to keep your towns fuller which will balance out negatives, plus I'm sure more things from the posts out there will be put in place, so success in the discussion will happen. Players in towns mostly come and go and do what anyone else would do in the game, no one is micromanaging, unless it were that type of town that wants to micromanage, which ours isn't. So if someone wants to live in a town without rules and deco rules and taxes, that is ours. Oh well continue on to help the game.

 

Yes, that's the actual design that was stated in the beginning and even at the first Duke and LOTM round table discussion that we were both at. Not only would PRTs start off empty, but they would be hidden around the world for players to discover and possibly stay hidden until it grew to a certain population and activity level to show up on the overworld map. It's like they threw that out that idea and both literally and figuratively "sold out" the goodwill idea of Player Towns as a means for crowdfunding. Just like some politician taking big money in exchange for favors, Portalarium is now beholden to the very few with questionable ideas at the expense of the many.

 

Mighty strong convictions there regarding how much sway players who own towns have...

It couldn't be that the ideas implemented by the Devs are their own ideas, and it just so happens to include PoTs and other things you don't like. It must be the influence of the players who spent money on a feature. Clearly...

 

Yes.

Edit: Sorry for the sarcasm in that earlier post. It's like oxygen to me.

 

I'll look, but my gut tells me it was Starr who announced them to us.

 

Not only did they come up with it. They could've come up with it 2 years ago. And they could've been inspired by my 1st SotA guild "BOTs" lol

http://banditsoftheshroud.tumblr.com/

jk.

obsolete guild. but that post, being the only BOTs post I made I mention this...

"I’m also really looking forward to the underground catacombs city as mentioned by Tracy Hickman in today’s video-cast.

* As for an underground city
- Perhaps Mage/Necromancer/Hierophant themed cities
- Skull themed cities
- Pentagram themed cities, pagans, perhaps forbidden magic practitioners.

I wouldn’t want giant underground cities, just simple usable realistic ones, limited number of shop-keepers etc. Potential housing plots was mentioned for the newly discussed underground city, this would be an amazing place to place a plot (especially if you roleplayed a character who has a morbid underground type of personality, such as Mortegro from Serpent Isle).

--- April 12th 2013"

 

Hmmm well sorry if you've had a bad experience or got caught up in negativity regarding POTS. No worries I'm sure most pot owners are really nice. You don't have to live in a pot but they will host events have quests etc, vendors, etc since this game is being made with the player getting tools to create as much as possible, there will be a lot of that , but it is your choice of course. I think our town has extra nice people in it. I haven't meant anyone rude in the game yet.

 

It absolutely is reasonable to believe it was because of sway of players who advocated for POTs. In March 2014 and April 2014 I attended both of the Duke and Lord of the Manor round table discussions in Austin. At both round tables the idea of POTs were brought up in one way or another and not only was it not remotely hinted at, but the the whole idea was shot down as it basically meant "feature creep" as they needed to work on finishing episode 1....their words, not mine.

A little over a month later in April, the idea of POTs for sale was brought up with them being a apart of 20k, 30K, 50K pledge tiers beyond Lord of the Manor. That idea was dropped as it was ridiculous along with other ideas of like POTs being able to ban players as the Devs agreed it was too exploitable and negative.

In June 2014, POTs were announced and started selling. 18 months into development and nearly 3 months after they were regarded as feature creep and were not a glimmer of an idea they were suddenly a new feature.

Since then, the role, features and abilities of POTs has grown month by month. Countless time and crowdfunding money has been spent on them. Don't get me wrong, the premise of Player Towns is great, but what has been done here developing them is a lot of unforced errors.

 

Since POTS are an online feature, it makes no sense whatsoever to have any references to POTS in the Single Player Offline mode as they technically wouldn't exist. Anything from NPC dialogues to books with references to POTS in the offline mode is going to look really out of place. For those who will never touch the MMO part of this game, they will probably be left puzzled by those references.

 

Yeah, I enjoy both purely single player RPGs or Co-op or full blown MMOs just the same. They're all worthy of their unique experiences.

Possibly, but that doesn't mean the single player has to die off. We have Elder Scrolls 1-5, Fallout 1-4, Witcher 1-3, Deus Ex series, and many many more, all of which lived side by side with its evolutionary brethren, as you would put it.

But yeah, in regards to SotA, Richard has been trying to make this game kind of game since 1996.

 

Yeah. I'm sure EA put a lot of pressure on OSI to crank out a good game with minimal budget. Anyone who has read the stories knows EA thought UO as a side tiny little project and didn't give it much respect until the money started flowing in from beta disc sales. But the deadlines and major publisher restrictions would be a theory I would propose as to why UO had no questing, no quests at all, yet the framework for potential quests was there, it was never executed, the quests were left up to the imagination of the players. But such a sandbox environment, unless you have the imagination of Tom Hank's character in the movie Mazes & Monsters it can be a difficult questless journey. I hope for the best, and hope SotA is filled with quests.

But to focus on the POT topic... UO had POTs, but they were simply random houses in the forest. To customize a POT reminds me of Odyssey Online, people probably think I'm dissing SotA when I compare it to OO, but OO was fun in it's simplicity. The only Custom housing/POTs that existed were made for friends of the owner/creator of the game. So to have the opportunity to customize a POT in SotA might be a rare one, I wonder if Episode 2 will have POTs, who knows they might not exist in as great a quantity in episode 2.

 

Awesome video, I've never seen this one. It does sound like he's describing SotA.