Add POTs to "mail" quest

In an effort to get more traffic moving in and out of POTs, I suggest we add POTs as destinations for the starting mail quests. This would help build awareness of POT locations.

 

Isn't that already the case? I was told POT's only need to talk to @kyzn and provide a post office to be in the loop. Perhaps I am wrong as I don't have much first hand info.

 

That's a pretty good idea. If all PoTs are going to have a generic banker NPC then it would be worthwhile giving them repeatable delivery quests. It would increase foot traffic and also serve to give newer players a source of revenue.

 

That's a player run mail service, Drocis is referring to the mail quests that rewards the player with a sum of gold for delivering a mail package between NPC town criers.

 

Thanks @Lained, I stand corrected.

 

What's the best way to find a town crier in any big time beside playing where's waldo? Town guards don't seem to be much help for this.

 

Generally we try to avoid having in-game quests point to player-owned towns because of issues involving lore (many PoT owners have lore surrounding them that conflicts with SoTA's storyline) and percieved favoritism (the second could rapidly be a nightmare - if you send a mailquest to Newtown, why not Newerville?).

 

I'll check on this. Which town specifically does "where is the town crier" not work in?

 

Sure, but since every player owned town has a town crier, why not all of them?

Isn't it basically just a matter of filling up the database with POT names?

 

Is there is a logistical problem though? So I go to the town crier for a mail quest, and see a list of 250 POTs, with multiple mail delivery questions for each? Seems like it could be a bit much? Then post a mail request for each player, and could the system be overwhelmed? I guess the list of available quests could be truncated, to just the mail waiting the longest, but then wouldn't everyone complain that they cannot see their posted mail quest? And how long would some wait? Would you ship mail using a clogged in game system that didn't provide certainty on when the mail would arrive?

 

Right now there are 4 NPC towns that one can deliver mail to. Why would it be hard to have 400 towns in that list? I mean all you're doing is going from one town crier to another. If we wanted to keep it regional, we could do that too. That way someone isn't delivering mail from Ardoris to Rats Nest and having to travel through 3 control points.

Who cares that it's a POT or not? The mail quest itself has nothing to do with anything involving the lore.

 

Ardonis was one of them. The phrase I used was "where is the town crier?"

 

Because that would mean 400 new items in the game specifically to support those mail routes. Each mail package for a town is unique.

That doesn't mean it's not doable, it does mean you basically are getting a world builder (most likely me) to spend a couple of hours doing nothing but making mail packets. This should have a good payoff!

There are players who do not want to enter a POT and will complain if a quest sends them there.

 

Thanks, I'll look into it. It's an easy fix (and for Ardoris I think specifically the town crier was added well after the rest of the town NPCs)

 

I think once the team bit the bullet and decided to have PoTs, they committed to including them as part of the game's story. Since every town has a town crier, and that's where we go for these mail quests, it makes sense to include all towns in this process. I'm all for making it more difficult to distinguish NPCs from players, and I think making it more difficult to distinguish player towns from NPC towns is a major part of that process.

One challenge with this idea is that the offline game will not have any PoTs.. and since stories and quests will be in both online and offline play, it may be in Portalarium's best interests to keep PoTs 'out of the loop' at least for Episode 1. Perhaps work could be done to integrate them into Offline quests and such for future episodes though.

 

As someone who works on the game's story: no, we absolutely did not.

Players who own POTs make their own story. We do not interfere in that, but it does mean that they have perspectives and views that diverge from the story we want to tell. There is a help popup that appears the first time you enter a POT that tells you precisely this.

 

Fair enough. I don't know if it's worth that kind of time. I'm surprised that it's a manual process though. It really "feels" like it would be a database column that had a bunch of towncrier's in it. It seems like this would have the same code just duplicated in every town. I'm not doubting you, I'm just explaining why I thought this would be a lot easier and a lot less time than you've stated.

I totally agree that if we did this it should have a better payoff than sucking up all your time working on a mail quest.

You could give them the ability to opt out of the POT mail runs if they wanted to.

There is also the issue of pvp POTs that would need to be opted out of too, although I'd argue that going there should be greater reward than just 75 gold.

 

Okay. So PoTs are officially to be ignored by all who are interested primarily in the story and quest lines. Got it. I think that's a strange stance to take, but I'll make note of it and avoid them from here on out then. Wow, I didn't see that coming.

 

He's not saying that. He's saying that the main story line is devoid of POTs.

POTs exist in the game, they just don't connect directly to the main story. That's all. They're not to be avoided, you should just understand that they don't represent official canon related to the main story. There are actually NPC's that will mention POTs and how they dislike them. But there are not NPC's that will tell you, "go to Pax Lair and find Winfield and if he gives you some fish bring it back here and I'll pay you X for it".

 

Considering that POTs don't exist in single-player offline mode, for that reason alone it's a necessary decision. (And what Drocis said is also accurate)