Enhancements for Dynamic POTs - ideas?

So what you are saying if I understand you correctly is that by opting to make all players walk everywhere within your POT, you would be putting yourself at an economic disadvantage, and the best way to address the imbalance is to force
all players to walk across every POT?

Sorry, but just like the virtue system, your actions have consequences that affect you. Lots of players are very enthusiastic about the idea of having POT teleport tiles, and the choice should fall to individual town owners regarding whether or not they want to use them.

 

My view is that if teleport tiles / magic portals are the only thing the devs offer in terms of helping POT owners with distances and empty spaces, every POT will end up using them, because that's all there would be available. Plus, they'll also be pressured to use them, and it won't be optional anymore, but a necessity.

IMO, devs should consider other solutions first.

Also, with any solution, devs should consider to what extent it would work. Could you place two transports? Or twenty? Or a hundred?

 

No, what i'm saying is that opting to make all players teleporting around POTs you're lowering the convenience standards and creating a huge gap between Pots that have them and pots that doesn't have them. Just because you call it an "option" doesn't mean it's one. What i pointed out is to find alternate ways that favor the roleplaying spirit of the game to overcome that flaw design. Dont point your false dichotomies at me please.

Just like the virtue system, humility should be shown acknowledging that you are just pro fast travel and i'm not, instead of posing it as a totally objective matter that would improve the game. Your actions would be good for those that are pro fast travel and bad for those that aren't, that's why we're discussing our opinions and not actually debating facts. That accounts for honesty. I won't repeat myself about the optional nonsense, call that my lack of humility if you want.

Lots of players are very enthusiastic about many things and (luckily) that's not enough to put a mechanic in game.

 

Sorry KuBa, but I think we are going to just have to agree to disagree on this one, I genuinely think that this mechanic would add convenience and not detract from it. I kind of get what you are saying about POT's who don't use teleport pads being at a commercial disadvantage, but that disadvantage would be through their choice since they would always have the option to use the tiles themselves. We already have POT's without overland access and POT's with overland access, so it's not like we are dealing with a level playing field, where some sort of sanctified trade equality exists that needs to be preserved.

I am not specifically pro or anti fast travel, but I am pro user experience, and I think this would create a better user experience, and improve the usability of POTs.
I also don't see how travel by magic detracts from RP experience in a world where we can shoot lightning out of our fingertips and resurrect the dead, IMO it adds to it.

 

This is what i was trying to imply when i said that we were expressing our opinions, and i didn't tried to imply that mine was objectively right. We could never agree in the first place because we are talking about the game each of us want, and we clearly want different things. The only real, objective fact in our discussion was our disagreement, so you could say i already agreed silently on that.

To end this i just want to say that under the principle of subjectivity i'm exposing my points with the same goal as yours; to improve user experience. It's just that i'm thinking on my user experience and the rest that think like me. You are suggesting a way to improve the usability of POTs that goes with the user experience you want, i'm defending other. You don't see teleports as an RP detractor because you're valuing convenience over the possibilities of a journey, while i do the opposite... and not because it's magic, but because of what that kind of magic would take away from the user experience i think would be good for the game. Once again, this is not about suspension of disbelief or immersion, this is about options, opportunities, and expectations.

People are used to say that "agree to disagree" thing here. I prefer to say "let's understand why we don't agree". Believe me when i say I understand you. I hope you can understand me.

 

Good discussion on pros and cons ideas to the Teleport ideas. Teleport tools/deco is only one idea of MANY ideas brainstormed in this thread. So let's keep the brainstorming going. We can break off a discussion thread for more detailed discussion on a particular item if needed, like we did for the Gustball pre-fab design. Thanks!

 

i want food trucks. at my house. so i dont' have to go far when playing sota.

wait, wrong thread..my bad!

how about the ability for multiple biomes within a town? like exterior be a tropical island, and interior be swampland, or forest, or a big frickin lake as an asset to modify the town? yeah, i wanna noviaform (like terraforming, but on novia!) the ground as i see fit, fill in with extra dirt to make hills, pave to flatten it out, dig pits... when mounts come in, i want to be able to make a dirt racetrack with hills valleys etc like bmx/motocross races..

how about the ability to set part of the zone as pvp while keeping other parts pve only, all within the same zone? like build alleys inside your inner city between the row houses, and set them as pvp zones?

 

What i would really like to see is construction projects that allow groups of crafters to work together and create PoT and plot creations like statues, buildings and other objects. Construction sites for premium versions could be sold on the addon store and others could be crafted in game.

For example, a walled tournament keep could be a town lot sized structure, also placeable as PoT decoration that is a pre-fab structure that could not be decorated further. Before construction begins, the construction site itself is crafted/purchased and placed the same as any deco object. When first placed, it would appear as foundations and would act as a container in which the required construction materials could be placed but not removed (by anybody). Our tournament keep example could require 1000 granite blocks, 1000 timber, 500 metal ingots. Once the required materials are stored in the construction site, players could then interact with the object in a similar way to a crafting bench with X amount of interaction time required to take the site to the next stage of construction. The more players that spend time interacting with the site, the faster it is built. Once it reaches the next stage of construction, more materials are added and the process is repeated until the object becomes a completed decoration/structure.


This type of structure could be a benefit unique to player lots and dynamic PoT's, providing group activities for crafters, guilds and communities that do not yet exist.

They could have craft level requirement for different stages of construction, so to make these structures, we would need at least one master of each of the crafting skills.

 

@Themo Lock i'd also like to be able to downgrade them, if they looked cooler at the lower levels. - and get back like 25% of the materials used.

 

I like that idea…it is as the idea of really building the houses in SotA back in the beginning, but as we have no building sites for player houses this might be not just a design choice.

But maybe we bypass the need to create a “dynamic” site.

For example there could be different lvls of decorative PoT- items. E.g. the castle walls we currently see are lvl 1 granite castle walls. Creating a lvl 2 granite castle wall will need more materials, skills and time as creating a lvl 1 wall. (E.g. 1000 granite stones + 250 iron ingots = granite castle wall lvl 2; 2500 granite stones + 1000 iron ingots + 250 obsidian chips = granite castle wall lvl 3;…)
The higher the lvl the decorative item the more awesome it is.
This way you can start with a „simple“ version and strengthen the fortification step by step and over time.

Thinking about it something similar could be done with NPC-houses. You start e.g. with a small and simple shrine for the oracle. By gathering the required resources and putting them into a “gift box” this shrine is maybe upgrading to lvl 2 in its current version and up to lvl 4 like the large temple we can see it in Brittany Central. (requirements could be materials and/or numbers of inhabitants…and maybe even some kind of downgrading if the numbers of inhabitants is falling below 2/3 of the previously lvl-requirement)
The higher the lvl of the NPC-House the more more beautiful it is looking but maybe even add abilities to its utility. (number of products you can buy, more items you can sell at one time, strength of buffs, …)
This kind of mechanic may even work in all towns not just PoTs…in NPC/PRT the buildings just start with a chosen lvl.
Maybe we need to define sizes for NPC-buildings depending on their lvl (row-> village-> town-> city) or we keep the current...err..."individual" NPC-house sizes and just change the appearance/decorations.

 

A couple of POT template variants of existing templates:

1) Options for sandy beach added to existing templates with a shore. Here you would have sandy beaches without changing the trees into palms. It is a bit disconcerting to have no beach options for POTs on ocean beaches, the dirt just does not look right compared to the overland map where sandy beaches are common

2) Tropical beach option that is not an island (the SoTA overland map has lots of beaches with palm trees, but no POT templates outside of Islands really fit this). Here you would have sandy beaches with palm trees, and if the template is a forest they could be palms.

2a) Same as above, but with palms on the beaches, with other tree types interior.

Lots of other template variants could be added that might not be as much work as creating entirely new templates, but would provide a fair bit more of variety in looks of POTs. I'm all for entirely new POT templates but feel we might be able to get in more slightly altered variants of existing templates first.

 

I would like this as a POT decoration.

 

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos,

I'm not sure why those would be POT only and not available for lots; it would make a good addition to this thread.

 

I would like to see more gaming mechanics enabled for team completions, like capture the flag, racing, finding items, fishing contests, platforming, better support for in-game board games, card games, ...

One rather simple mechanic is clicking a sign to start something and another paired sign to end it, tracking time to completion and announcing the results in local chat. There is an unlimited amount of games that can be created with this.

Secondly, there is the capture the flag mechanic where there are two signs red and blue and picking up one and tapping the other one with it adds a point.

 

Just to add to my previous post some examples of using those things.

Paired Start/End Signs:
Race through a maze, complete a mystery puzzle, race through parkour challenges.

Capture the flag:
Besides the obvious where players can create the playing fields in a PvP zone, these can also be used for long running relays in PvE. If spawners are introduced, a variety of PvE challenges can be created.

Although none of these mini-games will hold interest for very long, the mechanics can be reused for creating new game after game after game. This is fun for both the creator and the players. I see enabling these sandbox games as a win for everyone including the SotA.

To sneak in one more request, add 1-way doors. These are awesome for mazes in a small area.

 

As a Never Winter Nights persistent world builder I had seen how 10 years ago, even a normal guy like me had a lot of power to create content with the Aurora toolset. This toolset looks a lot like Unity (used a derivative of C for its programming) . I spent a good 5 years building my module by myself and it serviced over 200,000 players on 5 shards.

I was able to use the tools in the game (to be honest, they clearly had a lot more variety on release of NWN in terms of different monsters and placible then SOTA even now) to create pretty amazing "scenes". Funny enough, I created my world like they did in SOTA, you had an over world that you would enter scenes from.

So saying this,

I think it would be awesome to allow PoT owners (who have paid a lot of money for them) to have some kind of access to SOTA unity to actually design their own PoT scene and have access to all of the dev's item templates. We could create our template and submit it to them to place.

I really dont think this is that hard to do.

On a side note, I actually compare Sota to my own little project. My mod was a hall of fame persistent world with some of the best reviews. It was actually huge, near the size of SOTA in raw content. I had access to all of Biowares tool set items and the full gambit of D&D monsters (50 times more then SOTA right now). I had used player made content to supplement. In the end, I spent 5 years on that. I had to engineer a lot of tech myself such as my respawn system (which helps make it a pesistant world). My crafting system was probably more complex then SOTA right now considering you could craft the full gambit of D&D weps. When I look at the progress of SOTA after 3 years I do have to feel that they have 30 people on their team and in 3 years have produced about the size and content I had made in NWN in 5 years solo while still working 50 hours a week. So when I judge SOTA, these are the kinds of things Im thinking about.

 

NWN was awesome! spent allot time on it also. We asked about submitting player owned scenes quite a while ago, and the answer was that it takes more dev time to smooth out issues with these templates than it does for Port to create them from scratch

 

Pallisade walls. With Gates. And Towers.

 

I have an Island PoT with homes placed along the high grounds.
Which means that I have huge unused space in the middle of the map.

One thing I would really love to have is:

• Keep lot sized decorative farmland pavers with crops growing on them (24 of them should fill the metropolis area)

IMHO, we really need bigger pavers!

Also, on the Island Template, the left bottom island at the edge of the map, and left top high ground island can have lots placed on them.

That makes me want to have:

• Teleportation boats to the left bottom island.
• Rope work thingy on a pole so that you can swing across for the left top island (the cliffs are very steep so we need a sky route).

 

Hmm. I like that there are some places that you have to swim to get to. Great for quests.