Housing is ruining the game

I think chance of destruction is awesome. id be fine with a town being knocked ots commision till the players do something to get it rebuilt. if your houses are there, it gives invested defenders. make houses unable to get to untill completed.
Make sieges last 3 days or w.e so the defenders had a proper response time. * shrug* would be sweet.

 

That would be cool; instead of killing NPCs, have them flee from an attacked/burnt up town and have them return when the players have repaired the town sufficiently.

 

For me playing through the story of an RPG is like reading a great book or maybe even watching a good movie. There needs to be a flow to the story. There needs to be drama, action, lives should be at stake, heroes could die. A very dense atmosphere.
SotA is lacking this. It is like reading a book in which the author concentrates on describing the houses in the cities instead of what is going on and instead of presenting great, deep characters and have the heroes make moral choices that lead to permanent consequences.
This is disappointing as Tracy Hickman is involved in this. I wonder how the story of SotA would play out in a novel. The hero has to ask every NPC about keywords, walk through big, empty areas, deliver note after note and if he frees the house of a farmer from undead they return and return and return and the farmer doesn't care. The town siege is played out in the wilderness instead of in the town and the villagers don't care. Also no one can die, nothing is at stake. Would this make for a great novel or movie?
But this is what an RPG should strife for with the quests and the story. And this is what SotA lacks. Instead we get a novel describing house decorations...

I just thought about how this would play out in the Dragonlance series of Tracy Hickman. Solace wouln't be burned down because of player housing... Sturm Brightblade wouldn't die... Raistlin couldn't become evil. The whole war would be pointless because nothing can be destroyed and no one can die...

 

I 100% agree with this.

 

Your argument is actually not one thing to do with housing but the scenes around housing and other issues.

Houseg has not one thing that can sway the game in one direcirection or the other, it is all that is around the houses, scenes, POTs, NPC, PRTs whaevever but not actually housing.

Sorry but need to get the focus on what is wrong not perceptions.

 

This is how Skryim's Civil War plot plays out, capital cities burning, with a token NPC house destroyed in the aftermath, and a few scorch marks showing they have cleaned up and rebuilt. The town destruction is surely doable since it is something that all players would see since it is not based on quests it is based on astrology, no need for multiple scenes causing database problems that NPC death based on quest actions would.

 

Sure until a 10k backer complains that no one wants to help him repair his POT and Port is ever so mean for not letting him play with the ant farm he paid good money for, and his mother is a lawyer and so on and so on.

 

Yes you can play the game without housing, it is entirely optional and decorative by design. But you miss the point if you think it is not affecting your game. It affects the staffing choices of the company as they are more focused on the rares for the next telethon, rather than hiring MMO database experts that can figure out like ESO how to do phasing. Without phasing the writers have to write a story that has nobody dying, going to jail, leaving camp, and no towns burning down. The world is without consequence, your actions have zero impact on the world. Every writer is taught that you have to destroy something or someone so that you can build them back up, it essential to the triple act structure of movies, novels, TV, and theater for centuries. SOTA is lacking in consequences because of player housing, the devs cannot do anything that changes the town or it's NPC state.

 

I'm sure they would be upset, but a lawyer? What you're alluding to ain't gonna happen.

Like everyone paying $45, the $10K backer paid to support the development of the game, not get whatever THEY want. Funding the development of a game via Kickstarter/pledging is gambling and you have no recourse if it doesn't suit you.

If someone is looking for a custom game tailored just for them, it's going to cost a lot more than $10K.

 

You miss the point of this thread. So it has everything to do with housing, you are quite wrong in your assumptions. This is not our assumption, it has been confirmed by the devs. Phasing is the solution to you letting a NPC move, die or go to jail, you are phased into instances of the scene with other players that made the same choice, it is how ESO solves this questing in towns problem. Portalairums database design cannot do this, when they tried it bugged out and doubled player decorations.

Yes Solace Bridge is a scene that is multiple states, either burning or burnt down. The game can absolutely swap scenes like this with the very severe restriction that it cannot be done in towns with player housing. Why this is a problem is that they decided to put most of the story into town NPCs, then they decided the most attractive housing would be story towns because everyone has to go there to get the story, and all of those houses have merchants, so of course people want their merchants where the people are.

The solution is to remove the player houses from story towns. They could rent preplaced market stalls in NPC story towns to still access the market. Or they could remove the story from NPC towns, but that is much more boring that town NPC have no story. But that is why Solace Bridge works, there are no player houses, thus state of the scene can indeed change.

 

Exactly what is wrong with them. Any good D&D DM learns that despite random encounter tables being in the DMG, you do not want to use them without tying them into your campaign story. The orcs should not block the town gates and attack you preventing you from entering because you the DM rolled it because that gets annoyingly at first then really damn boring really quick. The orcs should be there because they have been tracking you after being hired by the evil bad guy that you have been chasing. They are there to threaten the town to force you into making a bad deal that saves the town but puts them in bed with the evil bad guy. They are there because you cleaned out the orc caves and stole their treasures, and your greed is costing NPC lives.

This implementation is nothing more than a gate blocker because the stars said it was that time of the month, it has zero impact on the town. Once you sneak past them, the NPC's will have no clue what is happening outside their gate.

The random encounters on the road has the same problems. The starter story has you cleansing the area of undead, but it never happens. You can never clear an area, as the next instance they will have respawned.

 

The story is being written with the MMO database engine they have, one that does not support phasing, which is how ESO tells a RPG story with consequences within a MMO. So you cannot use the excuse that the story is not written yet, because the story that has been written so far has zero consequences on NPCs and towns. This is a design limitation confirmed by the writer, they cannot write a consequential story because of their MMO database design which did not handle player housing in NPC story scenes. It is a fundamental design limitation, there is no fix in the daily standups being worked on, nor has it ever been discussed in any of the quarterly or even episodic goal statements. Playing the wait and see game is just putting your head into the sand, the writing is not going to improve because it cannot. Tugging at the purse strings is the only way to solve the problem, surely RG has to be very unhappy that the story he wants to tell cannot be told.

 

I acknowledge that this is a fundamental design limitation; I simply reject the idea that an engaging and meaningful quest/story experience that allows you to impact the world in some way cannot be created without it. There are lots of other places in the game world that is free of this limitation.

 

Technically correct.

But it does have everything to do with housing being placed into story NPC towns. Which was the most popular housing because houses come with merchants which need to be in story NPC towns to make money, many PRT/POT are rather vacant despite the landrush and lottery supposed to fill them up.

Yes Solace Bridge is a great example of how to do it, but the majority of the story is being told with town NPCs, because otherwise town NPCs would have no story to tell just like the PRT NPCs, and merchants would be in an uproar that nobody is coming to town because it is as boring as a PRT.

Which is why the solution has to involve changing dynamic housing into static merchants in NPC towns, and booting the dynamic housing into housing instances (inside NPC towns or relocate to PRT/POT). That is much less of a price to pay than stripping towns of their story NPCs and impacting the player merchants.

 

Although, I suspect a substantial amount of main quest line locations involve NPC towns, I also suspect much of it does not. One of the things I want from these quests is a reason to travel and visit all the locations on the map. I don't think they are designing quests around merchant traffic. I don't think more than a third of the quests are actually in game right now. I don't think it needs to be all or nothing for NPC towns vs. non-NPC town quest lines.

I also think that some changes can be made within NPC towns. Like, I think it may be possible to flag individual NPC behaviors towards you based on flags from your previous interaction with the NPC. They won't die, or go to jail, but they might be able to really like you or hate you or offer you additional quests or no quests or different rewards, etc.. That should all be able to be done within the same instance for different players.

 

All of the starter Love quests are in NPC towns after the Solace bridge tutorial, after that it gets into some dungeons out in the wilds. Players see they can have a merchant house in the NPC towns. They voted with their pocket books and quickly filled up the NPC towns in the landrush, with many players saying all the good houses was taken despite PRT towns completely open to settlement.

They are designing quests in towns because otherwise town is boring as a PRT, and nobody wants a merchant there because nobody goes there.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg.

NPC towns being the quest hub originated with D&D, which is how Ultima came into being and every RPG since has had quest givers in towns. Elder Scrolls has done much better with radiant, random and nested questing and is well known for their immersive open world questing, but even there much of the questing is handed out in towns.

In SOTA's case the chicken ate it's own egg. They allowed player housing into town because of merchants as the short term funding incentives, and are now stuck figuring out how to write a RPG that has static NPC and town states with the result being inconsequence.

Which is the worst fix, booting NPC out of town and breaking the traditional questing hub story structure, or booting dynamic player housing out of NPC towns and replacing them with static merchants?

Booting dynamic player housing could be as simple as fencing the yard and making the gate an instance entrance. just like the basement. Or it could be a nested PRT inside the NPC town. Or voucher for getting a house upgrade in an external PRT/POT, keeping the merchant in the NPC town (less dynamic house and yard decorations)

Either way requires player compromise, move their house so NPC can tell a consequential story or lose merchant sales as they relocate NPCs out of town.

That is player conversation state based on virtue, supposed to be in the game but outside the Oracle nobody has noticed it changing conversation trees. Could be very useful if the Soltown Mom moves to Ardoris to be with her daughter that you saved from a burning building that she could open a seamstress shop and gives you discounts. But if she stands in the refugee camp for the rest of the game because the game demands she be the there for the other noobs, how could she change based on your virtue? She cannot even move into Soltown proper. Your interaction with her is finished she can never move or change, is that really a good story that all she has to say is thank you and no way to show it?

 

But this is the important part. They did not design quests around merchant traffic. Players perceived there would be required story elements in NPC towns and put their properties there as speculation they would receive more traffic. Once all the quests are in the game, we'll see what's what, and maybe they do make the mistake of making 90% of the quest lines originate and be effective of NPC towns. But look around in all these different scenes where there are ruins and camps and abandoned buildings. Surely there's a plan for those places. So you want a way to impact the world? An NPC gives you a quest to go and find someone that defrauded his brother. You find him in an old ruin and either negotiate a settlement or kill him. If you kill him, every time you got back there, he is gone. So, even quest lines that start in an NPC town can have impact on the world. If the only thing that's going to make you guys happy is for your player to have the quest agency to burn down an NPC town, then yes you will be disappointed. But it sounds like you think the non-instanced housing prevents you from having any meaningful impact on the world, and I don't think that is accurate.

I played the ESO beta, and wasn't impressed overall. Phasing is a neat idea, but I really didn't see it used in some way that really enhanced my RPG experience.

I'm not saying for sure they won't screw it up. I'm just saying there are some opportunities not to despite the technical limitations of NPC towns.

 

They certainly could rewrite the Solace Bridge town refugee camp to be an instance just outside of Soltown, would be very easy to carve out that section and displace it elsewhere leaving a plot of land in town for another player house. Then the fire could really happen, and the guilty party could have been a guard in that camp, and he can go to jail. Mom can leave camp with her kid safe in her hands. But they cannot make that change because of the chicken vs. egg. Players already bought merchants expecting story traffic, if the story is bumped out of town, there would be much whales raging.

The Ardoris quest of archer killed kids is way more interesting because it happens in town, they could place it in the nearby tower instance in the swamps and it would lose story impact because that story is supposed to hit your fears that even town is not safe. The writer cannot actually kill any kids that you can witness - not because the writer drew a morality line (after all RG always kills kids in his games!) - but because the engine cannot let it happen. So either way leave the story in town or take it out of town, that story is weaker than it could have been.

The writers hands are handcuffed by having to force everything interesting to happen out of town while the quest givers support the merchant traffic. It breaks the narrative structure of most RPGs that what you do is for the townsfolk and events that concern them. You can only stretch the 'I heard a friend of mines cousin that lives out of town has a bandit problem but it does not bother me here in town any' so far without breaking credibility.

I tolerate those similar bounty quests in Skyrim from the Jarl, not because they are good stories but because they are an XP/GP grind that I need, and killing bandits is just plain quick fun . They have a place but not as the delivery for the main story.

I was under the impression that the ep1 story was 3/4 of the way done and just needed polishing. You are putting a lot of faith in a broken system if you think this narrative will change before ep1 is released. It takes years to write a good RPG story without the handicap of handcuffs, and they have mere months under a severe handicap.

The game would be better off if they remove the impediment to story telling before release. It requires only a very small compromise for housing instances - the very same compromise players had to make to be able to expand their houses with basements. Once they release players will expect more town houses with merchants in future episodes, and they will happily fund the game that way because it worked. But nobody is going to buy it if the game is structured that it cannot tell a good story.

Kicking the houses out of town is a solution that will work but can only be done in the chaos of early access pre-release, you can still have a static town merchant capturing story town traffic.

 

Try be patient as the game is still in its early stages. Having played many of Richard Garriots previous games and listened to a few game interviews you get to know his personality. He has vision and gives his projects a lot of thought... He's always done so from a early age referencing his D&D 1-28's and I'm personally very excited to see the final outcome and the general direction he and his team are going with SOTA. Just remember we are still in Alpha, most people don't even get to have a taste of a game until Beta stage. I feel privileged to be apart of that.

 

I didn't pay for the housing, but more options/features is always good for any game. The housing system is part of a game, is not the game itself. If someone is not able to see this, it's hard to discuss about what we are playing.

The key is to add new things to the game, and not take things out from the game.

About Darkmoon points, I can see a few of them. for example, the atmosphere point is really true. Soltown is not a good town (or any other starter town) for housing imo, but this is something more "personal", and I know lot of people don't care too much about this.

Little work? you missing the point of how much time and work you need to create a game like this. If you have never tried, being honest I can understand your ignorance in this specific regard.