http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/feature/9110/ArcheAge-Aurorian-Upheaval.html The entire design of the game is really the problem. Take housing, if you are going to have noninstanced housing, you must increase the landmass a lot more than current MMO's do. That was the nice thing about SWG, there was always housing space in multiple areas. Because of the way Korean accounts are run, there was not a lot of need to lock up the game from farmers, botters and cheaters. Hence the ongoing disaster with these jerks.Server technology seems to be very poorly designed due to the extreme lag at times. Trion got really really greedy and opened the servers to f2p far too early. A month or two should have been the minimum.Don't even have to go into the lame pve when the pvp lacks a lot of luster.Oh well hopefully noone got burned too bad. You can just chalk this up to one of those bad decisions and leave it at that. Fortunately there are other MMO's out there that are much better. I know, there are no decent sandboxes, but then again this game is really not a sandbox either, just has some of the elements of such. This review was about housing in Arch Age but I would think the same thing applies here. Housing is something very little games get right. On first play, the game does really feel like the original UO. Housing was a very important thing though. I remember getting PK'd for hours just trying to get to my house. I was somewhat late getting in on the last installment, R11 I think it is. It took a while to figure out the mechanics of the game but once I got going... It was clear sailing. The problem is the housing is too expensive for anyone who don't pay 1200 bucks for a nice plot. I was finally able to place a house in the town of Ardoris. Wasn't too bad, between the large castle to the left and the Oracle. I guess, what I'm saying is... Is there going to be a purpose to housing other than storage? I tried to place all the crafting stations in my house, lol was not fun. Took a while, but I got it.
Archeage is an interesting case study of what not to do. 1. Regarding housing, the expectation was that you could get it. That shouldn't be the expectation in Shroud of the Avatar unless you pledged up front for it. That's virtually the only way you're going to get housing at launch, and probably the only way you're going to get a location that you really want. Outside of that, you're going to need to trade A LOT to get a house once the game gets going. Archeage didn't set expectations correctly, and now they're paying for it in the media. 2. Gold Farmers, "technology" and the general cutthroat principles of online gaming are not going to be avoided in multiplayer. But unlike Archeage, SOTA can attempt to design around them. SOTA has no plans for an "auction house". SOTA is using instanced scenes and P2P architecture that should cut down on the impact of lag and disconnects (outside of combat) once optimized. SOTA has limited and rare housing as part of its design, and welcomes players trading this inside and outside of the game, making us all "gold farmers" to some extent.
If all you intend to use it for is storage, well, that is your prerogative of course. However, you may want to check out the mazes in R11, or the decorative phenomena that have cropped up in Valemark and Holtrot. They are quite impressive. You will probably have better luck in the future, once basements are implemented.
Thank you for the input. Still learning more about the game as we go. Ardoris just seemed way out of the way from where all the action is so far and was the only place I even had a chance to place.
Sorry for the super large map. This is the mainland of Novia. You can see Ardoris is in the Southeast corner of the map. While the "Hidden Vale" where Owl's Head and Kingsport and that little island that we're on for Pre-Alpha are somewhere Northeast of this map. Because this is pre-alpha...they are oddly linking what they have completed together so we can test it. The takeaway from this is 1. There will be a lot more towns in the game at launch. 2. There will be a lot more places to find action at launch.
Yeah, that does put things in perspective... Just makes me want to leave Ardoris and start exploring the rest!!
During the Kickstarter, the map was advertised after stretch goals to be 128x128 hexes/scenes... 16384 scenes... It's a big map. And that's just episode 1.
Are we certain there will not be instanced housing? Player owned towns are already instanced housing, in a sense. Do we know there will not be multiple Ardoris instances where one can settle on a lot, for example?
No, there will not be instances in the manner you presume. There will be a maximum number of avatars that a single scene can support, and once that limit is reached, a new instance of that scene is spawned, and new arrivals are placed in the new instance... (This is an intentional oversimplification for any that might come along and decide that I need to be educated.) All of the houses, lots, decorations, vendors in a scene will exist in all instances of a scene. As such, Ivan Sneedbarg cannot claim Lot 34b in Adoris instance A, while Prisilla Flesbagger claims Lot 34b in Adrois instance B. Lot 34b exists in all instances of Adoris, and is the same lot.
I'm killing both of these people in-game should they be flagged open-pvp, just for their horrible names. If they are not flagged open-pvp, I'm going to convince them to give it a try for the sole purpose of killing them. This should be easy since I know where they live.
Is there any way to make it open world...? The cut scene to the different map, I think takes away from the game.
