Make PoTs first come first served, not by bank account size. (POLL) [UNOFFICIAL]

I think Duke Arradin makes some fine counter points and for the most part, getting the PoT into the game early isn't that big of a deal so long as they're all there at launch.

 

The numbers was only for examples, ofcourse they will rise.

And as far as your ideas go, i never suggested anything other. Im sorry if i didnt make that clear enough. I wrote that just because Metros will be served first, doesnt mean that they get to pick the spot they want.

And i seriously hope that ALL PoTs will be in before launch. If Portalarium doesnt feel that it is realistic, they need to make that perfectly clear NOW, becuse alot of people expect PoTs to be in by launch.

 

What extra entry should be in the poll?

I accused no one of anything. That is clearly spelled out in the post. This also has nothing to do with pledges at all. The facts I stated are true and not misleading it was all stated by (I believe Darkstarr or Chris if I recall) in the cyber telethon (from a question I asked that they responded to). I am a dev+ Knight Marshall attempting to assist in the game too. The use of the three principles was illustrative using Ultima game lore not real life definitions. My apologies if you or others didn't get the irony there. That was not meant as an attack as I stated in the OP.

 

The two options listed in the poll are quite slanted and you said the devs are not acting with virtue.

 

As mentioned earlier, the entire thread stinks of Bias, the options in the poll and the way you worded your original post.

 

Well yes the statements are opposing to each other and perhaps an 3rd option of "It's all good to me." could have been included.

I never said the devs are not acting with virtue. That is a false statement. I said the Shadowlords must be involved somehow. I never equated one with the other. My point in Ultima lore is - there is a dilemma that must be addressed and the choices are not always clear. Hence the irony used in the post.

I have the highest admiration for the entire development team. My gosh they are undertaking a 50 million dollar project on a showstring budget and pulling it off. Only Richard Garriott could lead a team that well.

 

I am sorry you missed the Ultima references. I guess it was a poor attempt to phrase the dilemma in terms of the game. I feel properly chastised for a poorly worded post but not for the intent.. NO BIAS was intended. I only want to make sure smaller PoT owners are not shoved aside in favor or larger more lucrative purchases.

 

the third option needs to be for both and the option titled "I paid more money" is very VERY poorly worded!

 

I am open to criticism as I never proclaimed to be perfect, so what would you suggest?

 

"First come first served" IS time based.

Size of town is monetary based.

You are arguing for money > time, not the other way round.

Not true. They mentioned before that it would be first come first served. Possibly in the previous POT deep dive. I don't recall exact words but the most recent revelation is clearly a 'shock' to some. It is new information, and different from previously expressed.

It isn't EXACTLY how pledge houses work. Pledges are by era first: i.e. RF before F. There are no eras for POTs. My suggestion above was to create 'eras' by segregating by months. Naturally there is the issue of metros not fitting into a small space, or being too close to another town. Small towns don't really suffer from this and actually have more options available.

Looking at the extremes does not serve us well here. I think we have to look at the examples where town sizes are similar (but different) and where the age of the purchase is either totally ignored or of great benefit. e.g. a village purchased now vs a hamlet purchased on day one (that POTs were made available). Both towns could reasonable vie for the same spot, yet the greater dollar value wins. In such a case I'm not convinced that the village should get the best spot.

The comparison of village lots to towns lots is not wholly accurate here imo. I'm inferring that there isn't a "lot size and house size" mechanism here, but rather a spectrum of "better vs worse" (i.e. relative as opposed to the absolute system in housing: a city house must be placed on a city lot (or greater)). That is to say that there are many spots where any type of POT could be placed, and perhaps some spots where any POT under a certain size could be placed.

Benefactor is an era. Purchasing the smallest POT NOW would not give them any benefit under any of the proposed systems here. If divided by money, time or any combination there of does not put them at the front the queue. The placement of POTs is mostly separate from the placement of houses. Not sure why you are conflating them here.

 

I am not perfect either, many here may attest to that lol, perhaps wording it in such a way that those that did not pay can still vote for that option, i personally think it should be a combination of the two.

 

Unfortunately, editing the post does not allow for editing the poll. Anyone know how to do this and I will add a 3rd option?

 

The more I think about this, the more I think the devs should also consider the size of the POT in relationship to which quadrant location they will let you put it in. This would also in turn dictate how many POTs could be in the game, which I think is a good thing.

I think it should work something like this....

1. A single quadrant can't have more than 1 Metropolish, City, Town or Crossroads Village.
2. A single quadrant can't have more than 2 villages.
3. A single quadrant can't have more than 4 hamlets.
4. A single quadrant can't have more than 6 holdfasts.
5. A single quadrant can't have more than a combination of any 2 of the options above. This means that you can't have option 1, 2, and 3 in the same quadrant, but you could have option 1 and 2.

This seems to be consistent with the current map of Novia.

This would also keep the larger towns apart from each other while giving the devs a framework that is a little better than just saying "well we haven't even used 1% of the map yet so we're ok". This is where the qualitative logic trumps the quantitative logic.

 

I agree with the spirit of this.

What isn't clear, imo, is the definition of quadrant. I roughly know what a hex is, a la the old Vale map in game. For me, a quadrant is a division by four. So when I hear that we can pick the quadrant then I'm thinking top left / top right etc. Perhaps the Hidden Vale is an extra / fifth 'quadrant'. That is obviously very coarse but it wasn't entirely clear, again imo, what they meant by quadrant.

 

I also agree with the spirit of this, but apparently there are already 12 metropolises. There are only 4 quadrants to Novia.

 

I was thinking that a quadrant was one BOX on the map...not 1/4 the map.

 

To me a hex is the little tiny hexagon's inside of the boxes on the map, which are quadrants. I'm assuming, so I might be completely wrong about this.

 

Potential Challanges:
1) Portalarium stated people can upgrade their PoTs in game.
2) If the map is divided into 4 quadrants. Your suggested limits would leave most PoTs out of the game even though they were purchased and paid for.
Personally I see the need for a halt on purchases until Portalarium gets a solid framework out. They have admitted they did not forsee selling more than 4 towns or so and that had led to many problems especially when hear they have sold 80 or more.

 

1) No. They said we can replace a PoT with a bigger one, god knows if it stays the same location if we chose to.

 

Edit: lots of posts between me starting this post and finishing it, sorry.

This is actually old news. It has been mentioned a couple of times as early as late summer IIRC.

I have trouble following the disconnect between these statements? If you didn't want others to be derisive then why start the discussion with a derisive post?
You are basically saying that Portalarium and everyone who disagrees with your PoV are cowards, liers and promoting hatred. Do you really expect there to be no reaction to that?
I mean you have some valid concerns and reasoning hidden in all of that, but the message is mostly lost in the black/white positioning from a too strong PoV.

Due to that disconnect this topic will most likely not be a productive one.

But nonetheless I will try to make an effort to respond properly.

So let's start from the beginning.
This game development is crowdfunded, that is a given and it has some pros and cons that go with it. Most of those pros and cons are obvious since Portalarium isn't the only company going down this route.
To get people to pledge money you need to offer them more incentives, one such is in the form of perks or trinkets, etc. There is a very tricky balance between offering too much and offering too little.
So we know there will be perks with purchases, it is the point of crowdfunding after all. Most of those perks are insubstantial and are usually not argued, like the titles. Other perks are substantial and people will have more problems with since they feel it is unfair.
Yes, paying more to get more is unfair for those who have less, but how else are you going to get people to pay more?
Arguing that this game is not being developed for the wealthy misses the change in business model that the gaming industry has gone through. It has become the norm that most people pay less for more content as long as some people pay a lot for perks. The extreme end of this trend is F2P, but it is everywhere nowadays. Me, having lived in the time when "computer games" was very expensive and only for the select few I find the new model to be much much more fair than anything before. This since the threshold to play and get a lot of content has been lower and lower.
If you are saying that paying more shouldn't give as good perks, then you are implicitly saying that everyone should pay more like in old business models. That would mean an entry level of beyond $100. That in my eyes would be much much less fair.

But when it comes to this crowdfunding side, Portalarium has been suprisingly non-greedy. They are short on staff everywhere where needed and could have easily gone down a much much greedier path.
Case in point is the telethon where everyone registered could win - had it been me I wouldn't have done it like that, I would have only given prices to people making new purchases during the telethon - that is how it is normally done. You know the ordinary ones with the ticking clock and the sum of money collected etc etc. So if they even miss getting money in a context where it is usually all about the money, then I think we can establish that "greed" isn't the only motivator for their decisions.
If they had been truly greedy then they would auction the order - highest bidder gets to decide first, within each tier.

Since the beginning of civilization. Although the question misses that currency and trade have given us all a much better life. Just like landing a couple of extra LotM or Metropolises will give the buyers a lot of perks, but it will also give ALL players more content and thus a better virtual life.
But I guess this is a rhetorical question and not really looking for an answer.

Ah, here is the real issue, right? Yes agreed that location is key. But...this is the old announcement megapost:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...wned-towns-stretch-goal-store-megapost.11465/
"Location: Roughly which quadrant of the map. Exact hex will be determined by Port"
You were never promised to be even close to placing your POT where you want.
Yes it is a big worry for a lot of POT owners and a lot of nerves etc but Portalarium gave that criteria early, and they did so for good reasons. This is because they reserve the right to place you where it fits, and not where you want.
If they are smart they won't even announce the exact locations for all POTS until start of the beta, precisely because no matter what they do there will be lots of POTs that will not get what they want and they need to balance the POT locations to fit the game, not the wishes of the owners.

Regarding the big first, smallest last: Lets bring an anology.
If you want to fill a jar with rocks and pebbles, then you can't start with the pebbles, instead you need to start with the rocks and then fill the gaps between rocks with pebbles.

Its the same here, if you would place POTs during the design session in date-order then you could end up with some unplace-able late purchased metropolises. So a holdfast is placed early in a sweetspot only to find out later that a metropolis is placed in the adjacent hex, diverting all traffic to them instead of the holdfast. Me I don't think that would be good for the game nor for the holdfast.

What they discussed in both POT deep dives ( the old one and the one in the telethon) is that they need to balance all 80+ POTs out all over the map, especially so the larger ones. They also mentioned 11 metropolises. They also hinted at collecting wishes from more than one POT long before deciding on placement.
This gives us a pretty decent picture of the problems at hand.

If that had been me, and I had to place 11 metropolises and a handful of towns/cities then I would collect all wishes first, put those as lists on a wall, put up a map of Novia and Vale on the wall, then have a pin for each metropolis. Then black out the parts of the map that we don't want a larger settlement, for instance, having a metropolis right in a region which is supposed to be sparsely populated in the story wouldn't really work.
Then I'd start placing pins according to wishes, then iteratively change to where they make better fits, spread them out, place them where they don't interrupt the storyline etc. When I had a good feel, I would collect cities and towns wishes as well, just to be prepared. Then do a nudge here and there until I'm satisfied that they fit the game world the best while still trying to respect their wishes.
After that you can start placing smaller settlements, until you reach holdfasts which can pretty much go wherever since they don't interfere as much with the story and the other towns. They can even be placed in the blacked out locations that couldn't have larger settlements.
Finally I would wait, and then announce all locations at once with a grand reveal. Then all the inevitable bruha and moaning won't be spread out but rather concentrated and more a done deal.

The POT design sessions start in spring. We are looking at a release after summer.
I wouldn't worry needlessly if I were you. The holdfasts that go last is also the easiest place and create.

Me I'm much more worried that things are slowly being less and less of what was stated originally. For instance NPCs are now down to names only. I think those templates will be much more limited than most owners realize.
This because they are looking at holding the current schedule, so they are reducing the potential time thieves early. But those time thieves is what I was really looking forward to.