PETITION/POLL: Please Portalarium put a hard cap on sales of Player Owned Towns

@TEK
POT settlements without overworld map access will be connected to NPC settlements. Access cannot be cut off.

 

Not entirely true, they have a choice:

any additional PoTs purchased will not have Overland map access rights, but must connect to another PoT that has Overland map access. Additionally, PoTs that do not have Overland map access (or have foregone that right), and have not requested connection to another PoT with Overland map access, will be connected to one NPC town in the quadrant/biome you requested (you may request a specific NPC town to connect to in your PoT Submission form and we will do our best to honor such requests).

 

It actually can be.

 

As far as I'm aware this is incorrect and opposite is true.

 

unless i'm misunderstanding here, we are now at the point of instanced housing. Because essentially, if a POT does not connect to the world map, it isnt in novia, it's in some ethereal realm only accessible via someone else's POT or a portal of some kind.

 

Thematically, you would be correct Bubonic. Unless the level of detail on the overworld is increased to better represent many small towns, thereby allowing everyone to have map access, it will actually be less user friendly than instanced housing.

At least with instanced housing, the system pretends your instance is the only one and you can come and go just as easily in your instance as any other instance.

 

I agree and this is one of the examples here where "whale" donators, (which I have no problem with someone being a whale) have had a negative effect on how the game is being designed with their tunnel vision ideas that don't consider the greater effect on the game as a whole. The early adopters of POTs advocated for 2 things:

1. Banning players from entire POT scenes
2. Adding more POTs that are only accessible through the main POT scene.

Both ideas were immediately panned by myself and a few others as it would be devaluing all our pledges, leading to instanced housing nonsense, and hurting the game's overall reputation with pay2grief possibilities. I would love to pull those early debate threads but you simply can't go back that far in forum history, but it was said then both on these forums and in person and only being realized now.

 

There are scenes already in the game where you have an entry scene before reaching the next one and can be considered just a loading zone for the new scene instead of seamless. Such as Graff's Gem Mines. Or Sewers. Or basements. It need not be a portal - it could be a gate or a grassy meadow or a path - fading out as you walk along the path and fading in as you continue along that path. All of these require less suspension of belief for me than jumping on a rowboat in Kingsport to go to the Bravecoast.

I don't think of this as instanced housing at all. Some scenes on the map are much larger than others despite only having one entrance, some scenes have scenes within them despite having only one entrance from the map. It's just neighbourhoods as part of a whole, or towns that grew into eachother.

I see no difference between 4 hamlets in one scene, smaller than a metropolis, with a single entrance from the overland map where one travels through a hamlet to reach the others - than having 4 hamlets that require a loading screen to walk to 3 of them with one entrance leading to the same hamlet. It just lessens overworld map clutter.

As much as I appreciate the cleverness of incorporating pay2grief across a few threads - As far as I understand it, the discussion seems to be centered around kicking someone to another instance of that scene, seemingly singleplayer.

If such is the solution that is arrived through iteration of the banning concept:

If one must go through The main gates of Andernuttia to reach Andernuut Square (a small nook of 10 homes to the east of Andernuttia that one reaches walking out the east gate) and Lord Andernut has banned thee to single-player where you walk into the community and see nobody there (probably a very common occurrence in smaller towns), you can still take in the homes, the NPC's, the vendors and the decor as you walk through to your house at the end of Andernuut square.

Probably you were banned for griefing anyways and so by owning a POT I have now gone the pay2avoidgrief route.

Nowhere on the POT or FAQ is "banning" advertised as an owner power, so as banning is iterated on - it can change, and even if it were advertised they can change it if it becomes a reported problem.

Having two towns in the same locale with a loading scene between them is not inherently game breaking or somehow "more instanced" than having a metropolis with 500 homes is more instanced than a hamlet with 5 homes yet occupying a similar amount of world map space.

The tech isn't there to stitch together the hamlets, or perhaps it is but is too demanding to load it all - so what we have is a loading screen. Sorry.

 

I would argue that the tunnel vision is coming more from the little "i want to come into your area and be as disruptive as i want" group. As hard as people scrape the bottom of the barrel for reasons to reduce POTs to nothing more than a place to put a house there is still not a single valid reason for preventing them from becoming the extremely useful community tools that they can be. The more tools and options POTs get to create, host and protect events and activities the better. Instanced housing? hardly..its just a large city created by combining smaller scenes ... nothing is invisible, you just have to travel through outskirts to get to the centre like any actual human settlement. All it would take is a slight adjustment to the city appearance on the overland map to represent it. Like Ardoris..its way bigger than Braemar but occupies the same amount of space on the map, and Ardoris will have additional scenes added to it in future. Saying...

" The early adopters of POTs advocated for 2 things:

1. Banning players from entire POT scenes
2. Adding more POTs that are only accessible through the main POT scene. "

is great example of hearing exactly what you want to hear and nothing more, the "early adopters of POTs" wanted a whole host of things, which very much mirrored the development teams vision of what these scenes could become, bans were added to deal with issues that were, are and will continue to happen. The ONLY reason to want them removed is if you want to BE one of the disruptive people who could not care at all about community. Getting all excited about the slim possibility that it may interfere with a yet to be implemented feature like guild wars may have refuelled hopes of kicking over other peoples sandcastles but how about we see how that even functions first. Wanting to shape the game to your solo, antisocial playstyle and masking as "for the greater good" got old months ago.

 

Having a story based scene only accessible through a certain point in the world is not the same thing as having an unlimited supply of housing, with so much existing that you cannot fit it all on the overworld map, thereby being forced to nest, or instance, the town. The point being that having this much housing negates the original intended design of limited housing.

 

The only thing I can say for certain is that this is a very unstable part of the design right now, and as such, creates a lot of tension. Thanks to Spoon for the poll, and I hope that something is done soon to firm up the questions in everyone's minds.

 

I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing to not have map access to a town. It makes exploring an NPC town more fun especially for new people. They might say hmmm let me see where this takes me or also the same if access is in another player owned town. Just having this interweaving of the game is interesting. There is a game called Istaria which I believe had a different name at launch, not sure since I wasn't around playing it then. Anyway you see player owned towns during your exploration and you don't know why or how they came to be, or even what their purpose is since the game gives little explainations of things to a new player. So anyway we have so much more capability in this game. We have books that can direct and describe the world for us. Perhaps you have a POT that is off in a remote area through another town, so what. It just adds to the mystery and exploration properties available. Perhaps if we get town squares with the ability to post things like Here ye, here ye come to the town of Such and Such to experience the magical wonders of Heliotrope(highly fragrant purplish flowers). In case you wondered. It can all work out. While sometimes we can't see the picture because of the forest, or perhaps the forest is the picture. Whatever

 

Picking up on something that was said earlier about underground POTs and brainstorming a bit further.

How cool wouldn't it be if the devs reversed the biome & size question to be the selling point, instead of an option.
Like saying right now in the addon store we have:
10 "off the coast Island" POTs
4 forest POTs
35 cave POTs
etc
and you'd specifically purchase such a style of POT. Maybe even specific sizes.

That way placement through biome and size wouldn't be up to the players, but rather to the world designers (devs) and they can decide where there are more space and where there are not. Which would make the placement difficulties much less a factor.

(This doesn't address the issue of lot saturation though...)

 

I disagree - they aren't having trouble fitting housing on the overworld map, they don't want to clutter it with POT icons though. Housing is in towns - and towns can span as many scenes as Portalarium desires. Two towns sitting cozy with eachother does not = unlimited housing.

Portalarium could have put in 230 towns in the forest with no NPC's/quests if they wished.

I should say I am sitting from the perspective that there are too many POTs already. I never really was a fan of POT's (I hear the phrase pay2grief in relation to banning from a town - but in my opinion kicking someone out of their lot when the world is full I think is far far worse - really really bad and horrible actually). I love them in terms of guilds or groups but always felt there were a lot of negatives there too. If one ever wishes to "cash out" then you can't sell your spot in Andernuut because you don't own your spot in Andernuut - whoever modified my name into a town name owns that spot and can evict you any time for any reason.

I'm curious though what you feel is a fair number for "limited" housing? Twice the presold number? Because right now if we have 20k in POT's and 40k in NPC/Story towns and see just 600k players at launch (that's just 11 times the current number of pre-alpha backers) then we have 1 in 10 people with a house.

Please be aware - I do not own a POT, and my primary lot won't be in one. I just don't feel that two hamlets or even two metropolis's sharing the same locale is unlimited housing, and Portalarium can cut off POT's at any point if they feel they are approaching "unlimited" housing.

Portalarium has a dance to dance anyways because while housing is their funding model and they'll want to run that tap - they'll need to populate the landmass generated in Episodes 2-5 as well.

 

More funding for a bigger, better game for all who are interested = "the more the merrier" no cap

Now for the deeper issue: why are they developing and making decisions on the fly? This should have been well thought out from the very beginning. It should not require a vote from those who want, or have, POTs. That means the big investors (avoiding the W word) are influencing the game's direction. Is that wise?

 

Yes. Agreed.
Way back when it was Player-Ran-Towns, as in in player lot towns without any owners or npcs or anything, then they could have knobs and cranks to pull.
So if they are more successful then anticipated, they could tweak it so that Holtrot and Valemark etc would allow double the lot claiming, or if they see a decrease they could tweak it so that they would allow less lot claiming. They could even through the moving of cut off borders, add more space to existing lot towns to accomodate some larger lots that need space etc.
All such knobs and cranks goes away when it is no longer the game controlling the space, but rather the player who has a fixed number of X and Y.

I'd much rather see a capped number of POTs and more PRTs in the game's control.

 

If expecting the team that created Ultima to come up with thoughtful immersive ideas rather than lazy immersion breaking ideas gets old then I am happy to be consistently guilty as charged. There has been no reasoning that I have seen so far that justifies why there is a need to POT owners to ban from an entire scene instead of using the tools already at hand. What I have notice is a whole list of problems that it creates and the continued selling of POTs that are linked to mainland POTs only compounds that problem further and adds to the list of bad situations that can and will occur.

 

You have been presented with the reasoning many times by many people and choose to ignore it. And you whole list of problems are ridiculous.

 

I am well aware of all the reasons to wanting banning players from entire POT scenes but none of it justifies the need to use a poor design choices that will likely do more harm than good to the game. It is not like there is not alternative and more immersive ideas out there that take care of some of these issues without adding pay2grief.

Let's not forget the whole point of this thread is the 230 POTs sold and further sales of POTs effectively creating instanced housing in SotA. A complete jumping of the shark in regards to limited housing space. So you really have to wonder how much future planning is going into the whole POT system or are we just winging it day to day.

 

I am in complete agreement with you on limiting the number of them but it doesn't matter how many times you post "pay2grief" it wont lend it any validity.