Player owned town portals

Yes, ideally there should be enough content everywhere so that nobody feels compelled to skip anything and look for shortcuts to cut the fat, and reach the "meat" of the game. And the many ideas floating around - from the valid to the reasonable to the silly ones - mean there's a lot of brainstorming going on. And that's healthy no matter what.

I come from a game that gives players an awesome number of tools to create their own content, to enrich their own narrative and shape the world as they see fit. A true sandbox, however, where nobody is restricted from kicking anyone else's sand castle. So my mileage varies wildly compared to non-open-world, non-true-sandbox, non-immensely-massively games - like S0tA. I don't want to replicate what's unique in other environments, but for sure many design challenges are similar, and why not being inspired by the best solutions found by the best minds of the industry?

For the specific problem, what if portals would be able to teleport you and only what you have on your doll? Or just a specific allowance in weight? Like 20 pounds max in inventory, or the gate... pardon... the rift won't activate? Or range inversely proportional to carried objects: only you, your doll eq, and 100 arrows = unlimited range; you, your eq, and 200 pounds of crafted items = you can rift only to the closest destination.

Insta-moving, without risk of carrying around enough resources to pollute/inflate distant regions.

My point is also that the risk of something being exploited cannot remove useful/needed features. Better add the feature AND enable workarounds against exploits. Players will always be more creative than the dev team, and if something can be exploited, it will. But if we don't ever risk unbeaten paths, we'd be back at Space Invaders in an heartbeat.

 

I am with the Baron on this. I respect the idea, but I don't think it is appropriate for POT's to have such an exceptional dominance over travel.

 

Sure, there should be POT portals. There should be portals far more accessible to everything, in fact, not just POTs. Anything that encourages people to play the game together, rather than spending all their time walking and random encounters alone, is a good thing.

Based on some responses, I'm wondering if there are a lot of older people saying they want no magic or portals. Because in all the games I play that are modern, none make a person walk excessively. That's just not game play. It may be trying to imitate real life travel, but, I'd rather real life travel than spend hours in a game just walking.

 

I agree.

 

I personally would like the idea of having lesser portals.

The lesser portal by itself does not go anywhere; you need to obtain gem (or whatever) that can be harvested at the destination to open passage.
When the gem is placed into the lesser portal, path opens, and the gem is spent. You will need to obtain gems in advance by harvesting, or purchasing them at player owned stores.
This is a great way of access control. We can add restriction such that lesser portals only work on short ranges (travel to different quadrant will require you to go to lunar rifts). We can sprinkle the lesser portals around the world, making exploration of individual hexes worthwhile. We can add restriction so that only certain lesser portal can use certain gems. Imagine discovering a mysterious portal gem in the dungeons treasure, but not knowing which portal will accept it. Or, imagine conquering a dungeon, you went into every room, searched every crevice; you find a lone lesser portal in the deepest levels, but where is the gem for that ? (perhaps the drawing on the wall may provide mysteries to be solved)

Such access control will make players to visit dungeons multiple times. Every time you figure out the mysteries, new portal gems will unlock additional facet of the dungeon. This improves longevity of the dungeon content if you make this an optional content (If your dungeon have memorable locations, make it so that player can almost reach it, but cannot; Finding appropriate portal and gem will allow the player to reach that location to appreciate the details).

If your POT is located in difficult location, controlling the flow of gems will control who can reach it. Guild Recruits may be given a gem, and instruction to go to certain major-city portal, and then travel to hidden initiation facility. This will make great experience and story.

 

Those are pretty cool ideas. If they made it so gems didn't weigh stones, or take up excessive amounts of pack space, that would be even better.

 

The main issues for fast travel is with the regional economy, the game is being designed so that some resources are more readily available in certain areas to add value to trade routes and create a living economy. The other side to it is that we want to be able to attend events and activities that are far away from our homes and be able to get there in time. This is why things happen like "portals! that would be great!.. oh wait.." .

 

Maybe you can explain why having portals would interfere with trade routes. Because I surely do not understand your point.

 

There would be no trade route between point A and point B if you could teleport between point A and point B.

 

The reason that portals would interfere with trade routes is they bypass the design concept of the game which intentionally makes it difficult to traverse the landscape. Different regions will have different resources. To be able to teleport back and forth would ruin regional economies.

 

Still doesn't make sense to me. So, is the design that there will be numerous villages along the trade route? Because to be honest, unless I knew a good vendor were in one of those villages, I wouldn't stop into them anyway. The way they are all cloned and looking identical right now, there is no real motivation to stop in one of the villages or POTs.

Forcing people to walk along a route may not encourage them to stop into places between Point A and Point B. So what is the mechanic to encourage this?

 

So you think people will enjoy being subject to lengthy amounts of time, encountering hazards?

How does this make a trade route desirable to negotiate? And why should POTs get portals and avoid this, when others can't?

 

I cannot break down communication to a simpler form than a crayon drawing sorry. Also i never mentioned anything about what people would enjoy or should have, we are talking about the possibility of fast travel to events without it being used to circumvent distance for trade (which is not overly viable). Take your self righteous campaign and aim it at somebody else and stop wandering around the forum looking for arguments to start.

 

Is she/he here? I have on ignore. Makes life much easier Themo.

 

if you pay the gold, or pay gold on use, it takes out a lot of the "free concept?" or "free loot" concept, as far as pricing and what not, would you charge a default rate per hex, or would you charge a service fee based on how much you could yield out of a zone.

ignoring that; I think teleporters would be alright merely because the game is a single player game. Things that turn me off about elder scrolls games is i don't care to travel some meaningless terrain to get to where i want to be, or where i want to go. The idea is an adventure, certainly, but rarely does me walking somewhere accomplish anything other then make me regret the time it took me to get from point A to point B only to realize I forgot to buy bullets.

and for anyone that was a wow player, who can't recall how much time they spent almost entirely meaninglessly walking around to get to an 'area', can somewhat relate if they played vanilla.

Teleporters open games up, and allow for more particular farming circumstances. If not player owned, perhaps merely even their own randoms, and i say this purely because some of the best farming runs I had, had more to do with my ability to cast moon-gate, or recall, then it did much if anything else. If I had to physically trek to these locations the value of them wouldn't be as obvious

 

I have nothing against portals as long as it is equal or more expensive for goods to be transported over great distances with ease. I would compare it to the time/cost it takes to travel the landmass and put a value to it, then set the portal at a rate that coincides with it plus a bit more for ease. You cannot have it be cheaper than overland travel or no one would travel anymore.

I would not worry about single player as you say. Single player offline is a different animal all together. Single player online however is tied to the economy and must follow the same principles as friends online and Multiplayer online.

 

Making profitable trade means that you must know the prices of the goods at various locations. You do not just buy something at A, and hope that you can sell it higher at somewhere en-route to B. When the game launches, merchant information network will spring up that will correlate various vendor prices and allow you to plan the most profitable routes in advance.

If you are a merchant who maximizes for profit, going to intermediate town C is not an option if you already know the prices. Unless we restrict the use of external websites that share price information at the speed of light, intermediate towns are not going to get regular visits of merchant who visits for the purpose of trading.

 

I understand this. I hate external websites for this reason. It proves a blight to any game economy. People will do what they have to in the name of "winning" even if it ruins the game. One thing we can do is make it hard for travel at least, so it might be more profitable to trade locally, and services will open up to transport goods.

 

It would depend a lot on what is the valid IC (in character) communication method is for SoTA. If we for example choose to send carrier pigeons as valid in-game communication method, websites incorporating such delays will be game compliant.
In the old days, I used to write ECON codes for some MUSHes. Having ridged economy system makes trading a science, and everybody will attempt understand the math behind it. Having more random (NPC trading) economy system will lessen this effect, however too much randomness will make trading more of a gamble, and spare time hobby at best. Making travel difficult goes more with the "randomness" side, and discourages in-game trading.

The better approach is to provide incentives using a merchant fame system that can lead to better deals (or access to rare merchandises). Fame points can be earned by becoming carrier of news/rumors (Make it so that NPCs do not get latest information without player involvement. Getting settlements up to date will earn points. Settlements not having latest information may be penalized in major in-game events (such as war) ), or by fulfilling NPC demands (A settlement could be looking for large amount of iron to make weapons. Fulfilling trade proposed by NPCs (not vendors!) will count up towards that goal. Reaching the goal will result in bonuses for that settlement).

By having merchant system affect the in-game NPC politics, NPC conflicts may result in favorable or unfavorable results (such as bridge getting blocked, levies being set, towns overrun by monsters). Merchant needs to be wise on how to approach the intermediate towns to make their future visits profitable.
Of course, once merchants are linked with in-game NPC politics, it means that warriors are affected as well. Since the difference in information will lead to different kind of items provided at the stores (settlements knowing the news of war may produce more healing potions), it will make sense for the warriors to guard merchants to ensure that the front lines are kept in good conditions.