Player Owned Towns Update: Scope, NPC Buildings, Icons, etc.

Greetings Avatars,

We continue to iterate on our submission, intake, and fulfillment process for Player Owned Towns (PoTs). We are also doing continual design work for PoTs, including ways to incentivize thriving PoTs filled with occupants and ways to keep traffic moving through PoTs. We are far enough in our thinking that I wanted to provide all of you with an update on a few topics (note that templates is not yet one of those topics).

I also wanted everyone to understand the scope of this feature. At a high level I am trying very hard to control the scope of PoTs for Episode 1 so that is why anything I propose will be more fixed than some of you might like. As much as possible I am trying to use systems we are already building (or have built) versus creating whole new systems or new parameters for existing systems. This will also make it easier to debug and balance. That means a lot of the requested features are not going to make Episode 1 launch including: contracts/automated taxes for owners, owners being able to decorate NPC areas, income to owner from in town purchases, etc.

I am also attempting to make the PoTs function as close to the regular towns as possible which is why you will see things like town size influencing certain parameters.

Icons on the Map:
Our current plan is to make the size of the icon associated with a PoT on the map directly related to the number of occupants of that city (occupant in this case is defined as someone who has claimed a lot and has at least X number of items on that lot). If there are no occupants, your PoT will appear on the overworld map as just a foundation. If you have a few occupants, you might get an icon of a single building and perhaps the foundation of the second building. If you are at full occupancy, you would have an icon of a full village/town/city/etc. A stretch goal here would be to also indicate current activity, so for example, if there are players in the town then smoke will come from the chimneys and lights will be on.

NPC Buildings and NPCs:
Owners will select a certain number of NPC buildings based on the size of the town. These buildings each come with 1-2 NPCs. Owners will be able to pick name and gender of the NPCs and provide brief stories for them (which we will use to attempt to create some dialogue for the NPCs).

Building List: This by no means meant to be the final nor complete list. As other systems come online we will add these to the list including things like Theaters.

• Tavern: Bartender & Customer
• Bank: Banker & Guard
• Combat Shop: Combat Merchant (assorted weapons & armor)
• Weapon Shop: Weapon Merchant (assorted weapons)
• Armor Shop: Armor Merchant (assorted armor)
• Magic Shop: Magic Merchant (assorted reagents, wands, staves, potions, cloth armor, etc.)
• Home Shop: Homes Merchant & Decorations Merchant
• Guild Shop: Guild Merchant
• Stables: Pet Merchant plus some assorted farm animals
• Cemetery: Caretaker/Merchant (assorted undead stuff like corpse wax)
• Guard Tower: 2 Guards (NOTE: These can be placed on perimeters of town, not just in the central square area)
• Crafting Shop: Crafting Merchant
• Fishing Shop: Fishing Merchant
• Cooking Shop: Cooking Merchant (assorted cooking recipes and cooking ingredients)
• Public Garden: Crafting Merchant
• Monuments / Shrines: These would be items players could have placed in a central square or other point of interest in their town. Placing these is a requirement if you wish to take advantage of the Blessings system (mentioned below). There will likely be a cap on these up to no more than 3. Note that these would not include NPCs
  • Titan Statues
  • Oracle Statue
  • Hooded Statue
  • Moon Tower
  • Dragon Bones
  • Virtue Shrine
  • Chaos Shrine
  • etc

Blessings:
This concept is that the population of any scene that includes player housing (PoTs as well as cities we place) will trigger a blessing when it reaches a certain threshold (for example 60% occupancy). The blessing would be a long term buff (24 hours for example), and the city would be “blessed” for 1 month. Any players entering the blessed city and using a monument/shrine would receive the blessing. For cities that we place in the game, we will determine the type of blessing based on a combination of trainers/merchants in the city as well as story elements. For Player Owned Towns, the concept is that the owner will be able to select from a menu of blessings. Smaller towns will have more generalized blessings while bigger towns will have more specialized blessings (this mirrors our current plan for trainers*). Current thinking is that there will be a limit to how many blessings a player can have based on type; as little as 2 of each type. So you could only have 2 adventuring blessings (combat, magic) and 2 crafting blessings at any given time. The actual blessings are still being designed and are part of a larger system of blessings tied to the story, trainer placement, lore of map areas, resource locations, and overall map layout (hope to get a post out in the next week from Beast about this latter topic). We think this system will bring traffic to PoTs while at the same time encourage owners to be really reliable / trustworthy landlords so players want to live there.

Permissions: We do plan to get some permissions sharing (like our current housing system) in for PoTs along with some succession rules like we want to do for Guilds.

We will continue to update all of you as we have further designs. For now our tentative goal is to have a test case Player Owned Town (minus blessings) in either Release 17 or Release 18 at the latest. That test case will be an example of a template that we will use to base other towns from.

-Darkstarr

*Trainer Design Sidenote: Trainers start generalized at lower levels and become more specialized for higher level ability training. Tier 1 trainers will teach all Tier 1 abilities across both Combat and Adventuring. These trainers will be found all the starting villages. A Tier 2 Combat trainer teaches all Tier 1 & Tier 2 combat skills across all combat schools. However a Tier 3 & 4 Trainer would only teach skills of a specific school (ex. Death Magic). Tier 3 & 4 Trainers will often require a player to quest / task before they will start training a player. Tier 2 trainers will be common in most areas while Tier 3 & 4 Trainers will only be found in a few cities in the game. Those cities are generally known as the centers for those specialties (ex. Blade & Shield combat). Tier 5 Trainers are the only source of Tier 5 spells. There will only be one of these for each Tier 5 ability and they will often be hard to find and will always require some questing by the player before they will teach the Tier 5 ability.

 

Undecided but perhaps.

 

No trainers for now because we are specifically placing them around the world to reinforce regional economies but we may relax that rule later.

 

There are over 20 different buildings in the list I proposed and max is 15 for a Metropolis so not sure how there will not be enough.