The thing that is going to make SOTA highly playable

...is a third party mapping utility.

I feel like all I'm doing lately is running across trees and fields to explore yon mansion on the horizon, only to discover 99% of the time it is devoid of detail, NPCs or services.

This isn't a complaint btw, I realize the game isn't finished. There are a lot of "speculative" structures in the game and it's hard sometimes to find the NPC you need, or a legitimate content area, when you're on the other side of the map. But for what it's worth, there should be at least one of everything in the eight hub cities you have highlighted purple on the map.

 

One suggestion btw :

Given that you can log out to the main menu from town, and then log back in with [Start on World Map], it would make sense to me if somewhere you had a [Leave Town] button that would just eject you from where you are. It wouldn't be appropriate for adventure maps, but town maps should be fine.

 

Yeah, navigation needs a lot of help. I still get lost in a town I've been to many times, in broad daylight, and have the map in my inventory.

I get that people want a challenge exploring some dark catacomb for the first time, but at some point a poor UI isn't more immersive, it's just really annoying.

 

Sotamap.com

 

Also note that there is now a log file that contains player locations.. something great maybe happening soon (or at some point in the future)

 

Yes, I'm trying to work with that

UOAssist for UO had an elegant method where your mapper program registered itself to UOAssist by PostMessage'ing it's window handle with a WM_USER ( + some value that I forget ). UOAssist would then actively update your mapper with messages back, posting X & Y in the lParam & wParam. They could use the same method with SOTA as UOAssist and save a lot of hard disk writes. The only difference is they'd need to convert floats to integers to pass in the lParam / wParam, and then let the mapper convert them back. I would just multiply the game coords by 100 and then cast the result as an integer. So a position of 55.43, 220.18 would be sent as 5543 and 22018 respectively. Anyway I doubt this is a high priority issue

 

Oh god, yes. I got lost in Brittany Estates trying to get back to the main map. I was thinking of this same feature, a non-hostile map quick exit.

 

That one will probably get stomped by pvpers because it could be used to avoid a fight.

 

Even with only allowing it in non-hostile scenarios, a few ways to resolve the PvP aspect alone or in conjunction with each other:

• Tie it's availability to your PvP status
• Tie it's availability to combat status
• Give it a cooldown after leaving combat
• Check to see if you are far enough away from any potential combatants.

However, if you consider that we can exit out of the game, restart and then select the main menu, perhaps the solution to the Leave Town button is to just mimic leaving the game. Have a twenty second countdown until activation where you have to remain still or it cancels.

 

I agree there should be a leave scene command, could even put it in one of our imaginary "additional" non-combat hotkey bars along with our maps and emotes...

cities and scenes should allow you to enter on the side of their respective map based on which direction you entered from... if I come into it from the north I should enter on the north side... this way I know which way to enter to get to where I'm going quicker.