Your View: Fast Travel

[TwinkleStar 27]

2 hours ago, Sky said:

Now, for a new player who wants to be a player in Haense, that's a whole twenty-one minutes that they have to spend simply walking in a direction (Assuming they don't get lost) to finally arrive there. Even if you soulstoned to Oren, it would be a whole fourteen minutes spent on the road to arrive at their town, and that's ridiculous. 

 

Also simply saying "Use your ss, it's a fast travel!", you need to remember the following!

 

1) Only nations get green soulstone pillars.

 

2) Soulstone pillars made by donaters, WHEN THEY WORK, only hold a certain amount of player slots and even then, now with the new shitty update it takes time to get to their max slots. (It has been well into a month, and my pillar barely holds 20 people, that sucks if you have a large playerbase like Haense).

 

3) Can only have a few pillars in a certain radius of each of them, thus making it near impossible and quite frankly, the ugliest thing to see is a mass amount of redstone soulpillars.

 

If there was an application format that you can fill out for a green soulstone pillar, then maybe that would be a thing, but that would remove one benefit of being a nation. 

 

Without fast-travel = Everyone is forced to walk to their location, some begrudgingly, others happily.

 

With fast-travel = Those who wish to walk, may, and those who don't, don't have to.

 

It's literally as simple as that, and saying "But I hate dock role-play", have you not noticed that no one wants to role-play at the Isle of Malin, and they want to role-play at their nation/settlement? That's why people want fast-travel, and if it fucks up, it's literally not hard to remove them afterwards. Simple as.

Point one. A new player probably wouldn't even know about Haense unless told, so that point is a touch moot because they would have to find out about it first. Hell, I didnt even know that town existed until this post, and I dont ahve a clue where it is. More than likely it would be through another player, who then takes them there.

 

Point two. Anyone set as a human will be automatically sent to Jberg already since they are humans. And more than likely a new player will end up in Jberg because they'll follow the signs towards the humans. Each new player tends to try and find more of their own race, and only when that fails do they really follow the signs to other towns to try and find roleplay.

 

Point three. If you haven't made a bug report about the soulstone pillars, I suggest you do. Only way for things to ever get half-fixed here is to screech like a pterodactyl until someone's ears bleed.

 

Point four. People will always take the easy option. Its really just human nature. If a fast travel is available, 9/10 times, you will probably take it, new or not. Humans are lazy creatures, if there is something that can remove effort for us, we do it. Its only on a very rare occasion you'll find someone doing something the hard way solely because its the hard way, and not that they were ignorant to a more efficient medium.

 

Point five. A lot of this can be fixed by a charter for active settlements (at least 10 or so people there 50% of the time) to get their own green pillar. This would pull off from nations, but if a town is active enough to support such a thing, they should be given the reward.

 

Point six. It has been seen, time and time again, that anything not directly near a fast travel dies very quickly, simply because of the fact its not easily visible. That is why places like the Drunken Mare didn't go anywhere, but the massive tree tavern and Pikel's tavern were exceedingly popular, because they were right on the busy main roads, and everyone constantly fought for those plots.

 

Point seven. A lot of small farming areas depend on people walking the roads for their crops to grow. Because of how the server is set up, if nobody is within a chunk of an area, it effectively shuts down. Animal timers will not tick, they will not grow or be ready to breed again, and plants will not grow, effectively killing the point of the plot itself. One could easily say to move it, but usually these spots are handed off by a GM and you're not going to get it moved. You get what you get there.

 

Point eight. Again, I still stand firm that if you can't walk to a place, its laziness. If you don't have much time to log on and roleplay, don't settle yourself in an inactive hub, pick a place that is always bustling in your timezone, something everyone is capable of. Granted, getting involved in the hubs as an outsider is exceedingly difficult, so again, not for the lazy. You're going to have to work insufferably hard for very little payoff. But what can you do? You get what you get there.

 

Point nine. Vote. You'll usually get enough food and mina to hold you off until you can buy a horse, there's plenty of people selling them and you can get a decent horse for very cheap. It took my only 3 days to get one, and I was lazy about it and picky because i wanted a specifically colored horse and was willing to wait for it. The food you get form voting, other people summoning the taterlord, and /bread will keep you alive rather easily until this, or you're extremely lucky and get handed an active hub because you were in the right place at the right time.

 

Point ten. Again, nobody will ever choose the difficult route when an easy one is available. The real thing that needs to be done is make the territory more interesting past floating trees and open grass. If fast travels are an absolute must, why not set up stables to 'rent' a horse, a fast travel 'horse' that hops a small distance at a time for an amount of mina. The further the 'horse' was rented to go, the more it would cost to take it, like they used to in the old days with liveries. You would still have to walk from livery to livery, which has some space between each, and offers a place for taverns and the like to be between them, as an option for those that dont have mina, or wish to save it.

[jamyei 45]

I would just like to mention something that I suffer with my travelling is that when I'm on my Golem Construct persona, I have a slowness debuff which makes walking around to different cities excruciatingly painful and long. Just thought that was worth mentioning. 

 

EDIT: I realize that this only affects a minority of people but I still think something should be done about it as it makes playing a Construct persona less fun.

[TheNanMan2000 473]

The problem with fast travel is it removes a huge chance of meeting someone on the road, which can create more unique RP which is hard and rare to successfully do. Bandit RP with fast travel is very hard and rare.  If you try and mug someone with fast travels about, you'll be waiting for a huge amount of time.  If you don't want to be sitting down doing nothing for half an hour, you need to go to where the fast travels are, which is terrible for bandit RP as 20 people will pass by and get involved, making the RP really messy.  This applies to Admined events.  An admin who wants to create an interesting senario will need to create it in a city or somewhere populated, which will cause a massive clash of people's emote and will be confusing for everyone.  Fast travels kills rp and makes friends who msg he other when in trouble and then come to help much easier.  Without fast travel, the metagamer will need to sprint for a long distance.  With fast travel, they hop into a cart and rock up with a minute or 2

 

[Suika 111]

In Aegis, Malinor used to have a railway teleport to another wood elf town. I liked that kind of useful, but rare fast travel.

 

 

[frankdh 2418]

just bring them back bro this **** takes too long

[John Ivory 4546]

6 hours ago, DreamInSpace said:

just bring them back bro this **** takes too long

Well said

[Wolf Druid Ouity 1461]

It's hard to quantify the issue for this map as "fast travel vs road travel" because the frank and bottom line is that this map is ridiculously far from the ideal. When Axios was pre-launch, we voted against all but essential fast travel. Why? Because the majority of the community agreed that we preferred to meet each other on the road, and that the server should encourage spontaneous and organic interaction.

 

The problem is that, and pardon my lack of constructive feedback, this map ******* sucks. There's really no other way to put it-- I cannot, from a design standpoint, think of a single redeeming quality for this map. As for fast travel, the fact of the matter is that without it, this map is stupidly inconvenient to roleplay on. Who the hell wants to walk aimlessly through twenty minutes of empty road, which you cannot build on or interact with in any way? That's not in any way conducive to roleplay-- and I think most of the community has caught on to that, or soon will.

 

There's no "trash this shitty son of a ***** map" option in your poll, but that's my vote. I haven't been able to bring myself to log on for the last month because I just see red every time I realize it's a fifteen minute walk to the next RP hub.

[Hiebe 2493]

3 minutes ago, Wolf Druid Ouity said:

It's hard to quantify the issue for this map as "fast travel vs road travel" because the frank and bottom line is that this map is ridiculously far from the ideal. When Axios was pre-launch, we voted against all but essential fast travel. Why? Because the majority of the community agreed that we preferred to meet each other on the road, and that the server should encourage spontaneous and organic interaction.

 

The problem is that, and pardon my lack of constructive feedback, this map ******* sucks. There's really no other way to put it-- I cannot, from a design standpoint, think of a single redeeming quality for this map. As for fast travel, the fact of the matter is that without it, this map is stupidly inconvenient to roleplay on. Who the hell wants to walk aimlessly through twenty minutes of empty road, which you cannot build on or interact with in any way? That's not in any way conducive to roleplay-- and I think most of the community has caught on to that, or soon will.

 

There's no "trash this shitty son of a ***** map" option in your poll, but that's my vote. I haven't been able to bring myself to log on for the last month because I just see red every time I realize it's a fifteen minute walk to the next RP hub.

The problem lies with the three maps instead of one. If all the focus was made on one map and the ET actually contributed to the maps and filled them with things to see and do then the maps wouldnt suck. You have wide spaces of emptyness cause thats what I was told to make, and the builders would fill in the blanks, but as we see that didnt happen and still isnt happening.

 

fix the problem by going to one map and filling it with areas to explore and actually use it.

[Wolf Druid Ouity 1461]

Just now, Hiebe said:

The problem lies with the three maps instead of one. If all the focus was made on one map and the ET actually contributed to the maps and filled them with things to see and do then the maps wouldnt suck. You have wide spaces of emptyness cause thats what I was told to make, and the builders would fill in the blanks, but as we see that didnt happen and still isnt happening.

 

fix the problem by going to one map and filling it with areas to explore and actually use it.

It's funny how in half a decade no staff have learned anything about map design.

[Hiebe 2493]

Just now, Wolf Druid Ouity said:

It's funny how in half a decade no staff have learned anything about map design.

When you have totally different staff leads and then coders that say "if we split the map into three different maps itll be less load on the server" you tend to run into walls and such. 

 

The map design was ok I think, on Than I shall say. There are focus points on roads through passes where towns should sprout up, various different landscapes all about and not focused in certain areas (other then the deep cold and hot areas). Had all the nations been on Than (or hell on the one Sutica is on) there would be more towns and more things to explore and the wide openness would have been filled up by now with player made areas and ET areas.

 

 

[Ever 2648]

There's been a lot of back and forth and I think we've discussed a lot of good options and points. There will be a new thread up on Saturday with better-targeted feedback and better questions. Don't worry, I'm not asking for more general feedback. This thread will be more like "here's the idea, do you want this: yes or no". Plenty of good feedback in this thread and plenty of good ideas swimmin' upstairs. Anyways, I wanted to make another personal post about how I feel regarding the map and fast travels...

 

The map is hurting. I'll straight up say that it's designed poorly. The multi-world/islands idea is great and I like it a lot. But travelling between them is clunky. Spawn -> Island A is straightforward. But having to go from Island A -> back to Spawn -> to Island B is silly. We're not taking full advantage of the fact that we're roleplaying on Islands now, though they're quite big. Boat travel can be done quite easily and in a way that doesn't hurt immersion/road roleplay. I've chatted with a coder and even they said it wouldn't be hard to develop.

 

Also, speaking of road roleplay: There likely isn't any and I don't blame players for not seeking it out. The map is empty. There's not a whole lot to see outside of settlements. It's the same issue I had with our previous map. When I joined, there was a lot to see (past event areas, ghost-town settlements, cities, etc.) but after a week... well, that was it. It was stagnant. Nothing changed. There's a similar issue with our current map. I am the biggest proponent for road roleplay and I'm not a huge fan of fast travel. But even I can't defend this map by saying "just walk around and explore". There's nothing too exciting too see, the map likely won't change drastically, and it's unlikely that you'll come across another player on your travels. 

 

Obviously the most glaring issue is just that the map is TOO BIG. Obviously it was designed with expansion in mind. Nations start (relatively) small and then, slowly, over months, expand out into the world. But a map should not be designed with the far future in mind. It needs to be designed with the current and very imminent needs in mind. Personally, I think the map is twice, or even triple the size it needs to be. On second thought, map size isn't the issue. SPACING is. Things needs to be closer. We shouldn't be splitting up the player base across three large islands then telling them to walk from capital to capital.

 

The map did do a few good things, however. The tile system is simple but amazing. It makes divvying up land and expanding nations easy. The islands are a neat idea though they're not being used to their fullest potential. I have no doubt that with a few good ideas, a plugin or two, and some tweaks, this could be a great map. But it needs to happen quickly.

 

Pros:

- Islands are cool and provide access to some unique roleplay opportunities that we're not taking advantage of

- Tile system is 200% awesome

 

Cons:

- Nothing to see. Best to just sit inside your fief/settlement/capital than go exploring

- Map is 2 or 3 times bigger than it has any right to be

- Map launched late summer rather than early. Players are still getting accustomed to the map during a time where they have 1 - 3 hours of play time a day rather than 5+.

- Current region system is a bit choking

 

[Suika 111]

Agreed.

13 hours ago, Ever said:

Spawn -> Island A is straightforward. But having to go from Island A -> back to Spawn -> to Island B is silly.  

 

I have an idea to solve this,  a /spawn command to bring the player back to the main hub, to where they can then travel, as you said "straightforward". Thoughts? @Ever

 

Also if not a /spawn command, then perhaps a boat in every dock that goes back to spawn.