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[Your View] ARCAS - Sense of Completeness


Lukariatias
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The ST are yet to actually use the ancient ruins beside Krugmar AGAIN. This **** happened last map and it’s gonna happen again, don’t bother building the **** if we never get to interact with it in any way, it’s ******* obnoxious. 

Though other than the ruins beside Krugmar? I have no ******* clue. In case you forgot I will remind you, there is currently a system in place where players are punished for leaving their activity square. This means we don’t adventure around for fun. We don’t see new parts of the map. We often don’t meet new people.

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everywhere feels the same

interesting desert is so far south no settlement on it has survived longer than just a little while, bar maybe thyra. Interesting jungle aswell is so far south and irritating to get to, it did not survive. The same for the mushroom island, and so on. Everywhere on the mainland is just grass. I appreciate the smallest difference with the taiga for the orcs, and I really think the lakey-island-y area north of sutica could be expanded on, and so aswell the ravine and swamp areas near the druids. It feels like that part of the map is a compilation of new builds while everywhere else seems barren and abandoned. The snowy biomes are so far away to warrant building there either, with only Norland being the surviving nation up there. 

There is little variance in biomes, builds all feel the same as just squares, event builds are always unfinished and while they invoke mystery (the ones up north, in particular, to be vague) they are entirely just left there. The map feels sparse, empty, devoid of life. The only rp to be done is in cities. There is no incentive to explore or settle somewhere that looks the same as the rest. 


i want to go even further beyond

the map between atlas and arcas, in the glaciers- there was so much to explore, so much to see. You had small groups rping in such interesting and wondrous places that nobody even knew about, like the secret tree past the frostpunk-esque city that i would love to see again. The moving glaciers that encouraged so much exploration to break up the roleplay that was evidently a stale break from the rest. It was so fascinating, so interesting! The map seems to have none of it. Atlas had so many, even abandoned, yet still interesting cities that showed their scars and told their stories, and got the player asking and thinking questions. Rivia, a city that was a ghosttown at the end with warclaim chests still there, likely a memory of a city about to be conquered. Santiega was locked off yet it had all these ships off its port with these massive, beautiful walls that you even saw from the worldmap. These ships all around and so many interesting islands and corners and biomes to explore, it was quite literally never boring to explore such an oddly beautiful map. 

Arcas has none of that. It still feels like launch day. It still feels like the map is confined to your activity square, and that is all.

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23 minutes ago, Xarkly said:

Rushed map launch with no event site and the inability to get them started until months after is a major incompleteness issue.

 

Makes the map a pretty stage with no performance

 

Don’t forget staff mergers that completely fucked over several teams, followed up with admin incompetence in leading on multiple levels. 

 

For the most part, the map is fine. Whats not fine is the big ole **** you the players and nations get once they’re dropped into the map. Seriously, why can’t there be build support? The only “build support” is if you convince a CT to abuse LC, which they for some reason have access to and isn’t against policy to use.... 

 

15 minutes ago, _Jandy_ said:

In case you forgot I will remind you, there is currently a system in place where players are punished for leaving their activity square. This means we don’t adventure around for fun. We don’t see new parts of the map. We often don’t meet new people.

 

Also this. FFS.

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Personally, I dislike the layout of the map pretty heavily- though a lot of the builds became a bit of a saving grace at least for me. It’s layout as a giant circle kinda weirded me out, and it feels a bit unnatural as a continent.

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A mix of Anthos and Axios in design would be nice and I'd love it if Cloud Temple were in a desert that kind of sprawls out and is a notable feature. Minor, scattered historical builds alongside larger ones relevant to ST region lore (e.g. Asulon tidbits with the depth of Athera region lore) would be great for being able to both wander but also have content everywhere. And like Jandy put regardless of how the map is set up the regional heatmap restricts people from experiencing the world rather than encouraging them. And of course there needs to be follow up on locations with interactive lore and if that's not feasible then write and build them to be more obviously 1 dimensional. Pardon unsightliness, on mobile.

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When Arcas began, and after I had gotten myself settled, I began to map out Arcas, and sell the maps I had made.

A month or two ago, through sheer curiosity, I mapped out the entirety of Arcas.

 

6ed5028b8583a36a05f70c72d51f55c0.png

 

During my time mapping Arcas, I found: 

 

2 event sites, both of which were un-interactable, but just had weird things.

 

1 natural cave.

 

1 abandoned pre-built town

 

1 unaccessable area.

 

...

 

And thats it really... Other than the player-made builds-... theres not really that much to find.  Though there is some crazy wildlife- such is copy pasted around the map far too much for there to be much uniqueness.

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Hey, my builds are perfect. I spent WEEKS building the swamp west of the CT during map development and every build I’ve done so far has added to the map. The problem here really is the fact that we didn’t have enough builders during the map development process and simply ran out of time afterwards. That combined with lax rules on nations at the start of the map (Fenn..) mean’t we’d have these issues.

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Arcas is a really boring map tbh. At least with Atlas there was freebuild to fill the gaps that the world team neglected. As of present, there’s no reason to explore. There’s simply nothing to be found. 

 

For the next map, make things smaller and flesh it the f*** out. It’s clear that the World Team can’t build a large map without filling everything with boring plains dotted by the occasional copy/pasted tree, so clearly we ought to go with a smaller yet more detailed map in the future.

 

The wilderness of Asulon, a map that’s 7 years old, is more interesting to explore than Arcas, even if the build quality of everything was far inferior. Arcas has no creativity in its biomes or features bar the spooky forest and the mushroom island.

 

Some suggestions:

-Make mountains taller. Go all the way to maximum build height and make the slopes steeper so it isn’t ridiculously easy to climb. If the mountain isn’t a serious obstacle for travelers, it might as well not be there. The Dwarven mountains in Axios are a pretty good example of the types of mountains that LOTC needs.

-Don’t fill the map with boring plains. Some empty areas are alright, but if half the map is basically featureless, you’ve failed. Even some basic rolling hills are 100x more interesting than a useless plain.

-Put all the biomes reasonably close to the Cloud Temple. If the only desert is on an island nobody visits, the map might as well not have any desert at all.

-Don’t be afraid to make terrain more epic and fantastic. This is a fantasy RP server.

-Find more interesting details to put in places. Random ruins that will never be used are not interesting. Cannibal camps, native tribal villages, magical oddities, etc. are much more interesting.

-For the love of God, PLEASE create world lore BEFORE the map is released. Arcas still doesn’t have any world lore and we’ve been playing on it for half a year. Furthermore, if the terrain of the map could be connected to the lore behind it, that would be fantastic.

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  When the map opened up, I used whatever map or terrain image I could get my hands on to explore the new world of Arcas, to see what new things the world builders left for us to find. Of the locations I travelled to I found some areas that looked unfinished, so after giving it some time I would return later, in hopes of it being completed, and sadly most were not, as well as some signs that may have said to contact a person had disappeared in that time span. Exploring Arcas at this point feels like a giant test world where there are ideas all over the place that are pretty much just brainstorming that the map creators forgot to either implement or remove.

 

  As for the activity mechanic that everyone has talked about, everyone is too preoccupied to stay in their own cities for activity at risk of losing their land. Now the bright side of this mechanic is that since there is a lack of finished interactive builds scattered everywhere, theres no real reason to leave your nations tile. Now if the activity mechanic were to be removed, then it should increase the amount of people exploring, and it might even promote activity in areas that are struggling to keep the quota.

 

  But I digress; If there is a site in Arcas that is unfinished, either complete it or remove it. If there are sites that have been around since the beginning and it appears to be that nobody is going to interact with that area, remove it. Theres no point in having unimplemented ideas scattered across Arcas, only for them to be Easter Eggs that hold no lore value or otherwise are irrelevant to the story arc of Arcas.

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I think people might start to get annoyed by me saying Axios was the best map but I feel like I spent weeks teying to discover all it had to offer, the mountains touched the sky and my thumbs went sore when I had to traverse the surface of the dwarven lands from me hitting spacebar. But every now and them I found a cool place I knew I would visit some day with an event or just rping with my friends. I miss having huge maps and the nations noy being placed in a circle around the cloud temple, back then even Bandits had to do some work because the roads were large and you could take more than one path. I loved to see then giant biomes and different colors in the map, my druid friends might not agree with me but I'm kinda tired of seeing so muuuuch green everywhere. I love the map I just feel it lacks a bit of different colors.

 

2. CT don't have access to LC in the main world... @Sykogenic

3. I also feel like an already medium wized map gets reduced to much less space when you have to worry about something like activity. We are a RP server, distribute lands among factions (natioms/races even event factions and antags or even untouched lands) and if someone wants to build something make them and their friends go to the nation leader and ask for permission for their guild or group, try to take some uninhabited lands for themselves or attack an et faction to conquer their piece of land. 

 

Make something in which land is worth more than signatures and voting money land in fantasy settings is often stuff races and empires started wars for. It feels a bit of a let down that nowadays land is just oh look a cool place we cant visit cuz our activity data gets lower...

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The issues I have are simple enough. We’ve got these huge worlds, with everything spread out, but we’ve completely discontinued any form of fast travel. Boats, carts, anything. Even if they only went to crossroads or staff built docks, it would make traversing the map easier, so you don’t spend 3 hours running from one town to the other town you wanna go to.

On top of that, half the map is “nation flagged”  so that only nations can set up there, but no nations can get there cuz nations tend to start as settlements, but settlements can’t go there. and on top of THAT is the fact that tons of really great spots have been snatched up by event team folks (story team?), but they just don’t do anything with them, so really great spots are completely worthless. Why bother HAVING spots that nobody can use, much less spots that only nations are allowed in. Why should only nations get to be anywhere near CT?

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Won't lie, the map is just generic as a whole, so here's my pennies in suggestion for biomes alone. 

 

More diversity of biomes. One thing that particularly irks me is the desert continent of Korvassa, of which only the northern half is remotely desert, and barely even feels like a desert because it's so small that literally everything is packed together. This irritates me even more when I see that the desert's creator clearly based it off the incredible and ambient desert of Varant from Gothic 3, which Korvassa is NOTHING like. If Korvassa is to be more like Varant, the entire continent must be a gigantic, sparse desert. None of this Thyra here, Marsumar there crap. At best, the entire continent must have two cities, and must be particularly open and possibly harsh to navigate. One thing that I've noticed is that the Wildlands and northernmost part of Arcas in particular, are partially locked off from Arcas by a series of mountain ranges to make access difficult. This tells me the GM's can create a similarly inhospitable land, just with one massive desert. Come on. It's not hard. If I were given the opportunity, I'd honestly help myself. Furthermore, of the parts of Arcas that are Plains and forests, I see an incredible lack of diversity amongst those types. It's all generic green crap most of the time. What I'd like to see more of is something that is currently happening to Lorraine, where instead of the bog standard oak tree crap, we diversify with Spruces, Dark Oaks, Birches, etc. Take Oblivion for example. It's not all green forests. Some, like the Colovian Highlands, have a more rugged terrain, and what trees exist are extensively spread out. The Gold Coast, with a perpetual autumn feel as all the trees are gold and brown, Blackwood, which is a giant marsh with huge trees that could easily be Jungle or Spruce trees, but without being a Swamp. The Nibenay Basin, which itself is the stereotypical forests we see in LOTC, but takes influences from all the others to avoid being so generic. 

 

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I really think the map lacks in both ways..

 

The overall ‘lushness’ of the map has quite the copy pasted feel and most biomes are mostly empty and boring. Apart from that I really think we should aso show more history through indeed the making of ruins and other landmarks.

 

I also shared some other ideas in my development application ?

 

 

 

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ATTENTION CITIZEN PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR DESIGNATED ACTIVITY SQUARE

 

The map is lacking and the supposed biomes are so insignificant they might as well not exist. Most importantly the charter system makes it so the map might as well not exist. Just put each city in separate world instances and have a big room of buttons that teleport players too them. This is clearly the ideal solution to defeat the great big bad evil of player independence.

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