[Your View] ARCAS - Sense of Completeness

[JustMeMorgan 1000]

Having a luscious world with history locked away in certain areas which promotes exploration in my eyes would be greatly effective, having places that people can try to see what happened and what-not is always fun.

 

I’d also suggest probably making it so each place has something of value, be it that it’s a good view or it could hint to some of the events that go on in the map

 

This map has just been an oversized transition map due to the loregames

[Dandoop 18]

I made my account in Atlas but I was a lost noob so I didn’t start playing till Arcas. Because of this, my opinion of different worlds and lands to explore will primarily come from my experiences outside of Lotc.

When I think of Arcas, the first thing that comes to mind is that the world feels very.... generic. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing. The world of middle earth could be argued to be generic, yet it’s still loved to this day. No, I think what I mean by generic is that the world doesn’t ever feel like it has an Identity. Something that defines what makes this world special and worth my time. When I explore Arcas, I keep running into the same environments, with the same biomes and a very similar height map to everything. Nothing feels unique, aside from the voidal tears recently, and the different player made areas/kingdoms. Yes you could argue there are interesting areas like the mushroom biome, or the bamboo forest, but those are so far and few apart from each other, and with no reason to visit them, that it makes the world feel even more sparse.

Contrast that to something like Azeroth in World of Warcraft. The different lands and biomes, and the contrast between each land is evident and interesting with almost no two areas being exactly the same. There is also a story localized to each region through the use of quests. Some of these stories help immerse players into that region and give them reason to care. I’m not advocating a quest based system for the server, that’s not what I believe Lotc is about. What I am highlighting is an apparent lack of history, and activity outside of player action.
The thing that makes a world feel immersive and real is that things are happening in the world apart from your actions. While you were role playing in a tavern, there was a war going on between two kingdoms. You might be away for a week and come back to someone you know being ousted as a murderer. Things happen and that’s what makes a world feel real. But it feels as though almost nothing is happening in Arcas.

This isn’t helped by the current system used to check activity. The system makes sense on paper. Roleplay in your region to keep activity up. It encourages roleplay, and makes cities/towns feel more alive. But in practice, this can get really stressful and it soon starts becoming about just keeping up your little percentage number, and not about creating fun and interesting roleplay. No one wants their activity to fall, yet roleplaying in the same area gets tiring very fast, and with these activity checks it can feel like your locked into an area.
Until there are some key changes to the way that we check and maintain roleplay, I don’t believe we will be seeing a lot of exploration anytime soon.

So we have a generic map with very few interesting story hooks and areas to explore, and a mechanical incentive to not explore them. The question is then, what can be done to fix this?
Well there are many things that could be done, but these are a few that come to mind.

 

Make the world it’s own.
World building is hard. At least I believe so. There are so many factors that go into creating a world that it can be hard to know where to start or how to flesh out a world you already have built. I believe the best place to start when creating a world is knowing what happened/what is happening in it, to allow yourself a setting to create something interesting and unique. For Arcas, that could be creating ruins of temples with statues of creatures that seem very reminiscent of the void. This both creates history of the void within the land, and hints that there are clues about the void within the world that players can try and find out. This also creates more reason for people to explore.

 

I would also say making the biomes and lands more interesting in general. I can see generic grasslands, planes, and mountains on any default survival server. Infact, I’m more likely to run into a floating island or an extremely insane hill/cliff on a default map than I am on Arcas. So then what does Arcas have that I haven’t already seen? That’s something that you don’t want players asking themselves, so creating some geological wonders with stories and events behind them is something that should be implemented.

I would start talking about the activity check system but this is already getting to long and there is so much to talk about when it comes to the activity check system that I would rather just make a separate post about it so for now I’ll just say this. Either do a major rework of the mechanic, or just remove it.

I guess that’s all I have to say. I want Arcas, and subsequently, all future maps to be amazing, and I hope that my feedback has been helpful in some way.

 

[Nozgoth 2897]

I say you should add a new desert somewhere or expand the Korvassa desert. The Korvassa desert is fairly small and It doesn’t really have much to it.

Edited September 22, 2019 by SparkyWiz

[Hephaestus 1317]

I feel there are way too many plains- maybe it’s just personal preference but; I feel like having an official farfolk nation and bigger desert region would be awesome.

[LoTC's Next Top Model 713]

The freebuild is borderline non-existant and a twenty minute walk from spawn, and the Biome diversity on this map is absolutely non-existant.

[ferdaboy 1551]

the way the plots r placed is so bad it feels like a giant square

[THUNDER37 162]

The main issue really i’ve noticed on maps as of the last few years is the sense of scale.. Things are too large to incorporate the player base. It would be nice to see builds and the land surrounding scaled down and made more accessible to the average player.. As of now everything feels too grand and it keeps the average player away. 

[JuniperSelkie 241]

I also agree with there being a problem with the activity check system. Everyone is huddled down in their little square, afraid to leave cuz it'll **** over their city/nation/village.

[chaotikal 2236]

Map structure is wrong, it basically encloses the rp activity around extremely restrictive “nation” tiles, and makes reaching non nation tile regions extremely hard. That, coupled with the bad regioning system and chartering system this map, makes lotc feel stale in areas where activity is less consistent, which will generate ghost towns speckled on the road or road whereabouts. 

[The Fact Core 511]

 

→ Add some life thru historic/ruins things, something a player could enter from time to time and explore, such a thing would also be a good prebuild spot for future event purposes etc. (Everything can be explained with lore, give the characters a possible motivation to build up a myth and so on.)

→ Add some life thru small life spending objects, such as a odd broken or abondened house in a bland forest or a monster nest/cave etc.

→ Add some life thru possible after war battlefield scenes, the server has war and that never changes, communicate between the factions on which possible spot would be nice to have a limited timed built of a battle long over. (Much immersion)

→ Add some life thru reoccuring events which might happen from time to time on Arcas, such as a meteor shower on the night sky, something only on Arcas happens because of it’s history, the return of some extreme rare creature to nom. etc.

[chaotikal 2236]

Also I don’t know why this isn’t talked about but a roleplay that relies on immersion and lore changing maps magically every year is getting old. A map that is made with love and made to LAST at least 2 years is what LoTC has needed since Anthos.

[BipolarMk2 13]

6 hours ago, chaotikal said:

Also I don’t know why this isn’t talked about but a roleplay that relies on immersion and lore changing maps magically every year is getting old. A map that is made with love and made to LAST at least 2 years is what LoTC has needed since Anthos.

 

Agreed. I’m kinda sick of moving every 8 months.

[D4NNA 282]

Bring fast travel back and institute it to RP!

That would’ve helped the Arcas map too and is absolutely needed for a non-decentralizing nation layout.

 

 The thing I was most hoping for this map was the wildlands. In the end you had to venture ridiciously far out into the wildlands until you’d finally encounter freebuild area, because the region that was supposed to be clear to build right at the beginnning, just was regioned and flagged (probably claimed by some gm). 

Then again I hoped no freebuild would keep the ‘unpleasant kind of builds’ out of the nations but still I see little animal pods or some other farming contraption littering the places, and not to mention the ridicilous amount of signs in every nation you go. If Arcas was in any way not complete the sheer amount of useless crap brought there afterwards makes up for it and I’m just waiting to put evil event creatures in all these ghost charters.

I wish next map we can have just nice things, made by many nice builders and with solid nice lore behind the builds. No more charters, no more freebuild, full on immersion. It doesn’t even have to be very grand or outstandingly designed, just a little more variation and more dedication to the lore behind it and a challenge behind exploration (maybe have complete areas shut off because descendants have yet to find a way for them to travel there safely) 

[Pikel Boldshoulder 175]

As a person who played on every iteration of LotC, I don’t believe the failings of this map is to do with lack of unique terrain (look at Aegis it was literally a vanilla map) but a lack of interactivity. Since coming back into this map I’ve only ever felt like visitors to this world with little agency. This was improved after spending my first month gaining entrance into Sutica, Rentatus, and Hefrumm and I started to enjoy my times spent in these locations as I carved out my place in them, making them feel as homes.
However it became apparent it’s very hard to interact with your environment outside of your bubble. The Jungle island an example, I tried incredibly hard to be invested in that location along with the swamp, and hats off to the ET’s that tried to push them. But it was an act of pulling fingernails to truely invest in exploring outside as it required organising often days in advance to be babysat in a location you ultimately could do very little with.

If a player doesn't feel l like they can interact with the world or have any agency their environment, they are going to have lacklustre time.

[NotEvilAtAll 9926]

12 hours ago, chaotikal said:

Also I don’t know why this isn’t talked about but a roleplay that relies on immersion and lore changing maps magically every year is getting old. A map that is made with love and made to LAST at least 2 years is what LoTC has needed since Anthos.

I think we should take a page out of Tolkien’s work and modify the map every year instead of getting a completely new map. Have new areas rise out of the sea and old areas become flooded, make rivers erode the earth around it into canyons, change up the climate of certain areas every so often, etc. 

 

Of course, this would require there to be a map people actually enjoy enough to want to play on for years and years with only some terrain modifications here and there, which would require a lot of effort from the world team.