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A Discussion on Map Storylines


Xarkly
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I feel like most maps have a storyline that just ends up getting scrapped on launch so nothing ever happens.

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3 minutes ago, DrakeHaze. said:

I feel like most maps have a storyline that just ends up getting scrapped on launch so nothing ever happens.

shoutout to the cheese mountain "events site" area that went completely unused by both players and staff for the entirety of almaris

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I think you should be lt with your writing skills ngl

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I'll be perfectly honest and say that I didn't read all of this post because I'm a lazy *******.

 

I'd love the existence of an overarching map storyline to tie things together. Unfortunately, I don't believe there's enough of a unified vision for a long enough period of time on the ST to maintain it. There are too many people who would (and often do) seek to insert their own flavour into it or steer it in their own direction, regardless of what is best. It would inevitably descend into a grey, overly broad mass, rather than an engaging and unique tale.

 

Perhaps the only way I can see this working without the project losing steam or falling apart is for one person to hold the reigns and drive it themselves. And that's just as impractical as the alternative.

 

But maybe I'm just pessimistic, which is likely

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3 hours ago, Xarkly said:

This is like watching Attack on Titan for the first time in Season 3 after the Marley reveal

bro after the what :///

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Ultimately the problem with these major ET eventlines is you can just walk away, not care about what happens, and everything will still turn out fine. It makes it really hard to care after the first one or two you get involved in. The disconnect between the actual stakes and the portrayed stakes is just too big.

 

But at the same time, the ET can't just nuke a nation or they'll piss off half the server. Even if they have a plan of nuking every nation Aegis Undead style, the nation that loses out first won't be happy.

 

I thought the Westerlands was a good balance for this. Maybe it was different from an ET perspective, but for me it seemed like everyone, resident or visitor, was there to fight the undead hordes, and so the ET didn't have to pull their punches nearly as much as usual. People were expecting, and wanted, to be constantly harassed with attacks, to wake up and see a village burnt to the ground.

 

The North of Aegis was a similar concept. For the first few months of the map, the Undead stayed almost exclusively there. You could easily wake up to your town being destroyed, but (1) that depended on player action and (2) you were most likely in the North just so you could fight the Undead anyway, so you rolled with it.

 

I think we had similar stuff in Anthos (and even last map? I dunno I ignored the Inferi), but that felt wasted because you weren't hearing of nearby player settlements being destroyed, nor was there any chance for players to destroy outposts of the antag, except when it'd happen all at once as part of a scripted event. Again it just felt like something that could be totally ignored.

 

Moving on, the climax: 

Done well: Aegis Undead, Anthos Harbingers.

The Undead story culminated in nations capitals falling one after another like dominos, with major political upheaval as countries collapsed or capitals moved to other, safer towns. You had literal refugees and the world really felt like it was collapsing. Cool time.

 

The Harbingers were totally different. They didn't didn't destroy nearly as much (although they did kill a couple notable cities); Anthos just kinda got deleted once we got the Fringe because of performance and we were bored of it. But we did get to literally invade Hell, and that was really cool. What was nice about it though again was the dynamism. You had these mob-spawners sending waves of mobs at you, so you'd push them back and quickly erect a stone wall to keep the ground you'd won. Recover and charge over it, destroy some mob-spawners, build a new forward outpost. It was nice determining our own progress.

 

Both of them had their own apocalyptic ends. Next time I'd like both tbh. Have the Antag start off in the "danger zone" of the map destroying shit there, and towards the end they bust out and start destroying player regions, nation capitals, like nobody's business. Do attacks with very little warning, maybe attack multiple settlements at once to spread the forces thin. And then when it comes down to the final conclusion as the world burns, we invade some shit to kill them off. But oh RIP, our map has been tainted and destroyed by evil forces, nothing will grow here any more, on to the next map. The end.

 

The Inferi did kinda have an "invade Hell" ending, and it was a nice event over-all, but unlike the Undead or the Harbringers, they never really busted out of their corner of the map so they always felt totally irrelevant to me. And the final event was cool, but ultimately it felt overly dramatised for what you actually felt and experienced as a player. You had no hordes rush you in PVE, you didn't have famous settlements get wiped away across the map, and unless you were from that shitty little island they were on, you probably didn't really care or notice that it fell. It was this huge big world-ending, uh, ending to an antagonist that felt anything but world-ending. I mean there were even player wars going on right in the middle of it; that's how little people really cared. Also, having an antag like that not be the map-ending event feels really anti-climactic.

 

And one last thing I touched on there: Have PVE ffs. The best parts of the Westerlands event lines were sweating like a madman as you fought horde after horde of mobs, seeing your friend on half a heart and rushing in to save him, before just barely escaping yourself. Seeing others pop around you, your numbers dwindling while the hordes never stopped coming. The Undead and the Harbringers too had lots of really fun PVE events. Sure CRP events are cool sometimes, but can we mix up the endless walls of text with mechanics for once? This *is* Minecraft.

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everything @argoniansaid and more

 

super dramatized server-wide events are corny. watching an ET cinematic rp infront of a ton of people is really not fun and often self absorbed. 

 

the aegis undead were so great because they were overpowered. the server is so obsessed with fair endings and balance that everything is so canned. legit feels like WWE sometimes. whereas in aegis, as mentioned above, the undead could and did roll up on towns and just destroy them in huge pve fights. there would be floating undead citadels that would encroach upon your small village: netherrack spreading like a virus. i have distinct memories of using cakes as medpacks because that predated Minecraft hunger bar.

 

i didn’t experience the harbingers but from what I hear they had a similar gimmick, and were similarly powered up to make up for their smaller size. 
 

and of course im chief Westerlands shill: there’s some minor misconceptions when it comes to the wlands, mostly, we didn’t have a ton of ET support into late into the life of the Westerlands. we legitimately hunted mobs in the woods, did patrols by the sunless sanctum portal, and when Skylez started coming around he started doing our massive PVE fights for us. the whole “mordring invading the word through the sunless sanctum” was entirely pushed narratively by us to give us purpose and fulfill our niche if nights watch rp. by time I became king, rudi and ang got involved because I wanted to cooperate with ET / spooks to create something special. were there not special actors at play I think it could’ve been something even more special than it was ! 

nevertheless, I bring that story of the wlands up because 9 times out of 10 players will make their own fun and only a select group of people who really care about lore will care about storylines. overall, people want something to fight and they talk about. they’re high maintenance, oftentimes larp, and rarely done correctly. a solid PVE world event will always be more fun than some weird dialogue and crp. 


manpower is also an issue in that this is a hobby for most people and this server isn’t a video game. so developing these super in depth map storylines is sometimes strenuous and just not fun, especially when players are only so clever to murder everything in their path ! ! 

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13 hours ago, un-w said:

shoutout to the cheese mountain "events site" area that went completely unused by both players and staff for the entirety of almaris

 

Yeah, stuff like this has definitely become a bit of a meme, and it's a bit of an unfortunate staple of the map development process since Arcas -- areas are designed by a couple of ET but from stuff like lore being scrapped, builds being unavailable, or the ET themselves just not being there when the map launch actually rolls around, I don't think there's been a single instance where these areas have launched as intended. Although it's taken close to two years, I'm glad Dark Harbour seems to be getting used now.

 

Obviously, this issue is to do with Staff structure and map development process, which is something that I think can only be properly addressed with a team wide, and heavy Administration involvement (though that probably has its own pitfalls ...) so that visions of a map storyline aren't confined to a couple of people, and instead something the entire Staff can carry throughout the map. That seems to be the only real way to fix problems like these, which are a product of a small number of ST who lack the resources (whether through their own fault or others) to pull the project off.

 

4 hours ago, argonian said:

Ultimately the problem with these major ET eventlines is you can just walk away, not care about what happens, and everything will still turn out fine. It makes it really hard to care after the first one or two you get involved in. The disconnect between the actual stakes and the portrayed stakes is just too big.

 

But at the same time, the ET can't just nuke a nation or they'll piss off half the server. Even if they have a plan of nuking every nation Aegis Undead style, the nation that loses out first won't be happy.

 

 

Yeah, for sure this is a valid point. A part of me, though, feels inclined to say that a lot of eventlines are robbed of consequences because they are just eventlines -- because they're just one part of the map, a month or two out of the two-year run-time, they lack the gravity and significance to inflict consequence on nations and other player groups.

 

I don't think the same necessarily has to be true for map storylines.

 

Because I describe these storylines as such a major part of the map's identity and functioning, that should in theory give them the weight they need to start exacting some meaningful consequences. Of course, we still have to navigate the usual pitfalls of player interaction and the practicalities of taking player land, but I don't think that's by any means impossible, and I frankly think the community is kind of looking for some would definitely bite at the prospect of something new and exciting, especially from the storytelling department.

 

But yeah, TLDR, I think the status of map storyline as the narrative pinnacle of the map, fully backed and executed by Staff, can give it the leeway to look at real consequences. Other eventlines are just that -- they're random eventlines, usually ran by 1 or 2 ETs.

 

1 hour ago, space warlord organ trader said:

everything @argoniansaid and more

 

super dramatized server-wide events are corny. watching an ET cinematic rp infront of a ton of people is really not fun and often self absorbed. 

 

 

Completely valid, but I think that this relates more to the merits and skills of individual ET rather than some of the broader roadblocks for map storylines that I talk about in this post. Ultimately, this again just falls to the internal operations of the Story Team, and I decided it was probably better not to embark on a critique of the Team, their experience with large-scale eventlines, and how to carry them out from the perspective of an individual ET. I think it definitely is possible, though, and again it requires a lot of 'reading the room' and knowing the climate of the server when it comes to designing and executing your events -- for example, it's abundantly clear to me that the playerbases at large are pretty tired of these blogpost text emoting in massive CRP battles (especially when not a lot of ET are equipped to deal with high emote loads in any kind of timely manner), whereas rewind to 2020, and people loved seeing an entire war played out entirely in CRP.

 

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56 minutes ago, space warlord organ trader said:

the aegis undead were so great because they were overpowered. the server is so obsessed with fair endings and balance that everything is so canned. legit feels like WWE sometimes. whereas in aegis, as mentioned above, the undead could and did roll up on towns and just destroy them in huge pve fights. there would be floating undead citadels that would encroach upon your small village: netherrack spreading like a virus. i have distinct memories of using cakes as medpacks because that predated Minecraft hunger bar.

 

Going back to what I said to James, I feel like a big part of this is because most "big" eventlines we see now are just eventlines that look big because there's not really much else going on story-wise. Ultimately, they're just an eventline without any special status, and it seems disproportionate that an eventline can destroy a nation or something like that. I'm not saying that it can't be done, it's just easy to see why it might be a difficult thing to justify mechanically.

 

Outside of that, while I think NLs these days might genuinely be down for some more risk and consequence in events, I also think eventlines need to actually start deserving that risk - what I mean by this is that the eventline has to basically be good enough to warrant players to trust the Team enough for them to inflict these losses or consequences in a way that is narratively rewarding for them still, makes them want to participate, etc. I think the overall absence of meaningful eventlines in recent years reflects that most playerbases aren't willing to hitch their wagons to horses that they don't necessarily seem to have a whole lot of faith in.

 

As far as map storylines are concerned, I think this could be addressed by the 'slow-burn' start I alluded to. In the earlier portions of the storyline, the relevant ET need to basically build up a level of trust and quality with the players they're dealing with, to the point where they create a relationship where the ET can essentially go "you know you can trust me to do my thing, and you'll get a great story".

9 hours ago, Rilath said:

bro after the what :///

 

mikasa is freddy fazbear

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Sounds amazing. Where do I sign up to help write all of this?

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21 hours ago, argonian said:

snip

 

In Anthos, didn't the Adunian meatgrinder frontline against the Harbingers at Ard'Kerrack cause the entire event-line to get derailed and fall several weeks behind schedule, culminating in the rushed end of that map?

Edited by Arafel
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