LotC Maps and their Future?

[Nectorist 12869]

A large map also needs to be easy to traverse. Where Axios worked was that the cart/boat system meant that you could get around to different hubs easily to check for RP. Where Atlas worked was that most of the major settlements were along the same north-south road, so while the map itself was large and there was no easy fast travel, there wasn’t a large section you had to cover to find the main settlements.

 

If that doesn’t happen, then ideally you’ll have a smaller map with some fantasy aesthetics (biomes that are slightly distorted from real life in a cool way). The best maps don’t last for much longer than 2 years, but that’s not all too important. Nations also should be allowed to make some landscape changes, stuff that would make sense irp, but builds should generally conform to their location.

[Laeonathan 5889]

 

I did not see this coming.

[L1veLaughLich 425]

I'll say it.

Remove soul pillars.

Why would anybody bother to traverse the big map when they can just warp outside of their city's gates?

If you want a big map, then incentivise people to explore that map. Let people stumble into cities because they got lost on the way home.

Right now, we have a big map, but nobody on the roads, and nobody going anywhere they don't warp to the closest soul pillar to.

 

"Why are you booing me? I'm right."

[Unwillingly 18125]

30 minutes ago, FelicorAugusto said:

I'll say it.

Remove soul pillars.

Why would anybody bother to traverse the big map when they can just warp outside of their city's gates?

If you want a big map, then incentivise people to explore that map. Let people stumble into cities because they got lost on the way home.

Right now, we have a big map, but nobody on the roads, and nobody going anywhere they don't warp to the closest soul pillar to.

 

"Why are you booing me? I'm right."

removing soulstone pillars won't fix road RP because soulstones aren't the reason there's no road RP people who say this make me sad :(

 

if people want road RP the roads need to be

 

1. actually more convenient and navigable to travel as opposed to just cutting through the land. for example there's a spot between haense and numendil where just walking over the mountain is quicker than taking the actual roads, because the road takes you on this extra minute or two minute detour towards petra. and there are many spots on the map that are like this. without fixing 1 you cannot have 2.

 

2. interesting to do roleplay on. if you think about it there's nothing from stopping people from doing road RP if they really want to, nobody HAS to use soulstone pillars. but that doesn't happen because most peoples' idea of road RP is boring, bare minimum encounters that consist of halting people on the roads, standing there and talking (maybe you get bandited or attacked) before moving on. people use roads to get to a destination, not to look for RP because there's virtually 0 outlets of road RP 

 

and if you still don't believe me, road RP was arguably at its peak during atlas 4-ish maps ago (at least relative to how long I've been playing the server). bandits and darkspawn not only created road encounters, but they often had lairs and fortresses sat on top of roads. this meant that you'd also run into actual guard patrols on your way to a place because they'd have their own guard forts set up on the roads to counter the bandits and darkspawn in their lands. belvitz, like adria last map, was a little town right on top of the road you'd be forced to pass through if you wanted to get from point A to B. there were taverns, military checkpoints, merchant sites, and all sorts of buildings within view if not literally on top of roads, and it's all what made them actually interesting to travel in 2018. people who created different outlets and actual reasons to watch/patrol the roads. above all, soulstone pillars existed during atlas and have existed since I started playing the server 8 years ago

 

this can somewhat be attributed to the slow, painful death of conflict/villainy activity in recent years. guard RP as I previously mentioned was one of the biggest forms of road RP back in the day, but guard RP has become so SO isolated to being within their cities, there's just no reason to really go outside and explore because there is nothing to explore and no danger even exists to fight off. back in the day you had 3 different groups who could encounter each other at once, darkspawn and bandits would frequently team up to fight off a guard rally because shit was just that fast paced back then. that's not something I think we've seen in years and honestly I don't think we'll be getting it back any time soon

[Cheese 8893]

I miss on Almaris how much empty space there was. It was easy to claim for settlements, lairs, or small structures/event sites. Also, I think the current geography of Aevos is weird. You're telling me Haense, a northern kingdom in a frigid climate is next to Hyspia, which is supposed to be a hot savanna-thing? It doesn't make sense that neighbors should have such vastly different climates.

 

Please refer to the Aevos peace plan I made last January while I had the flu and was high on painkillers

[Jihnyny 5233]

3 hours ago, Cheese said:

I miss on Almaris how much empty space there was. It was easy to claim for settlements, lairs, or small structures/event sites. Also, I think the current geography of Aevos is weird. You're telling me Haense, a northern kingdom in a frigid climate is next to Hyspia, which is supposed to be a hot savanna-thing? It doesn't make sense that neighbors should have such vastly different climates.

 

Please refer to the Aevos peace plan I made last January while I had the flu and was high on painkillers

Aevos is a struggle map. The fact that the majority of the current tiles nations own dont have anything on them except resources because they cant afford cores, sucks too. Also the mountains, hills and cliffs divide the terrain alot which forces nations to be in specific places. It truely does suck and the region pot is dumb.

5 hours ago, Laeonathan said:

 

I did not see this coming.

Alot of the poll answers are really surprising ngl

7 hours ago, Nectorist said:

A large map also needs to be easy to traverse. Where Axios worked was that the cart/boat system meant that you could get around to different hubs easily to check for RP. Where Atlas worked was that most of the major settlements were along the same north-south road, so while the map itself was large and there was no easy fast travel, there wasn’t a large section you had to cover to find the main settlements.

 

If that doesn’t happen, then ideally you’ll have a smaller map with some fantasy aesthetics (biomes that are slightly distorted from real life in a cool way). The best maps don’t last for much longer than 2 years, but that’s not all too important. Nations also should be allowed to make some landscape changes, stuff that would make sense irp, but builds should generally conform to their location.

 

7 hours ago, Morigung-oog said:

What people seem to fail to understand is that a larger distance between nations makes it far less easy to find Roleplay. As someone who’s experienced four maps + Axios to some extent, I’ve seen a range of map sizes and I’ve never really enjoyed larger maps. In order to make them really work, you’d probably need to add more soulstone slots. I don’t want to spent 30 minutes going from empty nation to empty nation to use the server for its intended purpose.

 

7 hours ago, Andustar said:

Whilst I don't necessarily dislike large maps, they can be very frustrating to navigate at times and often result in mutual roleplay hubs between communities (i.e. the Red Rose Tavern in Athera) becoming far more sparse. If they are to remain the norm going forward, I would appreciate the addition of a wider range of fast travel options. This has often been a controversial add-on that has frequently been subject to debate, but I do honestly consider it a necessity if you truly desire a vast sprawling landscape.

Really poorly drawn example but I think you get the idea. A long map, controller shaped probably. The Deep-Red is the kings road, the Bright Red are the soulstone pillars. You'd have WEST, CENTRE, PORT, EAST. Which all would be within around the same distance of eachother. Nations should be allowed to have builds on the road,(like Adria last map) though with regulations, and carts should be available between every soulstone. 
 

The port would feature a ferry to each respective island (unless a nation owns some and disagrees)
Every soulstone would have a cart that does NOT go to nations, but instead to each soulstone, (so if you want to roleplay in a nation within the east, and then the west, you simply go back to the east pillar, cart to the west, and move from the west pillar to the respective nation.)
This'll force players to walk some, but not an exceeding amount. 

as for the past trouble of maps, i think the problem with them was the road design and the terrain. for e.g Almaris was horribly difficult to go around if you didnt travel through the road. Currently, on Aevos this is almost the same, except the roads are a mix of horid and confusing twists and paths, troubling roadsigns and horrible mountains thrat u have to go through if you want to go off-road. 

Im a fan of forcing players to walk through from x to y, i dont think the server should ever have a fast travel option to every single nation or place. That would defeat the purpose of having roads at all, or, an open space to roleplay on. If you want to have complete fast travel, you might aswell have 2 continents where one has no nations, and the other is just citys like massivecraft or something.

if ST complain theres no events or something, then the map could be tall with the addition of just BS biomes that no nation ever wants to put their build in. Just a giant wasteland of fantasy biomes, explained by some lore or something. 

EDIT: the very wide map would allow biomes to be spread evenly and mixed together without the trouble of the north being placed with the desert. 

[Nectorist 12869]

3 hours ago, Jihnyny said:

snip

Having fast travel carts isn’t a hill that I’d die on, and I’d be fine with having nations strung out along a single, giant road, but I will say that I’ve actually seen a lot less road RP now than I have back in the day. Not that there was ever a ton, but there were a couple of more roadside taverns and small towns that you’d see pop up. The issue with theoretical road RP is that 99% of it is banditry, but with banditry basically dead there is absolutely nothing on the roads as you go from point A to point B. The new /realms activity command helps, but in practice what this has meant is that you just run back and forth between hubs to see if any RP is there, because there’s nothing really on the roads.

[PCSwift 1422]

wish we could see who voted what

anyone who wants a big map like aevos is  MORON

[Laeonathan 5889]

3 hours ago, PCSwift said:

wish we could see who voted what

anyone who wants a big map like aevos is  MORON

 hate to break it to you but aevos is considered a smaller map...

[Legoboy7984 3155]

Although I'm quite late to the party here, will state that I think the size of Anthos is ideally the size we should have. If not slightly bigger. It's the first map that I was on when I joined, and it was a really good one.

 

In Anthos, you can walk towards nations quite easily. I think someone the Admins should look towards is creating an antag within the map. As within Anthos, we had the Black Scourage that lived in the frozen north. We'd walk in and there we'd have ET/ST members ready to start roleplay. We'd have interactions or schedule a bit with the team to do expeditions. Within these expeditions, you won't ever get super deep into it as that was saved later. That being the entire map gathering together to put an end to them, one that I believe later led towards them coming back with the map ending. Fantasy biomes can be good, as it brings more uniqueness to the server's maps. You can create different variations of antag in some of these places if need be as well.

For Aevos, I'm quite bored of it and wish we were looking towards a new map, as I believe that two years is a good timeframe to be on a map. Though not hitting the 2-year mark yet, we should be talking about the new map around this time and building hype for a map change. Hopefully, we won't have a lot of delays like we had going into this map as I know we went through like 3 or 4 map designers or whatever it was to get the world set up.

[Frisket 4538]

Let's just invade and purge an old map instead of going through and making a new map. Personally some of the answers I did not see coming