Closing Islands ?

[Gustav Kuriga]

What's the meaning of life?

42. Now stop asking silly questions!

[Draco Tanos]

Because in SpellMaster there were three islands, East South and West.  The east Island was eponymous the eastern island of the three. The south island was actually the War-Islands (hence south-west, and south-east) The colonies map is actually the West Island map.  It's also why there was a Lich King character there for a time as there was a Lich King character in SpellMaster.

Any other questions?

Though if there was a combination of the continents onto a single map, such locations should be taken into consideration. 

[Forbes Family]

When I first started  the game I was playing another one where battles were very... infrequent. My first character was brought in in Etoge and the next turn was in a battle against a small horde. Almost all of his men were killed in the battle as he was the only one fighting, but he won. And I was hooked.

I think in order to get more player retention we need to give instant battles to them. How hard would it be to code something where a horde appears when a new player does? Give them an instant battle and let them get that rush of adrenalin?

Another thought, People talk about old players possibly coming back. This game has changed a lot over the years with Trade, Estates, Sea Travel etc. Tom, you must have emails for people that have deleted accounts. Is there any thought to write these old players and extend an invitation to come back? Perhaps an incentive where they can start with more characters than a true newb?

I don't think closing an island is a good idea as it will loose us more players. What we need is more players or something to recruit more players.

[loren]

So I had a good think about this while I was out just now. It seems to me that the only way we can really 'sink' and island is to choose two that aren't going to survive and have them both collide in a fashion where they scramble for land.

In other words two islands are going to one single empty island and they have to duke it out for space through portals that are placed in various places throughout the sinking islands (portal exits I think should be random and have to be explored).

Why do I favor this approach? Nobody feels singled out, it will drive a ton of combat as old alliances shift and batter against one another. How could this actually be done without creating a new island? Two options as I see it.  We sink the Atamara based clones.  Or we sink the FEI and the East having them merged onto a new paired continent ala Dwilight with shrunken coasts from the original FEI and East islands.  This would be a lot more work, but I think will appeal to the player base as it allows cultures to stay in-tact, but to merge realms.

[Chenier]

The only "sink" that wouldn't go too badly for me was if BT got a huge beastie spawner in the middle of it, and all continents were merged into one game world with sea zones allowing travel between them, so that the rogue spawns would increase the character per owned region density by making regions go rogue, but coordinated efforts to reclaim targeted lands would always have a chance of success and no land or realm would be guaranteed to be wiped permanently. Perhaps, as an option, portal stones could be made to allow people to "move" the rogue spawner into other regions and other continents, or a series of scrolls (should be nobles that do it, imo) (ex: using more summon scrolls at once in the same region than was ever used before), so that the realms next to the arbitrary first spawn place aren't totally doomed, and that the burden of the rogues can be moved around a bit by player actions, thus keeping this mostly a PvP mechanic.

[Kai]

Sink the island with the lowest player density.

[Gustav Kuriga]

Sink the island with the lowest player density.

Well technically that would be Dwilight, which has nothing to do with player retention and everything to do with how incredibly huge of a continent it is.

[Wolfang]

and that it has a one char per person limit maybe?

[Solari]

I have always favored shuttering a continent, or accomplishing the same through mergers or some other means. Density drives everything. Folks need to decide if they'd rather be King Turd of Crap Mountain—by acquiring positions of power but nobody to play with—or a part of a vibrant and interesting experience. For me, it's the latter.

[Tiridia]

Bring in the weapons of mass destruction. We dislike pve solutions, so let it be pvp. Give us ways to semi-permanently destroy regions, turning them into wastelands.

Introduce two new scrolls for that - one to destroy and another to heal. Success rate is influenced by noble density on the continent. When the density is low, healing often fails and destruction succeeds, and vice versa.

Or sages make scrolls based on density. Low density gets more plague scrolls than healing.

[Indirik]

Interesting idea, Tiridia. A Scroll of Blight that allows you to blight a region in some manner, either instantly, or by accumulating points over a period of time. But let's skip the healing part. ;)

What worries me about that kind of thing, though, is how many realms/players would organize a vigilante attitude toward the scrolls. i.e. organizing alliances/groups to punish anyone who uses them. You can see some version of this with the monster/undead scrolls.

Perhaps, to make it more interesting, you could make them "30 second bombs". Every turn they count down by one, and when they hit zero they activate, blighting the region they are in. Make it a "reverse capture the flag" kind of thing, maybe.  Have the bombs announce the remaining turn count to the entire region (or current/adjacent regions, like the "RP event" the GM characters can use). That way you can see if someone is sending one your way, and attack the carrier. If you wound the carrier, they drop it, and you can pick it up and carry it somewhere else. You'd know who was sending the bomb after you, and could take appropriate retaliatory action. I'm sure we could come up with a convincing RP basis/explanation for them.

Zap an island with enough of these, and you'd definitely knock down the inhabitable area. You could control exactly how much you reduced the land area by controlling how many of them you released onto the island.

[egamma]

Interesting idea, Tiridia. A Scroll of Blight that allows you to blight a region in some manner, either instantly, or by accumulating points over a period of time. But let's skip the healing part. ;)

What worries me about that kind of thing, though, is how many realms/players would organize a vigilante attitude toward the scrolls. i.e. organizing alliances/groups to punish anyone who uses them. You can see some version of this with the monster/undead scrolls.

Perhaps, to make it more interesting, you could make them "30 second bombs". Every turn they count down by one, and when they hit zero they activate, blighting the region they are in. Make it a "reverse capture the flag" kind of thing, maybe.  Have the bombs announce the remaining turn count to the entire region (or current/adjacent regions, like the "RP event" the GM characters can use). That way you can see if someone is sending one your way, and attack the carrier. If you wound the carrier, they drop it, and you can pick it up and carry it somewhere else. You'd know who was sending the bomb after you, and could take appropriate retaliatory action. I'm sure we could come up with a convincing RP basis/explanation for them.

Zap an island with enough of these, and you'd definitely knock down the inhabitable area. You could control exactly how much you reduced the land area by controlling how many of them you released onto the island.

This could be a huge amount of fun. A 30-day timer that announces every turn, to its current region and all adjacent regions, that the bomb is in keplerville, carried by Evilstan. Infiltrators would swarm Evilstan, and if he gets wounded, the bomb drops and gets picked up by another player in the region (random, or make it appear on the action menu). The bomb stays quiet for 2 turns, to give him a chance to get away, and then starts announcing again.

[Sarwell]

Interesting idea, Tiridia. A Scroll of Blight that allows you to blight a region in some manner, either instantly, or by accumulating points over a period of time. But let's skip the healing part. ;)

What worries me about that kind of thing, though, is how many realms/players would organize a vigilante attitude toward the scrolls. i.e. organizing alliances/groups to punish anyone who uses them. You can see some version of this with the monster/undead scrolls.

Perhaps, to make it more interesting, you could make them "30 second bombs". Every turn they count down by one, and when they hit zero they activate, blighting the region they are in. Make it a "reverse capture the flag" kind of thing, maybe.  Have the bombs announce the remaining turn count to the entire region (or current/adjacent regions, like the "RP event" the GM characters can use). That way you can see if someone is sending one your way, and attack the carrier. If you wound the carrier, they drop it, and you can pick it up and carry it somewhere else. You'd know who was sending the bomb after you, and could take appropriate retaliatory action. I'm sure we could come up with a convincing RP basis/explanation for them.

Zap an island with enough of these, and you'd definitely knock down the inhabitable area. You could control exactly how much you reduced the land area by controlling how many of them you released onto the island.

That could be hilarious. Every realm would probably end up creating a whole small army for doom-artifact containment.

[trying]

Yes and then some people will just build a moat around their entire realm.

[Frostwood]

Yes and then some people will just build a moat around their entire realm.

Make it so that you can still travel through the blight, but not gather food, or do anything with the blighted regions, and have them produce monsters and undead at an accelerated rate.