Closing Islands ?

[Tom]

How quickly would you want to do this? I think I would prefer it it were over quickly, i.e. a certain number of bombs are spawned at once, 30 days later land is blighted, and then we know for sure we won't have any more for at least a year.

I fear the strategic implications of regularly spawning nuclear bomb would have on the general gameplay. Uncertainty creates fear in realm leaders, and many realms will prefer never to go to war for fear that their enemies would destroy their precious lands.

It would definitely have to be an event, i.e. something that happens once and then it's done.

[Tom]

I think it is important that the affected regions are wastelands, not blighted. We do not want walls and bottlenecks. They should probably adversery effect joined regions as well, in order to discourage their use on own border regions.

It would be comparatively easy to add code that turns regions into permanent wasteland that can not be TOed, that is considered permanently in starvation (so travelling through requires food reserves) and so on. It would solve the bottleneck problem and we wouldn't have to redraw any maps.


I don't think we can use the unique item code. I'd rather go with something like magical monoliths. Rough cut concept:

   
• They spawn around the map evenly distributed.
• Every 3 days, they will move to a neighbouring region.
• If 2 of them meet in the same region, that region is turned wasteland immediately and one of the monoliths becomes inactive.
• After 30 days / 10 moves, any remaining monoliths will turn their current region into wasteland and go inactive.
• They will not move into wasteland regions.
• They will not move into capitals (no abusing monoliths to destroy realms).
• An interaction option is available for characters in the same region as a monolith. They can pick which region they want it to move to on its next move, and add "power" in some form yet-to-be-determined. Whichever choice got the most "power" contributed will win.

Those contributions should be something simple and available to everyone. The most simple idea is that every pick simply adds 1 power, so number of characters equals power.

[Poliorketes]

The use of scrolls is interesting! But we already have the summon scrolls, etc... Why not to 'upgrade' the power (and the number) of them in Beluaterra and see what happens? If we want to reduce the number of regions, maybe we only have to give the players a good number of 'usual' scrolls.

[Chenier]

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.

If regions are turned rogue, people will just take them back. Period. That is absolutely plain from the players' behaviour.

A rogue spawner would make this possible, but difficult. For as long as the spawner (vortex) is in a given area, the number of rogues that come out of it would make holding near-by regions difficult, and the spawn location almost impossible. Thus, a potentially large number of regions would be kept rogue via warfare with undead and monsters, allowing players to prioritize which regions to defend and to attempt to mount coalitions to contain it at its source, as opposed to a blight no one can really do anything about and which is mostly static, not granting the players any choices.

[vonGenf]

A rogue spawner would make this possible, but difficult. For as long as the spawner (vortex) is in a given area, the number of rogues that come out of it would make holding near-by regions difficult, and the spawn location almost impossible. Thus, a potentially large number of regions would be kept rogue via warfare with undead and monsters, allowing players to prioritize which regions to defend and to attempt to mount coalitions to contain it at its source, as opposed to a blight no one can really do anything about and which is mostly static, not granting the players any choices.

You mean something like the area around Jobo's Mouth between the 3rd and 4th invasion, or the Zuma coalition on Dwilight?

[Chenier]

You mean something like the area around Jobo's Mouth between the 3rd and 4th invasion, or the Zuma coalition on Dwilight?

Not GM-controlled, so no, not like the Zuma coalition. Just a vortex that spews out rogue troops, guided by standard rogue code, and which is movable via scrolls and which's spawn strength is dependant on the number of scrolls used to create/move it.

The monster spawns in wild Dwilight were enough to keep most of the western subcontinents from being colonized for quite a while. Indeed, it wasn't truly colonized until the spawns were brought down by tweaking the code.

[Wolfang]

Why not both, the monoliths and the rogue hubs. I think they are both good ideas.

[Tiridia]

Upon reflection, I agree it should be one time event. But if player density rises dramatically, introduce healing scrolls. They could be released gradually.

The monolith concept sounds sweet. Perhaps give hints to priests about where they will first appear. Also to be able to vote "stay".

[Scarlett]

FWIW, one strong vote against any kind of random blighting.

If you want higher density, blight the edges. If I still have to walk across regions where nobody lives, that's an increased MTTSH (Mean Time To !@#$ Happening) which is already high in some places.

Density doesn't do you any good if your habitable areas are pockmarked with inhabitable areas. Yeah you have more players per region but they also have to be closer in for that to be an advantage that will offset the folks who are losing regions.

I realize that this is a harder task in some respects, but a random blighting will seem heavy handed and arbitrary. Those are the top two things that caused most everyone I know who played BM to leave.

[Ender]

I'm going to have to agree with Scarlett on the idea of shrinking edges vs random blighting. Random blighting has that downside of just messing with everything on a map while shrinking the edges achieves the same effect without giving everyone a bunch of annoying obstacles to walk around all the time.

Shrinking the edges isnt fair to the edges, sure, but I have a hard time seeing how making random regions go rogue would be beneficial in the long run for everything, not just solving the density problem. And this is coming from someone who, I just realized, tends to play only in realms that are on the edges of the map so would stand to feel the effect the most.

Which is weird now that I think about it...

[Tom]

That's a good input and yes, I agree.

But going for the edges does not help much on most islands, it will mostly slim them down. Especially places like EI would have pretty much the same travel time afterwards, just a LOT less ways to travel, those more choke points.

[Scarlett]

I'd also throw in a vote for a game-wide reset with fewer islands. Blighting will leave a permanent admission of 'we are going downhill' right on the map and it won't make sense to people not on the forums. I get that you could do it in such a way that it could be un-done but it's transferring the stagnation of the game to the stagnation of the in-game world and I don't know if that's a good move either from a utility or a marketing standpoint.

I know lots of people have invested lots of time into their realms and I'm no different. But I'd give it up if it made the experience better afterwards.

The game just doesn't have the same feel it did years ago and the biggest reason for that is the player count because so much other stuff is better.

Keep Dwilight, FEI, and EC. Ditch the rest. Those three places have the most unique 'feel' - Atmarra to me feels like a more boring version of EC and BT seems to require too much work from the staff. Maybe time it with some new code if you guys are semi-close to anything new and exciting - sea travel everywhere, new intra-realm / duchy dynamics, anything like that would go real well with this so that it looked like a purposeful reboot rather than a desperate act.

[Tiridia]

One thing to keep in mind is that there is probably no way to do this so that everyone is happy. We are contemplating a cure with side effects that we hope does not hurt more than help. The current density issue has to be remedied and some people will need to pay the price.

The treatment will hurt. Not treating the malady will keep on hurting.

[Wolfang]

That's a good input and yes, I agree.

But going for the edges does not help much on most islands, it will mostly slim them down. Especially places like EI would have pretty much the same travel time afterwards, just a LOT less ways to travel, those more choke points.

And going for the edges will also have the negative side effect of some people being extremely butthurt, no, I think it is better to keep things as randomn as possible to keep the whining to a minimum.

[Anaris]

I ran some numbers on optimal noble-to-region ratios for the continents and how to achieve them. I went in with the assumption that "optimal" is about 3.5 nobles per region on average.

Based on this, if we followed the plan of blowing up regions in one way or another, the mean number of regions we would have to remove to push a continent to an optimal ratio is about 70.