Merging all the continents would create a different set of problems. Just off the top of my head, how would you handle characters with the same name? And how would you implement character limits? Right now, you can significantly limit the amount of influence one player can have by preventing them from having more than 1 or 2 chars per island. If all the islands were one, how would you handle that?
I do have plans to improve island geography; however, I don't think people would be very happy in general if I just swooped in and completely rewrote their islands, any more than they were about the Ice Age.
Things that do involve some thought and discussion.
The name issue has already started coming up, as it is problematic when one wants to emigrate to a continent where the name is already used. A few suggestions have been proposed, such as allowing patronyms or middle names. Personally, I don't really see identical names as being a problem, as everyone has a unique family name, which is shown everywhere. And identical names are a RL reality which people manage. Plus we have a ton of titles to help. If we have a Katherine Johnson, queen of Johnyland, and Katherine Bobson, marquess of Smallgrad in Bobbyland, one can say "Marquess Katherine", "Queen Katherine", "Katherine Johnson", "Katherine Bobson", "Katherine of Johnyland", and so on, without every creating any confusion. And people already mostly use titles when naming someone.
Character and title limits would require more thought and discussion, I believe. There are many options to handle this:
- Total deregulation: Simplest, allow players to put their allowed characters wherever the heck they want, and hold titles wherever the heck they want. Probably not the ideal solution.
- Maintain regional limits: Even if all of the continents were to become "merged", that doesn't mean that we need to stop recognizing them as distinct. Realms would be affiliated to a continent according to where their capitals are located. All of the current restrictions could be mimicked. A few additional restrictions would need to be thought of to handle continental transfers by capital moves or secessions.
- Generalized regulation: Further limit how continents can hog power by generalizing the restrictions to the whole game. Someone who is king on one continent could therefore not also be king on another simultaneously. This should help prevent the hogging of power by a few influential families, especially through multi-continental cliques that we've been able to see now and then, where realm X on continent A is basically a copy of realm Y on continent B.
I do have plans to improve island geography; however, I don't think people would be very happy in general if I just swooped in and completely rewrote their islands, any more than they were about the Ice Age.
No, of course not. But the continents could be merged with very minimal redrawing of the continents themselves, as they mostly fit into each other quite nicely. While I did remove some land masses on the concept map I shared, I now consider that most of the land that was erased (that wasn't already targeted by the freezing) would not need to be removed at all.
Additionally, to further increase inter-connectivity, I would surround the merged continents with portal islands, which could basically be the Lendan Stones island (a portal region and a small stronghold region, though I really think strongholds need to be allowed to have harbors, and the portal region would be non-TOable). One such island would be placed in the in the sea between Caelum and IVF (BT), on the sea between Spearhold and Thalmarkin (BT), merged with that pre-existing stronghold in Astrum (Dwi), between Colonies and EC, in the Dwi-EC-AT sea, between FEI and AT, and gapping AT and BT. 7 portals total (or up to 10). To use them, one would just need to travel to the portal region, and then from there, he could travel to any other portal region through normal mechanics, with travel time fixed to 40 hours regardless of actual distance. This would allow to compensate for the limits of normal geography, which would impose edges. With these portal regions, there would essentially no longer be edges. The northernmost realms would not have half of their realm face nothingness, southern realms could attack them through the portals. Same for West and East. All realms, regardless of their geography, would have close proximity to a much greater number of realms.
