Indeed. These worlds are so many more times larger than even minecraft multiplayer worlds were, and those took forever to fill up even with creative. And with world regeneration, we won’t need to worry about the wayward buildings left standing on their own. Most of them will decay over time, which in my opinion would look cooler anyhow.
every world has its own terrain too, like gasan? the all water world, you’d want to see more then just water everywhere even if we reach 3 million players, the actual world size now is pretty small compared to what it can be, so nothing to worry unless your favorite location gets a giant pillar or housed plopped onto it
That is be good idea, but how would decaying work? What if certain guild would build guild building of 1000x1000 blocks and nobody would come there in 1 month? There could be some feature that if owner visits decayed building it would be repaired or some repair fee that changes depending of how large building is. Kinda sad idea that one-of-kind building would be fully destroyed beyond repair, but I don´t want to see buildings that have been abandoned for long time as we may have very large worlds, but when more and more people start building stuff…everything goes farther away from Capital.
We will keep a constant control over the number of players in the game and the number of available worlds - to make sure that the player density never gets too high. Also, any land that isn’t contained without a player beacon will experience a form of regeneration, to re-fill resources, remove partial builds, and tidy up torches and items used during exploration. Lots of features are structured around this.
That’s great news to hear and takes a lot of my worries away about future. I was worried how Oort will stay as Oort when player base grow, but if land will recover…everybody should come and join us plus support development
Odd question then: I understand that un-beaconed areas will regenerate, but what about beaconed areas whose owners have abandon it for another area or been offline for a very long time (a year lets say)? A world could be filled with abandon beacons, so what could be done about that?
Beacons could have some sort of “power” that will decrease unless refilled,changed etc even though some will disagree with me in this one as it would mean possibly losing your castle that took you 3 months to built if you don´t visit it after 2/4/6 months.
The positive is that yes, it would decrease the amount of inactive beacons.
The negative, and as many people have pointed out from the game Landmark is that this would actually punish those who do play. So instead of titan hunting, now I have to gather resources to “refuel” my beacon, and if I go on vacation for a week, I lose everything I’ve spent months building. Read the forums from the Landmark game, they call this system the player punishment system.
The system could actually work, but the cost would have to be low for a long period of time. For example, 1 easy-to-get shard can get me 1 day, so if I farm 30 easy-to-get shards, I have a month “paid.”
On another negative to this, and far in the future: Players who have stopped playing (lets say for a year) and who may be considering coming back will be discouraged from doing so because they know they will return to nothing.
I played a game like this where you had to “rent” your house, and the rent was cheap because I farmed out over a year’s rent in a few days, but I know that year is gone and I have no desire to see my house gone, so I don’t want to go back to the game, even though they’ve had a few expansions since I left.
Another idea, or addition to your idea is that instead of vanishing completely, it could be given ownership to the next coordinator, like the way a guild passes down in WoW if the guild leader has been offline for 30 days. However if there are no other coordinators, then yes, it disappears.
Another idea could be, that the blocks which were placed will went to your “inactivity inventory”.
That means that you just lost the beaconed area, the location itself. But you do not lose the blocks which you farmed.
This will ensure that inactive accounts still have their staff. They just lose their place/work/house/whatever.
Another thing about the “rent price”. I totaly dislike the idea of doing that manual. It would be awesome if Oort is the first game where that rent fee would be paid automatically. (Maybe a button in the interface on the beacon - pay taxes manual [ ] - automatically [x]). If you forget it all is gone.
Just to ensure that the automatic thing works, you need to login within 3 month. That means the overall highest way you can pay is 3 month. This is enough time for everyone going on a long trip and enough time for the active players.
It will also make sure, that those “buy it and leave after 1 day” players will be wiped out from scenery. This ensures also, that the capital nearest beacons aren’t only placed on day 1.
I am not sure if 3 month is too high. But if you imagine that there are guys out there who go on a holiday trip for about 6-8 weeks, how should you deal with them?
Renting is an easy way to time things out in an immersive way. I would not have a problem with that. But there is real tangible value in retaining the previous builds for players in the form of return players. I must have gone back to WoW no less than 8 times over the years mostly because I didn’t lose anything.
I am confident that the developers will reach the correct compromise. It is not going to be a tragic problem that we have to lose sleep over.
What about a system that deletes beacons of inactive players from the world but gives them some sort of blueprint of their beacon into their inventory?
That way there would be no abandoned beacons and players that come back after a long time of inactivity wont loose everything they built.
The blueprint could ,when “used”, either just spawn the original beacon + all its previous content on the current location of the player(if there is enough unoccupied space around him) or spawn an “in construction” block that has to be filled with all / some of the materials you had placed inside your beacon.
I dont know if such a system is possible though, since every blueprint would have to be saved independently by the server.
hmm, if beacons have months til they are removed by the game there is no need for such a method for saving the blueprints or stuff that was storred in the beacon. If somebody don’t manage to keep his beacons up it is his own fault. The time to programm such saving methods can be used to make more important stuff
I agree with @TheBirne what he said post above. We don´t need methods to keep something safe over long times of inactivity. It both takes realism and effort out of things as you could just make beacon once and everything after that could be done with having no effort.
If you could spawn everything back with blueprint there would be no penalty of losing or not taking care of things in first place. I hate the thought of castle/beacon that is build on top of hill in course of couple weeks and then left there for month. Sometime after hill would be completely empty or have ruins and week later there would be suddenly same castle/beacon again. If you want to build enormous castle you have to see the effort to collect all resources,built it AND have some effort to keep it tidy and working.
Things don´t just magically stay like they where when made or built. There is topic about should abandoned/decaying buildings/beacons just vanish or turn in to ruins and I support the idea of ruins, but if one can somehow keep things working forever or you can spawn copy of same building back it wouldn´t work or be same.
@TheBirne & @Exsu I totally agree with you and i would also prefer a system where inactive beacons just disappear permanently but since many players here seemed to demand such a system I wanted to work out a system that saves inactive beacons.