From the Otherside - Gamewise

General
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I took a break from Oort after grinding a lot of hours in a short amount of time. During that time I was able to play some other games that are very similar and other not so similar to Oort. I either had to a pay a small fee play or was given alpha/beta key from signing up. Below will be a collection of things I noted while out in the other worlds.

First: Convoluted Interface - I am using the term Interface as a way to group the processes and screen appearance when you do things like, enter journal, quest log, crafting, etc. My biggest complaint about Oort about 2 months ago, the lack of detail/depth the games general interface had. You had a simple bar at the bottom, some health, crafting menu was like a restaurant menu with 5 items on it… Nothing satisfying out of it. However I am a born-again basic interface person! After having to deal with so much junk thrown on my screen, 4-6 click needed to understand what the heck decayed wood does and a ton of random pop ups, it got ugly. I came back to Oort to mess around and discovered the beauty in how simple it is. My hope would be that it followed something like ESO. Very basic on the surface but once you dig deeper the complexity is there if you look for it.

Second: Multi-Block Placement - one of the coolest features was the ability to place multiple blocks. For those of us that love to build this is a thing of beauty. Obliviously there are limits, but nothing is lost when you are able to play 3x3 or 5x5 wall sections if you have the material. Not all games need to be a block by block placement clone of Minecraft. Following some other post maybe this is a unique trait given to someone that has reached a high level of building. Minecraft gave me nothing for 100,000 blocks of cobblestone moved…

Third: Lively Public Cities - I am not sure how this will be achieved in Oort but this is something you can notice within minutes of being in a game. You enter a city and one of two things happen: your chat bar becomes flood with WTB’s, LFG,s, etc. or this … For those of us that say Oort does not have much activity, trust me it is not allow in the alpha,beta world!

Fourth: Posted Updates - On many of the forums you will see tons of post from the developers about changes. Following along the lines of League and posting them on the same day every week. Besides the oblivious here is what we added updates, there were alot of here is some of the technical changes we have made. For me I did not care how sliding on ice works, I just want to slide on ice. But other did! I 100% understand Oort is a small team but there are people out there that seem to need to the update log to appear to feel something is happening. I am not one of those people. Just give me a tool and I’ll figure out how to use it!

Figured I would post something like this, forum seems to be slowing down at bit.

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I totally agree on pretty much all of this. I love simpler interfaces, personally. I play other games that take a whole lot of time to get use to what you’re able to do, but a game like this has the feel of something that can be deceptively simple. Most of what you can do should be accessible through 2-4 clicks, yet at the same time, there’s a lot you could do with that, through crafting benches and different materials. I feel like if you have to scroll through a list of things, clicking submenus and subsubmenus, you’re doing it wrong. D: Take the game Trove for instance; simple, but about a million things to do once you dig in!

Multi block placement would be awesome especially for terraforming and building really big projects. C: Do want! A 3x3x1 sort of thing would make me so happy. :3c

Lively public cities! This is something that bugs me currently about Oort and that I’m not sure how they’re going to fix up. Currently, every server I’ve popped into feels like a vanilla minecraft server that’s gone to the dogs because people join, build a box, destroy some land, then leave. Everywhere near the capital is like this in Oort, and though we have the idea of beacons, it’s still going to be an issue I think. I want to know how Oort will differ from Minecraft in this way! I would love to see a capital city where players are able to build most of it, where there’s NPCs wandering around people’s buildings and stuff, where people can build their own shops show off their loot! That would be amazing. What I imagine happening in Oort, though, is beacons everywhere with nothing really built in them, just taking up space around the capital and scattered around the wilderness, especially once there’s a lot of people playing. If anyone has any links to any information about how this sort of thing will be handled, let me know! I’m really curious about this part of the game, but I can’t seem to find anything about it.

Updates are great so far on Oort, though! I love seeing all the stuff they’ve done, I’ve scrolled through the devlog a few times since I started poking around the game. c: The best way to do it is a little bit of info for the TL;DR crowd, then the in-depth stuff for whoever wants to see the how and why. :3

But yeah, I haven’t seen a single person on Oort yet, haha. I built a cute little house near a giant hole in the world, though, so hopefully there will be more stuff to play with soon. c:

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About the capital. A solution would be to just make the biggest town on the server the capital.
Even if everything is like what you said at the start of a server. Somewhere somebody will build a beautiful town. And that will then be the capital.
Maybe with monthly votes for each server about which town should be the capital.

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Oh man, I love that idea, Kuro! That would be awesome, then every month or whatever time period it is, different towns would get some exposure to new people coming through, while the area surrounding it would have time to regenerate – I saw something about land regenerating. Make it so that no one city can be the capital twice in a row and it would be lovely for area upkeep and sharing! c:

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True that but I see one problem with that.
As people who guide the city, I wouldn’t have any incentives to make the town better in that time period. They are the capital and they won’t be it again the next period. So they could use that off period to make the town better again. But wouldn’t for that period they are the capital.
I hope that made sense somehow^^

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Truuuue. I think I know what you mean. But! While you’re the capital, you wouldn’t wanna be all UNDER CONSTRUCTION anyway, would you? :smiley: so you could definitely use that time as just a showcase time, take a break from building, restock your gleam supplies, then while you’re not-capital you can get to work on that next big project that’ll win you the next vote. :3c

Or! Let them win the next time around! One city can become a sort of permanent capital, why not, as long as they keep up with it.

B-but this might be offtopic and belong in suggestions ;w;

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I didn’t think of that. Maybe it really is the best idea to take turns being a capital^^

But yes that might go into suggestions^^

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For the capital projects it would be cool if Oort would allow people to build/purpose an area to be a world capital. Take for example, NiHZ, KuroKuma and I build this huge stone city, we post it in the forums as a possible capital and community/developers decide. Once the capital those individuals can add/edit to the city, but the developers still have the ability to make changes if the builders neglect it.

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So it’s like a single voting for a permanent capital?

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Yes for example: Kuma is a new world that will be live on 7/7/15. There will be a two week period to submit your city/area, after that the community votes.

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Sounds good but I would stretch the period a little^^ 2 weeks is extremly short for a city.

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I think capitals should be a more dynamic thing and not something that is voted for and then set in stone (and be it only for a month).
In my opinion the capital should be wherever the most players gather, be it for the layout, stile or the location. Simple as that.

Like in WoW, where at one point the community decided to make Orgrimmar/Ironfroge the capital.(mostly because those had the best layout regarding to auction house-bank distance)
Or like in EvE online, where the community decided to make a system(region/place) called Jita to the trading hub. It was designed just as any other ordinary system but due to its rather central location players started to gather and trade there and nowadays everyone who logs into the game knows where to go if he wants the best deals in the game.
Things like that are (Imo) one of the most beautiful things in MMOs. They generate “player made lore” and just generally make games feel more alive and dynamic.

(They also don’t even require a single line of code :smile:)

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I would want what you propose but that depends on how spawning is handled. If you spawn somewhere that could work. But if you spawn in the capital then you need a designated capital^^

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That´s true.
I think we will probably spawn at a random location since it´s already kinda standard for survival games (Minecraft,Rust, etc.) but maybe when we all spawn for the first time on a t1 world after release we will spawn at some sort of temple (the best player made alpha builds? :heart_eyes: ) and after you have placed your first beacon you will respawn there (or any other beacon you have placed, or at your guildbeacon (if there is going to be something like that), or at the beacon of a friend (if he gave you permission to do so), or at a citybeacon, or…).
If I remember correctly the devs already said that when you advance to the next tier by walking through a portal you will spawn at a random location.

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Instead of having a capitol, what about just letting the player choose where they want to spawn? Something along the lines of:

Where do you want to spawn:

  • Town 1
  • Town 2
  • Town 3
  • Random spot (Wilderness)
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Could allow players to set up inns that others could teleport to (WoW style) that could be in towns, trade posts, or popular mining sites. So, you’d have the default home to that took you to where ever you set up home on that planet (default spawn point if you’ve not set it) and an inn tp that you have to set per world. That way, the individual player can explore the world and locate their own favorite cities and towns to set their 2nd tp to. Eventually, the best established cities would become unofficial player chosen capitals. Also gives inn keepers and city builders incentive to make more grandiose builds to attract players for trade and quests.

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I like that, too, having people spawn in random places, but it still doesn’t solve the matter of chaos around main cities, where people have dug and built and abandoned their stuff. I like the idea of people just choosing where they like to hang out, too, if it works out like that. c: Like a natural progression of population and people migrating to different places just based on word of mouth.

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Those issues of people digging, building and abandoning areas around cities will be resolved by the world regeneration once that’s implemented. :smile:

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What if they dig , built , beacon, and then abandoned there stuff lol

World regeneration won’t do anything then and we will have to deal with it forever -.-

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Abandoned beacons are a different problem. One solution is for beacons to eventually expire. The way that they expire is a hotly contested issue right now.