True… i was more thinking out loud about potential abuse concerns… i wonder if it raises or lowers upkeep/cost for a server as the number of plots increas? i guess the more plots there are, the less the server would have to worry about regenerating.
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Yeah i agree with you @onebitknightly It would be a nice feature to implement as it would encourage people to craft even more. Plus it will help from hostile creature’s as the increased movement speed would help get to your house/safe place quicker 
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I am still thinking about when they originally announced the game and how they said we could build roads/tunnels and charge people to walk through them. Now I’m imagining the exact same thing, but with the additions of many of the players opinions above.
If we could build roads out of crafted blocks that would increase movement speed and protect from aggravating nearby creatures, there would be a lot more incentive for people to want to pay a small fee (I myself am thinking about 5coin or something for remote roads and more coin for roads to bigger cities). The coin fee could also be broken down into how long somebody was on a road, or how many blocks they traveled on it.
This would also give people more incentive to craft. If by simply making a nice road you could have a fairly regular source of income, it’d be a plus for both sides if the road added more benefit than just being a flat path from point A to point B.
I had one more idea as to how roads could work differently. If there was a skill that could be unlocked by a profession (builder or crafter, maybe?) that would allow a different type of plot for them. If they could place individual block-plots and these plots had to be connected in specific ways to one another, then it would provide the “special” function of roads. That way, not everybody was wasting all the space in 8x8 plots, and the road building would be restricted somewhat to certain specialties. We could also have narrow one-block paths to quickly get through mountains, etc., or we could have great wide roads to and from the major villages and cities.
Just some musings from a Boundless freak . . .
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While I think the idea of increased speed on roads would be really cool… why exactly would we need them? I mean… we will be able to open portals that can go to other worlds and within the same world. I think the speed idea is a great idea, but wouldn’t it be incredibly useless given we have an instant teleportation system.
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Yes in a way. But portals will cost a lot of money and they are there to travel great distance. The roads would be for going to a near by mine or other town. Maybe you want to mine or gather materials on the away from one town to the next.
Think of portals as a high speed toll highway or a airport and the roads we build as the local streets.
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I rather think of portals as the quickest way from point A to point B. And while their cost to operate has not been disclosed, I am pretty sure it will be way cheaper in the long run than what it will cost to build roads between towns. That’s just my opinion though, I just think it would be pointless to make roads when we have portals. And if we also do get the airships like they plan, I am not sure roads will be all that necessary. Again, just my thoughts, also just wanted to throw that in just so everyone remembers that we have it. Because it is entirely possible that making the roads will actually be more expensive than making and operating the portals.
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All valid points… but most of these sound ether:
(1) endgame / require being well established
or
(2) knowing ahead of time your destination (saved location)
What about when you don’t exactly know where your going, or you want to visit the next town but you don’t have the loc. yet?
for these reasons I think roads have a valid place in Boundless… using a portal / air ship to go to a nearby mine / town seems a bit extreme while technically the fastest option
Are they an absolute mandatory? No.
Would then be nice and helpful to new and established players alike? yes =)
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While I do agree with some points, remember that one of the key features is that towns can upgrade to become city beacons, which will automatically be searchable on planets and marked. So entirely possible that portals will be able to link from city to city, and to capital cities without actually ever having gone to them. As for the point of exploration, that defeats the purpose of a road lol.
Again, just wanted to play devils advocate and remind everyone of that feature. I do like the idea a lot of speedup on certain crafted blocks (get around the house quicker, or the cities), just wanted to have everyone keep in mind we will have instant travel options.
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I’m a bit on the fence when it comes to roads…
I can see the merit in fast travel and wanting to connect places together, but I’m dubious about the space it would take up. People have already debated about others taking up prime real estate and then not doing anything with it - I just think roads between cities or other major places will do exactly the same.
I feel they have the potential to divide as much as they connect.
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If they don’t have large inhibitions like other plots, I think they’d add, and not detract. If it’s only the 3/4 blocks above them that are kept free from people building, it would also introduce an interesting dynamic. I don’t know about others, but I’ve wandered wilderness areas for some time wondering if a place would be nice to build in because of the traffic or lack thereof. I think it’d be fun to see a road and know that people went along it. It would make for a nice place to set up shops, organize communities, and just establish a feel to the world.
I’ll also mention similar (in scale) games like WoW. They have fast ways to get around (landmounts), faster ways (airmounts), really fast ways (zepplins), and instant ways (mage portals, etc.) including established portals from major cities to other major cities. However, even with all of these transportation means, there are roads everywhere and those roads are often used. We already have landmarks, and it’d be nice to say “Just north of [insert name of area] on this road, turn west”. It would add realism, and potential benefit for brand new players.
Even with all of the other options of warps and portals, I don’t see roads detracting from the world. If people don’t like them, they don’t have to use them. However, especially on hostile worlds, it’d be nice to have some thoroughfares where people new to the plants could hook up with one another via relative safety. Even if it’s only from reduced aggro and not eliminated aggro. Roads could even be a determining factor as to whether or not a planet is classified as “settled or not”, but that digresses into many other possibilities.
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I am one for the roads. I will start a construction guild in boundless are sole perpose will be to make roads from one city to the next.
No but for real I think it is a great idea to have roads and that when walking on it you would have a speed boost of some sort. Roads means people are around if you are a new player and come across a road you would be like what is this. And be in awwww. If you do. It want to use a road you don’t have to. Also with roads you would know where people have been and where they are not.
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I’m all for the mounts, I’ll be a master Roadrunner tamer!
On topic I kind of like the idea of roads, rest-stops, following a road for miles and finding a big city would be cool. Maybe it can be a Guild Upgrade thing? Your guild members can move faster when travelling on a certain surface once your guild reaches a certain level?
I’m definitely one for travelling everywhere on foot, I like to be able to navigate via landmarks, take sneaky peeks at peoples building projects (and falling down holes a lot), I doubt I’ll be warping/portalling unless it’s to other planets. Even in GW2 they had a vast network of instant travel Waypoints but I chose to go on foot to see the sights.
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yes, mounts would be definitely be better solution for fast traveling over roads since most of the people don’t know that roads increase movement speed at basics but mounts they do. even if you get unlimited amount of plots it still get harder to get more and not many would spend they’r plots just to connect cities. it would work if there wouldn’t be world regen tough. i’m afraid mounts wont be released anyways soon if ever so i would recommend that add ability to skill tree to increase movement speed.
I totally get where you are trying to go, but you forget that WoW is an established world long before the player actually gets there. Westfall was already there long before you showed up and had its roads and houses and stuff. The worlds we are inhabiting in Boundless have literally been “cleansed” of major traces of civilization. Just wanted to say the comparison is kinda moot, you are comparing apples to oranges.
I want to agree with Stretchious on the point he made about real estate. It is something we have seen already complaints about, people placing plots over pretty areas and ruining them. I feel like the way the game is set and the whole aspect of portals, roads just don’t really fit in. Going back to CunningCelt’s comparison to WoW, reason roads exist is because not everyone has access in the games world to those super fast transportation methods such as flying, zeppelins, boats, or even portals. While the roads do serve to help players have a direct rout from place A to B, they are more there for the whole RP value of the world than for the players benefit.
Except we have a compass that shows you where all the beacons are within a certain distance, where the capital city beacon will be(all the time), where city beacons are(all the time), and where your beacon is(all the time). So really a road is irrelevant for the whole aspect of where people are and aren’t. If people are really going to follow the way devs want and turn cities/towns into the largest hubs and those hubs getting the beacon status the devs want, then anyone on the planet will know, “hey we are here.”
Again I am not saying I am against the idea of speedup blocks or even roads in general (I am for small roads say within a city) but I just feel like building roads between cities will be… pointless. Something like mounts would be great, but just roads I think defeat the purpose of having this instant teleportation feature through a magical wall. And they would detract from the beautify of the world around them. Most of the towns I have seen in the game are all built in huge clearings, or surrounded by pretty sites, throwing a road through a really pretty forest is just killing the beauty of it. I’ve even seen an under water bridge made by someone, just so that the beauty of this one lake wouldn’t be disrupted by a bridge just going right through it. (which I think made someone make a post about glass in water and it’s graphic)
No, you obviously don’t.
It’s not apples to oranges at all because the purpose and function of the roads would still be very similar. It would guide people around. Only, as it’s been discussed so far, they will actually be MORE useful in Boundless because players will create them. Since we’re talking about potentially using a type of limited resource block for them, then it would follow that roads would only continue to exist if they were actually useful in boundless rather than simply existing from some prior civilization like you’re saying happens in WoW. Also, if the constructed roads also increase speed (whether there are mounts or not) then you get an added bonus that also doesn’t exist in WoW.[quote=“UmbraVictus, post:20, topic:6418”]
reason roads exist is because not everyone has access in the games world to those super fast transportation methods such as flying, zeppelins, boats, or even portals
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Actually, they do. Just like in boundless, it simply takes playing for a while to collect enough resources and then it’s very easy to access all of these things. Also, Zepplins are free, and you just walk onto them. I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve even played WoW…[quote=“UmbraVictus, post:20, topic:6418”]
hey are more there for the whole RP value of the world than for the players benefit.
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No, again. They serve to travel from point A to point B WAY faster than other transportation. Just like, I don’t know, warps and portals in Boundless. [quote=“UmbraVictus, post:20, topic:6418”]
If people are really going to follow the way devs want and turn cities/towns into the largest hubs and those hubs getting the beacon status the devs want, then anyone on the planet will know, “hey we are here.”
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Did one of the devs explain their desire for this exact type of play to you? Please, point me to that thread.[quote=“UmbraVictus, post:20, topic:6418”]
just roads I think defeat the purpose of having this instant teleportation feature through a magical wall
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This is the exact reason that I mentioned the many forms of transportation from WoW as an example. The roads are still functional, especially every time you roll a new character. It’s already been clearly stated by the devs that we will be able to roll several toons in Boundless with different skills. Even if we have warps, when we first start out we won’t have the resources to immediately make the warps and use them. Thus, another example of why roads would be nice.
As for your several statements about roads and beauty of the worlds, etc. I simply disagree. People build ugly buildings too, and we’ll never be able to limit them from doing that. Roads don’t have to detract from the worlds at all. Just like you mentioned somebody building a “under water bridge” (which, let’s be honest, any bridge is just a short section of road), the roads could all be built as far above or far below the surface level as people wanted to build them. I’d be all for subterranean roads. That’s first on my priority if we get the chance to make special road blocks.
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Some interesting points in this thread, many of which I both agree and disagree with. As for the original proposal of roads providing a speed boost when walked on, I say… meh. On the surface, it’s a great idea, but as with most any movement enhancing mechanic, overuse is a bit of a concern. In the case of roads, I can see them quickly used to speed up movement everywhere, even where roads would typically not be used such as indoors. As such, roads lose their niche as a road and pave pretty much everywhere players have the resources to place them. Not only would that lead to vast swaths of developed space being covered in the same uninspiring “road” block, it vastly detracts from the possible creativity of those areas. I’ve always been a fan of beautified roads with patterns and colors and a variety of building material. A road block would in most cases replace form with function.
So if movement speed increasing road blocks are so likely to cover basically everything, why not just make movement enhancements a passive effect of something else? Running shoes or mounts come to mind as a solution. These things can be further “balanced” by other effects like a lack of defence in the case of shoes, or a lack of maneuverability on mounts. Both of these things could still utilize (standard, non-enhanced) roads as a clear and unobstructed avenue of travel, much as they do irl. Simple roads with standard beacon protection can provide everything needed to connect settlements and a well engineered road can provide all of the safety a traveler needs with the reasonable investment of plots (remember, 1.0 plot acquisition will be different than at present). Vertical plot reservation concerns could be addressed by beacon control options, which is a totally different topic I’ve discussed elsewhere before.
I don’t believe boundless roads need any more features than what can be achieved by beacon controls and protection, and some simple engineering by the players. This provides the widest range of creativity, and allows other sandbox features to enhance it naturally rather than forcefully.
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This is the last thing I will say on the topic since it is just going to get more argumentative from here. YOu either missed or ignored the entire point I was making about the roads in WoW or really ANY MMO with a pre-existing universe(which is essentially every MMO made that isn’t a sandbox MMO). It is what I tried to say in these quotes [quote=“CunningCelt, post:21, topic:6418”]
reason roads exist is because not everyone has access in the games world to those super fast transportation methods such as flying, zeppelins, boats, or even portals
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and [quote=“CunningCelt, post:21, topic:6418”]
They are more there for the whole RP value of the world than for the players benefit.
[/quote]
What I meant is the roads exist because the universe already existed and they exist for the game, not the player. Meaning, players are not the only ones that use these roads, NPCs use them too, NPCs that can’t use zeppelins, portals, or gryphons. They exist because you are referenced in the game (and lore) that there is a trade route from Goldshire to Sentinel Hill and all the farms in the area. Sure you rarely actually see NPCs using them, but they exist because NPCs used them. They exist solely for the purpose that the universe was created long before the player actually arrived. There are megathreads in WoW forums about why roads exist in the game, cause there are roads that literally lead nowhere that the player actually uses (more so now since a lot of the world was changed, there are roads that exist to places that are no longer used and you can actually tell the road has been altered to look like it has not been traveled in a long time). But said roads are NOT the quickest way from any point to any point, even if you are just running. The roads wind around rivers, houses, farm lands, and a bunch of other environmental and RP things that existed long before the player arrived. They exist for the RP aspect of you walking in an already civilized area. Don’t forget, the universe existed long before the player, and the universe created trade between towns and cities. Roads are the indication of that, yes players can use them to move from point A to point B while enjoying a scenery, but they also exist to exemplify the fact that this is a living world where these placers are connected so the people within them (the NPCs) can communicate and work together.
As for this, there is a thread that actually talks about the future of beacons and warping to worlds for the first time. There is also a video(edit: it’s a gif) if I am not mistaken of a dev using the feature they want where you can see city beacons, and friend beacons when you are first trying to warp pick to a planet. Not sure right now where the thread is, but that was an actual thing. They also talk about the whole city and major city features that they hope to bring to the game. Here is the link to where they talk about this: Weekly Dev Update: 2017 February 10th - Less suicidal Creatures, More devious Creatures!
But yeah, with that I am done. I really don’t want to continue a pointless argument about why roads exist in a game. I do think the idea of speed up blocks would be cool, but again I just think roads between cities will detract from the game. Roads are just such a permanent thing that are going to be used to connect things that are not necessarily going to be permanent.
The arguement about WoW roads is an odd one. I don’t really see why they are relevant to Boundless. In WoW, players invest exactly zero time or resources into development of roads. Roads are little more than a way to connect quest hubs throughout the world, and provide no transportation benefits what so ever. The only feature of roads in WoW is that hostile mobs typically don’t wander into aggro range of a road (except in cases where they patrol the road, but that’s usually a fluff thing).
In boundless, a road would 100% be planned and placed by players and communities. The motivation for, expenses of, and benefits of the road would be completely in the players hands. I’m 100% in favor of empowering the player to make any decisions they want. For me, it’s not a matter of “are roads needed” but a matter of “how do we help players fulfill their imagination”.
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More speed or not roads will exist to the extent of players’ desire to build them. Beauty of truly sandbox game is that players can do things not relevant to survival and/or competitiveness within game’s world - as long as they have some spare time and resources. So, they will build roads the same way they build houses they imagine to live in (even though there’s no “home” feature providing faster healing or anything else) or arrange a garden.
The point is we will see roads in the game, no matter what, even if the only reason to build them is to have a nice looking path from one’s house to one’s shop or else.
I’m not too bothered whether them roads get speed buff or not and I think we can all be relaxed about it.
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