It’s still ok to disagree. It’s a multi-faceted issue and to be honest I have found that not many people who want to discuss this agree on every single point. For the most part I’m enjoying the discussion.
I will clarify that by “disturbance to survival” I explicitly mean with issues like the portaling problem (which plays both ways) and some others which are being dealt with one by one. Like the guild buffs, and whatever else may come up.
There’s also the addition to ‘sky-clutter’. While I agree that’s going to be some sort of issue for low tier sovereign worlds with or without creative, It would lessen the impact on the survival worlds and potentially eliminate it from creative entirely if another method of accessing creative worlds is in place.
And to be fair I’d like it if accessible sovereign worlds were also available in the players’ world lists as well. Even if there are limits such as only those attached to the current sanctum planet.
But there has to be another system that includes a sanctum warp and some default spawn point or even just random coordinates. Otherwise we have the oft-mentioned hypothetical you-tuber who has rented a creative planet in their initial purchase having to learn enough about survival to find a warp augment and the planet their creative world is orbiting before they can get there.
So if this system will already exist, why not use it to allow players to warp to creative planets from anywhere? If the creative universe is not interlinked at a planetary level with the survival universe, some things can more easily be relaxed to simplify this.
Back to what I mean by the portal problem playing both ways - if some players DO want aggro mobs, high level mobs because they look great, specific biomes, or whatever, it seems that with the integration as originally announced, visitors and other friends who want to be 100% creative players are still going to have to traverse dangerous survival worlds.
Best case, if there are enough creative worlds of varying tiers, and a lot of people are willing to tolerate atmosphere damage in their creative builds and skill sheets, a fully creative network could develop in parallel. But that is, in my opinion, unlikely. And if it does happen it’s likely to be unstable in terms of permanence. Fully a matter of opinion and conjecture, of course.
But again if there’s separation the blinksec rules can be relaxed or modified. Depending on how deeply it’s hard coded into the system these planets could be very close, but it seems likely that they could at least push them within a range where you could skill to max blinksecs and portal from a T1 to a T6.
This is only socially/economically viable if a solution is selected that eliminates creative worlds being used to bypass travel costs or restrictions in survival. And the easiest solution, with limited information, appears to be a distinct separation between the two environments.
Minimizing economic (and to some extent social) disturbance to survival is not just a matter of NIMBY in this case. It appears to be the largest non-technical issue affecting the release. And since portals are acknowledged to have a hard financial cost to the developers in terms of computing costs just saying “f@k it make portals free for everyone” doesn’t appear to be a reasonable solution.
Letting the creative planet renters who are actually paying cash for the resources foot the compute cost bill for free portals to anywhere has already low-key caused some exclamations of the usual P2W type complaints and how fair that is to people that have struggled through survival mode and now focus their game play around these aspects of the game.
So I honestly feel that concerns from both sides of the issue are most easily solved in bulk with a clear back end and front end separation of the different ecosystems. Given what’s known or assumed about the technical requirements, combined with a ton of player speculation
Perhaps a sanctum variation like @DKPuncherello’s Dream Realm would help with some feelings of being un-acknowledged by presenting creative more as a “featured game mode” rather than feeling like a hidden or set-aside part of the game?