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DoxieDoc

Alpha Tester
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Everything posted by DoxieDoc

  1. I sincerely hope you are all right, but I don't think you are. I also don't think I can convince you otherwise, so I will simply disagree and move on! I wish we could all go to lunch and talk about stuff like this. It'd be an interesting discussion.
  2. Even in your own example you "once" stood at a subway checkpoint and it was already terrible enough to cause an impression. I think you overestimate people's willingness to do menial labor in a game. The best example is Grand theft auto. Every person has at some point said "I'm going to obey all the traffic laws and play like an upstanding citizen." Flash forward 10 minutes and you have a rocket launcher and 100s of cops after you.
  3. Also how cities are formed is that people live in them, and pay taxes so that militaries and police forces can be formed, and then those forces are active 24 hours a day. Do you really expect someone to work a job, come home, and log in to a second job where they watch a border or walk around on patrol for another 8 hours? It isn't real life it's a game and it needs systems to compensate.
  4. Yes I'm suggesting that the center zones would have layers of defense. If there are no automated defenses, NPC guards, or shields which last for multiple days then the game will likely devolve into a wasteland outside of safe zones. The scenario I'm more worried about is that we go out and build anything impressive which gets destroyed overnight by organized troll raids which launch surprise attacks. This doesn't happen in real life because people sleeping in the city would wake up and fight, but I'm not waking up at 3 AM on a worknight to fight (and I'm sure many others wont as well). Maybe in frontier zones an NPC guard is spawned for every 5 logged out players, but a metropolis zone gets one for every individual player. Maybe we get scripts which function offline for automated weapons. I'm not exactly sure what protections each layer should add. That can be decided by NQ, I just hope they do add buildable defenses for non-safe areas. PS - Yes, it should take weeks to destroy something that took weeks to build.
  5. I think you are absolutely right for incentive, and glad we agree on protection. Mainly it's things like organized overnight raids which can cause problems. Nothing sends a chill up my spine more than imagining some summer vacationers staying up late to destroy something when nobody is around to defend it. Hopefully build-able automated defenses become a thing as well!
  6. The safe areas that are being generated by Novaquark are a great idea, but I feel they may lead to some problematic game elements. Players will likely build in safe areas and only journey outside of them to mine. Players in safe areas will likely be neighbors with bitter enemies. Trolls could interrupt multi-hex building projects by claiming hexes in the path of development. There is less of a reason for people to band together to form protection if it is inherent to the game. I am a huge believer in emergent gameplay, and this game relies almost entirely on it. Emergent gameplay is the idea that rules and systems are established which sort of "Make sense," and then players find ways to extract value, power, and fun from them in ways that the devs may not have initially intended. An example is movement patterns in Starcraft 1, Wormhole pirate guilds in EVE online, and metagame strategies in almost every game. I propose a system which in a simple manner mimics the way real cities were formed. When a new hex territory is claimed grant it "Frontier" status which offers little or no protection. Once it is surrounded by other claimed hex tiles grant the center tile an upgraded protection status and a new name like Rural area. When all the frontier hexes bordering this rural area are surrounded by frontier hexes, they become rural and the center hex becomes suburban. Continue in this pattern for a number of layers, a progression such as: Frontier Rural Suburban Urban Metropolis Adding and removing layers, changing costs of territories, and modifying levels of protection at each status would give devs control over game balance while still feeling fair for pvp. In addition, this gives groups an incentive to build together as a troll or bad neighbor building near the city would only have frontier status and likely be soon destroyed. There may also need to be other controls like a minimum of a couple of days at each status level (so that a level 5 protected zone cant be sprung up instantly) This would be a simple system which mimics the way cities start small and grow. I also don't think this should replace safe zones, but be in addition to safe zones.
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