World Decline: Thoughts and Suggestions On Meta

[CSPAN]

Then how do you fix limited space and lack of freshness to a new player?

A never ending world will be an empty one.

And right about now I feel like I should have bothered a whole lot less with layout if I knew it was going to be empty, after youve accomplished everything within the first few months, there really isnt incentive to play, its just a chore. Does watching a set of three numbers go up for a year sound fun to you?

Personally, I feel a map runs its course rather quickly, most people dont have a need to leave their supergrid, if not a smaller amount of space. And even then, youre having to share it with 10-20 hermits and several villages. Shit is too cramped this world for sure imo. I think the size should be somewhere in the middle of this worlds, and the last. Since water travel is viable whereas last world it wasnt, the map didnt need such a drastic cut.

Resets encourage half-assing things, I know I'd bother a lot less with layouts and setups if I knew it was just a 3 month thing. Expansion and evolution are a far superior way forward. In an ideal world there would be systems in place that allow the world to never need to be reset.

Expansion in village size or map size? Villages dont need to be bigger than like 5x5 minimaps at the most, on average. Map expansions would be sick tho.

What kind of systems would you suggest? A big turn off for me when I first started the game (most recently in w7 anyways) was the fact that I no matter how many characters I spawned, it was in close proximity to remnants of someone elses play. Its ugly, it feels like you'd bought a game with someone elses "save". And making player made objects and alterations decay quicker doesnt really seem viable.

[shubla]

I think thats what devs should aim at.
Never reseting world. Make mechanics and other stuff so this is possible.
(For example, old structures will completely decay in some time so new ones can be built)
If we would have reset precisely every 3 months.
People would first play lot, then they get raided when world is 1½ months old and think, "Its useless to even try starting again, I better just wait 1½ months for next world".
Resetting every 3 month wouldnt solve anything. But instead make players play even less.
Sure the player count would shortly peak at beginning of new world, but then it will again stabilize to normal numbers. Slowly lowering because people get raided, and no new players are flowing in.

[dageir]

If people knew the world ended in 3 months the game play would be more relaxed.
You would not be afraid to lose your character or base. There would be more action, more combat because you knew it all would be gone in
a pretty short time. Right now people play as if the world and life would be eternal. That makes for crappy game play.

[shubla]

If people knew the world ended in 3 months the game play would be more relaxed.
You would not be afraid to lose your character or base. There would be more action, more combat because you knew it all would be gone in
a pretty short time. Right now people play as if the world and life would be eternal. That makes for crappy game play.

When they announced that world 8 will be ending.
Player count immediately dropped to almost zero.
Thats exactly what would be happening.
I dont want this game to be like rust, that theres resets multiple times a week which sometimes is really annoying.

[CSPAN]

I would like to note, I dont think scheduled resets every 3-5 months is necessary. But to build on a point someone else has made, is that it would be nice to see the End of the world event reinstated around that point, the world just needs to be renewed periodically. And if a world is to be permanent, it needs to be quite a big bigger than it is now.

If people knew the world ended in 3 months the game play would be more relaxed.
You would not be afraid to lose your character or base. There would be more action, more combat because you knew it all would be gone in
a pretty short time. Right now people play as if the world and life would be eternal. That makes for crappy game play.

When they announced that world 8 will be ending.
Player count immediately dropped to almost zero.
Thats exactly what would be happening.
I dont want this game to be like rust, that theres resets multiple times a week which sometimes is really annoying.

They also mentioned that regardless the world was going to end in a few weeks time regardless if the event was successful or not. I think its a great idea, but it needs to be more interactive with everyone.

The playercount prior to the announcement was averaging 100-150 at best, it was essentially already dead.

That however was with the old payment model. No one played because no one wanted to pay for sub time just for the end. It would play out differently today, with the improved payment model.

[dageir]

I do not think the world size is the main problem.
The main problem is that most people have tried most things within their time frame capability.
I.e. They run out of things to do that they are capable of fitting into their time table. I have time for
farming and shitposting on the forum (which is my current main role), but that is about it. I do not have time for raiding
or organizing a village.

[shubla]

They run out of things to do that they are capable of fitting into their time table.

I totally agree that HnH takes a lot of time.
If you are hermit you dont have time to do everything.
But you cant join a village (good enough) if you dont play 8 hours / day.

[dageir]

They run out of things to do that they are capable of fitting into their time table.

I totally agree that HnH takes a lot of time.
If you are hermit you dont have time to do everything.
But you cant join a village (good enough) if you dont play 8 hours / day.

Exactly. So if HnH was my actual job, I might have been able to put enough time into it to still make it interesting.
As it stands now, the interest is dwindling as I run out of casual things to do that still might be of interest.

[Undefined]

Expansion in village size or map size? Villages dont need to be bigger than like 5x5 minimaps at the most, on average. Map expansions would be sick tho.

What kind of systems would you suggest? A big turn off for me when I first started the game (most recently in w7 anyways) was the fact that I no matter how many characters I spawned, it was in close proximity to remnants of someone elses play. Its ugly, it feels like you'd bought a game with someone elses "save". And making player made objects and alterations decay quicker doesnt really seem viable.

I'd definitely go with an ever increasing underground depth. I'm not sure what could be done with the overground but if fresh areas were to become available over time that would be a positive, I'd also like to see old SGs eventually decay and renew, but that has so many obvious drawbacks. My suggestion is more meta than actual mechanics, focus on maintaining a playable, populated server with viable sustained resources rather than the cycle of creating new worlds.
Even now I find myself thinking "Well, next world I'll do this and that much earlier" rather than thinking "I'm going to do this and that now" because I know we edge ever closer to a world reset and at this this point, going by past experience we've basically entered the mid-life of the world.

[Vaku]

Let's say that J&L, in the longterm, plan never to restart the world.

Let's say their objective is to create a persistent and mutable world. Coming to terms with that, how can we emulate the experience we all feel at the beginning of the world, short of frequently restarting it?

I do not have time for raiding or organizing a village.

What about joining a village?
For me, an incentive to create denser populations is a start.

For me, what a dense community does is it cuts down all the individual man hours required to be part of something successful.
What we do in our village is push for redundant professions. The 8 hours, for instance, a dedicated cook would need to do, is then reduced to 4 with just two cooks. Continue to add people who enjoy cooking, and soon enough you're looking at creating a surplus and eventually a market, centered around what would be an hour or two of casual play.

When I see a comment like this:

But you cant join a village (good enough) if you dont play 8 hours / day.

I feel those "good enough" villages are high quality & aggressive raiders? It would seem that if these groups put power behind recruitment of people across the spectrum, it'd be a course of action that could drive the world at large toward a very different experience—perhaps one which glues people in for more months.


An issue, however, is even though we practice redundancy at my village, there's no game mechanic that makes a dense formation exciting, nor something that makes the benefits obvious. People still borequit.

Activities need to stir excitement—activities need to draw people in and be entertaining...

Sometimes, I feel that there needs to be more "game" that generally isn't inherent to a sandbox. Early-world establishment is something of a game—but months down the road, we have all these sandbox tools, ways to manipulate the world, but no "game" to organize around. I can probably elaborate more if that doesn't make sense.