New frontier - map ideas

[Kamekono]

Hello!
This is an idea for future worlds, which I think would greatly improve their longevity. Please bear with me while I try to explain it:

Long story short
Every set amount of time, a new part of map would be unlocked. Player's activity might or might not reduce that timer (dev's choice).

What issue would it fix?
In my experience, lots of players stop playing after they feel Hearthlings life got boring. Unless you're in a top PvP faction or ahead of the quality curve, you reach a point where anything you do is a boring waste of time.
You're safe, full of stuff, and too far behind to compete with the "top players" in PvP or trading. And you have no reason to move elsewhere. This often leads to people stop playing.

How would it work
A new chunk of map would become available every once in a while (a few months).
In order to make this interesting, this new area requires two important things:

• It has to add a new challenge
• It has to reward those who accept the challenge

What could a new challenge look like?
Let's remember the objective of this is to keep interested the "average player", not just to add content for those who are at the very top. With that in mind:

• Harsh weather: an arctic or desert area, where vegetation is scarce and farming won't yield;
• Infested area: maybe an alchemical experiment went wrong, or something else, the place is swarmed with hostile monsters; if that's the surface, who knows what's underground!
• No way out: strong currents and some weird interference prevent you from sailing away or teleporting back; you're now stuck here, until you find another way to leave (probably linked to some new resource found here).
• And so on...

I think many people underestimate how many players love this game and yet don't like/understand its combat system (which leads to not doing dungeons and avoiding PvP completely), which is why we also need non-combat related challenges.

Why should players go there?
The new area should include some rewards, in order to incentivize players to go there:

• New resources (not localized resources, or this will become a race for top players to get those too) of any kind, that can't be found elsewhere.
• New plants that can only grow there, including new crops.
• New animals.
• And so on...

I think most of the rewards should fall into the aesthetics category. If the new materials were used for "useful" items, they would need to be stronger than the current ones (to keep it interesting) and it would lead to a "top players race" to get them, leaving once again behind the average player (who can't compete in PvP against them for the control of those resources).

The new places might have higher quality stuff too. Instead of having 10 as a quality starting point, it might be higher in order to give a little help to get started. (For example, if trees and stones were q50 instead of q10). This increased quality would have to be balanced with the average quality you can find in the "old continents", in order to be advantageous enough so that players won't have to sail with logs and stones, but not too high quality so that they might still want to bring some of their tools / crafting stations and won't make their previous effort feel worthless. I didn't add this to the list because it might have unforeseen consequences, so I'm not sure it's a good idea.

In the end
The goal of this suggestion is to incentives the average Joe to keep playing, by adding content that interests them: new areas to explore and possibly move to, new stuff to gather, and new localized challenges that aren't all combat-related.

I hope it's clear enough. Let me know what you think, and how you would improve it.

[LadyV]

No this would simply make factions and established groups get further ahead. The game already heavily favors them. If your going to open a new area of map then let it be random as any section of world would be. Even as that it would cause a survey boom and faction rush to find new resources.

[Kamekono]

No this would simply make factions and established groups get further ahead. The game already heavily favors them. If your going to open a new area of map then let it be random as any section of world would be. Even as that it would cause a survey boom and faction rush to find new resources.

How would thy get ahead exactly? It's not like the new stuff there would make them stronger. As I said, most of the new stuff should be focused on vanity items and new skins for building materials.

If the new area was just a "random section" like any other part of the world, why would people bother exploring it? Why should I spend hours to get there, if there's nothing new? No new materials, no new animals, no new challenges...

Large factions might want to explore it too, but they wouldn't have a real reason to try and claim such a place; they would have to leave too much stuff behind, and the new resources there wouldn't be something that makes them stronger. That's why I specifically said not to add Localized Resources to those new places, since those are the ones people usually fight over.

The goal is to keep people interested, not just to create more land. That's why it's important for the new area to feel different and challenging in some way.