Spawn ideas: "Offspring", kinda.

[Zizi]

No, just new. No question or speculation is idiotish unless it is asked by the same person multiple times.

Spawning at a village tended to be a bad idea. No village wanted random new alts having access to their belongings ("Where's my q62 bone saw!!?" "Someone harvested all the wheat and ground all the wheat seeds!") so automatic village membership was ruled out from the start. Every village that has had spawning of noobs has also had to deal with clear cutting of trees and the appropriation of anything that is not nailed down. The alts are more destructive than the noobs since they are more experienced and more systematically hard on resources. Meanwhile the noobs soon found that they were fenced in by claims and liable to starve to death before they could find a source of food.

If you want to spawn into a community start a post here perhaps seeking companions, and recruit some people to join you in the wilderness by sharing your hearth secret. Bears and Certain Other Players are the only thing aggressive unless you attack so learn to keep an eye out for the bears, stay near the water if you can -they can't get you at the point where the message comes up saying "You need swimming to enter deeper water." You start with around 30 hard hit points so can actually probably survive nearly 30 bear attacks...


One significant difficulty this game has had is developing communities. I think that is normal for a mmo. The trouble is that finding half a dozen players who live in your time zone and share a common playing style is not easy. The communities that have developed have often wandered in en masse from other gaming systems or been based on Larry's Saturday afternoon D & D games membership. With pvp as a strong feature in the game you can never be sure if someone is trying to join your community in order to attack it. CoB for example requires a couple of weeks membership in SwampCrazed before you can be admitted to their other villages, clay source, mines and maps etc, during which your playing style is evaluated and as a newbie you bring the crop q down from the height that the last batch of immigrants left it. Wheat quality in SC yo-yos from about q60 down to q4 depending on who has been harvesting it and what their farming skill is like.

Trading relationships had been fostering some community, but at this point the people who are posting that they want to trade are normally powerful characters who have difficulty finding trading partners due to, perhaps, a past history that may link them to some aggressive acts or allies. More established players are very cautious about trading due to already having what they need, so not having to take a risk to get the metal for a meat grinder and having a lot invested in their main characters. Newbie trade posts have pretty much been squelched on the forum by posters who respond to the offers made by two day old players to swap chickens for clay and mushrooms for perch, with harsh demands that they shut up because "nobody needs your low q shit!"

Despite all that it is possible to find like players, and in fact, the majority of people you run into in game are actually friendly, willing to give advice and frequently looking for other friendly people to interact with. Unobtrusive people wander around doing things like planting pumpkins where new players can find them and putting up runestones that tell where the best clay and water sources are.

If someone tells you to shut up on forum just keep in mind that they are inexperienced enough not to realise that the same questions have to be asked over and over again and that most of the rest of the world will have a different agenda to them which cannot be changed by a demand to stfu. Back in Neolithic times, I am quite sure there was a new person wandering around plaintively asking where they could find some wheat and how come they couldn't grow grapes and what in the world could they use for string? The world has not changed much in half a million years...

[DasGuntLord01]

Okay,

Seems like the problem was not with the spawning mechanic, but with what players were expecting of the game. Did the devs consider adding things like what I suggested earlier, namely the village choosing if they want newbies, and the newbies choosing if they want a random village spawn?

[Kahim]

Well see some villages like WV dont want newbs but experinced players. And if they ever wanted new players they would put in a charter stone and unlock it so they can spawn. That doesnt auromatically let them in because if they are automatically in the village you cant trust them without knowing them.

[burgingham]

Okay,

Seems like the problem was not with the spawning mechanic, but with what players were expecting of the game. Did the devs consider adding things like what I suggested earlier, namely the village choosing if they want newbies, and the newbies choosing if they want a random village spawn?

The spawning mechanic was a problem, because new players couldn't even start to play the game since everything was claimed and the trees all gone.
Also there is an existing village spawning system. As already mentioned you can always chose to start in Brodgar. Vilalges can set up their own charter stones for newbies to spawn there as well, but almost no town wants this, because then the same would happen to them what already happeneed to Brodgar.

[Kahim]

Not to mention Novigrad which many many people helped reforest