re: keybindings
i do believe the most important implementation would be the ability to set your own keybindings. What's so important about this feature is that you would have to put all the available actions in one spot for the player to look at and reference. From there, you can just decide which actions you want the player to be able to do (drop all, withdraw all of 1 type, close all containers, etc), add which keybinding intuitively fits your schema, and from there the player can either accept or change the keybinding as they please.
re: ugly features
As the creators, i understand you have a certain artistic vision you wish the player to experience, but as the player, the experience I wish to have may differ from yours. The most notable example is cambad. For me, cambad is essential. being locked to 4 orthogonal views as well as a certain prescribed zoom distance really bothers me. And for what its worth, the two camps of players (cam ortho vs cam bad) are very stuck in their ways. Those who enjoy one version usually cant stand the other. I don't mind the
void, and oftentimes play at angles where I dont even see it. Increasing the render distance isnt necessary, It would probably just encourage cam bad users to zoom out even further.
I also came here to say this:
Dakkan wrote:Gridlines, bounding boxes, and badcam are useful for designing and building stuff. I know you don't like the idea of people making the game look worse on the client but we need features like these to make visually appealing stuff in-game.
I use amber, and the features mentioned above are essential for me when building and designing. Placing objects with any precision at all requires bounding boxes.
As for the other ugly features such as disabling terrain smoothing, flattening terrain height, etc.: I use those features to make the game playable on my laptop when im away from my desktop. These features aren't strictly used for their PVP optimizations, they make the game run better on slower machines.
re: mechanically distinct boss fights
You briefly touched on the only viable option for fighting high-leveled creatures is cheesing, opposed to mechanic driven tactics. Having certain fights which are 'minigames' of sorts (harpooning whales is the lowest hanging fruit here) sounds like a fun alternative to cheesing/regular combat, as well as allowing low levelled/inexperienced players to interact with this content. You mention its difficult to create risk for players: either they cheese and risk nothing, or they die and lose their character. Another form of risk is material and time, you've hit this theme briefly with whales breaking knarrs, although players still find it easier to cheese whales with luring tactics(saving their knarrs and their character). Create more materially intensive methods to fight large creatures. For instance, if players had to chase whales using only a knarr and many harpoons and rope, the risk becomes losing their knarr and the tools used to catch the whale. Risk of death is lower, ability to cheese is gone as entering direct combat with a whale is no longer an option.
re:locality vs. travel, farming qualities & time gates
I feel you're emphasizing the role of travel and its correlation to locality too much. A location should not be important for its distance to another location. Being able to travel quickly between two villages is important for player interaction. What matters in terms of locality is what village A can offer to village B which village B can either not produce itself or cannot compete with in quality. This is currently hard to offer as most players are either at the bleeding edge of the quality grind and thus dont need to trade, or will never catch up and thus have nothing to trade. The example talked about on stream is farming. it's time gated and randomly rolled. Either you plant enough fields and harvest frequently enough to beat the curve, or you fall behind. This is where locality comes into play - if one location can consistently grow a higher quality plant - either by faster time gates or by better quality rolls - it can distinguish itself as the best area to grow certain crops. even if the buyers replant these crops, they do not have the location advantage which means the seller will still be able to produce a higher quality crop. Essentially, time gates are necessary, but could be variable based on factors outside of the player's control in order to create specialization, especially geographical specialization.