RoB replacement brainstorming

[canned]

[Silly idea] Have jorb or loftar make a "secret" hideout where chars 1st spawn, and after they log off, they spawn near some village, or person who invited them( throught the name?)
That would give people also something to try find out (as in trying to find the location of eden of H&H which is the hideout of developers)[/silly idea]

[theTrav]

I like the idea of allowing villages to craft their own RoB's and make them public / invite only.

That gives you the problem of boot strapping where there are no public villages (map reset) in which case I say throw people in to the wilds randomly (DIE NOOBS DIE!) or spawn them some small distance from the highest concentration of civilization available.

Whatever ends up happening, you are STILL going to get an area with overpopulation and heavy de-forestation, because people like to gather and people consume. All you're really solving with this change is the 'problem' of a centralized hard coded teleport location, which devalues crossroad signs.

[Jackard]

Whatever ends up happening, you are STILL going to get an area with overpopulation and heavy de-forestation, because people like to gather and people consume. All you're really solving with this change is the 'problem' of a centralized hard coded teleport location, which devalues crossroad signs.

possibly, but at least then it wont be forced overpopuation

[Laremere]

Well, with that you have very localized impact. With the RoB you have the impact and high density going on for a long distance, and the entire super grid has an unnaturally high density compared to other grids because of it.

[theTrav]

so should new characters be introduced near existing characters or not?

I would have assumed J&L would go for some sort of natural population growth model, do hearthlings just magically appear in the world? or do they happen via a more mundane reproductive mechanism that implies spawning proximity?

I don't think the current RoB model is the best way of handling population, but I don't think its population density is particularly un-natural either.

It'd be kind of funny if they went with proper population growth based on hearth fire density, and people just slowly migrated across supergrids consuming trees as they went, leaving ecological devastation in their wake

[CG62]

reproductive mechanism

Interesting solution to character creation: Male and Female characters copulate, and create a slot for a new player to join as their child. Then the "parents" could perhaps receive a reward for properly teaching the newby how to play the game. Then perhaps we could have a "Children of Men" scenario in which no pregnancies occur.


In case you haven't picked up on it yet, I'm not being serious T_T

[Jfloyd]

reproductive mechanism

Interesting solution to character creation: Male and Female characters copulate, and create a slot for a new player to join as their child. Then the "parents" could perhaps receive a reward for properly teaching the newby how to play the game. Then perhaps we could have a "Children of Men" scenario in which no pregnancies occur.


In case you haven't picked up on it yet, I'm not being serious T_T

Lol, I know you're not being serious, but has been suggested before, and the person was raged at. Hard.

[CG62]

I imagine so.

Still, it'd be something new, and probably (PROBABLY) better than the RoB provided only responsible players are allowed to have children.

[Potjeh]

Maybe we should draw inspiration from the real world. How did most of the modern Europeans come to Europe? Barbarian invasions.

Perhaps RoB could be replaced with multiple mobile tribal totems. When forests start recovering on their own (and it makes no sense whatsoever that they don't), newbs could always be kept on land with resources by moving their spawning point. Of course, the whole moving business is a bit tricky to do right, as it could be used for griefing. It should either require multiple lawspeakers (which is still exploitable, but require a lot of effort), or the totems should in fact slowly move on their own when the land around them is depleted (say, unclaimed tree count is under a certain number). The latter would represent barbarian invasions quite well, I think. Of course, they should never appear directly on village territory or tribal claims, but even if a horde of newbs appear in your neighbourhood it can be bad news because the forest around you is as good as gone. This would only be a temporary setback, though, because forests would slooowly regrow on their own.

In addition to these "wild" totems, maybe multiple villages should be able to form into a tribe and build a permanent RoB-like spawn point. Newbs might be a huge pressure on natural resources, but they're also a valuable resource themselves if they can be turned into productive citizens. This RoB-equivalent would let villages allow newbs close to them for evaluation purposes while not actually letting them into the village where they can cause problems. It should also be possible at this RoB to request membership in any of the villages that make up the tribe that owns it. Something like runestones with village names and short descriptions, and when you right-click on it you get a "request membership" option, which the lawspeaker of the village in question can grant or deny at any time from either his village idol or this RoB. There could also be some management options, like setting immigration quotas, banning certain bloodlines from spawning there (so a griefer would have to start from scratch every time) etc.

[theTrav]

Just to be clear, I wasn't advocating a detailed representation of reproduction.

More of an abstract model that uses the concept that reproduction is happening "somewhere" to say ok, that means new players should appear close to dense populations of other players, possibly more frequently where there are more females around.