Apocalypse - sunsetting Worlds with grace

[NightMind]

* Each hearthling receives an in-game event stating that "You feel the magic beginning to leave this world. In time, it will be your turn as well. Meanwhile make the most of the remaining time." It can also give a sizeable XP boost, even as much as 5-10k as it will have a greater impact on newer hearthlings and will give players an incentive to learn magic mechanics, given that there is few reason to stockpile XP now that the world is ending.
* Starting from the event, Personal claims stop accumulating Presence. Once the presence runs out, the Bond of Blood and Soil displays claim pole's HP. You can still protect your stuff from decay by fixing up the pole, but homo homini lupus est - when it comes to crimes, the gloves are off.
* Villages can still attempt to maintain their authority, but the authority drain increases exponentially by 1.1 times daily, meaning it doubles every week. This results in ~200 increase by the 60 day mark, meaning villages will likely run out of authority about the same time as claims if not sooner
* Realm authority remains as-is.

This makes the dying world a much more inhospitable place to be, and prompts hearthling to take more risky and daring decisions as any consequences would be drowned out in the flames of a dyign world.

Some other changes that could improve the feel of the last moments:

Increased dungeon spawn rate
Trees grow up to 150% just because they can
Localized resources respawn more often
Perhaps at a 30 day mark a number of falling stars descend, giving much higher chance to acquire and try out meteoric iron

IF it is possible to allow two worlds to exist concurrently with the current server architecture, a "soft" kill of the world could provide an interesting endgame option.

this period might also be good for testing some new features (like the infamous armor gildings), as any impact they would have would be limited to the last few survivors.

[Fostik]

Something of this is already happening after announce of the new world - e.g. trolls spawns outside, bashable claimed walls and stuff like that
But overall I like the idea of soft pushout, with incentives to play in sandbox while it still lives.

[SnuggleSnail]

Completely off topic, but it would be insanely cool if troll eyes could _rarely_ views spots in the old world. Dakkan's pyramid, community fair, maid cafe, W12 graveyard, jorb's W10 shithole cave base, etc. Everybody likes ancient monuments.

[Robben_DuMarsch]

I seem to recall, in some recent images or video, Jorbtar showing off the doomsday ritual model that they created a long time ago, which was supposed to allow players to have some effect on the world reset by fighting over the human sacrifice that would trigger the new world.

I'm curious if they intend to (re)introduce that and/or iterate on it.

[Nightdawg]

sacrifice me in exchange for no more radio-silence and devs that aren't out of touch

[The_Blode]

Completely off topic, but it would be insanely cool if troll eyes could _rarely_ views spots in the old world. Dakkan's pyramid, community fair, maid cafe, W12 graveyard, jorb's W10 shithole cave base, etc. Everybody likes ancient monuments.

That would be really neat. Have a repository of images from past worlds that players can contribute to. "Memories of other realities"

[Robben_DuMarsch]

sacrifice me in exchange for no more radio-silence and devs that aren't out of touch

Lol I'd support that.
I looked up the old ritual of sacrifice quasi-patch, and now I'm second guessing if I actually saw it anywhere recently or I just had some weird fever dream.

It has some parallels to the discussions in this thread, so I'll leave a link here: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=46591

It's also ridiculous how engaged Jorb and Loftar were back then. They literally handed players the ability to force them to reset the world at any hour of any day while they announced they'd have a host of changes ready in about two weeks - then they followed through on both.