Posts made by OlivePit

will they? or wont they?

drum roll please.

The areas circled in light blue are houses that are a stones throw from mobs.
The very effective and active group criminal hype dominated the far eastern ogre camp as easily as they did likely to the very close proximity to the town and houses. This allowed them to farm the mobs almost continuously giving them an excellent source of bear meat (for paying town upkeep), gold coins, and blood iron ingots. With this advantage they were the only group who were able to test all of the summon able world bosses, make multiple raids on towns testing the siege mechanics, and enchant their equipment to the highest allowed by the towns tech levels available in the test.

There are other places where similar benefits exist and in the case of the Arena of Olyssa you can practically fight mobs while standing in your house. (and be killed by them) or Snipe other players who are hunting mobs there from the safety of your home creating a gankers wet dream.

The fact that in this post they labeled large areas with "TBD" greatly implies that they intend on having mobs spawn even in those areas which are even closer to housing. This is backed by the fact that the western coast "TBD" area is already populated by sea trolls.

How this will effect the game balance is partially speculative, partially based on past trends (criminal hype guild).

If the human housing options are concentrated that reduces the area of exposure/access to mobs and allows for larger areas of higher mob activity. If the human housing options are heavily dispersed all over the map that creates much more potential overlap/exposure/access to mobs which might necessitate reducing the overall mob presence to only the hot spots which would create higher density of player activity in specific areas which would further encourage pvp and ganking.
Having areas of high concentration mobs also reduces the area that can be given to resources like stone and ore. A specific example is Bandit Camp #1 which used to be a zone of high stone saturation with some copper but was entirely replaced by the high density bandit camp. This greatly reduced the stone available to the two towns right next to the camp which slowed their construction significantly.

Doing one thing will cause effects in other things. Some of these effects we know from past tests, some we do not. The general idea of having isolated houses is cool, but will cause other consequences, like the reduction and concentration of mobs which will increase factors favorable to pvp and ganking.

Overall I think it can be agreed that people do not want too many mobs around their houses or their mining areas. As such

are much more player friendly than other options. Not only does it allow players to mine and smelt faster and safer, but it increases the cost of PVP and ganking in the area making them less likely to happen.

While situations like this:

Are just ingredients for guaranteed PVP and Ganking, not to mention kill stealing and sniping. (of the summoned world boss)

Would be cool to get @Prometheus 's take on this feed too !

need new news, not old's

no news is bad news

And governors have no control over the tax, more appropriately rent, of any housing outside of the city walls.
What control the govenors do have over taxes within the walls is by commitment levels : traveler, resident, citizen, Lt. Governor. Any tax they set would affect the whole group, not just individuals. And taxing the entire population of residents for a few bad ones is not going to be popular.

There has been mention of NPC guards, but the only proposed applications were for guarding high resource node areas, or 'mines', or for guarding the town gates / port.

I am not sure they will create more diffuse housing beyond the clusters of 12 that already exist. it would be interesting tho.

Ok, so just hype and fluff, no content. Sigh.

no news = bad news

Questions:
Are we going to be able to play demons/wildfolk out the gate this beta?
Is the data successfully migrated?
Does the Glyph launcher work?
Will vegetables be fully implemented (farming, city upkeep) at start of the beta?
Will you be able to use wild vegetables to make vegetable food sacks?
Will alchemy be implimented at start?
Will we get bigger carts? -more volume, higher cost-
Is the first tier of imbued gems going to be cheaper to socket? -500 is excessive barrier to entry-
Is the chest bug fixed?
Do the weapons that are supposed to affect incorporeal creatures work now? Or are they still bugged?
Will there be NPC's?
Do donations to the temple/alter for adjusting karma get split with the town that build the temple/alter?
Where are the cannons and 'superior human technology'? Coming? or scrapped?
Will the talent tree be fully implemented for this beta or will there still be gaps? - charisma branch, some end talents, etc..-
Will the Devs and community managers be roaming, monster spawning, and town raiding terrors to help test the siege system and defenses?

Concern for loosing equipment will incentivize people to travel, hunt, and harvest in groups or use cheep equipment when not in groups.
Harvesting and crafting equipment is not meant to be a huge barrier and unless you regularly go to pvp hot spots or seek out pvp you should be able to keep yourself well equipped.
Personally I rotated outdated equipment for newer, better, equipment more regularly than I had need to replace lost equipment.

A reference to NPC's being an aspect of the PvE game for evil alignments is interesting: "gain the attention of some not-so-kosher NPCs."
I am guessing the donation to shrines is an alternative to getting sent to jail... I hope that it is a slow enough accumulation that evil people cant just go and become instantly neutral and thus avoid the justice system... And that the city gets a cut of the money? they have to build the shrine after all ! >.>

Still a re-hash of old info with a few new bits.

still no news... this is bad news... sigh..

no news is bad news.

Prometheus-
Progress in this game requires equipment, which is gated by cities, which are gated by upkeep, which requires crops only available through farming done by cities. In the past tests we have seen how problems with the crop economy effects the entire test. As such I feel it is no exaggeration to say that the crop economy is the foundation of the game economy. Considering the next test is going to be a continuous beta that only ends shortly before release the initial state of the crop economy is going to be very important to the city development and player participation as any misstep early on will have cascading effects. The information given in spotlights are our only indicators as to what that starting condition may be. As such it is important that information given is valid or clearly not meant to be taken as true.

Thanks for the confirmation that the numbers shown are not the numbers that will be used for the beta. Fast growth rates and short upkeep times make sense for beta/alpha testing, good to know that. Still some concern that in launch the cereal threshold will be a major barrier for those interested in starting a city... but I guess that it will be less if they can buy that starting crop needs from another established city.

On the citizenship issue... It seems really harsh to say that you can start play in one of three worlds but only get to have a residence in one...
I can see that only having one home forces a decision on where to focus your attention and is a decent counter to independent players who might otherwise have a house in all three worlds and just trade with themselves.
However any group of 3 or more players will still be able to do that. In essence you are just punishing players who have complex schedules or are loners, but still want to experience all the game content offered in each world.
The lone player is already going to have to split their time, attention, and coin between three places for upkeep. Is that not already a sufficiently high opportunity cost?

@Vortech
I really really hope that is not the case. If they start beta with those numbers city economy will be a joke and the situation I described will happen... again.. since that is what happened last time.

@DarthJafo
With enchanted equipment and a specialized build of skills and talents you could solo the gobs and bandits. Although out of date now, two tests ago I was able to solo the bone dragon by the end of the 4 week test.
The test before the weekend test all mobs (not so much bosses) were possible solo from what I heard.
So very much possible, just not easy or quick.

They mean one settlement membership per account per world.
So you can be part of one town as a demon in the demon world, and one in the human world, and one in the wildfolk world.

@Vortech
The most recent test had no intentions on having player towns, as shown by the devs magical creation of two rank 15 towns near the starting locations.
It is not a valid comparison with other alphas where the town mechanics were being tested, where I pulled my example from, or the coming beta where vegetables will be implemented to allow full town economies to be tested before launch.

Acknowledged.
While I doubt they will be changing any of the layout of this island it will be interesting how they design the others.
The winter continent would make much more sense to have the housing tightly clustered around the towns.
Also remember that there needs to be a modest amount of space on two sides of the town for siege emplacements.(the orange areas in the picture)

And sometimes it is a good thing to have a residence far from a city. Like the below example where you would have far easier access to the copper ore if you lived far out than close in. Variety is nice and provides different access to different resources. If you plan on using the towns crafting, banking, and trade services a lot, then a residence close to it would be more beneficial. But if you would rather just have tech access, house anywhere in the territory, then being closer to resources, or mob camps, might be more beneficial.

and this spot reminds me of your real world example picture: