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So if you're not in the know, Intrepid has been holding Discord events for people to come into their discord for an hour, and discuss how they feel about the most recent Dev discussion they've put on their forums. It is hosted by community managers Vaknar and Roshen. These sessions are recorded, and handed over to the dev team to hear community feedback, so I figured some people here might be interested in a summary. The discussion is an hour long, so sorry if this summary is lengthy.
This week's dev discussion was about world map discovery, from the forums post: "Would you like to see a traditional MMO world map that, once explored, updates with the ever-changing state of the world, or would you prefer to see more innovative ways of keeping maps up-to-date?"
The community has taken this question to ask whether tthe world map should automatically give us information about new events, new resources, new roadways, new node levels, etc or make it a community effort to obtain this information via a cartography class/skill. Here are my impressions of the meeting.
Almost everyone seemed to think a fog of war would be a lot of fun. However, the major concern is that a 3rd party website would be able to get information from crowdsourcing a lot more conveniently than some in-game cartography system would, and therefore people would just use that 3rd party website.
As an example, in Star Wars Galaxies there's a website called Galaxy Harvester that has a community who figure out what dynamic resources have spawned on the different planets, and uploads that information to the site. The community does this because of just how frustrating it is to be searching for good resources by yourself in SWG. Here's the site: https://galaxyharvester.net/
So, would a "fog of war" system just become useless with the presence of a third party website? I think it was about 70/30 of the community that was saying yes it would become outdated. The dissenting opinion, which I'm a part of, noted that resources could end up spawning and rotating quickly, meaning that a large community effort is necessary, and as long as the in-game system is convenient enough, people who would have contributed through the third party website may prefer to just use the in-game system. The game might also be a lot more secretive over information, given that alerting your enemies from other nodes that you just got an amazing new resource spawn might not be the best idea for your own gameplay.
How would an innovative fog of war system work? There were several ideas: - Have a fog roll over your map to areas you haven't visited in a certain period of time - Just leave a person's map outdated. E.g. if you visited a node and it was tier 4 last week, but it has since then been upgraded to tier 5, your map doesn't reflect this update until your map is updated.
How do you update and share your maps? - Have a cartography artisan class that can explore and map out the world, and then sell those maps by various means Or - Have a cartography skill that everyone has access to, which levels up as you explore and update your map more and more, and have everyone be able to share their maps.
- A broad idea was that you could share your map with others through various means. Maybe there's a guild map through UI, or in your guild hall, which you can update so the rest of your guild members have the newest information. Maybe you can share a map player to player directly via some means at a tavern or anywhere. Maybe you can update the map at a scientific node's library, and others can go to the library to update their map.
And I think that was the major points about the fog of war. Some more minor points of discussion:
- People debated whether the map should be a topographical map, or just an old flat map
- Some people were really excited over the possibility of there being a treasure hunting skill; something similar to ESO's Scrying.
Anyway, that's the summary recorded for history. If you want to participate or listen in to the next one, they post announcements for these office hours on the Ashes discord under events, as well as under Announcements on the forums.
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