Holy crap! Wow, dude! Thanks for this! There is so much great stuff here that, although I don’t agree with everything, I now feel obliged to comment on every point you made, simply because I think there are great conversation to be had on all of them!
The first point you made is amazing, and I hadn’t really think about that until now: What is tested on Beta does not necessarily have to make the way into Day 1, and housing is for sure one of the system that needs to be extensively tested before reaching the live server (as you mentioned, the potential, for better or worse, is colossal). With that in mind, and if we expand this issue further down the timeline, I think we start to see the inevitable necessity to have a way to player-test new systems before releasing them. Sure, right now, we can test things in Beta and decide to release than later on, but what about the dozens of things that will come later and for which development has not even started, things that haven’t still been though about. What I’m envisioning here is that, for the reasons you mentioned, this game will need a what WoW has in the form of its PTR (Public Test Realm): a test only server in which new patches are deployed first. I think I get a chance, I would like to ask Henrik about this in his next live.
On your second point, you state that the world and the current travel speed are not consistent with each other, resulting in a less than fun combination. Analyzing by what we currently have in game I would agree, but here is my take: I think the relationship between players and with the massive world will change dramatically as some of the core systems are in place. As a headline for what I think it will happen, I could say that “Travelling will be optional.” With Broker and Auction Houses (supported by wagons and better mounts), those who decide not to travel too much will have a very viable way to do say, and at the same time, create content for those who want to explore the world. And those people exist right now, and they will exist in much more substantial volume in the future, when the world will be better populated, carrying weight greatly enhanced and substantial profits from moving goods (and even people!) from one place to another can be achieved. Staying faithful to its primordial promise of choice and consequence, I think MO2 will leave braving such a massive world for a subset of players that really enjoy it.
I totally agree with your point of the Global Chat, no “buts” or “ifs” here. Without a global chat in game, players will look for a global chat somewhere else, achieving the same results but spending twice as much time and having to deal with additional headaches. I also agree that “realism” is a lame justification for everything that is game related. Starting by the fact that you can revive your character by talking to a priest, nothing else makes sense under the “realistic” perspective. Finally, at the end of the day, you can always disable the chat if you desire to do so.
I LOVE the point you made about the online map and how it affects the future cartography skill. I think you hit the nail in the head there: There is already a map in this game (the online one) and denying that is ridiculous. So, once and for all, I totally agree that everybody should stop discussing if this game should have a map or not, that boat sailed when the player-developed map went online. Now, the question that SV should be asking themselves is: How this our own official map. The one I see this, they have two options
1: Do nothing and leave it be. Scrap the plans for in-game cartography and accept the fact that the community will hold the maps
2: Put something in game that is at least as good as what we have online.
And if they go with option two (which I hope they take), I don’t see another way to do that but to go with what you said: making it a secondary skill (that everybody can get at no skill points cost). If they don’t do that, people will be ponder if the benefits generate by the in-game skill are worth the additional skill points given that there is already a functional option online. Honestly, in this context, the only thing worth 100 skill points is that if the cartography skill actually include some sort of GPS (a.k.a showing where in the map you currently are), and, in my opinion, I don’t SV open to that idea, and thus, I think they are forced to where you pointed: a secondary skill that works very similar to the online map.
Your point about making it easier to find your dropped loot after death is something, I’m sure SV is thinking about right now. I was surprised that this was one of the very things they addressed when players starter to pour in the server during the stress test: They made your loot bag red to increase visibility. I honestly don’t think this is the last addition they will make there, although I don’t dare speculate what they may implement in the future. One idea that crossed my mind was to make your loot shine a beacon of light, just like the red beacon from priests. This way, if you want, you could run back to a priest while dead having a persistent reference of the location where you died, and thus making it way easier to find your back to retrieve your things.
As for your point regarding the resources’ location, I want to believe that the logic here will be very similar to what we discussed in the point of the size of the map and the speed of the travel. Gathering resources and moving them across the map will be a task designed to those that enjoy it. We must also keep in mind that, right now, there is barely enough profession points to specialize in both producing Tungstell AND making plate armors of Tungstell (just one example). As such, I can totally see that gathering raw materials will not be essential if that’s not something you enjoy.
Finally, I understand the frustration with the lack of teleports, specially when there two already in the game (from home and to the next priest). Honestly, I think this will hold for some time, but I’m not sure these will never happen. The official material of the game already states that there will be “dangerous” way to magically travel to another locations, and I think this kind of thing will continue to expand as the world gets even bigger. When we have 4 other continents in game, I basically don’t see SV insisting in hinder all forms of fast travel, simply because they will want people to move from one place to the other in less time than it would take to make it by horse (on the same note, I think it is a given they will make their best to do not allow the player movement impact the movement of goods in any substantial way).
Phew! That is it! Again, man, thanks so much for putting the time and effort to share these ideas with us! Great stuff! All the best!
