Cantr II Discussion Forum

I apologize if this is in the wrong place but I also find the forums confusing and hard to navigate.

My issue is: I wonder if there is something going on with the newspawn system. Allocation of newspawns seems to me to be off and far from ideal.

One of my characters was spawned into a town with 5 other characters, zero of which was very active and speaking at the time. Two of the characters were very old and spoke only when necessary and two were fairly recent newspawns who had grown completely silent because of the lack of activity in the town. And, just a day or two before my character was spawned, another newspawn had appeared there making things slightly more active.

So that's 4 newspawns within a fairly short time, two of which were spawned only a day or two apart.

Now, with the two most recent characters still just 21 and one of them being away from town for an extended time, another newspawn has recently appeared.

So that's five newspawns in a relatively short time who were spawned into a small and not very active community. And, per the old guys, there were others who had just walked away. One died on the road and slid back into town so he could not have been that old.

Meanwhile, I have other characters in very active, very awake and talkative towns where no newspawns at all have appeared for ages.

I thought that newspawns were weighted to go to towns which were more active and talked more. Is this still in effect?

I've seen and heard of some odd things too, for sure. It might be something to look at. Someone informed me that a high number of their characters (8) spawned on the same island, which makes it very difficult and frustrating to navigate.

PS I agree that the forum should be reorganized a bit.

Yes, speaking within the past day or two makes a very significant difference in terms of spawning. But note that the same applies to newspawns. Two newspawns who speak today could very well cause another newspawn to appear, under the current system.

Then why no newspawns in some busy, talkative towns? I feel like something in the programming is not seeing them be evenly distributed throughout Cantr.

I have no idea how hard this would be but can programming be added which would look at a list of English (for example) speaking towns and says, "This town hasn't had a newspawn in a long time and it's active so it goes to the top of the list" instead of dumping newspawn after newspawn into a tiny, inactive town where most newspawns are not going to be happy?

New players and their newspawns are our most valuable resource and retaining them is important. I think that at least some of their characters should go where they will really be nurtured.

Just my observations and opinions: It might be the randomness in the spawning that makes new spawns not always appear in the right place (i. e., not evenly distributed), but in my opinion, certain randomness is necessary, otherwise it would be too predictable where and when a new spawn would appear.

Gudgeon explains it well. It would be complex to take into account randomness, a queue (taking turns), and ever-changing activity levels all together in the same equation. But, I don't doubt the current formula is not as ideal as it could all be. A possible improvement is to not include a character in the equation at all if they haven't spoken in a couple days, whereas now it's just a small percentage due to a discount (lesser after 1, 2, 3 days etc.). I think it would also be fine to not include very new characters, unless they are the only options.

Current system is still better than old one where you could horde sleepers to get more newspawns (yeah people actually did move sleepers to their towns..). So new system is definitely better than old one

It seems to me that a simple scoring system can be implemented that tracks a town's likelihood of spawning. It is a running total that gets updated daily and when spawn activity occurs.

Something like:

• Each day the point total is reduced by -1
• Activity is rated and scored something like 0-3 pts, and that is added to the total
• When a new spawn shows up, the score is reduced by 5

Activity rating can use a weighting that takes into account each char age that displays activity, such that if a 25+ char does something it counts much more than a 20-21 year old, to prevent spawns creating more spawns and to favor towns with proven established char.

When a new spawn occurs, it's randomly distributed but heavily weighted by the town's current spawn score. In this way, the consistently active towns will eventually have the top scores. A once active town that slows down will have a decay factor (the daily -1) and slowly sink to the bottom of the list.

Finally, once you gain a spawn, you score gets knocked down somewhat and you need to build back up to get back in the running. Of course all of the actual values would need to be tuned, I just made up some simple numbers as examples.

Maybe the time has come to go back to fixed spawn points. The Cantr world is too big for the current player/character base.

In the stats thread, there used to be regular posts about towns with the largest populations. If anyone with access cares to dig up the current numbers, I would appreciate it.

I think that, at this point, English-speaking newspawns should be limited to only the English-speaking islands and not sent to the islands where there are only a couple of diminishing, isolated, pretty much inactive English-speaking towns surrounded by non-English speaking towns and/or vast expanses of empty towns. No one wants to have their English-speaking character spawn in those towns.

PaintedbyRoses wrote:I think that, at this point, English-speaking newspawns should be limited to only the English-speaking islands and not sent to the islands where there are only a couple of diminishing, isolated, pretty much inactive English-speaking towns surrounded by non-English speaking towns and/or vast expanses of empty towns. No one wants to have their English-speaking character spawn in those towns.

I am of the opposite opinion. My favorite characters are in those places and I am working hard to adapt. Learning Polish and Spanish bit by bit.

PaintedbyRoses wrote:I think that, at this point, English-speaking newspawns should be limited to only the English-speaking islands and not sent to the islands where there are only a couple of diminishing, isolated, pretty much inactive English-speaking towns surrounded by non-English speaking towns and/or vast expanses of empty towns. No one wants to have their English-speaking character spawn in those towns.

This probably would be hard if not impossible to implement as it would need manual work and rework of the spawning system. Current system allows newspawns to go most active places and people can create their own towns etc. So in practical sense I would say this would be not possible to do. I understand the issue though... That can happen also to non-english players that spawn on EZ towns due travelers

I actually would like to have one or two chars in zone of other languages, but all of mine spawned onto the most populated English islands. Some of my chars are traveling to see the "frontier".

The current state of the game doesn't allow for detailed spawn location preferences.
Giving the existing characters a say by means of their activity, plus of course the spreading algorithm for characters of the same player, is about the best that can be done.

Tiamo wrote:The current state of the game doesn't allow for detailed spawn location preferences.
Giving the existing characters a say by means of their activity, plus of course the spreading algorithm for characters of the same player, is about the best that can be done.

I find it hard to believe this is the best that can be done. Without going into a lot of detail, the system is clearly not the best and can actually contribute to a rocky start for a new player. When some towns can get several newspawns within a few minutes of time and other active places get nothing at all for weeks, that is not optimal. It's easy for a newspawn to be ignored if they are among several spawning at one time, harder to find their place when competing for attention, and in some cases may be spawning more than once in the same town.