Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

[Doug R.]

Original idea accepted.

[Snickie]

Question.

What about those huge continents like Fu or Pangaea?

[Andu]

Spawn in the middle of the wilderness on a sparely populated island? Already doing that.

[Doug R.]

Question.

What about those huge continents like Fu or Pangaea?

An island is an island, regardless of size.

[Addicted]

Maybe we should try making the spawn algorythm more sensitive to distance first though. If I remember what I've seen of the code correctly, it would probably be very easy.

What about this?

It would overcome spawning on small islands next to each other.

[psychowico]

Maybe we should try making the spawn algorythm more sensitive to distance first though. If I remember what I've seen of the code correctly, it would probably be very easy.

From the code - this should be easy.

[sanchez]

I like this proposal generally, however Hermie's point regarding clustering of newspawns is very important also because it addresses cases we've seen where visitors from a minority language group can nearly overtake a town rather quickly. This occurred in part because of the weighted chance to spawn away from your other chars and would be exacerbated by the choice to spawn on a new island. Please implement safeguards to avoid minority language newspawn clustering too quickly, as it's unnecessarily disruptive for players who would not choose to play in multilingual environments.

[Doug R.]

I whole-heartedly agree. Hermi's suggestion would partially help. Another suggestion is to allow characters to remove themselves from the spawn-candidate pool, kind of like a self castration. If sailors don't want to be spawning in every port, they can just turn it off.

[Snickie]

If sailors don't want to be spawning in every port, they can just turn it off.

Yes please! Want! Need! Needed three or four days ago!

[Rumaan]

I sort of like the thought of choosing a range of how many characters are in the areas to spawn, ... Perhaps such choices for number of characters could be wide ranges like 1-20 and 20+ or 1-15 and 15+. The wide range wouldn't really change how it already is a lot, it would just get people into smaller or larger communities. I suppose it could be stated on the page as: Community size? A) Smaller or B) Larger (or some better phrasing).

I like this idea. If it leads most people selecting the larger towns, at least it will naturally result in greater concentration of populations - which hopefully would make the game more active.

[Doug R.]

Without getting overly complicated, how about allowing players the ability to add parameters to the spawning algorithm when they create new characters?

This would only apply to characters after the second (the first two already have special spawning specifications).

Possible parameters:

-On an island where you don't have another character*
-More than X distance from other characters (or specific characters)
-In a town with more than X characters (could be an input box)
-In a town with less than X characters (could be an input box)
-On a coast
-Not on a coast
-In a certain terrain type

* - this could prove problematic, in that it would spread the language groups out even more widely, with the smaller groups being the worst impacted, so, while on the surface it seems to be a good idea, it could make the problems with population dilution even worse.

The player should be allowed to pick only two of the above options. Otherwise, they could very easily target towns specifically.

[Henkie]

I love this idea, but I don't like it to be too specific.
So things like 'in X town with less/more than X-players' or 'on an island ... character' would be great, but things like coast or no coast, grassland, mountains... I don't think they should be included.

[Vega]

Love it! I want it implemented NOW.

Can I ask what are the parametres for the first two?

[toon]

What happens if there sin't a town with the specifications? Or if the only town with those specifications is inhabited by another of the player's characters?

[Doug R.]

I think it should give an error message and allow the player to enter different parameters.