), but cannot find a good solution yet in my head ... This one is nice and simple:
formerly known as hf wrote:For a while now, I think our best bet is just to universally double all travel speeds...
That would of course be extremely easy to implement, and would also make the game a lot more fun at least in the two oldest islands. But on the long term it might be damaging. I never liked the long travelling times, but the reason I had those, was to have a very strong incentive to create cars. I always envisioned cars (or other vehicles) to be the main form of transportation in the game, not walking. Walking should be *within* locations. But alas, car/vehicle production has always been very slow.
A crucial thing to point out is that originally I made the distances between locations much larger than on newer islands. So the Cantr/Pok islands, which in terms of number of locations are a very small part of the Cantr world, are the only two islands with really long distances. And the effect is very noticable - cf. the comments about K-island, or this quote from the recent Webzine (did I mention already it's a brilliant Webzine!?):
Patryk Rutkowski wrote:In the Polish area things go faster. A lot of RPing, a lot of events. Every week is a "big case" I would say.
There can be many reasons for this, but one might be that the Polish are on newer islands, with much shorter distances. They are spread over a large area - probably at least as many locations as the English - but they have more activity and seemingly a more interesting game. Their recent enormous growth in number of players must also be an indication of a quality game there.
So the question is, if we just speed up travelling all over the place, what happens to 1) the incentives to create and use vehicles, and 2) the game in the current newer islands.
One solution that automatically comes to mind is to change the distances only on the two older islands, but that will of course change the relative position of those two islands relative to the others and thus mess up all existing quality sailing maps of the area.
Or what about instead of increasing all travelling speed, dramatically lower the cost of vehicles? Would that do the trick? Or would that do more damage to existing vehicle industries, who invested a lot for now low returns, than it does good for the game?
A mechanism more similar to the Aki-island is also an option. There due to the overwhelming numbers in animals, most people were for a long time forced to live in just one town on the island (now it's a few more), creating more social cohesion and a common enemy on the island. A similar trick could possibly be applied to the older Cantr islands. One can, for example, think of vulcanos, with a higher chance of occuring in those islands than in other ones, which kill / destroy within a small radius and deplete locations of resources within a somewhat larger radius. A depletion of resources could force populations to move closer together, or in this case even better, sail to unknown new lands. Something that doesn't destroy the fun of playing for the long term players, but that does force some inhabitants of these two islands to move elsewhere would really stimulate the game long term, I think.
I myself thought the abandonment of the Sring-Sri island after density spawning was introduced was quite cool. It's now inhabited again, but it was a nice natural kind of population dynamic. My char was one of the escapists and it was quite fun to play. Something similar could be stimulated perhaps more widely on those islands.
Just bringing down relative numbers would fix a lot. Currently I think new English characters have a much higher chance of spawning on one of those two islands than any other region, and if this balance is changed, more players will have more interesting areas to play in.
Anyway, I'd be happy to hear further comments/suggestions.
... It destroys the natural spread of populations that you can now observe.
