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How would you prevent open world ghost towns and urban sprawl?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
There is hard balance between having space for everyone to build, barren landscape, ghost town and urban sprawl in open world building. You don't want world too small or land will dry up fast. If your world is too big it will be barren and sensitive to population loss. Players will leave and even return to your game so you will have to deal with abandoned houses. If you allow building to be too freelance and too numerous in one are you will have sprawling plots of houses with no organization.
So what would be your solution to those issues?
So what would be your solution to those issues?
Comments
Or you can only build a fence if you have a couple of houses standing next to each other. The fence can still be damaged but it repairs if the town is visited frequently and actions are participated in it
Would fit more into a zombie setting but its just a first draft.
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Influence generation is heavily weighted toward tasks you need to be online actively taking part in, in order to build it. If you can multi-box 20 characters doing the same task at the same time, that task will be a low influence generation task. If you need your full attention devoted to a single task to have any prayer of success, that task will be a high influence generation task.
Such a system could also be used to control housing a bit. You need X influence with the controlling faction of the region in order to own a certain plot of property. Since influence is weighted toward active tasks this makes it difficult to just pay taxes on a certain piece of property forever without actively playing the game unless it's a very low influence requirement piece of property. It also makes it difficult to go the ArcheAge route and have 20 accounts that control 60+ pieces of property.
This also would couple with ideas like there being a lot of benefits to having all your alts on one account that you would have to forgo in order to make a bunch of alts to game the property system.
Essentially. Make the most efficient path to having great property options actively playing the crap out of a single account. That's how you get farms, manors, etc. Someone who has 40 accounts they play 5 minutes a month can have 40 single rooms at various inns (Which would not be highly beneficial to them so it's unlikely people would do this.)
If a building is vacant for long enough it becomes haunted or becomes a hangout for villains - either way it transforms into a point of interest and something to fight lives there.
if a building becomes vacant for even longer it eventually catches fire and burns down.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
1. People are able to claim too many properties too easily, but most systems that make it hard for land moguls to own half the map also make it hard for newbs to get property.
2. A lot of people earn their property while playing actively, then go mostly inactive but maintain a piece of property they barely use for years afterwards. For instance the roadside inn (tradesman's manor) I built in ArcheAge stood for like a year. 6 months of which I was just having my fiancé log me in for 5 minutes a day to burn labor on tax certs while we were without a second operational gaming computer. That along with like 5-10 other pieces of property.
Wurm Online, ArcheAge, LOTRO etc. They all have land ownership systems and they all have a way that land is lost if you straight up stop playing the game. But it is very easy for one barely active player to control many properties for years at a time, making most towns feel like ghost towns.
That is why I suggest tying it to something like my proposed influence system. You would make it very easy for anyone to maintain a room at an inn or something so less active players can have a little space to throw some decorations and chests but if you want to own big pieces of property with resource production and crap attached to it, you need to be a very active player constantly re-earning your right to that plot of land. Or perhaps share it with a group who can generate the needed influence working together.
Instanced housing is absolute dumpster juice IMO.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
That way, if a player who owns a house goes idle, the house isn't unused. The game just picks a different player whose house is at the same site as the one to be visible to other players and the game world seems as active as before.
Also give players bonuses for logging off in their own house, and then if another player would see your house as he approaches, he sees your character, too, even though you're offline. That way, the player housing areas don't seem like a ghost town.
It is true that some people who have a lot of time would have a huge advantage. I'm not sure why people get so upset about this. There are tradeoffs in real life for spending a lot of time in a game.
Houses shouldn't be permanent. If you don't pay a fee every so often in the game eventually the house disappears.
Houses can be attacked, damaged, destroyed, pillaged, stolen with a deed, etc.. If a house is damaged you have to pay money to repair it.
I think the key factor is to make it difficult for people to have a permanent house.
I am not a big fan of instanced houses. I'm not the type of person who wants a house in a fantasy world. Especially for cosmetic reasons. It's just not my cup of tea. I could do that in real life and it would be more useful to me. I also like to go adventuring in a game as it's not something I get to do often in real life. Sitting in a house or at work, a lot is what I mostly do anyway.
It might be possible if enough people want to build in a certain area, a neighborhood could 'spawn' at that location. When a certain % of the properties are sold, a new instance could appear there. That might make it simpler for some to accept the instanced housing concept without everyone having the 'magnificent view' and 'defensible location'.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
1) Larger maintenance cost x 10 for in-city costs
2) Have to hire guards - each guard costs money, more money for higher level
3) Have to feed and maintain guards - higher level and more guards mean more money
4) If you do not log on, your guards will notice that and steal from you. They will eventually steal items of increasing value.
5) Until one day, the guards ransack your place and leave. When that happens, you get an email and an on-line warning and in 7 days your place is burnt down and another person can build on it.
Four types of housing:
Normal housing is instanced - pay a maintenance fee
Set houses in-game - sell for real world cash (like in Entropia) and is tradeable.
Guild housing is in certain areas - Guild needs to hit certain milestones and have proper upkeep
Wilderness housing is its own thing - available to every player but comes with huge costs and can be put anywhere, but not too close to an NPC city or a guild dedicated housing.
All items can be placed to decorate your house like in SWG.
The crux to reduce the urban sprawl is just to make the maintenance cost so high on wilderness housing that very few people can do it. Also, have it require crafters and others. You have to be uber to have it. If you don't have the time, then better have the credit card for set houses. If you don't have either, then you are out of luck.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I was so amazed when I first played SWG because of the housing. Even though PoE has hideouts, I could care less about decorating my hideout. In SWG, when I played I was a gun crafter, so I had guns and weapons arrayed as if I was a shop. I could own a shop in Entropia but i'm not paying $100-500 for it. Even though it is in the game, it's just not really worth it in a game like Entropia.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
NPC factions with large towns that were planned out. So around the town you had lots plots that were taxed by the faction at cost depending on location and size. As more players take up plots the town upgrades and more area becomes open to build on. Player towns work the same way with guilds in control.
One advantage to that is the city can have order. Roads, walls and city decorations can have a place. So you don't just have buildings plopped down. You have a city layout for players to build on. You can also zone for commercial districts.
Upkeep of taxes going to factions or guilds would help keep some of the ghost town from appearing. Also have buildings degrade that must be repaired by a tradesman. So even if you pay for your plot without repair you building decays. Having town guards as a fee for the city is also there because without guards the town is vulnerable for destruction.
Players can also free build outside the range of a city but its lawless. Players could hire mercs NPCs but they would be more expensive than guards.
Taxes need to be relatively impactful though. If a person is making thousands/millions of currency every month, and paying like 100 in tax, it won't mean much. This is fine for a starter apartment or something, but taxes need to scale effectively.
Ideally, taxation would be based on the amount of land and the location, etc., just as in the real world.
This way if a person is wealthy, they can own more land but their taxes will be escalating as well.
2) - The other important thing is to not allow people to "stock up" on their payments. Like someone above mentioned, people just dump tons of currency into upkeep and the stuff will last forever.
Ideally, force players to have to log in and manually pay their fees every so often.
You could even go deeper to help out the folks who have to quit playing for a while and allow their friends/guildies to cover the payments while they are away for a couple months or something.
Interestingly, I could see a whole business popping up where people make sure your rent/taxes get paid(for a fee) while you are away.
What should happen of course, is that MMO housing should be a valued feature which any subscription MMO was lauded as having, but it was just one of the many MMO elements which were deemed not needed for "streamlining" or designing easymode solo MMOs as I believe.
To me it was and is a staple of MMOs even though not having one never bothered me that much, but if you start to only speak out for what you enjoy in a MMO don't get surprised when they ditch raids too.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
MurderHerd