[Poruku]

Wow, I never expected Druby to come in with the perfect post, but I should have.

I believe G6 offers a much greater variety of things for player expression.

This has been my massive complaint with Korvara since the very start. Why would we get rid of so many things that made SL2 great? We could have had the best of both worlds but Dev chose to cut away things that people loved. Not just player expression, I'm talking about all the cut content such as races, dungeons and mobs, and items. And of course most of all the player housing and to a lesser extent the shop keeper. Every single one of the things Dev removed from G6 could have been adapted with a few changes and slotted into Korvara, preserving them. Chief among them housing RP which is part of why SL2 was great. I also want to say removing the shopkeepers has made trading a nightmare. This is a topic for another thread but shopkeeps is another in a long list of things that were removed for the greater good of roleplay and it turns out the thing (trading) just became worse instead.

Korvara just feels too damn small

Hundred percent. As someone who tried to roleplay a group multiple times in the past, I can tell you that much. If you want to settle in an unused part of the map? You're out of luck.

On top of that, the current mapping system is multiple layers of red tape that prohibit people, other than the most insistent, or the most connected. 

Once again I've been there, and it's quite a pain. I don't understand why we're making the mappers do all that work when we have a mapping system players could use literally coded in the game. As someone who has made mapping requests before, it's kind of frustrating and most importantly it really drains motivation having to ask someone to do something for you. You have to write up a big post about the how and why of everything, and it's a whole big deal. And then you can't make small changes without consulting the mapper either, which is frustrating. They're doing an amazing job, but it just feels like the system is a poor solution to the alleged problem.

If extra steps are taken to further ensure housing spaces are always in use, then by all means, but quite honestly, the base system as it was is already miles better than what Korvara offers in my opinion.

To me the ideal scenario would be that publically visible spaces would have to be used for public spaces, and rotate more frequently. I think it was actually quite a big issue in G6 when you wanted to have an actually active location and you needed to compete with the private houses of people who log in once a month to play a different character. There's no reason to have your private house in public view. These should be reserved to bars and hospitals and inns and bakeries... Places that will have an LFG up. Nobody wants to write "go to east residential district and it's the 9th house down on row 2". So just have the leader of a nation check on the owners ever so often if they aren't being used, and rotate them out if so. With such a system in place we would be balling on this front.

The creation of the eventmin role has been a massive boon to the community of course, but I feel like SL2 has since come to rely a little too much on them.

Didn't expect to see something I agree with so much before I even knew it. This is actually a tendency I've been noticing more and more. As an eventmin about 90% of what people ask me is if I can come over and put down some placeables... Doesn't that seem odd?

The current mapping system used by eventmin is honestly not ideal.

I'm someone who runs events and I have very little choice when it comes to maps. I have to hope the basic event stages cover what I need otherwise I'm screwed, and have to rely on theater of the mind. Then I see maps made by others and I'm like dayum, that's crazy. Honestly good for them but that's a lot of work- having the event houses back would drastically expand what eventmins can do. I feel like this whole idea of taking away eventmin houses was part of this idea Dev had that events should be less significant in Korvara, which is also why we can't give people any rewards for events, which is something I've always strongly disagreed with. Good luck having the players make the content when it's so difficult to make anything happen if you're not the leader of a nation, unless you can get someone else to do it for you. Want a thing to happen? Better call an eventmin or a leader. Psychologically it feels very limiting and stops people in their tracks.

Being forced to work with eventmin to try and host them in-game is a massive administrative drain on my motivation

I think many people underestimate how much of a drain on motivation it is to have to constantly get permission and help for things, and this isn't just for Eventmin stuff. I keep running into this issue trying to play an antagonist, and it's crazy how boxed in I feel. The amount of things I can do are just incredibly limited. Have an idea for a cool bad guy? Let me call up like 5 people to make it work. Nation leaders, people connected to the thing, an eventmin, a GM to approve a thing... Ah the leader of the nation doesn't want that to happen. Ah you know what, nevermind, I'm good. Just gonna play a bandit again...

Jumping over to address some issues discussed about the negatives that housing brings and... Quite honestly, I don't find most of them compelling, or at least compelling enough to remove all the positives that housing brings. The most common issue I hear of is the idea that players will squirrel away in player housing and never RP publicly, and... Really, if people want to do that, they're going to do that.

Seriously I never understood this mentality. As if those people are selfishly denying the world their roleplay. As if we're entitled to having the players engage with everyone. People are allowed to not interact with anyone and stay in their bubble. It can be frowned upon to an extent sure, but why would they get pushed out of their spaces? Someone mentioned that a portion of players wouldn't go into the public as much otherwise but actually they would find friends out there and I'm like, do we really need to force them to do that? I would rather trust those players with the choice; they're not shy children in need of guidance. It's a game, we're supposed to play it and have fun however we want, as long as it's not getting in the way of other people.

All the bars and buildings in Korvara are basically owned by now. If I want my character to be a small-time guy, owning his own small place, that very much puts me at odds from being able to work at say... The Venue in Meiaquar, which already has a long established history and people who run/work the place.

Public venues created in player housing are easily managed through the use of the LFG system.

This was the best thing about SL2 and it was taken from us. To be honest I don't know how I've lived for this long on Korvara without it. Recently I've been playing in the Meiaquar Venue a lot because I feel like that's legit the only place in the entirety of Korvara where I can have consistent roleplay in public. That and the Vale.



You talked about over-reliance on eventmins, well what about over-reliance on discord? These days you need your eyes on that pings channel if you wanna catch people roleplaying. You gotta post pings over there if you're doing anything. You gotta post events on there, you gotta post notice boards to get your stuff noticed... The classic formula of simply putting together your environment and doing an LFG inviting people is gone. Sure we can still use LFG, but it honestly doesn't feel the same at all. Used to be I'd check the tab all the time, but now I don't bother... It's just a few people roleplaying in some place, usually not a proper context that would invite you to participate in something.

Back in the day I could have just made a tattoo parlor. Nowadays if I have that idea I don't have a place to do that. I don't really want to LFG to invite people to get a tattoo in a random-ass inn room so I just don't, I put up a notice board post that doesn't get any bites, and let that idea and character fade away. "Oh yeah I should get a tattoo!" okay great, now we need to organize a time for it. Yeah DM me bro. Ok now let me post emote-fulls to narrate the space we're in, going all in on theater of the mind (houses have these narrates built in so you don't need to post it every time). Fast forward months later and everyone forgot about it. Feels like I'm always fighting for people's attention with nothing to show for it... Man it's hard to get shit rolling on Korv...

If someone wants their character to be from a small isolated village, well... There basically none of those in Korvara, but player housing would allow them to create that space

It's actually crazy how many locations exist in the lore but not in the world. Look at any nation's lore doc and you'll find them. Small villages are definitely one of those things. The big issue with Korvara's map is that it doesn't allow for much abstraction. Either it exists or it doesn't. And for places that do exist but aren't apparent on the map, you need to imagine them as existing in a place outside of the in-game korvara map...

Addressing one final thing, maybe SL2 is too big technologically.

I doubt it. These issues can be fixed as they happen. There's no hard limit on how many Z-levels you can have, and the size of the game shouldn't be a huge impact on performance. The reason Dev isn't adding houses to Korvara is probably not because of technological limitations. Dev had a vision for what Korvara should be and it included taking out the housing, it's that simple. All of these things wouldn't be so bad if we actually had an active population on both continents. But we simply do not.


Overall, I agree with everything you said. Turns out new isn't always better.

I want to add that Korvara's main issue is that we gave people a ton of power and we're expecting them to figure out everything with no assistance or systems, and do everything on goddamn discord. Want to do anything? Go to discord.

Oh you want a position of power to make things happen? Better have good connections or suffer in low rank for months. God forbid you want to make something significant happen without being tied directly to a nation. Not only is the variety of our roleplay experiences drastically limited, but their scale as well...