Hypothetical - Not in a Mega Guild – Move Away

Ashes should generate NPC like Simcity to replicate happiness in everything from expanses to a metropolis. I have thought about mega guilds crossing over from other games. The though has perhaps always been right makes right. How many of us really like the inner city with its low rent districts? I am reminded of studies conducted at colleges to look at VR social structure in EQ. How will the programmers ensure a metropolis is filled with paying players? Is that NPCs? Quite a conundrum for me at least.

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unknown

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Atama

We already know that nodes will have NPCs in them. Is that what you’re questioning?

unknown

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Atama

If the city is a hub of vendors, quests, and other services it will be populated.

Star Wars Galaxies had a crappy system for player settlements. They let players put buildings together in the wilderness, elect a mayor, add things like cantinas and spaceports, etc. Basically you got to play at having your own town. But they also had “real” cities like Theed and Bestine and Coronet City which came from Star Wars lore, and they didn’t want those locales to be ghost towns. So they intentionally put exclusive, important services in those cities to ensure they remained player hubs. That practically guaranteed that no matter how much you built up your own city there was nothing that would attract players to them, so they were the ghost towns.

Ashes of Creation shouldn’t have this dilemma. All of the cities will be nodes built up and guided by players. There won’t be any competition; they’re all you have. So I expect it will work out fine.

unknown

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Noaani

I'm not sure what the issue here is

In order for a metropolis to remain a metropolis, it needs people perform activities within the sphere of influence of it. For the bulk of activities, that would require people to be in the metropolis itself.

If there are not enough people in the meteopolis, before long it will degenerate and go down a level, leaving another nearby node to level up to meteopolis - at which point it needs to maintain that level of activity.

I think that is what the OP is asking at the end of the post, but I have no idea how that relates to the studies done with EQ2 log data, nor what it has to do with large guilds.

Makinoji

Like everyone has stated, AOC will have social structures such as the city hall, city council and so on to balance out any Tyrannical powers. At least that's the idea. Large guilds won't be able to run an entire node alone, that's one thing that has been repeated by the devs. Though they could have a presence in that node, they won't be able to run all the systems of government.

Some special NPCs and buildings can only be summoned by activity and the mayoral systems. So if there's no activity happening in that place then the NPC won't be there or in some cases, attrition will happen and the NPC will leave and some social services will be suspended.

To sum it up, you need people to build a civ that will last or else you'll be forced to flee as the node delevels due to inactivity.

Dygz

ZOI of a Metropolis is 1/5 of the world.

Azathoth

Inner city districts are low rent because of the influx of congested traffic, aging properties, lower residential values, smaller residential footprints, and in many cases a variety of pollution.
Aging structures in zones that have a ratio of residential/commercial/industrial that is unfavorable to young families naturally have lower purchase/rent/mortgage costs. That allows lower income families to move in. Although the following will seem harsh and targeted, not to mention unfair, areas of lower income/wealth have higher crime rates. Which lowers value more and can produce more crime thus creating a cycle we, as a society with socioeconomic engineers, are just now grasping at with valuable solutions.

I don't see these things happening in an MMO, especially a fantasy one. I would also prefer there not to be slums and I am unsure how in-game economically friendly it would be to offer different rent values to players. Even if there was low rent districts in the game, I don't see them becoming slums. It's hard for players to make a city look dirty, and some players with wealthy characters will choose to pay minimum required amounts for rent.

Having red-light districts, districts with more shady looking NPCs based on buildings added, and some really nice districts would be fun. Seeing the occasional NPC thief, or murder, or crowd-fight could be entertaining as well. If the government allows the city to degrade to a lower level, having some protesters to oust the government could be fun too.

I have no doubt that there are nice downtown neighborhoods throughout the worlds smallest to largest cities and metropolises, I am addressing the OP which asked specifically about low-rent inner city districts.

unknown

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Gimlog

Is there some where a estimation of how much player there will be on a server ?
Because the max guild says is 300 players and alliances are of 4 guilds so 1200 players could be together ( not really viable but it gamely possible)
Only out alliances populations will prevent alliances to control a region , depending on the node type of the metropolis or not

Damokles

Gimlog wrote: »

Is there some where a estimation of how much player there will be on a server ?
Because the max guild says is 300 players and alliances are of 4 guilds so 1200 players could be together ( not really viable but it gamely possible)
Only out alliances populations will prevent alliances to control a region , depending on the node type of the metropolis or not

Each server is supposed to have between 8 and 10k players.

Dusknoir

Atama wrote: »

If the city is a hub of vendors, quests, and other services it will be populated.

Star Wars Galaxies had a crappy system for player settlements. They let players put buildings together in the wilderness, elect a mayor, add things like cantinas and spaceports, etc. Basically you got to play at having your own town. But they also had “real” cities like Theed and Bestine and Coronet City which came from Star Wars lore, and they didn’t want those locales to be ghost towns. So they intentionally put exclusive, important services in those cities to ensure they remained player hubs. That practically guaranteed that no matter how much you built up your own city there was nothing that would attract players to them, so they were the ghost towns.

Ashes of Creation shouldn’t have this dilemma. All of the cities will be nodes built up and guided by players. There won’t be any competition; they’re all you have. So I expect it will work out fine.

I quite enjoyed SWG pre-cu, they really ballocksed up that game.

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