[Poruku]

I think a part of the appeal of Korvara is that the open world nature of this big map allows people to hang out and hide in various places. However, as time goes on, more and more of the empty places of the world become used. If you go around, there's almost no places left. Even caves have people living in them, large swathes of empty territory is claimed by Geladyne, even containing a military presence. And there's a lot of tents and other such things in remote locations.

It's pretty hard these days to have your own corner of the world. I think that's a bit of a shame. Maybe it would be good to just have a bit more wilderness, you know? I think the Tundra (poorly named) is one of the few places that isn't claimed by a nation. The lava lake is geladyne, the haunted forest is telegrad (and has inhabitants). The worsong canyon isn't a great place to live but it's not particularly claimed.

Having a bigger map with empty space would allow people to make their own new groups in remote locations without having to fight a nation tooth and nail to exist there. A bit of a neutral ground if you will.

Also, I think it would be good if there was a sort of claim system, as in, if you live somewhere you should put down a sign. But if a place has nobody active there, then the area should be cleared to allow new people to settle there.

Having more neutral ground on Korvara would really make it more interesting. I think there should be a hard rule as well that nations cannot expand to occupy these areas. What always happens in these situations is that you get some expansion and a bunch of things put in place, even though nobody rps there. The biggest example is the badlands. This huge stretch of formerly empty land is now filled with NPC soldiers. It just feels kinda wrong doesn't it? Like, it belongs to geladyne, but they're not even using it :v

I'm all for war, and I think we could use more of it to be honest, but I think transforming empty areas into "occupied" zones that aren't used is not great. We should try to be minimalistic as much as possible. Place a tower and a few guards there, but you can't just occupy an entire piece of land. At this point, almost 50% of the geladyne territory is "guarded" or visibly occupied in some way. That's not very realistic... Let's also be realistic in terms of how much rp a given thing is going to result in; if it's not going to be actively used by people rping, then it probably doesn't need to be anything more than a small thing. Too much stuff being put down that is never interacted with only makes the world feel more empty. Each subsequent building and npc becomes more meaningless as the bloat stacks on.

And if something isn't used, it should probably be removed. I think we should probably have a system in place to clear up the map of unused things. Maybe buildings that aren't being utilized could fall into ruin like those ruins we had at the start of korvara. We quickly ran out of those when people settled in them.

Wouldn't it be cool to have new ruins too? In new areas? Even if there isn't that much going on there- like, we don't need a bunch of new dungeons and enemies for an expansion to be awesome. One or two cool lore features and it'd be even better, in fact. For instance, one area could have a ruined library. One other could have these elemental crystals or a leyline or something. Another could be full of tall cliffs overlooking the sea, with bird nests and high peaks... Then the people could go there and make new things happen, or it could be used for events, or there could be new things added later.

A big world only feels empty if there's a lot of things that suggest activity (buildings, people) but there is no activity. A large world that has empty areas of untapped nature does not feel empty, it feels vast.

[WaifuApple]

New areas are an inevitability, there's never been any doubt that eventually Korvara would expand - that's why they called the disastrophism the first. But new areas are also a lot of work to make, because of course they have to have themes and fit into the environment, and from concept to design to creation and implementation. We're a very small team of mappers out here, and there's a certain standard to be set for expansions!

Try as we might, expansion is a monumental task, and even bigger areas suffer from the same problem as these smaller claimed areas - it's a lot of work put in for inevitably rather fleeting use cases. Especially when you consider that most calls for "less claimed area" tend to mean "I want a place I can claim instead", or things that aren't really about the environment at all - see conflict and banditry that doesn't really play into the environment at all a lot of the time. I personally wouldn't want to map a place that's sole existence is for gank territory, for example, because that does feel like a waste of the love and effort that goes into these things, and what goes there would matter so little it wouldn't really be much to try over. I want to make places that can be loved and experienced by a wide variety of people for different niches and reasons, especially reasons served by the environment itself.

I think the bigger problem at hand isn't the environments we have themselves - it's ultimately that nothing is in place to stop nations from just saying they've claimed an area even if they haven't put a real foothold in there. Make new maps all you want, as long as a nation is saying "that's our land" everyone's gonna believe them and it's just going to become matter of fact. You cannot escape that with new environments, the same thing will happen, ultimately. And part of that is environmental storytelling. The outlands were meant to be dangerous but they didn't sell it very well, they didn't really present anything that stopped a nation in their tracks. They presented surmountable things and anything else was steeped in -too- much mystery. Situations where people were told "you can't really build in these places, or if you do expect it to be undone at any given point". But there was nothing to sell that IC beyond a thing of the past.

That's something any new environments need to have a fundamental change in the release of to overcome. I'm just a mapper so I don't have control over that kind of thing, but for places to be neutral territory you have to either tell nations OOCly, outright, "this is not your territory and you can't say it is" or present them with a very strong IC barrier to their ownership. The latter is the preferred for me, because it's really cheap to have OOC roadblocks in player-run stuff, but it's also really hard to make an IC barrier that people won't find some easy way around.

[Poruku]

I think the best way to do this would be to have some sort of in game systems or resource tracker, that would limit how much nations can expand due to simple constraints such as not having enough pioneers and military to colonize a land. At some point there must be a limit to how many soliders and buildings you can deploy as a nation.

I think ultimately it's about whether people actually use a space. If people roleplay in a location, they get to have a presence there. But often there is rp leading up to a place being built, and then it doesn't always stay occupied... At the same time it makes sense for a nation to have borders and stuff.

But yeah, I dunno. Any kind of system in place for nations to expand into certain territories in a controlled way would be pretty cool. Otherwise all it takes is people going somewhere, roleplaying that they're making a tower, and then they can make a tower. But these things have repercussions as time goes on, so we need some kind of system, hell even just having guidelines would be good.

Ultimately this wouldn't be as much of a problem if it didnt require so much work from the mapping team. It does feel like the mapping team is overworked, so it feels wrong to ask things of them.

On that note I am a supporter of asago housing in korvara in a controlled way. For instance what if you could build a tavern, have the exterior mapped in, and the door leads to your asago house that you then make, but it has to respect realistic limitations given what the building is. That would take some burden off the mapping team as they wouldnt need to map a bunch of interiors. Then they could focus more on new areas and adding things in the world. But that's just a side idea.

I would also mention that korvara is probably big enough for our current playerbase. I don't think we actually need more new zones. We just need to make better use of the zones we have. Make things more dense and remove unused things. The playerbase is already mostly concentrated in a handful of places, being the inns or town squares of each nation. So making the world more vast might be a bad idea. The problem is that all of these maps are fully in the territory of a nation. One big example is the geladyne east. Lots of empty mountains, some caves, a canyon, a river... Nothing going on there, it's free real estate. But it belongs to geladyne. Same thing with large swathes of southern telegrad, and north duyuei.

To be honest my main gripe and the reason I made this thread is mostly the badlands. It's a stretch of occupied land with nothing going on. I wanted to hide in a cave there but there's guards everywhere :v