[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.