In the most recent stream "CohhCarnage Talks Funding and Development with VR's CEO and Creative Director" at 58:20, Joppa answers a question and mentions items being hidden within the world. He paints a picture of an adventurer happening upon a thrilling find of a "tiny little golden ring" which uncovers a new path to some great item. He then quickly shifts to accepting that this person will pass on that information and it will find its way into online guides for all to follow. What I am concerned with is the player that follows the guide rather than their eyes.
I believe that players should be able to convey where things are using the /loc (GPS) coordinates in the game without having to perfectly describe a set of landmarks and/or have a good sense of direction, but I still don't think it should be as perfect as it is in EQ and other games I've played. What if the coordinates on a map drifted slightly and slowly over time, affecting all of a server's players simultaneously? I have been wondering how the playerbase would react to the following...
An hour - A location's coordinates will drift by up to 1 meter of the target. This will still let you effectively convey to teammates where you are, tell people in real time where you just found a lever, etc.
A day - A location's coordinates drift by up to 5 meters. If you lost your corpse and saved the spot, it might now be a couple trees away from the location you wrote down, but you'll be within sight.
A week - A location's coordinates drift by 25 meters. You might end up going into the wrong house to find the quest giver, but you'll be in the right area of town.
A month - A location's coordinates drift by 100 meters. This will only get you to the town.
What do you say? Would it drive you mad? Does it sound like an injection of tedium? Would you appreciate being incentivized to keep your eyes on screen for the last bit of the search or until the perception ping hits?
Another way would be fuzzy resolution. Coordinates would get you to within 10 or even 100 meters, that is, within the neighborhood.
To avoid overly accurate mapping, put a significant cool down on /location, and maybe introduce an error, perhaps based on a skill. Have a percent chance of getting a wrong coordinate, but higher skill could reduce that chance, or even reduce the cool down.
Maybe /location is a Keeper ability, and takes a slot in the LImited Action Set. Maybe there is a bonus the longer you've been in an area, and a penalty if it's unfamiliar.
Make it a mini-game, even.
I'd be fine with not having an exact /loc that gives longitude/latitude. (I believe VR has said they will, but I could be wrong). I've long been in the camp that prefers no maps in game for the reason that in the past I have drawn my own maps and enjoyed it.
So I'd be fine with having to take detailed notes of where my corpse was if I die in unfamiliar territory or wanted to tell others how to find a place I had discovered. If the needed description was longer and more complex than most people were willing to compose, that would just slow down the spread of spoiler info into the world. Not a bad thing IMO.
As to your suggestion, to me the whole point of having a /loc with numbers is accuracy. To be given exact numbers yet have them be wrong would be inherently frustrating. VERY frustrating.
I'd much rather have to use a poorly constructed, verbal description knowing full well the person may have made mistakes.
I like the idea of location coordinates drifting or fuzzy resolution as long as the results are not annoying to play with friends and PUGs.
I think the real trick is for VR to try and find a way for us to want to stay in-game vs looking at guides on the internet. Maybe it's just not possible or requires way too much effort vs reward for VR.
Are the guides the problem? Is it that so many people want to get to max level ASAP? Or do you just need to align yourself with people that have the same motivation as you?
My motivation is discovery and learning with like-minded people. I’ve played dozens of MMOs and as soon as I get to the end game grind, I lose interest FAST. It’s ALT time. It’s all about the journey for me.
I want no /loc at all. I want an in-game compass and paper map and navigate via triangulation. We should have nothing more accurate than a map grid given to us by the game. If we have to have /loc, then make it on a timer or cost gold. Spamming /loc is meta-gaming and immersion-breaking.
Counterfleche said:I want no /loc at all. I want an in-game compass and paper map and navigate via triangulation. We should have nothing more accurate than a map grid given to us by the game. If we have to have /loc, then make it on a timer or cost gold. Spamming /loc is meta-gaming and immersion-breaking.
I agree with this. Stand still and have it take a handful of seconds to determine location with a cooldown on using again. Without some form of hinderance it becomes easy GPS (and I'd bet third party mappable GPS too).
Counterfleche said:I want no /loc at all. I want an in-game compass and paper map and navigate via triangulation. We should have nothing more accurate than a map grid given to us by the game. If we have to have /loc, then make it on a timer or cost gold. Spamming /loc is meta-gaming and immersion-breaking.
Yep. This is one things from games, even like the wonderful Everquest, that has always felt 'gamified' and wrong.
Back then, though, it was a technical solution to a technical problem, eg. you could often die or get lost through no fault of your own when losing connection, for example. Your character would carry on running or warp large distances and leave you needing to use /loc to get an idea of where you had ended up or, if you'd died as a result, asking others if they'd seen your corpse and asking for a /loc to help you get to it.
Also the graphics weren't great, so navigating by 'recognising' landscape and POIs was frustrating or near impossible. Telling direction from sun, moon or stars was impossible, as they weren't accurately represented.
In a modern MMORPG like Pantheon, there's no reason there can't be the wonderfully satisfying and meaningful experience of actually navigating by the sun, moon, stars and landscape. Maybe a compass, if that's too frustrating. But 'natural' navigation should be very doable and fun.
There should be very few occasions of losing connection or other technical limitations that might necessitate something like a /loc command.
This is very much one of those aspects of an MMORPG where there is opportunity to behave like we are exploring a world, not just playing a game.
I kind of agree, Rather than deal with coding in geological drift, "east of the marker stone near the rocks by the river" or "left of the cave entrance in the flowers" should be enough and yes, you will have to look around. it is the area tou need to look around that should not be humongous and, the item should not be undiscernably buried. However, if a "Muse" were to make off-line maps? and maybe get VR sanctioned approval to publish such maps in nice format? with some coinage going back to VR on sales after everyone has said oh how wonderful they are from using them for free on line and then wanting to show appreciation by buying a hardcover edition? then, yeah.
I must admit that I agree with the majority of the responses here. Given that the devs have gone on record saying /loc would be a thing, I tried a thought experiment - How could I preserve as much of the function of /loc as possible while still removing the particular thing that bothers me? The thing that bothers me is the mass dissemination of locations online in perpetuity. I don't know what it is the devs like about /loc, so I tried to keep as much of it as possible.
Fuzzy resolution of /loc is something interesting that I did consider, but it has two downsides. If it is a random error with no bias, then you can take a lot of measurements and average them to get the position of a thing to pretty good accuracy. It also means that two players taking the same measurement at the same time will get different results, which I just thought was weird. It's kind of immersion breaking for the meta gaming that is /loc. I can see the benefit of simplicity in the concept though and in combination with a cooldown timer it definitely has merit as an option.
A cooldown timer on /loc could be a step in the right direction, but at too short a cooldown you probably just end up adding negatives with no positives. If it's 10 seconds, I could see players use it for the same purpose (a meta-gaming gps system) but it would just be an annoyingly slow version of EQ's /loc. If it's 1min or more, then it would prevent its use, but would players still use it? If no, removing it from the game entirely is probably easier. If yes, you probably found a nice balance.
Anyhow, I appreciate reading the responses since this topic is interesting to me. I wish we knew what it is that the developers liked about the system that makes it worth keeping around.
/loc can be made less precise by only returning values to the nearest hundredth. Instead of getting 1,313.7 X 225.1, you would get 1,300 X 200. Of course, since the server has to send the client the exact location, any effort to obfuscate this can be circumvented by a 3rd party program. So it may not be worth the effort.
Counterfleche said:/loc can be made less precise by only returning values to the nearest hundredth. Instead of getting 1,313.7 X 225.1, you would get 1,300 X 200. Of course, since the server has to send the client the exact location, any effort to obfuscate this can be circumvented by a 3rd party program. So it may not be worth the effort.
Is that really true or can't the info be encrypted somehow?
Zorkon said:Counterfleche said:/loc can be made less precise by only returning values to the nearest hundredth. Instead of getting 1,313.7 X 225.1, you would get 1,300 X 200. Of course, since the server has to send the client the exact location, any effort to obfuscate this can be circumvented by a 3rd party program. So it may not be worth the effort.
Is that really true or can't the info be encrypted somehow?
I don't know, but since the game has to place you at a specific location, I suspect a resourceful programmer could pull your location from the game engine as well.
Zorkon said:Counterfleche said:/loc can be made less precise by only returning values to the nearest hundredth. Instead of getting 1,313.7 X 225.1, you would get 1,300 X 200. Of course, since the server has to send the client the exact location, any effort to obfuscate this can be circumvented by a 3rd party program. So it may not be worth the effort.
Is that really true or can't the info be encrypted somehow?
If Counterfleche's postulate is correct, then it doesn't matter what /loc scheme the devs go with since a person using a 3rd party program will get the full information. Also, if everyone is using 3rd party programs to hack the game, the soul of Pantheon will have been lost to the botters.
VR have said a couple of times at least that the client will have very minimal information in part to help stop hacking.
Things that are very hard to obfuscate are text going directly to the screen - that is easy to scrape from memory. I think, though, even that can be displayed in such a way as to not actually be 'text' and, thus, be obfuscated.
Things like location I imagine could well be 'encrypted' to something only the client can decypher into a location and that location can't be worked out from the 3D display.
I'm no expert, so perhaps someone will correct me, but I believe most things *can* be hidden from hackers, it is a matter of how much effort it takes and how much processing overhead it adds that stop most developers from doing it.
For example, truly invasive hacks that alter the 'conversation' between client and server can more easily be detected, but in FPSs, for example, they still appear to be quite prevalent hacks. The reason, I believe, is that to introduce anti-hacking measures will adversely effect latency to a degree that would make the game itself much worse.
This shouldn't be so much of an issue in an MMORPG, but it still a factor.
Either way, it sounds like VR have a handle on it and intend to do all they practically can to avoid hacks and 3rd party apps hijacking game data.
A solution, and still being able to have /loc would be for random spawn location.
Now to think out of the box I'm not talking about random as in one of 5 or one of 10, obviously all these would eventually be recorded on online guides, but totally random. The X cord be generated by rng and the Y cord also generated by rng (assuming X and Y being horazontal locations and Z being vertical) The Z could then be determined with a Z vector at those locations until it touched the ground, There you have your spawn point.
The X and Y points could be generated excluding value ranges to keep an Item that should spawn on land from spawning in the water or one that should spawn in the forest from spawing in a town and the like. Or might be easier to do the valid location check at the determination of the Z value, is the Z to surface location Land or water? (If water for a land item recalculate beore spawning)
The spawn could have a limited timmer, to solve if it spawned in an unreachable location (Hours, days, weeks and it has not been looted it despawns and respawns in a differant location)
You now have something thats spawn point can only be narrowed to
THESE are the types of solutions I'm hopping VR comes up with for things like this. VR's goal as I understand it was to make Pantheon the MMORPG where MMO's should have evolved to. A solution to online spoilers is one of those I would like to see, not just doing what everybody else did.
And I have seen them do that quite often.
Im going to hi-jack this a bit. I know this is about object location and /loc. But I did think the invisible/unseen NPC triangulation method with pets was neat. If there was an invisible NPC or one hidden or one behind a thin wall and you were invis but unsure exactly where it was. you could set a pet to "guard" and then walk a few yards away. The pet would pivot until it zero'd-in on the closest NPC. you couls look where it was looking and get a rough approximation of where the NPC was. If the NPC moved, the pet would track it- except if the NPC moved toward the pet then you wouldn't know where it was between where it was "spotted" relative to the pet and you might run behind it or get blindsided but that was the risk. The other risk was other NPC's since the pet would zero in on the closest. If you were looking for one, and another happened to walk by the pet would zero in and track the other one so if you saw the rec con named walk down the hall to the right and you wanted to get by, the pet might zero in on it and then you would see it tracking to the left and you would think thats the red con but actually it was just a peon roamer so you dash in to the right... There were risks. Outside it was ok, just had to be aware of wildlife.
After reading this thread, and in consideration of climbing, I am imagining being able to use the stars in game to fix directions and locations.
The two moons are hardly even mentioned, but if done well, could serve as an in game clock and calender. If there are planets, then more's the mystery to be solved.
Even if not, at least one of my characters will insist they are an Astrologer.
Balanz said:After reading this thread, and in consideration of climbing, I am imagining being able to use the stars in game to fix directions and locations.
The two moons are hardly even mentioned, but if done well, could serve as an in game clock and calender. If there are planets, then more's the mystery to be solved.
Even if not, at least one of my characters will insist they are an Astrologer.
Ok now this brings next level imagination to the catch phrases I have heard pertaining to Pantheon, specifaclly
Will there be a reason to look to the stars? Will we see a red Comet indicating a Dragon has been born(spawned)?
Will the stars or moons align to show that NOW is the time to place jewel in the statue to spawn the rare mob that will teach us imperial backhand?
I'd like to see VR pincel this in for expansion #6 Give the players a reason to look to the stars by making the sun and stars more than a pretty backdrop..
I seem to remember Joppa saying that moon(s) will be functional. I might have to go find the comment to be sure, but I seem to remember at the time thinking he meant they would be modelled with 'realistic' behaviour, so that you 'predict' their movements and, so, use them to navigate and such.
Of course, Terminus is somewhat special. If a world consists of homeworlds somehow brought together across dimensions, then perhaps moons, suns and stars won't be following Newtonian physics, but it would be nice if they were reliable enough that we could at least look up in the morning and think "ah, the sun is over there, so that must be the east" or however it works in Terminus.
disposalist said:Of course, Terminus is somewhat special. If a world consists of homeworlds somehow brought together across dimensions, then perhaps moons, suns and stars won't be following Newtonian physics, but it would be nice if they were reliable enough that we could at least look up in the morning and think "ah, the sun is over there, so that must be the east" or however it works in Terminus.
I agree, but it would be awesome if the planets followed some kind of coherent geometric path, perhaps epi-cycles about dark planets that occasionally eclipsed them, so that the dedicated or insane might deduce their orbits.
/loc is functionally the same thing as a marker on the map, just represented differently (wonkier and uglier). It doesn't make sense to include in a game that isn't supposed to have a GPS marker on the map as that is essentially what it is. It's also gonna make everyone except EQ veterans question what century the game was made in.
I can understand why its in EQ given how everything kind looks the same but imo Pantheon's graphics are good enough that we should be able to navigate by just looking at a map and following landmarks.