[Linked] A Labyrinth Maze

Realm & Areas
#1

I had this nice idea of a hedge maze where one can get lost for a little bit. I planned to lay it out in a traditional MUD n/e/s/w exits manner and then add some nice little bits and pieces to every room so that people still have something to look for even when they reached the centre.

Now though, my initial layout that I doodled is 39 rooms (most of which of course aren’t on the shortest path because what maze would it be then!). I started laying out the foundation for it to solicit some reviews when suddenly…

Your characters can totally own max 20 rooms.

I mean, 39 rooms for a single area is a lot, surely. But if that area is specifically about such experience maybe we could have a bit of a higher limit?

I could cut the outer ring (18 rooms) but I’d still be over the limit and cutting it further destroys any storytelling I could possibly make do.

I’d appreciate some feedback for this matter. I’m open to sharing the layout and my plans for the specific content with builders but otherwise I’d prefer to keep it private so that people could enjoy the area when (if) it opens.

For the general location, I thought about east of the forest, north-east from the town

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#2

Yeah - At this time, the limits for user quotas on characters and build limits is definitely a bit reserved. I’m not entirely certain what the long term goal is for uncapping this (or what my caps from the position of site staff is set to for helping alleviate any problems of this nature), that’s more something @Accipiter could speak to the nature of if he gets a chance to talk about it.

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#3

Oh! Yeah, when I put the limit of 20, I was mostly thinking that users would mainly create their own little homes for their characters with a few rooms. And 20 would be plenty… I thought.

I did not consider 39-roomed mazes :sweat_smile:!

This limit exists for everyone at the moment, with the exceptions of admins and builders. Not even supporters or pioneers have any higher cap.

So, I find myself with some options:

Increase base cap

Simply increase the cap to something like 50 or 100.
Pro: It would encourage creativity. Simplest solution.
Con: Newcomers to a realm could create quite a bit of data soon to be derelicted.

Criteria based cap increase

I don’t have any sort of ‘achievement’ system, but if I were to create one, a cap increase could be given based on certain criteria. Maybe active time spent on the realm?
Pro: It would reward those being active.
Con: No achievement system exists. And ‘active’ could simply be bypassed by an ‘activity script’, keeping your character active 24/7.

Creator role - a “builder” light

Maybe I should add another role, similar to ‘builder’, that increases the cap, but does not give permission to edit other player’s things.
Pro: The admin could grant it to those in need of it.
Con: More administrative work of handling ‘creator’ role requests.

Supporter perk

Add increased cap as a perk for supporters.
Pro: Incentive to help support the project. The more supporters, the more time I will be able to put on making it better.
Con: Hampers creativity. There is no support system implemented yet.

I am not entirely sure what would be best…

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#4

I can’t really give you a solution for what to do, but what I did notice was that this 20 room limit is account based. So let’s say the following: You have three characters with an apartment room, having added the bare minima to each (kitchen/bath) (9 rooms). Then for the fourth you wanna do something larger, maybe with a few secrets spread in. Let’s say you require 9-10 rooms for that. If you want now to fill up the roster with your 5th option you can’t even give them a minimum Appartement anymore. I know that would not solve the labyrinth issue on hand, but maybe giving 15-20 rooms per character instead of 20 in total would fix a few other issues on hand already.
Edit: (And emerge new issues of building ghosts…sheesh…)

(Heard here and there already of ambitious builders hitting the ceiling after 2 projects feeling bummed out having to cut rooms to continue)

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#5

@Soulwing , thanks for the input! That sort of suppression of creativity is not what I want, so, I just jumped in to change the settings.

@Shinyuu, I’ve increased the base cap to 50 rooms, so you should be able to continue :slight_smile: .

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#6

Thanks for a quick solution!

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#7

Thanks ^^
I am sure many will appreciate that split decision. (And I can start planning on a community building project. A cathedral (The rift cathedral, built on rift technology to fluently draw of the beliefs of the player to alter its strange interior pulling altars and decoration out of the multiverse to assure a place to pray :3 ))

I am looking forward to the labyrinth ^^

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#8

That sounds amazing, I’d love to help with that when I get the current one sorted out.

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#9

I think I got everything lined up for the initial setup and I’d absolutely love some builder’s feedback on the layout and the ideas incorporated. Also, I’d like to know if it’s generally ok to post room ids here on the forums (as someone pointed that others can just link to the rooms if they know the id).

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#10

When Brooksong and I were getting the island set up, we tested that only builders / admins can link to the room by ID before they’re made public, so we gave the link as a way to make it easier for staff to come check things out, without opening it up to everyone yet. But we may have missed something in our tests!

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#11

Sounds good enough for me! The entrance room is #calkcqm9gbrqf705p4s0.

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#12

Having a light version of builder would be best I think. We should have criteria for when it is appropriate to give this role out and I very much would like to see it only given out when people prove they are actually using it and not just creating a flood of empty descriptionless rooms. Thinking more to the tune of proven that they can build rooms together, assign exits cleanly and also build things together into a well described area… criteria which can be reasonably proven by submitting an area successfully without a need for a large amount of editing by the builder team.

In the meanwhile, I would suggest increasing the build limit to 50 per account if people are locked to 5 characters anyhow. 10 per character is already pretty low. I assume its account based, right? If they have to share that across all characters, that’s already pretty limited and fair enough to establish themselves with.

I’m not sure what a light version of builder would be. If we could redo it, I’d say that builders should be called world editors, but I worry about term confusion at this point. Builder seems like the editor-light version we’re looking for since building doesn’t necessarily suggest creative control on others. Creator might work but feels bigger than builder somehow.

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#13

“Creator” and “Builder” - yes the first feels much ‘bigger’ than the second.

‘Contractor’? ‘DIY Enthusiast’? :smiley: Actually using the home-DIY manufacturing term of ‘Maker’ might not be a bad one. It has (in the ‘maker’ circles) a certain ‘enthusiast amateur’ connotation that fits well.

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#14

Maybe “crafter” might work as well. I like “maker” too.

But we still have the option of just allow a lot of rooms as base cap.

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#15

Might also be worth it to add a quota override command for mods/admins, so they can manually increase the number of objects a player can create without necessarily conferring other tags/flags to them?

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#16

I agree with your earlier logic that we don’t necessarily need new users just blowing things up while not knowing how to use the commands for finding old rooms and deleting old unused/unlinked stuff.

Having a tag that allows moderators to check in and make sure that these would-be makers know the core command list for cleaning up after themselves first seems like a good idea.

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#17

Apparently there was a way through the labyrinth that dodged all the points of specifc interest that I wanted visitors to experince at least once; I think it’s sorted out now (making labyrinths is hard huh!)

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#18

It was really cool! At first it’s difficult to navigate, but as soon as you understand at least something, everything starts to work out right away. Getting lost is easy, there are quite interesting things. Personally, I have not had such pleasure from passing the maze for a long time. There’s a lot of euphoria going through my brain at the moment and I can’t think of bad things. I am waiting for any improvements and hope to pass it again if it changes! It will be worth it!
However, I think it would be nice to provide birds with more interesting colors, just in case. For example, the color of a dying toad, and so on

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#19

I just saw it with an invite from Shinyuu, its very fun to navigate and there’s even a little mini game in it!

I’m looking forward to when it gets linked~

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#20

We participated on a lil’ something and now there’s one more place to discover from the labyrinth. Thanks Aura for cooperating.

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