Cape Theia / Umber Point / Clockwork City could do with area descriptions to encourage visits; you don’t get anything currently when clicking their names on the top-level area, unlike other areas.
There’s someone in Umber Point; I don’t know if I’d be interested in joining them because there’s no information on what that area is (or how to get to it; that’s a separate issue).
For example, the entry to Cape Theia could say it’s an area for Macro/Micro play, perhaps that it hosts the Milk Farm and Kobold Village and is a pathway to Patchwork Square and Umber Point.
Umber Point in turn could have a description that mentions that it is a realm of organised criminals and their victims, where law enforcers struggle to make a difference.
Clockwork City could say it is accessible via airship (as the top-level Grey Line doesn’t directly communicate that this is how you get to it, perhaps because the airship might go other places). Maybe some of the flavour text from its About calling it a mechanical and magical marvel?
Ideally these would be done by area owners, but when I raised this in the park it was suggested that some areas might have been ‘abandoned’ - so I’m posting it here for discussion, especially with an eye to how people who play/have played there would describe the areas.
Thanks for raising this. I was recently going over a few abandoned areas, cleaning them up. I definitely need to stop at these too.
I don’t think global teleports to each and every top level area are feasible. I hoped the world map would be enough, but people struggle to get to the Curious Canine Cartography. If you have any idea how to make that part simpler I’m all ears.
i suppose I base that on the existing teleports for City of Winds and Seziban. Both are low-populated places. Teleports aren’t easily discoverable for new players, I suppose (which is a problem of its own).
That said, it would be an interesting experiment…
Oh, that’s a very fair bit. That’s why I keep asking around for feedback!
There is totally a tension between making exploring the world meaningful (something my personal character loves to do) and making it so that regular people can get to places.
The initial post is directed towards the “if they want to” bit - people who are looking for a broad style or theme of roleplay should be OOCly able to find out that it exists, and this can be done within the game itself via the area descriptions.
Actually getting to them is more of an IC thing (ask around) but can be helped by OOC signposts. Like one or two extra keywords on Grey Line exits might not hurt if in practice there is actually only one or two places that a stop leads to - maybe there shouldn’t even be another intermediate stop until expansion is needed (thinking particularly of the airship here).
I did find the map shop, though it was complicated slightly by being in the library (IIRC) and I think it also lacked Lamplight or some other district (understandable as places are added).
Of course, many may not be interested in venturing beyond the main original locations, and that’s fine too. But I do now and then hear things like “so where is Riverside?” In fact I’m not entirely sure there is a teleport labelled “Riverside”, which a bit confusing as it is ostensibly a busy area.
FWIW it took a while to even find out that the four pointed icon was a) a button, and b) teleports. For some reason (yes, I know, it’s character location) it’s there rather than in the bit of the screen where all the other transportation-related stuff is. I just tried ‘teleport’ and realised tab completion gave me a few that I never saw before. Tooltips might be useful.
I will stand corrected on Seziban. It doesn’t see any organic visitors at all despite being a global teleport. So we actually know having teleports doesn’t help.
I lean on the side of adding some global teleports to full-fledged areas, particularly like Umber where it’s two different routes you have to take to get there. It still preserves the ‘exploration’ factor of actually perusing the zone itself, I feel. And while having a global teleport doesn’t, on its own, increase traffic - not having one makes it trickier to get there.
It’s still a factor of either hanging out in those zones, or interacting with people either in-room or over pages and guiding a scene to an area you prefer. The latter is easy enough for someone who knows how to get there and can guide or summon, but for the former, it could assist folks who’d like to go see who’s hanging out in an area. But it’s a good point that the teleport list itself could stand to have a bit of attention given to it in some manner, if it’s unknown to some folks.
At very least, I’d be in favour of including the route to get there in that area description the first post here mentions.
Figured I’d pitch in a little here myself, as I’ve noticed in quite a few RPs I’ve had that the player I’m interacting with - being on the newer side - tend to be reluctant to explore much further outside of Sinder, and I think that’s kinda a shame when there are plenty of interesting places to explore and tell stories in.
I do agree with the idea that these key zones as seen on the realm map should have some kind of description telling the player what to expect there, though.
Maybe some kind of area-owner tagging feature could be implemented for zones? Like clicking on the area gives the dropdown description, and under that are a couple tags explaining what RP themes one might expect there. Not sure how much of a technical hassle that might be to do, though.
As far as navigation goes, I personally don’t mind exploring to find certain areas, but I understand that, especially for newer players, this might seem a bit daunting, hence why they might just stick to the main town. I’ve used the global teleports of seziban, city of winds and sinder plenty of times myself, as I have characters who I feel can naturally exist in those zones, so the option is convenient. But I probably wouldn’t have visited those zones if I didn’t already know what to expect to find there.
I’ve been on Wolfery for a few-ish years by now, and there have been a ton more zones popping up since then, I’d wager it could be a little overwhelming to be greeted to a bunch of zones on the realm map, but not actually know how to get there nor what you might expect to find there beyond their short descriptions.
That’s a good point, we sure could benefit from a tourist guide. It doesn’t even have to be a feature that’s built into Wolfery; someone needs to write those tourist-level entries and make it accessible.
I’m going to throw in my unsolicited 2 cents here, just 'cause… I would definitely appreciate it if we didn’t go adding a whole bunch of new global teleports unless Acci creates a way to hide them. My registered teleport list is pretty long now and I REALLY don’t want to have to scroll even further to get to the rooms I control so I can teleport home.
Yes, this IS me being lazy. But I doubt I’m the only one.
Ah, so something like “Bili’s Guide to the Rift”: Sinder’s a great place to visit, if nyou know where you’re going… nya want to find a good meal, a good read, nyan a good time, all in nyone place? Head east, for Westside Road, nyorth of Sinder Crossing…
I usually do list rooms and then teleport, though I appreciate this list can be lengthy and it might be more of a hassle to copy and paste.
As for Seziban, it already has an easily-accessible area description:
The ancient cyberpunk capital, which worshipped the rift. Resurfaced recently out of the same.
…as well as a global teleport; this is more to determine text for those which don’t, although clearly travel accessibility is also an issue on people’s minds (there being no whereare #dir equivalent).
Umber Point actually has users tonight so I dropped by and one suggested the following (with a one-word tweak from me to make it fit three lines on the Area Info dropdown):
“A shady, crime-filled city for seedy roleplay and rough encounters. Accessed via Station 2’s Grey Line to Theia, then the Red Trolley to Umber.”
Dropped this in mail to the area owner (who unlike some others mentioned was on this week) and invited their comment here as well.
This could actually be useful for areas in general, with a search to find specific buildings/sub-areas easily by tag. Something to consider as Wolfery gets bigger and more spots open up - you don’t necessarily want to travel around every area to find, say, tacos; just search for . . . uh, ‘food’? ‘weight gain’? ‘chubby’? ‘vore’ doesn’t quite cover it.
Ah, but it led you back here, didn’t it? Sometimes it takes a little travelling to find out that the place you started is where you belonged all along!
Also, I can think of various cabins, but IIRC some are along the lakeside trail or (now?) only accessible through the dark forest.
I’m not exactly new here, but I am returning - And boy, has the place grown since I was last here ~3ish years ago! Like wow.
That said, my first thought was “Why are there only 5 public teleports, how the hell do I get to this place I’m looking for”. I saw someone who was LFRP at Vaell Shrine, and couldn’t really find any information on where that was - Other than the person able to tell me it’s “north of Sinder”. Cut to me spending the next ~30 minutes trying to find my way through the forest, the wilds, the… whatever other 3 areas, having to backtrack because I got lost, so on and so forth,e tc etc.
I don’t know what the right option is, but I can confirm that finding someplace outside of Sinder or not located immediately adjacent is daunting.
Or maybe even just… Teleports to the general area. Like, a teleport for the ‘overarching’ area that can get you kind of close, but still require some sense of exploration? And then a description. IE, Teleport to the wilds, and have that area in the list of areas tagged with what sub-areas you can find there, or… Something.
