Huge increase in land size, villages and mounts

[imported_Ssilmath]

My very first impression of the land Istaria was how very small it is...The Island of Vvardenfell, from Morrowind, seems much larger, and is only a small portion of the overall land...it's like Lesser Aradoth compared to the mainland...

To create what would be, at least for me, a much more vibrant and intersting world would be to expand it greatly(Lesser Aradoth for an example)...make it take 2 hours torun from Kion to Sslanis, and make the monster spawns be huge and somewhat densely populated, and for heavens sake, make spawns overlap, please...Of course, patches of spiders and roaming herds of Gruok would be needed, but there should be threats all over the jungle. I think it is silly that you can sit just outside of a spawn area and pull mobs to you...I want to go out and hunt them down, not memorize where they are, pull one at a time till I no longer need those mobs and move on...

Also, I think it would be real neat to come across villages and small towns, heck, mabye even roaming hermits...It would be awesome to be walking along a jungle path, looking for any sigh of a monster, when there is suddenly a clearing to your right with a few huts and several Sslik standing/sitting/walking around, who can give you quests or just talk to you...A bit farther north, a roving band of Saris hunters walks around to random waypoints, giving you advice on what is in the area and where you should hunt for your skill level...

And for heavens sake, make the cities HUGE!!! Sslanis was so dissapointing the first time I saw it, I expected a grand city easily bigger than Tazoon is now, filled with Sslik moving around, merchants, trainers, children running around, empty warehouses, nooks, NPC's that will give quests or talk to you in the way a Sslik would...wary of outsiders, warm and friendly to other Sslik...So many games are plagued by tiny 'cities' that wouldn't be classified as towns...Tazoon should be as big as Lesser Aradoth is now, and divided into 'zones' (Bad word, I know) that would be accessed via gates...

And how about Imperial troops? Why arent groups of them guarding cities, hiring adventurers to travel with them to attack WA forces, recruiting players, out patrolling and scouting out the area and giving advice on what roaming monsters are near at this time...

And finally, mounts...Everything from horses to ridable gruoks for gnomes to tamed Ruxus for a slow but hard hitting charger...Make pack mules to act as, well, mules, a cargo disk that moves at the same pace as you, but can be killed by mobs, making you either buy a new one or find a to protect it...And with a larger landscape, having mounts would be the only way to travel, making travel times about the same, but making some attacks impossible and the rest hard after your initial charge has hit and you have to fight from horseback...of course, that horse might be killed, and now you have to walk or go get another one...

Just a few suggestion that I think would make the game a lot richer and attact more people...

[Hasai]

It's a beautiful bunch of ideas, but I'm not sure it could be successfully executed on anything less than an IBM zSeries 990 mainframe, and I don't think the folks at AE can afford a cluster of those at the moment, nor the SONET pipeline needed to support the client traffic.
[:(]

And, speaking of clients, I hope your graphics card runs at 8 GHz and is water-cooled, because otherwise the cities you describe are going to bring your system to its knees.

Sorry; I don't mean to be a wet-blanket, but the logistics just aren't here yet for such a grand dream. Maybe in another 3-4 years.
[st]

[Seranthor]

Sounds lovely, but your kidding me right? AE appears to be having too many problems surviving and keeping customers, I highly doubt they have neither the time, manpower, equipment nor funding to even consider something even half as grand.

[Gilresk]

I have to agree with Hasia, while it would be nice, it would just take too much resources on both AE's end and on our systems to support such huge cities.

Maybe if they ever find a way to improve the graphics performance they could do it, but I also would agree we would need more land over-all. As it is with all the new plots they added, it almost seems too safe and residential in Istaria. Hopefully they'll start using the dynamic blight again and take back more of the land. It would make it a bit more interesting.

At least an RP reason for the cities remaining small is that the Withered Aegis kept cities from expanding too much.

Oh, also I have noticed a few ruins of builidings and such in various places. There are some on the road far south from Harro, and also there is still the abandoned fortifications northeast of Mahagra.

[Ken]

Gil, from your many replies to peoples' posts, telling them why what they would like to see will never happen...it seems you think RP = excuse to not do anything and explain away something lame. I thought it meant Role Playing...at least it has for my 25+ years of Role Playing.

[Rhaiannon]

I for one would love to see the world expanded.

How about this.Aradoth is fairly safe, so is the new northern continent. Here is my proposal.

New land:

Far to the south, a tropical supercontinent that is around 40 times the size of aradoth with lakes rivers, etc and that wraps around to the north in the far east.

New continent in the far west, around 30 times the size of aradoth, with rivers and lakes the southern side is tropical, the central area would be a vast expanse of desert, and in the north a frozen wasteland.

These continents would have no, i repeat NO player built housing on it save a port city that players have to build. and it would not be personal plots.

These continents would be vast and unforgiving, having just been discovered and crawling with mobs.

These continents would have vast ruined cities in them that IF we can destroy the monsters infesting them and free the natives, would be rebuildable and useable as outposts.

The port and the inland cities would be under constant siege, and have no portals.

in the far reaches of these continents, there would be a blight fortress with lvl 200 mobs in it and an expansive system for the blight expanding into the continents. AKA we might have freed aradoth from the blight, but thse continents are too huge to free completely.

These continents would have massive underground caverns in them that would be populated with native creatures.

What do you think [:P]

[Gilresk]

Gil, from your many replies to peoples' posts, telling them why what they would like to see will never happen...it seems you think RP = excuse to not do anything and explain away something lame. I thought it meant Role Playing...at least it has for my 25+ years of Role Playing.

No, I'm trying to say that there are ways to role-play around the limitations that we face due to limited system resources and the reduced staff at AE. People already complain about the lag Tazoon has so much that it started being called Lagzoon and everyone avoids it. And that's one of the largest cities in game.

I would very much like to see huge cities as well, but I realize that there are several obsticles that must be over-come before that's a possibility. I think these are great ideas Ssil has, but I'm trying to give the reasons I believe them not to have been implemented yet.