Neighbour hood visits (browser version)

[LisaMV]

+1 This seems like the best concept possible for world map visits.


Some cities end up in the wastelands and need those gold mines. I know, I've been there. So they need to be in the list.

This is me - thank you for thinking of us!
I visit my mostly-baby neighbors every single day, and a good 1/3 of my area is the 'gold mines' as you said. (Did not know they were called that - pretty cute) It is a bit frustrating to see those teeny little villages sit there the same, week after week. Nice to help them though...

 

[Ashrem]

Are you guessing a million active cities total for all servers in the US, or perhaps worldwide? Because I just went and looked at Arendyll, the first US server, and it only lists 60,483 players on the server. And players 57,314 to 60,483 all have a score of zero. Last time I looked through all my neighbors, I found about 25% active when I did this many months ago, and some of them have quit since then. 25% of 60k is only 15k active cities. Even if you are generous and up it to 35% active, you are still only looking at about 21k active cities.

A couple of other server numbers that I can check without making a new city. Sinya Arda lists 40,704 players and Felydral lists 49,242 players. Just looking at these numbers makes me think we are all way overestimating the number of US players that this game has. Even with 8 servers now, and considering all the players who only play on one server, there is couldn't be more than 150-200k unique player accounts on the US servers. And even if we use an average of 30% across the servers, maybe 50-60k active players in the US.

And on a side note, I think this removing the inactive and try to move the active closer together will have the problem of a lot of the players having the city to not be allowed to be moved. I think a lot of us are going to end up in a wasteland shortly after this is all put into effect.

1) I'm not guessing, although I don't know if it remains accurate. It was math'd a couple of years ago (before mobile) based on comments from a moderator and publicly available income reported by Inno at the time.
2) When I talk about effect on players, I always talk about all players. I am not from the U.S. and do not ever assume the game revolves around one country. There are fifty active servers I know about.

Some cities end up in the wastelands and need those gold mines. I know, I've been there. So they need to be in the list.

The list doesn't preclude people from visting as they do now, so nobody "needs" goldmines in the list,

 

[AtaguS]

Yes, I'd say that since there is no social aspect to gold mines, there is no reason to make an effort to make them easier. On the other hand, it's possible it's more work to exclude them than to include everything, so it would have to be a dev call, so we'd probably want to mention it under cons as a potential coding issue.

So perhaps this would up to the devs ultimately. But if we're still discussing things, I'd say having goldmines in the list isn't a necessity, other than as a way of seeing just how dead, or undead, your NH is. However, a quick scan of the world map would tell you the same and collecting from these cities doesn't require loading anything so easy enough to scoop up on that scan. I'm willing to bet if goldmines were included on the list, complaints would sore about them cluttering up the list, or about dead cities in general.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

1) I'm not guessing, although I don't know if it remains accurate. It was math'd a couple of years ago (before mobile) based on comments from a moderator and publicly available income reported by Inno at the time.
2) When I talk about effect on players, I always talk about all players. I am not from the U.S. and do not ever assume the game revolves around one country. There are fifty active servers I know about.

Why would you do that? Here is what you said: "There are over a million active cities. Pushing them all closer together..." Those million cities do not all play on the same server and can't be moved from server to server, so your point about total number of players does not matter because they cannot all be pushed closer together. And you may not be in the US, but you play on the US servers, so same thing for this game.

 

[Ashrem]

Why would you do that? Here is what you said: "There are over a million active cities. Pushing them all closer together..." Those million cities do not all play on the same server and can't be moved from server to server, so your point about total number of players does not matter because they cannot all be pushed closer together. And you may not be in the US, but you play on the US servers, so same thing for this game.

I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with this. I didn't ever say, or imply they are all on one server, and how many servers they are on does not affect in the least how big a deal it is for the game. Everyone who hasn't frozen their position will have a bunch more active neighbours. The ability to rapidly visit everyone you've scouted is the same whether there ar 5,000 people on your server or 50,000 a billion. You only get to explore so many provinces, and it isn't all of them. A million people will suddenly be doing more visits and having more visits returned.

And where I play is irelevant. I don't make assumptions about the game being restricted to the server I play on.

 

[AtaguS]

It seems that:

1) One way or another, NH visits will be on the rise, as more and more active players find themselves concentrated in one area(s). With the notifcation/visit system already in place, it seems likely that these active players will visit each other more as they are visited more. Perhaps we must wait to see how this changes things before blowing the whole thing wide open. That shouldn't prohibit the idea from being forwarded to the developers, though it may delay any time line in actually implemeting it.

- An aside: I have left my city UN-moveable all these years because of the handful of active and very friendly neighbors that I do have. Urghh...will I be left out in the cold if I don't flip the coin and hope to land amongst an equally wonderful (although limited) group?

2) There are questions out there: If Inno saw fit to make mobile NH visits a breeze, what is the real justification for leaving PC players out? Is an imbalance of goods an issue among mobile-only players? What percentage of mobile-only players use the easy NH visit option and can we expect a similiar percentage of PC players or are there variables that come into play?

My thoughts for the day...

 

[Yogi Dave]

...and a good 1/3 of my area is the 'gold mines' as you said. (Did not know they were called that - pretty cute)

I had other names for them, such as black holes and dens of despair. Others can not be mentioned here. A few years back what I called the plague of Enar passed through my two cities (US1 and US2), leaving both with over 2/3s devoid of life. I think in one area it was down to 17 cites and only 3 trading parties. One city got moved to a great area. The other did not, but slowly over a year's time it got enough people to consider it an okay region.

The gold mines is a good pick-up I had missed this. Without knowing the technical coding I suppose my thought would be to skip goldmines, They are easy enough from world map if someone wants them and there are other game features that should limit/reduce their qty and duration. Of course if they are as simple a coding exercise as a town name then why not, but let's assume it is not for this excersise.

Agree, with this to an extent. The length of the list doesn't change if gold mines are included since the total number of city sites are the same, but it isn't worth worrying about enough to distract from the central idea.

 

[Mykan]

I have mentioned the goldmines in the original post so they are factored in. There are some unknowns on our end, so thought it best to mention them so the idea is more developed for presentation. The devs can figure out what is best should they like the idea.

 

[LisaMV]

Ha! "Dens of Despair" - made me laugh out loud

 

[Socrates28]

+1 for me. Great idea if they can make it work. I think it would also speed the load time and transfer time as not as much data would have to be transmitted over and over again for each city.

 

[Vergazi]

I like it fine the way it is now. I don't see any pressing need for Inno to make changes when changes were enacted just recently. I tend to lean towards supporting Ashrem's earlier mentioned wait and see attitude,

 

[Deleted User - 1178646]

Downsides

• Developer time - is more then a simple UI fix. Pulling neighbour information could be complex.

I don't think this is actually true.
They most likely re-use there work on the fellowhip / notifivation menu.
And pulling player data should be fairly easy, as this data also needs to be pulled when you load up the world map since the game needs to know which cities should be green and which should not be green.

A gentle clean solution chapeau.

 

[Mykan]

Hi @Xelenia, I think we might be ready for a vote.

 

[Xelenia]

This idea is now open for voting!!!

Please be civil

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I am not sure which way I will vote. Yes, we need an easier way to visit everyone on the world map, like on mobile, so that we do not have to load into all those cities, but I am not a fan of this specific solution.

 

[Ashrem]

I hope this counts as civil. I think this is a complete and utter waste of programmer resources when we have no idea what the game will look like after the change to inactive cities has been implemented for two or four months.

 

[Xelenia]

I hope this counts as civil. I think this is a complete and utter waste of programmer resources when we have no idea what the game will look like after the change to inactive cities has been implemented for two or four months.

Of course, and this is why we have a public voting

 

[Pheryll]

I hope this counts as civil. I think this is a complete and utter waste of programmer resources when we have no idea what the game will look like after the change to inactive cities has been implemented for two or four months.

I do not see a significant increase to the loading of cities by the proposed method, and pulling a presorted list of culture buildings requires a whole lot less processing.

 

[Ashrem]

I do not see a significant increase to the loading of cities by the proposed method, and pulling a presorted list of culture buildings requires a whole lot less processing.

I'm assuming you read something other than "programmer resources," because your response has nothing to do with programmer time and energy?

 

[Yogi Dave]

I hope this counts as civil. I think this is a complete and utter waste of programmer resources when we have no idea what the game will look like after the change to inactive cities has been implemented for two or four months.

A couple of things here.

• Just because this is forwarded doesn't mean it will be accepted and even if it is, it doesn't mean they are going to start coding immediately. So, I don't see how presenting them with the idea affects programming resources.
• What do you mean by 'no idea what the game will look like'? Won't people just be moved so they are closer to other active people or something similar to that? You've mentioned this several times and I'm sorry but I can't make any sense of this. The map will still look the same. I can't imagine how that could change since it is so basic in boosted good selection for a city and distribution of provinces. I must be missing something because you seem to think things will be different enough that it's a waste of the devs time to even look at the idea.
• Having this presented to the devs before this inactive city thing occurs may influence how that is implemented, even if coding has begun on it. It also may make this whole idea moot. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be presented to them as an option.