IDEAS FOR RYZOM

The general idea is best described by a walk-though of how I see the activity, what it leads to and why it would be interesting.

Walk-through:
After months of training, saving and searching the lakes, Seek pulls out his golden field compass and checks his map one more time. The spring sun rises in the east and Fount is once again empty - a perfect time to find out if this thing works. His thoughts drift back angrily as the memory once again surfaces that the Kami have been hiding this from them for so long - a way to probe the subtle fields around Atys that lead to weak points in the planets auras and a way to portal to the vast riches in the depths of the planet.

Holding the field compass in his hands, he mumbles a few words causing the tiny trombosite needle inside to hover & glow. Seek smiles gleefully to himself but quickly steels his nerves & ebbing concentration as the glow flickers & fades. He sighs and updates his map; it's only a weak reading but it gives him a range and approximate direction of where a fissure might be.
He sits, allowing his concentration to return and thinks back to his training - maybe 4 or 5 more readings and he'll have a complete fix on the fissure. If he can find the weakness in the field before others arrive, he should be able to set-up a portal generator and break through.
Standing, he sighs to himself, of course - that's only the first step - he'll need to deal with whatever is on the other side before he can start prospecting for materials - and, with Jena willing, the portal will still be open for him to return; if the portal closes - he'll have to start again and find a way out. Portals are tricky - they can lead you in/out of the known lands.. or take you deeper to more dangerous and less explored places - so far unmapped by homins. Taking one last look at the picture of his loving wife Anju, he snaps closed the compass and walks towards the rising sun and readies himself to triangulate where the fissure might be. If Jena is willing, he'll be able to find the seeds of a rare Axe plan that he can research to make for her.

Details:
The general idea is provide a vehicle to allow connections to permanent instanced ring scenarios. Permanent in the sense that they continue to exist but are only loaded or instanced when a portal to them in found. These scenarios are intended to be hard - and to provide things to all players - mobs to fight, bosses to kill & exciting new things to forage. The specifics of the new things to forage/craft will be posted in an upcoming thread as per the thread norm.

Finding a portal involves skill (training), tools (something to triangulate down where the portal is & something to hold open a portal) and experience. Portals are dynamic - moving around a zone over time and having a lifetime of their own. Moving through a portal causes it to take dmg - so only so much mass can be put through it (affected by the number of players/mounts/packers/equipment they bring).

Current game mechanics are in place to support much of what has been described so far - although new skills & equipment would be required to find/locate/open the portal. Once you locate a portal - it could be activated by using an item - which would then instance something like a touchstone to move between zones.

Once inside the portal - the exit would continue to exist for x hours or until the mass moved through it exceeded its threshold - at which point it would collapse. Finding your way out means starting again the cycle of triangulation - which ofc may open a portal to the known lands (which may or may not be where you started) or deeper into another scenario..

Outstanding questions:
What's inside portals...
That's a content question which I hope to answer in a follow-up post.
The idea is that they're hard.. Almost too hard to solo without care. It's designed to encourage teams to work together inside them. Ideally people will go there for a while to work on something, gather all they can - and then find their way out.

What happens on Death inside a portal?
Good question.. No idea :) You return back to "home"?
Let's try to avoid dying :p

How much mass or people can go through a portal?
It would vary - some would allow just a little, others would allow a lot. I imagine the zones they lead to will vary a lot - easier zones will allow less mass, more difficult zones would allow more.
The Q of the zone you're coming from would affect where the portal leads to - lower Q's lead to easier zones. Higher Q'd zones would, more often lead to harder zones.

Genius idea - it opens up the possibilities of new territories to explore which have been designed by players. This frees the long-suffering Devs from creating new scenarios and could enlarge the map enormously.

One caveat: it does depend on the Ring-created areas being stable, plausible within the Lore, and up to (or close to) the standard of the rest of Ryzom.

Stability is one concern that should be fixed with technical solitions. The current code for it can be fragile in the client - depending on the OS. On Linux amd64 for example - you can get random segfaults on start (which I hope will be addressed with the coming patch due to an ID lookup failure) and then again when you place things into the environment.

The actual zones themselves - well that's a matter of design. I'd imagine we'd start with 5-15 zones created by the backend team - maybe a compeition to drive player participation with some direction regarding design principles, setting objectives and selection criteria.

Yep, this is a very cool idea.

Seems somewhat related to this earlier idea: app.ryzom.com/app_forum/?page=topic/view/8494/1

Details differ, but the basic idea is the same: Temporary mini-instances that are constantly changing, never the same or in the same place.

I think this would really make for a mysterious living world.

There is also a question of balance and compatibility with canon Lore. Even if users flock to this idea and make lots of new lands, there is the question of whether new mats and xp will balance out in the overall economy of the game. This is not a trivial matter and must involve the devs.

Yep - for sure Bittty although with the existing caps on XP gain as long as the HP & stats of the mobs in the zones match the Q - it should be fairly comparable (XP over time wise) to the existing langs - and hence it shouldn't introduce an imbalance in the sense of XP - what time people spend in these zones - isn't being spent in others.

The more interesting aspect is what these zones bring to the table in terms of craft & mats. The topic of an upcoming post.

I see this thread as involving the players to help scope the idea - if it gets support & the devs like it - then they'll be running with it.

Very interesting idea. I'm not sure: are you suggesting devs make the new areas or players? (though I bet I just need to read it through again.)

The primary creators would be the devs although they could run a competiton for players to come up with some ideas and have some kind of population vote to pick the winner.

Dev driven creation would ensure a clean consistent and more holistic approach to Atys lore & style.

So -- another quick question. Why instances? Right now each region (loosely constructed to include Kitin Lair and Silan) is an instance in a way, but we don't have instanced dungeons or the like. If it's a true instance, then only one person (or perhaps team) can enter, but if the entrance is locatable, multiple instances can spawn off a single entrance, each with a single small group in it. Is this really desirable / logical in terms of the rest of the gameplay?

(Don't get me wrong, I rather like the idea in the abstract. I'm just looking at the holes in the idea.)

Good question :)
Instances in the sense of that they can be loaded & unloaded - but on demand & as a portal is opened. They would be permanent & shared - so not an instance in the sense as one unique one for each entity.
Maybe some unclear phrasing on my side - it's one of those where some people have different interpretations of some words.

From what I understand - the lair and Silian are more permanently loaded - so they're not unloaded & saved when the last person leaves,