Hi all,
I am going to share some thoughts here that I have submitted on the new Road to 1.0 survey. I have not shared these thoughts in a form or on these forums before, but it’s something I’ve considered for a while now. If there were to ever be a rework to the Plaza, Gameworld Ports, or Condo Ports, these are some suggestions I have.
Plaza
As far as the Plaza goes, I selected “ability to navigate the plaza” not because it is confusing, but because it is generally not my favorite layout for the Plaza. I love how it looks visually, but I have always preferred the layout to the original Lobby 2, where the beach is at the end. I think it’s less to do with that specific layout, and more to do with how the layout influences the path of the player as they navigate through the plaza. A lot of activities (including the minigames) are located behind where players spawn. Along with this, for a 60 player limit in each server, the Plaza seems a bit too spread out in my opinion, leaving a lot of zones where you almost never see players.
An interesting way to look at it is locations of meeting points. In a full server, where do you find players? The usual answer is, aside from the key locations like the Casino and Arcade, you find players around the small or large fountain, or usually somewhere in between. This is natural, because it is the center of the map. After the boardwalk update, we are finally seeing players veer in that direction as well which is nice. There is a reason for people to go there, and so it is more populated. But there are a lot of locations that are outside of the path, places where there’s no reason for a lot of people to visit, and where there’s no path that goes through it.
These locations include the fishing spots on the edges of the map, the swimming pool with slides in the back, all of the areas on the side of the beach, the lazy river, and most importantly the minigames. I think the attendance of players to these locations has more to do with where they are located rather than how good they look / fun they are. Take the original Lobby 2 for instance. At the end of the path was the boardwalk and pool, and as a result, that pool was more heavily populated than it ever has been in this version of the Lobby. It does make sense that it has now been “replaced” location wise with the gameworld ports, but I think if there is ever to be a new version of the Lobby, it’s something that would be cool to consider.
Gameworld Ports
Another suggestion I have is regarding the gameworld ports itself. I don’t know if there’s a better place for this, but the suggestion is related to this plaza discussion. The original Lobby 2 gameworld ports was far more populated on full servers, and I think the reason for this is that it again was a central point / meeting place. The other factor here is the convenience of joining game worlds from the main menu. While this also detracts from the number of people in the ports, I do think it should stay in the main menu, it’s very convenient for players, and makes it easy for new players. But something that I think causes a disconnect here (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that the actual open lobbies don’t seem to be actively tied to the ports in game. There is a separate gameports server that you get teleported to after games as well, but the only thing people ever seem to do in there is instantly leave. It’s a separate instance, but it’s just a small room with a lot of boards, and there never seems to be open lobbies (again, it seems like it is not tied to other ports or open gameworlds).
This is something I think could be fixed by almost going back entirely to the original Lobby 2 gameworld ports design. It was wide open, it was fun to navigate, and it served as a meeting point. Perhaps having something like this, something similar to how the Condo ports functions, would be great to have.
Condo Ports
Bouncing off of this discussion is regarding the layout of Condo Ports. While the location looks great, and it is busy by benefitting as a central world people travel to in between condos, the general layout does not inspire people to look for Condos manually, but rather through the central list. This is very opinionated of course, but I do think manually walking around to doors is more fun of a process than going through the list. People always join the lobbies with the most people, but what if there was more customization you can apply to your front door? What if a very simple party system was reimplemented into the game, which existed in GMTower? A new layout, the central list removed, and a floor space that guides the player to walk and explore different condo doors.
The main issue with this I imagine is the limitation of the number of condos. You can support so many condos now, so how do you fit 50, 100, however many condo doors currently exist in an easily explorable flatter layout? I don’t have a great answer to this, but perhaps the layout can be reduced, but be open to expansion if required. At the moment, the layout is very vertical, and does not promote the player to walk and explore each door. Perhaps if it was flatter, with doors easily accessible and a layout that promotes a central meeting place with easily navigateable but large corridors, it could be a fun experience. Combine this with open condos preferring to be on doors closer to the center, and I think that would be a redesign that would be well received.
Again, these are all just suggestions for if the dev team decides to redesign these locations, but I wanted to share these thoughts in case it were to ever be considered
