Neighborhoods vs Home Streets
This is for debate/discussion - keep it polite, please! I know we all loved Glitch, and there's room for all of us to love different parts of it and to prefer some parts without disparaging people who prefer things the other way.
I came in late, and never saw houses with addresses. The system of home streets where everyone's home was equally close to everywhere seemed natural to me--I didn't know addresses had existed until I saw some older snaps, and then looked on the forums to find out what those were.
I loved the spice routes, and the barnacle routes, and the jellisac routes. (And I loved looking for abandoned home streets on Zilloween and planting all the available plots with pumpkins.) On the other side of things, I've seen a lot of people mention how nice it was to have neighbors, and a community. And having an actual address sounds wonderful. On the gripping hand, I've heard mention that many neighborhoods were mostly empty, as players dropped out, and you couldn't just arrange to be next to your friends. And all the walking required to get to them sounds like a hassle to me.
I expect that, at first at least, we'll have homestreets like Glitch had when it ended--that's where the code is; the older code may not be available, or it may not be able to integrate with later features. But it'd be hypothetically available at some point, or we might be able to come up with some kind of hybrid. But I'm a little blurry on how the houses with addresses even worked, and I know I haven't really thought about the pros and cons of the system I was used to--it was the only one I knew, so I didn't notice what could be different.
Can we have some discussion of the pros and cons of each? What was awesome about each; what was lost when the system changed; what features of each would you love to see again? What parts would you not mind missing out on?
I came in late, and never saw houses with addresses. The system of home streets where everyone's home was equally close to everywhere seemed natural to me--I didn't know addresses had existed until I saw some older snaps, and then looked on the forums to find out what those were.
I loved the spice routes, and the barnacle routes, and the jellisac routes. (And I loved looking for abandoned home streets on Zilloween and planting all the available plots with pumpkins.) On the other side of things, I've seen a lot of people mention how nice it was to have neighbors, and a community. And having an actual address sounds wonderful. On the gripping hand, I've heard mention that many neighborhoods were mostly empty, as players dropped out, and you couldn't just arrange to be next to your friends. And all the walking required to get to them sounds like a hassle to me.
I expect that, at first at least, we'll have homestreets like Glitch had when it ended--that's where the code is; the older code may not be available, or it may not be able to integrate with later features. But it'd be hypothetically available at some point, or we might be able to come up with some kind of hybrid. But I'm a little blurry on how the houses with addresses even worked, and I know I haven't really thought about the pros and cons of the system I was used to--it was the only one I knew, so I didn't notice what could be different.
Can we have some discussion of the pros and cons of each? What was awesome about each; what was lost when the system changed; what features of each would you love to see again? What parts would you not mind missing out on?
Comments
My idea is that there would be a series of streets (like the neighborhoods) around Ur with gates.
When you first join, you are randomly assigned a gate. When you go in your gate (which would have a number) it takes you to your home street, which is also availible in the iMG menu like normal.
There would be different styles of gates for each region, but your home street is unchanged. If you found an empty gate somewhere else, you'd have the option to switch to that gate for currants.
I'm thinking sort of like the entrances to Asslandia? I dunno. My idea isn't the best, but I think it'd tie it all together nicely. Of course, it doesn't entirely meet the issues with the neighborhoods, so imput from people who tested those is needed.
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PUVKMVKGUCG2PM3/10334-9a9092fb08/
This was in front of my old house. So there was a signpost on some streets in Ur, leading to a quarter, each with several blocks. Each block had a row of (I think) ten identical houses on it. The meadow houses were each different, though. Inside, you had garden plots, a trophy shelf, and a cabinet for stuff (that offered very little room).
Which meant you dumped most of your stuff on the floor. Be glad you've never experienced life before SDB's.
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PUVKMVKGUCG2PM3/10335-c483b41ef9/
Right before my original grind to 60 came to a conclusion, it was insanely bad. I wonder if I could find a picture...
http://justindaigle.com/files/scr/Game_-_Glitch-20120110-163447.png
The couch isn't actually a surface with plat lines; that is a bug. I still don't know how it happened.
The funny thing is I was never one of the "worst" hoarders. (coughcough @sumi and @Palindrome coughcough)
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PHVH3D3KFJ92PUJ/677-8c56125e2b/
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PHVH3D3KFJ92PUJ/670-2df8c57fb9/
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PHVH3D3KFJ92PUJ/669-52cc2484fb/
Oh also after Old went the Apartments got changed to this
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PHVH3D3KFJ92PUJ/19197-434ac2b517/
Cant seem to find the other pics of my other houses....oh well....
Old housing : Pros
Physical Neighborhood
Various house designs / shapes
Housing Market
Cons:
Not Modifiable - Yard & House & Furniture
Lack of Storage
Housing Shortage
Many houses owned by inactive players
New Housing: Pros
Modifiable - Yard & House & Furniture
Many designs
Practically unlimited Storage
No Housing Shortage
Butlers
New Housing: Cons
No Physical Neighborhoods, instead a signpost
Box like house insides
Not directly tied to world, instead we teleported to home streets
If there is a way to tie our house to a point in the world that would be nice, there are those street stones, maybe we can tie our house to those somehow. However housing blocks and a housing market would likely just be a repeat of the same issues.
Pros about the old housing system:
1. Neighborhood blocks: You can pick which block to go to with houses ranging from 1-20, 20-40, ect....
2. Different style houses: The outside is different just like the inside
3. Could view the inside of the house before buying it, you could also view the inside of houses already bought by people, all you would have to do is visit their glitch page.
4. Animals and notes all over the block was fun to see
5. Unique designs inside of the house, you do not get the same box shape as compared to the new system
6. You could have more than one house if I remember correctly.
Cons about the old housing system
1. People often stole animals on your block
2. couldn't move next to your friends if they bought a house in another block
3. All of the expensive houses were bought and not sold. Cheaper houses had virtually little to no room for your items
4. Tacky wallpaper, you couldn't edit or change something if you wanted to...you were stuck with what came with the house.
5. No ores on the street or any gardening areas
6. There wasn't a way to teleport there which means you had to set the street your housing block was on for one of your teleports. It was also easier to forget which housing block your friends lived on.
Pros about the new housing system
1. Can outfit your street with whatever you wanted in terms of nodes and they were interchangeable. Don't need barnacles anymore? Replace it with sparkly ore ect... You can also change what image you want for your backround street and the music would change as well based on the backround you had. Exterior of your house can be changed as well.
2. Stores! If you didn't feel like selling items on the auction house you have your own store to sell things out of
3. Resource routes. You could get all of the spice you wanted if you needed it by going on spice routes. Oftentimes you would end up meeting people and making friends this way.
4. Design your house with whatever wallpaper you wanted as well as what furniture you want. There was also plenty of rooms and you can build multiple floors.
5. The ability to set your friends streets as neighboring streets.
6. The butler that always told you who visited your streets, if anyone gave him items to give you, or getting the free extra IMG each day from talking to him
Cons about the new housing system
1. No neighborhoods. It was only one house per street so it can get lonely if no one visits.
2. People would be spiteful and ruin your street. It was rare but I have heard of people going on routes and poisoning other people's trees on their streets or harvest herbs/garden plots and not be generous and replant. Sure you could always ban the person but there is more than one village idiot that sometimes does this
3. Interior housing all had the same default design in terms of shape. I would have loved to see an ability where we could make a room be the shape of one of the rooms in the peat bog houses for example.
4. Less people out in the world exploring. This was a good and bad thing, good because you got to discover more things out in the world without a bunch of people stealing your quoins and you having to wait for them. Bad because the bots that were out in the world farm routes sometimes.
"You could have as many houses as you wanted in the old system." No, you could only have one house at a time. It was critical to watch the market and time the selling of an old house to be able to purchase your next one, especially as more people got in the game because sometimes you'd sell your house, and the one you were planning to buy was purchased before you could get to it. And since you'd have to sell one house before you could purchase the next, it made the timing of moving especially interesting since you left behind all the stuff in your old house, if you didn't move it out. This lead to moving parties where you'd enlist your friends to help carry bags, or you'd have a friend allow you to dump your bags at their house (because they gave you permission to enter) while you were shuttling your inventory. What was cool about buying a pre owned house was to see what the previous owner left behind (I always tried to leave some basic items in case it was someone's first house). The way people got around having only one home was to either have friends in different parts of Ur and them giving you access to their home or having alts with housing in different sections of Ur (which some players considered gaming the system, so rules were in place for people to no abuse them). Also, in old houses, all cabinets were locked to other players (so the homeowner could have a set of stuff that didn't get messed with), but anything left on the ground was fair game for anyone to pick up.
"No ores on the streets." Actually, what you got on the street depended on which neighborhood you lived in, and that was part of the decision process of purchasing a home in a certain location. In the hillside homes, they actually did have ores on the homestreets as well as trees. In Groddle Meadow, they only had trees. I don't think the tree houses had any resources.
So, some of my pros and cons...
Old Homes / Neighborhoods
Pros:
1. Neighbors who would either leave you things at your doorstep or put really cool things outside their house. I had one neighbor who would set up a bunch of gnomes to say things as you ran through them...it was quite funny.
2. Ability to move up to different types of neighborhoods. I used to start out with an apartment, and then move to one of the Groddle homes (meadow, hillside or tree house), and then eventually move into an Alakol mansion. Others were able to take the bog track for housing. Many over time, would pick a smaller home over an Alakol mansion.
3. Moving parties (if you liked that sort of things).
4. A sense of one part of the world being your 'home'. Your home felt more connected to Ur than being a separate parallel universe to Ur.
5. Locked cabinets so you could leave out things to share and keep your personal stuff locked away.
6. The interiors were not boxy. Loved how each type of house was unique - bog style, the multiple quirky meadow homes, tree houses, the sterile / modern Alakol homes, the rugged rock/hillside homes.
7. Balconies in Alakol homes and Platforms in tree houses...very fun for jumping... And basements in some of the bog houses. I missed how each type of house had something endearing about it.
Cons:
1. Limited number of houses and abandoned houses kept others from enjoying all aspects of the housing market.
2. No ability to change the houses to match your personality. (I really just wanted the option to change the colors of neighborhood homes).
3. No ability to make furniture, and no ability to have tons of storage (but that sort of added to the management of things).
4. No ability to modify the street you lived on (ie, changing out plots for ore or making a garden bed).
5. Moving was a pain in the a**, if you didn't have friends to help you.
New Houses:
Pros:
1. Highly modifiable (colors/backgrounds and what is there) both inside of the house and the street.
2. Never had to figure out how to get home, since you just teleported back. (though this could be a con, since it make the game a little boring since you didn't have to figure out how to get back home).
3. Lots of storage/expansion.
4. Ability to have markets in your tower**
Cons:
1. Only could have 5 'neighbors' on your street sign.
2. Felt more like a parallel universe than being a part of Ur.
3. Too boxy - no interior room size variety like in the old homes...every room same size, and everything rectangular.
4. Animal sticks instead of pens. I liked that some of the old homes had piggy pens...I really didn't care for the animal sticks, though they served their purpose .
5. No balconies. No basements. Though some of the street styles did allow for some quirky platforms eventually. Balconies were supposed to be coming, so here's hoping that it's in some of the code that didn't get implemented.
While I lean toward the old homes, having experienced both, I do have to agree the abandonment issue was a huge one to overcome since you couldn't tell if someone had abandoned the game, or was forced to not play for a while due to RL issues such as a severe illness or tragedy in their lives...I think everyone agreed it would have completely stunk if someone came back to the game after being gone a while, and find their house had been foreclosed and sold to someone else.
I also think there were grievers in both systems that would steal things off the streets or destroy the trees/plots in both. However, I think the grievers in the new system were more targeted toward annoying people they didn't like, or disrupting a specific route. It was harder to determine the grievers' intents in the old system.
I'd love to see an eventual option to have a blend of the two systems. I too would like to have an anchor for my house where I'd have to pick a street to live on (like the old neighborhoods), and then if you clicked on the facade, you'd jump to my 'front yard' (the equivalent of the new home street). Those yards could be connected via the street sign to friends who might actually live in different parts of Ur, so you could then use your home street sign to go to different parts of Ur since your friends might pick a different neighborhood in a different part of Ur. Maybe you still get a free teleport home and back to the place you just left, but you also get up to five different location portals...assuming your friends pick different locations.
Also, I wish they would have started out with exteriors and interiors of the original homes, and then build out from there. I really miss my Groddle Meadow cottage and the Modern Furniture and clean lines of the Alakol homes. Maybe in time the Eleven team can back fill some furniture and looks from those collections.
**ETA: Markets as a pro of the new houses, which I meant to include, but forgot until I read a later comment about housing.
That being said, I am thinking: what if new housing was like an tangle of ribbons that pierced Ur at multiple points, each ribbon made up of a string of homestreets. In addition to the signpost shortcuts, imagine if you could load someone else's homestreet by just walking off the end of the screen - one on either side. So it would be the 6th and 7th connection you could make for your homestreet. You would still need to load a new street for each person's homestreet but I think I would feel more "adjacent" if I got there by walking off the left side of my street and entering on the right side of my friend's, and I couldn't just change that by switching a signpost.
Addresses: You could get an address aka a location in a particular stretch of one of the ribbon-streets and arrange to be adjacent to your friends. Each street would be connected at one end to a particular gate in Ur, and the far end would connect to a random gate. Maybe it changes each time it is used, maybe it is changes each time a new homestreet is added, maybe it changes each game day. In selecting an address, you could add on to the end or in the middle of an existing street, or you could start a new street, and possibly you would pick your street's name from from a selection of street names, maybe created by some kind of random generator. Connections on a street could be controlled (moved, removed) by whoever is the base connection to the gate, making that player the street's "owner," which would make maintaining resource routes easier. That itself is something that would be great for other reasons, but the ability to move or remove home streets from the larger street would solve the problem of players going inactive as well. Maybe street owners could designate streets as Open (anyone can join) or Private (you need to request permission to join, if the street owner agrees they can complete the moving process via clicky button). There would be a notation on the gate's menu interface to tell how long the street is, and maybe streets could qualify to add an icon to indicate what resources are available at a high percentage on the street. It might be fun to go somewhere random while rambling in Ur by popping along a short street when you come across a gate.
Home streets that were removed from a larger street would go to a spot on one of the "default" streets, while new accounts are given addresses on newbie streets, with central gate connections near administrative halls. This would make new players easier to find to be kind to and as for the inactive accounts, if the owner goes active again then they can move back where they were before or somewhere new. And the endless stretch of inactive yards would be interesting to explore and would present lots of opportunity to repair plots for someone working on those badges. And there shouldn't be a problem with having a lot of one-house streets, as long as you don't load them all on the server at once. Arrange them on in a list of most recently active to least recently active, and only load ten streets at a time on the menu interface at the gate. You could also limit the number of gate connections, and pare inactive streets after a designated period, which would recreate the excitement of buying a new house by stalking the classifieds as you and your friends wait for a spot to come open at your preferred gate. You could even allow players to bid on recently vacated spots, while newly created ones would be first come, first served. As the player base increases, you can add more gates or gate connections, and also as new lands are created. Finally, perhaps street owners could ban particular players from their streets if there is an issue with griefing.
Of course, this would probably be enormously complicated to code but it's one way to approach the issues that I see people raising.
There are some more complex entailments of the idea that would have consequences for resource routes, but the initial thought is that you would get neighbourhoods back, addresses, and connections to Ur. I particularly like the idea of logging on, going out my front door, and walking to the right off my street and through my friend's yards and out onto a random spot in Ur. I reserve the right to edit this to make the idea clearer.
*i guess I meant b3achy!
I suspect that "visit random spot in Ur" is not an ability that every player should have at all times. Not sure. On the one hand, that sounds like a fun way to explore lands you haven't visited in a while and wouldn't normally bother with. On the other, if it's a free teleport, you could just keep doing it over and over until you get where you want. Or, wait... if the random visit-Ur gate doesn't come with a free trip back to home, then you'd have to get back to your fixed gate point. But that comes with the whole hassle of having to set a t'port point to get to your home. Other-other hand: I suspect Eleven is going to be a LOT more social than Glitch was, at least at first--there's likely to be a whole lot of "meet me at my house and follow me to [location]" as soon as following works.
It sounds like a lot of people would like neighborhoods, and some of the house features from the old houses, with the customizeability of the new houses. At the same time, nobody wants neighborhoods where 90% of the houses are abandoned, and I can't think of any way to prevent that--nobody wants to come back from a month of cramming for finals to find that their house has been sold and possessions gone, or stuffed in boxes at a bureaucratic hall until they get a new house. (However, if homes ARE reclaimed, that could work to protect one's assets. And the shift from old homes to new should have the "crate" code, if that's still available.)
People might be able to arrange a "don't evict me for inactivity" license for a fee? Fairly low fee, probably, maybe based on the value of the home.
I don't know how to create neighborhoods without the problems those neighborhoods had, but it's likely that the old house designs could be somehow merged with the new houses. (Later. Not at start.) I suspect that the people who enjoyed the housing economy are far outnumbered by the people who found buying a house to be an annoying expense that they hated, but that's a vague feeling based on a few comments, rather than anything of substance.
I do wonder if it's possible to have both--neighborhood houses for those players who want them, home-street houses for those who prefer those, and possibly a set of apartments for those who want the neighborhood house and are saving up money for it, or who are in the process of moving.
So on say, Sini Shake, there would be a gateway, and when you click on it, it brings up a menu with a list of streets, say 10 per page. Each street would have a name ("Sini Boulevard, Shaking Meadows,", etc) and possibly indicate how long it is and if it has a particular density of resources on it. If you click on the street name, you are taken to the first homestreet, belonging to the owner or founder of the street. You can get back to Sini Shake by walking back off the left side of the first homestreet.
Let's say here are four houses on the street, Shaker Treetops, A-B-C-D, where A is the owner of the street. A connects to Sini Shake on its l side, and B on its right. b connects to A in its left side, and C on its right. D connects to C on its left side, and either a random street, or back again to Sini Shake on its right if it would be game breaking to be able to skip across Ur to a random destination.
Person E wants to join a street, and looks for one on Sini Shake because they like the location. They join Shaker Treetops because like A, B, C, and D, E also has a large number of spice trees in their yard, and E's homestreet is added after D's. A could later move E between B and C if they want to, and if E goes inactive they could be removed and sent to a default street. If A goes inactive, B becomes the street owner and A is sent to a default street.
Maybe Shaker Treetops is private, and person E sends a request to A to be added, and their street is added when A agrees to the request.
Maybe there is a limit to how many streets can be linked to Sini Shake at one time. If you want to start a new street there, you have to wait for a spot to become vacant. Let's say players A through E either stop playing or leave the street for other locations, and none of the players left have logged in in, say, a month, then the people on the street are moved to a default street elsewhere and the connection to Sini Shake becomes available.
There is no concern with possessions going missing or houses being foreclosed because what is lost is the location/connections and not the house or yard.
@Kassutera I think they eventually made it so that you couldn't poison trees on another person's street. I was on a tree route (spice) and never had this problem, despite the fact that a lot of people visited my street to interact with my trees. Unfortunately, before they put that change into effect, I do recall accidentally poisoning someone else's tree.
Actually, yep. Confirmed. If you weren't the owner of a POL (player-owned location) or a keyholder, you couldn't poison a tree. And a few lines after that, you can see code fixing a bug I reported much earlier in the game's history.
https://github.com/tinyspeck/glitch-GameServerJS/blob/f4cf3e3ed540227b0f1fec26dd5273c03b0f9ead/items/trant_spice.js#L313
@"Scarlett Bearsdale" I like this idea! But it does still depend on scale to some extent, I think. Maybe I'm not understanding it fully, but if the game had a number of players some large multiple of the number of streets in Ur (there's ~1500 streets in Ur, I believe, and as of closing, Glitch had ~150k registered players, meaning 100 home streets per Ur street according to this model), I'm not entirely sure how it would scale. It is a lot better than, "nothing available, you can't have a house at all!" though, so this may not be as much of an issue as I'm making it out to be.
The only thing I would mention is that there are perhaps some logistics that would have to be nailed down. Perhaps how many players are allowed to be on one closed-loop ribbon AKA how many people can have their houses on Shaker Treetops?
Then I have to wonder. This is probably an unpopular opinion but I feel like this idea is actually a good alternative to signposts on homestreets. They have always felt a little too powerful to me. Being able to go to five homes all full of different resources with just the push of a couple buttons? Makes things a tad too easy!
With this mechanism we could still have resource routes, IE Shaker Treetops' treetops could be full of spice trees as agreed upon by all of its residents. As these things usually do I'm sure this idea if implemented would have a lot of interesting social ramifications. Social groups like the old GoC club would probably agree to live on the same ribbon and might have a mini resource route of their own perhaps all agreeing to stock wood trees to make a huge plank profit with fertilidust and quick chopping.
Again suggesting the removal of the signposts is probably an unpopular idea, but I really like this method of suggesting we tie our houses up into neighborhoods and tie them down to one street in Ur! My thought would be that new Glitchen have their home street same as usual it simply isn't tied anywhere. They type /home and it takes them completely out of the world of Ur to the 'living dimension', no signpost and they must simply leave back to the place in Ur they left from.
Then as I imagine where you decide to park your home becomes a free teleport point of sorts. You pick a neighborhood in groddle meadow and then groddle meadow is only ever a /home away!
Now if that seems too radical, to remove the signposts completely, then I sort of see this idea as way too powerful. It would essentially remove the necessity to have TP points as each name on your signpost could lead you to a different neighborhood in totally disparate parts of Ur! Have a friend who lives on Sini Shake? Just toss their name on your signpost and even if you're in Jal all you have to do is type /home, click that friends name, walk off their street and bam there you are in Sini Shake! I guess I wouldn't hate all that functionality, but to have it right away as a newly imagined glitch, just by making a friend who lives far away? Seems too much too soon!
And I signed up on November 9, 2011.
I wouldn't oppose losing signposts. But remember if you are on a longer street, maybe you're person X or even YY or ZZZ, getting to Sini Shake from the future, bloated Shaker Treetops would be a long walk. If we jettison the random terminus idea as too powerful, then the long walk would be partially ameliorated by having the far terminus be Sini Shake again. Or the random street could be somewhere else only in the same region (eg somewhere in Tamila only.) Or streets could terminate via travelling stone to a random homestreet. Also, each person could get a random 3 or 4 digit number as their address (A lives at 1674 Shaker Treetops) that you could skip to using the link on their homestreets webpage or possibly via interface. But you'd need the exact address.
Another way to address the issue of power is to potentially to restrict access to ribbon streets to higher levels. perhaps you need an Upgrade ("Good Neighbour"), and to have purchased the right permit from the bureaucratic hall to join a new street. Also this would cut down on the maximum number of homestreets per Ur street because a vast number of the registered players don't get past level 2 or 3. I'm actually thinking maybe level 29.
If that were the case then maybe when you're not attached to a ribbon street, you have a signpost and can only get there using /home. And when you join a epribbon street you lose the signpost? /shrug.
Of course, the first time I leveled from 1 to 60, I did it entirely by mining and donating sparkly...
GoC was really the place to be. The people in that group just really knew how to strategize, so I got to pilfer everyone else's ideas. :P
(oh, and you don't need to put my name in quotes by the way; that's just a mod we're using on the forums to allow you to highlight names with spaces in them)
@"Scarlett Bearsdale" Loving the tweaks here! Perhaps the way it works is that the ribbon is more of a bicycle wheel? Sini Shake being the center of the wheel, each homestreet occupying a spot on the circumference, and each spoke representing a connection between each homestreet and Sini Shake itself?
That way we could avoid doing away with the signpost entirely. The signpost would simply always point to Sini Shake if your neighborhood happens to be tied to Sini Shake. That way if you chose to live on Sini Shake you can always reach it no matter where you are on the ribbon/wheel. Then this way assuming an alphabet of Glitchen A -> B -> C ... -> Y -> Z -> A. With each Glitchen A-Z having a signpost next to their home that reads Sini Shake and leads back to a central gate or neighbordhood directory signpost on Sini Shake itself!
Love the idea of having addresses again so any Glitchen visitors know exactly where in Ur we are.
OMG, I remember how limiting 5 people on a sign post seemed to me!! There was a large group of us from another game, and we could have ALL our friends on a portal (you'd scroll through the list). Of course, there we were limited to 300 friends there. It was always interesting to figure out trading with folks because people would find you based on who your friends were...and things were often referenced as...do you have Betty on your list? You do...okay, go from Betty to Marge to Suzie and you should find me on Suzie's portal. Though that game seemed to tie the parallel homespace universe back to the game because you needed to collect special items only available from the homespaces to be used in the game.
@"Scarlett Bearsdale" - why don't we call a player's homestreet their yard or property? And then you can have multiple properties/yards on a street, and multiple streets in a neighborhood? Just a thought.
Given that I had a bunch of old resources from 'back in the day', I finally dug up a bunch of very old Ur Beta maps (Aug 2011, right before the "launch"), which shows many of the old neighborhoods and streets. Sadly, I have very few pictures of the streets, but have a few (for some reason, mostly the bog streets).
You also wouldn't necessarily need an owner I guess. Anyone could approve requests to join and a certain quorum would be needed to remove, I guess. But I'm just thinking about managing the larger groups and sometimes it's better for one person to be responsible for some administrative tasks.
It would also maybe make the resource routes more palatable to those who dislike them, in that they would become decentralized and manageable from in-game (a big priority.) Anyone could start a route and maintain it. And it would bring you back into Ur to explore. Maybe you would need some spice while piggling in Tamila, and stop at the neighbourhoods on Sini Shake and see the Shaker Treetops is relatively long and has minimum 50% spice. Eventually you'd find some really great neighbourhoods you keep returning to. As you frequent them, you'd run into homeowners and get to know them. Maybe when you reach level 29 you'd be friends and move in. By then you have some idea what your preferences are. Are you someone who likes the big, public, central neighbourhoods, the highly organized and dedicated neighbourhoods, or do you search out small, out of the way neighbourhoods and give the, some traffic. Do you like neighbourhoods where anything goes and a Groddle meadow is next to a spooky night and a bog, or do you prefer neighbourhoods that are dedicated to maintaining an aesthetic appropriate to the location?
Since we gain img for street traffic, I could see route neighbourhoods advertising their locations, maybe via the billboards at the abandoned apartments. This is could also serve to clue new players in. Overall the presence of routes that are more or less to your taste would encourage you to explore Ur to find more.
Actually, you could restrict some backgrounds for homestreets and backyards to certain gateway locations, So some bog backgrounds, or all of them, would be accessible from bog regions only. These restrictions may only apply when you live in a neighbourhood, though.
@"Scarlett Bearsdale" Love the narrative you're crafting here. Oh to be a new glitch again! If this infrastructure had been in place when I joined way way back in the day I think it would have been a lot of fun and a great way to find out what parts of Ur you like and what parts you don't mind neglecting for a while. I just really am a huge fan of having our yards/properties tied to a place in Ur with a tad bit of restriction on getting from one part of one to another part of the other : P
And yes I think it'd be good to have a diverse field of resource routes. Like we talked about above I remember the serious routes where the trees stood tall at 15 apiece on each street and the herb gardens were some serious business. I'd love to live in or near where some of the serious folks set up, they're a real boon to the dedicated gatherers!
I'm getting very invested in this hypothetical now, if only it were so easy to realize.
You could maybe also have other icons you toggle on or off for community kitchens, tower stores, take-an-item piles, and the like.
@b3achy yes, yard or property would work. I think you're imagining an interface more like old home streets though, while I would prefer to go straight from one yard to another - one less loading screen. From the menu you'd go straight to house A's yard. And I think that's why I prefer one entry per neighbourhood to the street, both to give a stronger feeling of attachment to Ur. In both cases, it increases the sense of adjacency to walk from one place to another, but I'm not married to it. Ribbon or wheel architecture would work.
However tying us to the world somehow, the street stones would be ideal, maybe adding one to the end of our street and linking it to a dead end street, when clicked on it from our street it only goes to one stone, the one its assigned, when that stone is clicked on from Ur, it brings up a list of houses but only those assigned to it. To be added to a stone it costs img or to change which stone you are connected to, can only be connected to one stone at a time.
Having 2 street signs one for routes and one for neighbors, but have the neighbor one hold 10 (make it look more like a notepole though).
Also more than one New Home house may not be doable on the same street, they often took awhile to load, and that was only 1 house / Tower
Concerning Resource Routes, its plausible to raise the cost of img to add resources to front yards, therefore slowing down how easy it is to add items. i dont see the need to alter backyards, since its private and not as much could fit in the back to begin with. Could also alter vendor prices to if need be
Concerning lack of designs for New Housing, near the end we did get a bunch of new outside looks, bog, teepee, a ship, a bunch of stuff, Towers had a bunch of designs as well. Towers being boxy is perfectly fine IMO, houses not so much. Certain things were discussed basements, walls, balconies. I know it was said walls were being worked on, room divider types, windows, basements . Balconies existed the devs had some i recall the pics. New Housing inside and out were being worked on more options im sure will come in time.
Balcony
http://www.glitchthegame.com/snaps/PLI16FSFK2I91/33603-6aad87fb38/
And towers for Stores or other purposes were another + of New Housing
Also ppl being able to poison stuff on your street was temporary, later on ppl could not ( not sure if that was Old or New Housing though)
Only one house could be owned at a time - Old Housing - New as well obv
Cabinets were locked in New Housing, i cant remember if you could access them if you had Key Access though
Very few Old Houses had pig pens and chickens still free roamed, its part of why i kept the Treehouse for so long they got into everything they could touch. So animal sticks were a + overall IMO
OTOH, I don't think that Quarters were viable for large numbers of players. The Quarters were changed at least three times that I can recall yet they still really could not easily house all players. If the game is to succeed, many players will be needed and there is no good way to house all of them on public streets.
I started playing March 10, 2011. At that time there was a street sign on the main street to click on and you would get onto a housing street. Those were not "Quarters" but were similar. As more players came in, the Quarters were developed. Before any of that, during Alpha, the houses were out on the streets.
Here are a few images of streets that I have. Note the lack of storage and the standard furnishings. We could not add storage or furniture. Note the early Garden plot and how it was used. My first house was a Tree house.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bribling/sets/72157631108998930/
(of course they're probably going to have some sort of hybrid anyway but i just wanted to understand how people felt)