Posted by Eternalhaze 4 years ago
As a player since betas, I can't express how truly disappointed I am that these new portal changes actually went live despite numerous veterans expressing concerns. I waited to give it a shot with an open mind but I can truly say that these portal lock changes are terrible for the game.
I get the reasoning behind it - you want people to live in the zones they own and make it harder to travel elsewhere but all you've done really is restrict content in the end by deciding who you can play with based on where people live. It also SEEMS like a good idea with F2P coming in giving room for new guilds to establish themselves in a royal city/blackzone, but once the numbers fade and we hit another saddle point players will realize how awful this portal lock system truly is. This system would make sense if the blackzone wasn't linear and/or there's more than a few t8 zones, but that's not how the current map layout is.
Not only does this change give massive benefit to the dominant Mercia guilds, but it actively stifles competition in an already drought ridden gvg scene. I realize the new season hasn't started yet, but I highly doubt any massive change happens that topples the current status quo in Mercia. If a small Anglian based guild wants to do a t8 random dungeon, do you honestly expect them to run two continents for twenty minutes before they can even attempt to?
The real issues that the game has is in the gvg scene, not portal locks. It truly baffles me that this change went forward, especially considering that there's a proposal of a new map layout. It doesn't make sense with the current map, yet it was pushed forward anyways. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but give it time - most veterans that aren't already living in Mercia will come to see that this is a bad change overall. Who knows, maybe the plan was to do it for a season knowing it's bad and then change the map to fix it but if that's the case I might just have to sit this one out as I'm sure SBI can do without my sub with all the fresh meat from F2P. Posted by Korn 4 years ago (Source)
I think your all idiots... They've said this is the first change, the new map is coming and clearly the cities will be optimised for it.
coming in Q4 of this year. April is the start of Q2. We have therefore 6-9 months of this shit show.
Exactly.
The point is why go with new portal locks before the new map? It doesn't make any sense with a linear blackzone map layout which is what we currently have. We have to deal with this moronic change for the better part of a year, it's not as simple as saying "oh it'll be better once new map comes" when it affects every aspect of the end game content.
The goal behind the centralized Caerleon change back in the day was to make all parts of the Outlands easily accessible. The clear downside of this - one of the most criticized points of the game - was that this leads to royal cities losing relevance and to high degrees of power projection for single large alliances.
With the announced map rework, we intend to change this. However, from past experience (in particular, Beta 2, where had a very large spread out map without fast travel options) we know that there is a trade-off between "accessibility" and "locality" (i.e. how much location matters in the game). It's easily possible to go to far in one direction (centralized Caerleon structure) or the other (Beta 2 map). We want to make sure that reworked Outland map is a success, so we must be able to assess how much a more local map design impacts the game. The current portal changes make the game world more local and allow us to assess the effects resulting from that, based on our own data and based on player feedback. Right now, it's definitely too early to tell, but a couple of weeks down the road, in particular after the next invasion day, we'll be able to make first assessment and will revise / adapt our strategy going forward based on that.
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