What this really could use is some.. events? Some grit?
Just have some stuff happen to give it some character and presence- right now it just sorta, well, came out of nowhere. The situation feels somewhat unreal, sterile.
Build itself looks okayish, haven't really seen it - But, to be a city, it needs some texture, some feel. Explain some of the NPC backing, have some stuff happen.
Or, can let it be more of a transit hub, a landing kind of thing, but if that's the case, again, needs to have the texture that implies.
(I'm not only answering to you Nael, it's just that you were the last one in the thread ^^)
Come on guys you know how much work something like that is. It's hard to coordinate building, builds contests, maintenance, moderation, events, player complaints and feedback and all that jazz. Especially with that new map, something that haven't been done in a while and, as far as I know, never in these conditions (new map with a complete brand new city at the same time -- last time PS was mainly ported in!).
So yeah, we could have done it better, we could have allotted more time to do some events, to make the builds transition from tents to wood, to stone, and add docks, and then the tavern, and change over time... But all that is time consuming. Every step added to make a transition smoother and have the actual city being built from scratch to something big and wonderful like we'd all dream of, adds a significant amount of work (things have to be built multiple times, ported multiple times, with multiple events probably too?).
We as staff are already trying to juggle between the time we can allocate to do our staff work, which encompass building this, and all the other stuff that needs to be done. And real life too.
We're trying to make things move forward, and sorry if we're not being perfect and are making mistakes in our desire to please you all, the community.
We had to do something about the ports, which quite frankly were starting to be needed quite a lot, to add a way to have links between the spawn point and all of your cities.
And not something temporary that would have to be redone all over again several times, because creating structures, making the ports, copying and pasting, changing things and having to remake the ports again and again, that's a lot of time in the end.
We made the choice to have a basic layout for the city with the importants buildings to be ported in. Because that's the most convenient and less time-consuming to do for us. And before complaining, go have a look: it's just some docks, an inn, some walls, and a few houses to make the whole bunch actually fit nicely together. That's far from being a city, as Anti said, it's merely a street!
With that out of the way, we can actually create links between the spawn and the other regions, and that will give us more time (because most of your are building your stuff, anyway ^^) to finish and post all the information regarding the evolution of spawn, which,
we're saying that again,
will be player led, at least partly depending on the welcome you give to these mechanics and how they are liked.
You as players will personnally take decisions on the builds you want to have built.
So no, we're not building the entire spawn city, we're not announcing things that we're not going to carry out as we announced them, we're not lying voluntarily or involuntarily.
We're just kickstarting the process, because let's face it, if staff doesn't give an impulse and rules/directions to work with/guidelines for something like that, we'd still be at the same point in several months (because most of you are already busy building your own regions, and also because there's absolutely no way of having this project be completely player-led -- time, motivation, the amount of work, the complaints from others because it has to be neutral, having a player or even a group of players leading it would lead to accusations of being biased and questionning on the neutrality, rivalries, players bickering, etc etc etc...).
There has to be some kind of framework to help us help you make the spawn city our server deserve.
So please hold your horses, and forgive the mistakes we're making on the way!
- ptiber
