Placing Zonelines for Seastorms and Seaswords

L

luceri

Dalayan Beginner
It's a huge downer to be working on main quest for hours and hours, finally finish finding all the npc's and learning about Dalaya just to get to the docks and have the boats not work so you can't talk to the npc required in seastorm or seaswords :\ .

So basically I'm wondering if you can place zonelines on the edges of the map waters for when the boats go down and perhaps place where the zonelines are via a line on the maps of the zones for the next mappack release. The boats being down seems to be a common occurance around the times I play (12am-5am GMT) and a lot of the time a GM isn't around to reboot all the boat zones. Rebooting the boat zones itself is a hassle due to south newport understandably if it's intentional to just let them sit not working for a while.

I don't think this would be overpowering in any way really, the only time you'd save time is if you're a bard or using scale of wolf (perhaps a positive here to aleviate some tedium to donators). if you can't levitate it'd take you an eon to get across the zone seas, but at least you have the option.

If you'd be willing to do this I'd be more than happy to assist by acquiring locs for where the zone points could be.

Thanks for taking the time to read.
 
I've always thought it's a good idea, even though there's few chances it'd ever happen. Maybe adding a few sharks , a terrifying sea serpent to the sea would be a nice way to make the trip difficult enough ?
 
I like this idea.
I'm cheap. Really cheap. Too cheap in most cases to pay for a port, when I can just run my little self there. But when boats are down, that isn't always an option, espescially when dealing with Erudin. Most of the other places I can use the tornado portals to get there, but with no boats and no tornado portal, getting to Erudin, or any of the nearby zones, requires a druid or a wiz, and I have to shell out some plat.
I agree that having the option of getting a SoW and a Lev and running across the oceans, or for despirate folks, swimming, would not be overpowering in any way. In fact, its a lousy second choice, but for tightwads like myself, its an option I would much prefer.
And as for difficult... itsn't a boat ride already difficult enough? (i.e. will the boat dump you in the water at the ZL, or will the boats even be working) I don't think adding any horendous sea creatures is really necessary.
 
And as for difficult... itsn't a boat ride already difficult enough? (i.e. will the boat dump you in the water at the ZL, or will the boats even be working)
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This isn't what I call "difficult", of course shit happens, because Wiz & co change things and sometimes a tiny thing mess up with a whole (like the recent crash for boats in all zones) but well it's casual,and not meant to prevent people from going to the erudian isles. Don't bring coding issues in the matter, I never experienced that much shit with boats, so please don't assume it's a pain in the ass for everyone. This merely gives another interest to lvl a wiz/druid alt.

If we consider the boats to be working normally (yeah I know I studied economics, and in this world all hypothesises are perfect :p ) the idea to enable a zoneline could bring a great advantage to druids shamans bards and at a lesser scale to beasties and rangers. That's why adding mobs that would "patrol" with SoW on storm sea , sea of swords and the water areas of Freeport, Newport , Erudin and Goblinskull could be a solution ; but what level would they be ? what kind of mobs ? ( I said sea serpents like in Ultima but they don't exist in this game I think) I have no more arguement in that way, except they should be flying and/or swimming Oh seahorses for example !
So *shrug*
 
Even without sow or selo's i would rather be able to swim, take all day, but be able to get to someplace rather then sit on the dock waiting for the boats to work.
 
Seems simple to me. Add a portal tornado in Erudin. Maybe somewhere near the spires in Mistwoods or something.

Needed, easier, and would widely be appreciated I am betting.
 
I've read somewhere in another forum that wiz never intended easy travel to erudin becuase it has always been isolated from the rest of the world, Kinda like the lore says it was isolated and not easy to travel to. So i dont think a portal is going to get put in place. Swimming would be a decent option though.

Hace 65 Beastlord(retired)
Mythryn 65 Enchanter
 
No. If you could swim through the zone lines Erudin would be easier to get to from Newport than Halas. It would no longer be anywhere near "Remote."
 
Allielyn said:
No. If you could swim through the zone lines Erudin would be easier to get to from Newport than Halas. It would no longer be anywhere near "Remote."
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True, but that's not as valid for Sea of Swords, which is huge enough that even running/swimming across it would be a huge timesink.

I know the staff doesn't like "hack fixes" but a possibility occurred to me while reading this thread. Example: In case of boat downage, a portal (similar to the runetoken ones) could be left open in some corner of the water in Goblinskull that poofs you into the NE corner of Sea of Swords. There's a similar portal in the NW corner that poofs you to the edge of the zone in East Freeport. Likewise there's a separate set of portals for going in the other direction.

This provides a viable way of getting across if boats are down or you just missed one, but doesn't trivialize the time it takes to get across because boats are faster than running for everyone except bards, and swimming is much slower. It also uses something already in the game, although I have no idea if the portal coding can be modified to work this way (i.e. have separate portals with only 1 destination) or how difficult that modification would be.

Also, placing the GSM-->SoS portal in the NE might make those nearby islands with the quest NPCs more accessible than the staff wants (i.e. it might be faster to run than wait for a boat), so maybe it could go in the SE. Likewise for the FP-->SoS portal and the Island of the Voices.

On the other hand, since you can already run from GSM to the Dawn portal and then from Darkwoods to Freeport, maybe just portals from each dock into SoS and then a one-way portal to either side could be considered (maybe to Athica as that's already the default). The exit would have to be somewhere in the middle of SoS for it to not become an easy shortcut.

I do agree that any plan like this would be a bad plan for Sea of Storms, and as much as I would like an easy portal to Erudin, I understand why there isn't one.
 
Freeport boats are down again today and I once again can't finish the next step in the main quest (Newport - Erudin boats seem to be working however). Honestly i'm not all too concerned about getting to Erudin; if that's the main concern and reason for not doing this just leave out the zoneline to erudin:storm sea and put in the zonelines so people can do the main quest from newport. I don't see how this is a "hack fix" or makes it easier to get to Erudin - the boats go the same routes and are faster than a random character with SoW and levitate. If we're talking logical arguments the boats have the same flaws this suggestion does really.
 
Was just brainstorming another idea and relevant to portals. Random location portals like Llanoldar suggested could work maybe just set them up like the nexus portals were on live (you stand around them and they go off once every 10 mins, you get ported if you have an item the npc gives you in inventory, or ammo slot in our scenario. Makes it so you need to spend time waiting like the boats so it doesn't trivialize them).

The thought i had was to put one of these in the Newport casters' guild to teleports you from newport casters guild to erudin casters guild, another from erudin casters guild to seaswords island, another from erudin casters' guild to seastorm island. This way you have the main caster/wizard race holding the power of the portals so logically it makes sense within the Dalaya world. And you can also teleport from newport-erudin when the boats aren't working along with having access to seaswords/seastorms. Still takes 10 minutes for the portals to go off. Maybe make the lore so that they consume all the wizards' energy in Erudin so it's very difficult for them to power the gates and they can't just spam them all day (fits in with Erudin being hard to get to still). Another side benefit from this may be that people would be more interested in using Erudin as a town; it's probably the coolest old world city aside from kelethin and it's just not used by players much at all unfortunately due to location.


Main issue i foresee with this is that the Newport casters' guild is already tight quarters. To remedy you could use the space behind the casters' guild where that homeless guy npc spawns and just move him elsewhere. Another is that this is just an elongated and complex fix that putting simple zone lines which would take 20 minutes to do would solve the problem of as well (in my opinion, at least).
 
A portal for sea of storms would definitely be nice zl or no zl, tmaps regularly show up in this zone and if boats are down...well you're group is pretty screwed. Add this to the problem if you had a pickup group, and you just happened to let your mt open the map...well goodbye map for a while.
 
A portal for sea of storms would definitely be nice zl or no zl, tmaps regularly show up in this zone and if boats are down...well you're group is pretty screwed. Add this to the problem if you had a pickup group, and you just happened to let your mt open the map...well goodbye map for a while.
 
Translocators comming back wouldn't fix the problem considering the original posters mq issues. Possibly change where that particular npc is and the text on the mysterious summons note. But the quest is so heavily boat involved to begin with that just glosses over the main issues with them. A portal to sea of storms? wtf...

Probably not possible - when boats are down/despawned whatever happens a translocator should spawn and be able to tl you to the 1 of the 4 main docks. So instead of having to wait and ask /ooc about boats you would know if the tler was up boats down ect. It would let people get around while all the problems with boats are worked out.
 
That'd be the perfect solution but the huge problem is that it sounds like it'd take far too much coding to be worth the bother. Wiz would probably have to find a way to get the server to realize that the boats are no longer zoning for some reason (they just sit there, they don't despawn), and then code enough logic for the server to spawn and despawn the teleporter npc's. sounds simple but really the way the database and server is setup it's not (to my knowledge at least). Just putting the regular teleportation spheres in with timers to go off every 10-15 mins would be a lot easier since you can just have an invisible untargetable/unharmable NPC sit in the middle of it and cast an AE spell every 15 mins which can be done in just a few minutes via writing a simple quest file for the npc.
 
I've been working on a solution for boats going down for the last few weeks, hopefully it shouldn't be an issue anymore soon.
 
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