Shattered Kingdoms

Indoor maps for cities and areas would vastly reduce the required starting "knowledge" to play the game. There are areas that are too complex to casually remember without actual maps, and that's not always proportionate to their importance. There's no use memorising complicated areas that you may only need to visit five or ten times at most during the life of a character.

I use in-game references to give people the global overview necessary to understand the concepts of cities.

Sith'a'niel is in a tree, so it has circle shapes. Exile is an engineered, planned city: it has quarters and plainly intersecting streets. Menegroth is an old city with two or three distinct ideological centers hinting at the historical class disparity in the city. These fluff things all help to give people the hunches and general feelings that allow one to have that mental map necessary to navigate an area.

In other words, I find that communicating the "gist" of an area often goes a long way to helping someone new nagivate it. Other kinds of areas are the same way.

There already are online maps for the starting cities.

Maps of other places would be pretty lousy and detract from the exploratory nature of SK.

We have an entire area guide forum, too, for just about any place you could want to document.

It's entertaining how anti-progressive some players can be around here. Even tiny muds have indoor maps as a standard feature and it doesn't detract from anything other than stumbling about the same small maze-like area like an idiot for half an hour just because you're trying to find the food shop. Let's see the solutions from the "community".



Even Lazeran can do a better job than that.



This just shows again a complete inability to consider other players. You learned the areas progressively as more were added over time, not the lot of them right away. People who enter the game now are faced with far more work than you ever had to deal with.

Mapping and routes are close to being the most popular OOC knowledge traded outside the game and transferred between characters. You've grown up in Aghelia and you're just a sixteen year old human that just got out of the gauntlet but somehow you know that in a specific street in Menegroth they sell strength trinkets and you know exactly how to get there? Rubbish. The most I've seen people "forget" from past characters is specialist class knowledge and that's usually to further player anonymity, since pretty much everyone that does know how to get weapon X from area Y knows exactly how and where to get it and they never seem to forget that on any character.

If the "exploratory" nature of SK is forcing people to map areas with mapping modules or on paper to reuse the knowledge on later characters, that's pure metagaming and it leads to metagaming behaviours. Exploration should be about what's in this particular area, what things you can find, what the area actually looks like as far as descriptions and background go and not trying to find the exit for twenty minutes. Indoor maps solve the last problem while aiding proper exploration.

Except that you aren't a newbie asking where to repair your stuff in Menegroth or Sith'a'niel. You're just being argumentative on the forums even though there's already a perfectly fine answer for the hypothetical questions that you're posing and that no one else is asking.

If someone is going to quit the game because they aren't willing to take the time to figure out that the forge in Sith'a'niel is probably on the floor labeled MARKET BOUGH, they they're probably not going to enjoy the rest of the game.

But hey man, if the game is dying because of there not being enough maps, and you want to go ahead and make visual maps, there's an area guides forum for that. Why don't you get to work instead of demanding that other people do it?

This has been presented before, but never really took off. I imagine it would take quite some time to change all the room descriptions but what I had in mind was something like this.

Normally a room would look like this:


But with the exits built into the description similar to wilderness rooms, you end up with this:



I don't have access to the correct font that would make it look better but you get the idea.

Shoot, I don't think I definitively figured out where the forge in Sithaniel was until about a week ago. I think it took me a week after moving to Menegroth to figure out where the bank was. Longer to figure out where the darn pet shop was (I finally had someone show me).

In all seriousness, I agree in-game maps of starter cities, that at least showed the basics, would go a long way to help newbs out. I think it took me a couple weeks just to figure out the fastest way to get in and out of Sithaniel, which is sadly not a joke. Someone had to tell me there was a staircase just north of the inn, to which I replied, "But it only takes you down to the temples," at which point they thankfully showed me you stopped and turned halfway down without too much ridicule.

And yes, I agree you could put them on the forums, and that's not a bad idea, but as a recent (and someone still trying to get away from the title of) newb, I didn't check the forums for at least a couple weeks if not a month after I started playing. At that point I'd decided I liked the game enough to stick around a bit. And even then, I posted a question about rogues and got at least one snide remark about how I should play a different class.

I did look at the maps on the website pretty quickly, and they gave me an IDEA as to the layout of the city and a few high points, but was generally dissatisfied with their ability to get me from one place to the other. This world is much, much larger than MUDs I've played in the past. The cities are more unique. Even though that's a wonderful thing, it's a bit daunting that first day you log on and are just trying to figure out if you are interested in sticking around.

EDIT: I do think jreid's suggestion would certainly be useful for helping new players visualize their surroundings in a city or small area. Which is at least something.

It wouldn't be too hard to write up some maps for the main cities and distribute them in book form or something from the recall inn and/or newbie zone.
I'll even offer to make a few if there is a spare vnum and one of the imms want to implement them.

I'll take you up on that. Send me a PM and we can started.