Shattered Kingdoms

Better than a book, how about help Sith pulls up the maps then the additional details.

Or an information point somewhere important, easy to find in game.

Helpfiles are more of an OOC nature, I feel maps should be an IC thing.


XXX studies the map carefully, before making his way to his destination.
rather then
XXX stops and thinks, suddenly realizing new information he had not discovered for himself.

I can see you must have put a lot of effort into expanding "qq moar noob" and giving it the veneer of an argument so I'll be kind in return and shoot it down. What you need to grasp is that I never claimed to be a newbie although I certainly am one compared to lots of people here. So just because I made a huge effort to map many areas, that doesn't mean I have a complete set of area maps and I won't expend too much energy into mapping the maze-like underground of Fort Tethos for example when I almost never need to go there.

Secondly, it's behaviours like yours that intimidate true newbies from posting on the forums to ask for improvements and since I still remember the experience of being one I don't mind advocating for them, especially since I find all these "get off my lawn" responses laughable. Problem?

But since it seems that you have already come to a rubbish conclusion about my intention and you respond in the time honoured SK-forums way of poisoning the well and using tu quoque type arguments let me reverse this a bit. What's your intention for jumping like a flea on every thread that suggests something new, shooting all the ideas down with pedantic half-trollish arguments and sucking up hard for the game to stay exactly as it is now? Are you following some tried and tested initiation rite to become a staff member? Don't try so hard.




Are they supposed to enjoy wandering around blindly and getting lost in the area for twenty minutes until they find it? I certainly didn't when I was trying to figure out the area back when I first encountered it. And what about the Exile map that's not even updated to current Exile? Terron? Maybe the newbie should look for the forge in the "open market" in Nerina huh? There's no map of Krychire or Kol's moot and this



has been there since I started playing. Want to inform us noobs how long has it been there?



I should probably just ignore you for -bad- trolling since I never said anything about the game dying and you're responding to things you never read as usual, but just in case you are honestly missing the point here it is again. SK is an enjoyable game despite its shortcomings like not having interior maps in the same way it has exterior maps right next to outdoor descriptions. Not having these maps increases the time to become familiar with the game to the point where you can act independently enough to enjoy it without asking for help every five minutes, and the time it takes to familiarise yourself with training or adventuring areas that can span several character lives. It also cuts down on the pervasive metagame phenomenon of characters who even though they just left the newbie school seem to know how to navigate even end-game areas.

Food for though. I'm willing to bet that probably no active alive characters right now can truthfully claim to have an unbroken chain of IC knowledge passing that stretches back to the characters that first figured out an area. If I just wanted to troll as you may think, I'd just create a priest and then spend my time reporting everyone that goes to the Wastelands, Iron Citadel, Cain Techt, Yggrithian Deeps etc. for breaking rule 2. about knowledge transfer between characters. That rule is being broken so consistently it's unenforceable. A troll would probably manage to cause total mayhem through just invoking the rule which could either cause selective enforcement of it that would be seen as terribly unjust by everyone or point out that the staff doesn't respond to reports of rule breaking. Do you even realise what you're arguing against?

I am generally supportive of easily-obtained in-game maps for starting cities, in addition to some outlying areas that would be common amongst the 99% of SK's population (aka- citizen NPCs, not player-characters). I am not generally supportive that they should be provided freely in the form of help files, but perhaps for sale in newbie zones/ in the starting cities themselves. I know this is lacking in Sith (which can be extremely confusing for some to navigate), and addressing it is on my long list of "things-to-do".

As for other places.... My roleplaying background is in tabletop dice-throwing D&D and AD&D. I am a firm believer that part of role-play is exploring new areas. I am a firm opponent of handing every success to a player on a silver platter. If you're playing a character who is exploring an area that is new to him/her, then maybe it would be a good idea to grab a piece of paper and a pen, or a piece of graph paper and a pencil, and map this area as you explore it. If you don't want to do that, it's fine, you don't have to. But if you lose your bearings, maybe it's okay to get lost or to spend some time wandering in circles. There's nothing wrong with roleplaying your character getting lost.

Another alternative for certain areas is to make in-game maps for these places existent but more challenging to obtain, or somehow tied into various quests. But it shouldn't replace your character's personal responsibility to keep track of where (s)he is going.

This could be an interesting feature to add someday. If I understand correctly, in this comment you're suggesting a VISUAL representation of the "exits" command, basically, correct? An interior map on the left not unlike the "underground" maps, where you can visually see 1-3 room exits around you? Limitations would have to include "blacking out" rooms you haven't physically walked into yet, and rooms you cannot see through closed doors.

I can appreciate the suggestion, but I wouldn't expect it to be implemented any time soon, really just due to competing priorities that I think would outweigh this one.

Without advocating the apparent hostility in this conversation (share the love, people), this is actually a useful response.

Nobody is questioning that there is a lot of work to be done for the game. Nobody is questioning the benefit of helping out n00bs as they enter and discover this brave new world of Shattered Kingdoms. Obviously the immstaff agrees and supports this effort, as made obvious when the above guides forum was opened up and made available for contribution.

And yet in the months since this was opened, to my knowledge, not a single player, n00b or veteran, has built or written or submitted anything to contribute to that idea. This is a place where players can contribute, and "DO" something if they think it's important/helpful. So the lack of response to it here in the forums suggest to me that it isn't really THAT great of a priority for the player base, or they would have done it by now. It makes me think this subject falls into the category of "Gee, this would be nice -- for somebody ELSE to do." Doing that gives that somebody else the right to prioritize it how they see fit. Which means it might not happen in the time frame you desire.


PS- sorry for the triple-post

I (and probably many others others) would contribute, since I have every single square inch of Pyrathia mapped, but I am simply not willing to spend the time it will take to format my maps in a way that complies with the rules for the Area Guides forum. I may at some point simply publish it online via my own webpage.

Exploring with pen and paper can be incredibly frustrating, not just to the mapper but to the people helping him as well. It's a very slow, tedious process that only becomes worse if you add up all the high level NPCs in various areas. I've been a part of various missions to recover corpses or depetrify characters and sometimes the only saving factor for them was a player who had metagame memories of the place and could navigate the area easily.

That becomes completely ridiculous when it comes to things like paladins knowing the exact layout of the tower of necromancy without ever having been there. What's your position on area memory?



That's pretty much the thought but more of an exact duplicate of the outdoor map. If someone can see that there's a valley beyond a mountain while he's on the other side of it, I don't think we need any limitations indoors either. I'd prefer an xp cap before the entire area is revealed to you but I suppose that if it was implemented as a gradually revealed map as you explore, it would still serve the purpose well.



Having extensive knowledge of an area to the point where you can write a guide about it counts as significant OOC knowledge that becomes an advantage when other people lack it. Especially so for areas that are hard to reach and require parties of characters. It's natural that people wouldn't want to share their knowledge and lose advantages versus "noobs". If the map of every area was part of the descriptions, the advantages of people who have maps versus the people who don't would vanish.

I haven't taken the time to read through all of this yet. But I will comment by saying this:
The easiest way to learn an area is to ask for help. Find someone who knows their way around and meet them in a familiar place. Have the vet follow the noob while the vet tells them which direction to go in every room. It's as simple as that and I feel like more people should do this. It only takes once most of the time. Muscle memory.

You're missing an extremely important point here, which is what Trosis is gesturing towards in the previous post.

You learn areas by spending time learning them. You learn HOW TO LEARN areas by spending time learning areas. Will maps help many people learn specific areas? Certainly. But making a map that is well formatted that fits in game that everyone can understand takes a lot of time. Most people don't even make maps. I can navigate throughout probably 80% of the areas in SK very easily, but I've only physically mapped one area, and that was because it was a maze where the exits didn't link to each other. The only other map I've ever used is the worldmap on the site (Which I definitely would point any and all newbies towards). Every other place I have learned, I learned myself by wandering around and figuring out how it was structured. That said, there are still areas that I don't have completely mapped out in my head, including the city of Teron, because screw that place. I still get lost in some side streets of that place, and I'm actually okay with that.

Ultimately, you claim that I should make maps that other people can use, and that the only reason I'm not doing it is because it grants me a gameplay advantage that I'm not willing to give up. You're completely wrong. Making a map for ANY area of the game for me would require a whole lot of work, and in my eyes, would actually -detract- from the game rather than add to it, with the only exceptions being starting cities, and oh look, there are already maps for starting cities. SK is a game you're meant to experience in-game. When I play SK, I'm always glad to help other people who are looking for places in-character, and I'm always glad to point low-level characters in what I feel is the right direction for them to level or gain equipment if they want it, or bring high-level characters along with me to places. But mapping out areas completely beyond what's already done? Meh. Many of my favorite memories of SK involve learning a place that I don't already know. I don't want to spend hours of my time doing something that removes the need for one of the aspects of the game I truly enjoy.


That said, one character concept that I always wanted to try out was a cartographer who would fly around, map areas in-game and make maps on parchments in-game, and provide them to characters. That would be fun to do. And hey, if you want to make maps for indoor areas, -no one is stopping you.- But don't get self-righteous and cry out in anguish about how all the vets have all the maps and all the infos and they're not sharing it just because they like lording over all the non-map having peasants. A lot of people just know places without maps because they played the game. Adding in-door maps for every area will certainly lower the gap between the "noobs" and the "vets", yes, but it will also destroy a lot of of the appeal of SK: A huge world that you can explore and learn for yourself. This isn't World of Warcraft, there is no website dedicated towards the dissemination of every piece of data about it. You are supposed to log into the game and play it.


Without knowledge of the event in question, the Tower of Necromancy is literally eight rooms. You ought to be able to navigate around in that place without getting lost.