The point of the culture districts is that they combine several groups into an umbrella area, instead of having a single isolated "Etosian district" that only 2 players have characters for. Neighborhoods can work (Petalcourt) but need a central unifying theme that players can leave and enter on a whim without losing activity. And there can always been racial areas like the Polorc that exist outside the city limits. In fact I'd say the Countryside Estates work well for these experimental groups. This is the Ailor capital, and should reflect an Ailor theme. Hence the
The biggest point I have to make is that I much preferred the previous “Main Street” setup that was present in Regalia v4. Having a centralized role play hub that wasn’t far from spawn seemed to generate plenty of RP. Business such as the Teahaus, which a character of mine used to work at consistently, seemed to receive a good amount of enjoyable RP. However, the new location it was placed in after the update subsequently resulted in a serious lack of RP. I haven’t been back in a while so I don’t know how activity is today, but I can only assume it isn’t as good as it used to used to be. Nowadays I think the city’s layout is too widespread, resulting in entire areas that never received consistent RP and are typically deserted all together.
I second this, “make the streets thinner idea,” that a few people have suggested prior. That being said, I’m in love with a double property I have at the moment albeit I haven’t used it at all in rp yet.
Most of what I was going to suggest has been mentioned - maybe condense things a bit, include cultural spaces, etc. I did really enjoy the Clickers, even though I never saw them ICly, because (for me, at least) there was a real sense of danger and mystery. It was fun to have everyone together in one or two places and trying to figure out what to do to deal with the crisis, especially with characters your character wouldn't ordinarily cross paths with. I don't know how feasible it is, but something that bothers me is that like 75% of players will be hidden on the map, making it hard to figure out what areas are active. I understand why players may want their characters to be hidden sometimes (if they're OOC, hiding ICly, etc), but I feel like sometimes players will hop over from Factions or from a hidden character and forget that they're hidden. If there was some way for /dynmap show to be the default when logging into Regalia, and then able to be hidden from there, I wonder if that might help. Or not, I don't know.
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Deliberate and incremental change is incredibly important. A small, but well thought out adjustment can have more impact than a radical but slapdash one. Player retention must become a major priority. Massive has a steep learning curve, and new players often have no idea how to get started. Increasing the active player base can help alleviate sparse RP through sheer volume.
I am very late in seeing this thread so I'm not even sure if my input will be seen. I'll keep my thoughts short and sweet, though my opinions on the topic run very deep. Downscaling, that is bringing the roleplay hotspots closer together, is necessary. The streets are too wide and too long, making it hard to navigate. The quality of the different districts is not consistent. There are some areas that are completely unfinished and abandoned. It's impossible to know if there is roleplay on the other side of the city to you, and very little happens between that. The return of a Main Street would be beneficial. Bring the main 'attractions' closer together - The Willow, hospital, Greygate, Hidden Dragon, etc. Encourage bouncing between. Have less application-based shop buildings, but ensure they remain active/decorated. 'Backstory' shops should still be run out of rentable buildings. Treat the Golden Willow more like the old Dark Lady Emporium. Bring back rentable bars within it, for different groups to apply for. Give each of the different bars a different 'vibe' to allow some differentiation. Basically, make the Willow more of a hub and less of a basic bitch homely tavern. Separate player housing from public buildings / roleplay hotspots. While it might be more realistic for them to be intertwined, it's not beneficial for roleplay. Most people who want house roleplay want it private, away from the activity, not near it. DON'T EXPAND DISTRICTS/BUILDINGS ON A WHIM! An ongoing problem of adding things to try and fix a short-term problem, like a boon of racial activity. This saturates Regalia and progressively makes hotspots further and further away. My personal fix suggestion: Remove all public buildings from Old Town and New Town. Move it all to the central isle of Regalia, with Golden Willow at the centre and Main Street in front of it, like V4. Spawn should be away from the Willow, ideally at the front of Main Street. Put the 'poor district' or sewer entrances behind the Willow somewhere, rather than on one of the offshoot isles, to encourage those players to have to pass through the hotspots. Keep the offshoot isles be solely for player housing and private roleplay spots.
Personally, I feel like the big killer of the Willow is the lack of consistent staffing there. Really the only big thing driving the Willow is the noble lounge, and there's no one underneath. I'm in the Willow discord as well as the Nook discord, and there is such a big difference- the Willow discord is inactive and barely has any talk, pings, activity, etc- meanwhile, the Nook discord has constant staff pings, a thriving general chat, and even though half the people mute it, a lot of people check that chat almost as much as they check RP Com. In order to save the Willow, maybe put in new management or a community that can invest there. I think that capping the houses is a good idea (maybe 2 per person to allow separate characters?), but I'd like to keep the Supremium "you get one more house" feature- it really incentivizes giving back to the community via donating, and it's a pretty good perk. In Regalia, I get lost really easily. I can't find my way around v5 to save my life, and only know how to get to specific places (Nook, Old Gods temple, Teahaus) because it's so big and so maze-like. Having more IC signs, for instance, or other ways to tell where you are besides running into rented houses to get an idea of what district you're at, would really be a lifesaver.
I see the issue as the following: Massivecraft's options keeps growing (housing, characters, etc) however the playerbase hasn't grown, it's stagnated. Back when V5 came out Regalia was a decent size for a server that gets around ~200 people online during peek hours, however if you look at the current dynmap of regalia, you see new districts (Estonian, Orc) and districts like the Yanar that got an expansion, but rather than new people renting the new spaces, it's just the same people who have been on the server for some time. I don't remember which staff member said this but it seams that for every ten new players that come to the server only one stays longer than a month, and that new person replaces a member who left. As long as Massivecraft only has ~200 people online during peek hours growth can't happen in things like housing or new districts, as they only get used for a short time and then are left to decay with occasional activity (1920AU and Gull are the best examples of this). My solution? Keep everything close together and cut back on how many districts and houses are in regalia, because with each new expansion and districts bring us closer to the same situation with Regalia V4 where only a few places are active and the rest is a ghost town. Back then the only major things active were the willow, main street business, the neutral district, and the slum emporium. Go to say the merchant district, nelfin isles, harbor, or ithanian district and they were empty 95% of the time. Edit: adding tangents I want to go on. Short since they're just on my mind and nothing else, may add more in the future: -event antags aren't good (most of the time). They're often meme tier because they don't effect life in regalia all that much if at all. -People tend to have way too many characters while only maining 1-2. I'm not going to say names, but this person is the best example of this. They only main 2 character, but have several other characters they use maybe once or twice a year for each of the other characters. Lore staff has to take time away to review the sheets, and that time could be better spent making progression events or arc. tl;dr stop making so many character that are rarely used so lore staff can have more time to make progressions instead of having to review character sheets.
After reading all the replies to this thread so far, it's my opinion that Massivecraft Roleplay has two fundamental issues. The roleplay player base has not seen any significant population growth and has been steadily shrinking for quite some time now. Because of this lower population player base, the layout of Regalia v5 as a whole no longer adequately caters to the roleplay community. There are a lot of really great suggestions on this thread that I think would work to help improve roleplay, but even some of the more mundane ones like making housing districts smaller, decreasing the widths of the roads, and moving RP hubs closer together would require a lot of world editing and follow through from World Staff to produce some cohesive results. With that in mind, it may be time to stop considering solutions for how to fix Regalia v5 and start discussing the necessary changes that need to be made in lieu of a Regalia v6. I'm going to produce an expanded explanation in regards to what changes I think would need to occur for a Regalia v6 to thrive, but that was not the original intention of this forum post and I don't want to derail discussion away from the original topic.
Demolish or relocate buildings in the Imperial Isle which are never used, such as the Cathedral, the Assembly Hall and old Howlester Estate and replace them with the rp hotspots that everyone goes to. This would centralise the roleplay and make it a lot easier to find. Higher foot traffic in a controlled area might even revive old businesses. As for combining all the bars, I agree with this, but in such a case it would be necessary to ensure that the remaining bar is accessible to everyone; Commoners, Criminals and Nobles alike, otherwise it wont achieve what it is being set out to do. Get rid of Crookback and just make it so that guards cant go into Old-Town. Crookback is the biggest offender when it comes to dividing roleplay, because it drags players from the city all the way to the opposite end of the map.
I basically agree with most of what has been said, but I'll say it again since that's what this thread is for: -Too many houses, most of them are inactive. I have no idea what people /do/ with their houses, but I'm starting to suspect it's usually nothing. Reducing the amount of houses and general size of Regalia should, in theory, create more rp. -Regalia can be a maze. Almost a year in, New Town continues to intimidate me with a lack of tp to a few areas I want to go, and a perceived lack of places to get rp. Throwing in some noble estates in new town would be neat. -High learning curve. Rp isn't super easy to get into, and our tutorials are outdated and inadequate. -Redblock, Guilds, Storywebs, etc. These things are fun, but seem to just vanish off the face of the earth shortly after they show up. I think regular players should be able to be minor npcs for these special events if they can prove they're good at being npcs. Limiting special event characters to staff reduces the creativity of these systems because they lack manpower. -(more than 30 words oops) IC Progressions. I was not around for Anahera, or Deathlings, Rikkira, etc. but I always hear such cool stories about them. While lore-wise it's weird for the greatest city on Aloria to get occupied every year, it creates great stories. Some of the most fun rp I've had on the server was the "lockdown" rp shortly after the clickers invaded. I loved hiding in defensive forts knowing that if the clickers really came, I'd never make it. The Greygate refugee rp was also super cool, with everyone from nobles to criminals banding together to be scared. And then... for the normal, casual player, the clickers just... left. These events give everyone something interesting to do for a while and break up the routine. -Oh, and Crookback. I love Crookback. But, it's kind of like a better Old Town, if you operate under the assumption Old Town is the place full of crime. So merging the Old Town districts into New Town and just making... Town. That might help.
I love Regalia, and I agree that the "one centered roleplay hub" has to stay. Creating different roleplay hubs would just make the problem worse and spread out players even further. I think the solution, unfortunately, is to make Regalia much, much smaller. I know how much work you've put on building the city and all its districts, and I think it looks absolutely stunning, but it's massive. It's way too big, and especially with the decrease of active people it just adds to the "desert/dead" look. Create a much smaller, accessible map.
For what it's worth, if it did come to making a V6, you could just save V5 as is until a later date in which the playerbase has increased to enough users to fill the city.
Go back to V4 style Main Street. Make it much smaller, maybe 100 houses or something. or delete regalia and move to a completely different city.
Hey y'all, I had to ghost-delete the thread for a while because too much info was being dumped on it. I had set up some basic guidelines at the beginning of the thread to keep it organized, but these were kind of just completely ignored, and I thought it was kind of disrespectful to the moderation of the discussion. The actual intent of the thread quickly trailed out of control, and I can't solve 20 problems in 1 day. We took the commentary to the Staff meeting. I guess it should be said I did say in the original post that this was not a staff thread, and that it was mostly a personal hot take. That being said, we pitched numerous ideas during the staff meeting and concluded the following: Regalia's rework was too ambitious. But we can't immediately solve that right now, so we decided the following: The Imperial Isle will be restructured and reworked new spawn/new tavern, congested businesses, new housing, smaller streets, all that stuff. The idea here is that a complete rebuilding of the city, or district by district update is too intensive, we can't afford it right now, especially since the world staff plugins are broken due to the 1.13 update. This is a bandaid that will "have to do" until FAWE is back and we can actually do worldedit properly again. When that time arises, we have a roughly nebulous understanding of what we're going to do: Move Crookbackbay to be adjecent the city as an "undercity" so that you can move between them, but keep them seperated by walls, and keep Crookback and the sewers distant and dangerous enough so it doesn't become part of the City. Add verticality to the city and playing with better design, more narrow streets and push all buildings closer together. Seriously scale down stupidly large buildings like the cathedral to small chapels and reduce on dead clutter buildings. We considered destroying the city entirely, but it was deemed too risky of an endeavor. We have too little tech and world staff to pump out a new city, so we had to go with the update process. With regards to the concern of the server activities, we're starting a heavy progression event focus for the server story. We quickly rushed out the Conduit event last weekend, which was a means to "close off ongoing storylines" so we could focus on the remaining part of the clickers, which is going to get kickstarted into full drive next weekend. Following that event. @birdsfoot violet brought up in staff meetings that we need to work more on facilitating a system for mass-scale combat, so we're working on that. If you in the meantime have ideas on how to do combat roleplay or ability rp that involves 30-50 players, please send your suggestions to birdsfoot. This wasn't meant to be a staff policy thread. But I guess it sort of became one because the players wanted it to be one. So there's work for us to be done.
