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Ekcin

Xanadu rift geographic bias

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As long as I am playing there has not been a single rift north of Xanadu equator. Most are in the southern, few in more central southern regions. This is a major annoyance for everyone living in the north. I have no idea how rift locations are selected and what may  be the reason of that imbalance.

 

Admittedly, some northern or northeastern spots may be hard to reach, but most have a fairly well developped road and canal infrastructure so that the hardship for southerners should be limited.

 

And yes, there is summoning which I am fairly critical of. At one of the recent rifts, there was not even an access or marker from relatively close by major roads as nearly everybody relied on summoning. Summoning has the disadvantage not only of worse mounts if any, but also of usually needing to waste karma teleport to get back home. At least it should not be the regular or even only way to reach a rift location.

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The game uses a number of factors when selecting a rift site - I understand it starts with a central point, then keeps re-rolling until it finds somewhere that isn't too steep around (i.e. no rifts at the top of a mountain), isn't on or too close to a deed, etc.  I doubt it looks at roads.  I'm guessing there are fewer possible sites that meet the above in the North, so other sites are chosen.

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On 5/29/2019 at 4:34 AM, Wonka said:

The game uses a number of factors when selecting a rift site - I understand it starts with a central point, then keeps re-rolling until it finds somewhere that isn't too steep around (i.e. no rifts at the top of a mountain)

Can definitely confirm that this is inaccurate, as the last rift on Xanadu was in fact on top of a mountain. If it wasn't for Aske already having a tunnel and road system set up through a good portion of these mountains, this rift would still be going. But he tunneled for almost 2 days, and got us access. It still took us 13 hrs to close it, as the way up was a horrible slog so only 6 people showed up at all, but an all NEXA team came together and closed it.

 

Tried to paste a screenshot of the rift location, couldn't figure it out. Insert image from URL did not work, so here's the prinscr link https://prnt.sc/py3epc

Edited by DaletheGood
tried to post image of rift location

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For the smaller servers, they consistently tend to be in a very limited number of general areas.  In the past, when I've asked on GL what the rift coords on a particular server were and no one knew specifically, I would often get a reply of "It's probably either X# or Y#" and almost always easily accessible (close to a shore, highway, etc.).  Xan has some of that, e.g., a fair number of rifts are in the area south of Fogshore, just not enough of that. 

 

The Devs need to rethink the rift spawn system for Xan.  It's almost like they took the smaller server system and just multiplied it by 4 in everything (number of general spawn areas, size of the general spawn areas in which a given rift will spawn, etc.).  There need to be appropriate (for Xan) changes beginning with 1) selecting spawn areas that are going to produce spawns on non-mountainous terrain, no matter where in that area any given rift spawns; 2) spawns need to regularly spawn within a smaller general area, so people can build roads over time to the general vicinity of spawn locales that will facilitate travel long term; 3) selecting spawn areas closer to shores, so people don't have to travel overland for 2 hours to get to it (the size of Xan is a problem with bring and give missions also); 4) the majority of the spawn areas need to be nearer the outer perimeter of the server.  The rationale for #4 is that there are many more deeds near the outer shores of the server than in the interior.  By spawning all the rifts in the server's interior, the current system maximizes the travel time for the large majority (compounded by the frequent inaccessibility).  If some decent % are closer to outer shores, the majority will have an easier time getting to them.  Even people coming from the opposite coast can reach those relatively quickly (for Xan) by double server jumps.

 

Sandbox games are wonderful, but the grind is not the game. The grind is for being able to play content and anything that hampers players' ability to enjoy content harms the game and the rift spawn system (and I would throw in major elements of the mission system also) on Xan hampers that ability due to Xan's size.

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There was never any rift near Glasshollow area for sure...  

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