Ask Guard to Locate Tower for Treasure Map

[Soluna 237]

One of the towers we were tasked with finding for a treasure clue was downright impossible. Thankfully we ran into Sidereal on her deed and she knew where it was located based on the player name. It had been built on the very tip top of Troll King Mountain on Pristine by someone that had stopped playing nearly a decade ago. She had us hop on her cart and took us thru a maze of a secret cave up to the top. Some of the mine had collapsed and she had to remove walls. Since the mine was hidden, we would not have found it, nor had the ability to reopen the route. We couldn't even see the tower with a spyglass, it was so high up. Thanks Auntie Sid!
 

So this is a suggestion for a feature to be added. Ask a guard at a tower to locate [EDIT] a distant [EDIT] tower. Functionality could be similiar to the locate spell, analyze ability and find route on highways to at least give general directions of distance and compass directions to the [EDIT] distant [EDIT] tower listed. A new interface would be given when interacting with a guard, and a table provided to the players giving the numerical range based on the guards response.

 

How it could work

Player interacts with a guard that is within range of the guard's home tower, via right click menu. This brings up a drop down interface similiar to Find Route used on highways. [EDIT] The player selects a tower name from the drop down box. [EDIT] The guard responds with distance and direction, such as "Tower X is pretty far away from you East of North."

 

Restrictions

The player and the guard both have to be free from combat.

To prevent spamming, there is a cooldown given to that guard's tower and to the player.

Functionality on PVP servers could be restricted to kingdom only, or disabled entirely based on community feedback.

 

Thanks for reading and have an awesome day!

Soluna

Edited July 24, 2022 by Soluna
clarification

[Lovelie 419]

I don't know if a whole new window/interface like the "Find Route" window is necessary, if I'm understanding this correctly. That wouldn't be ideal anyway, I think, because of how long it takes to load that sort of window and populate that dropdown list.

 

If a guard will only tell the location of his/her own guard tower, then all that's needed is an option in the right-click menu.

 

 

Besides that... I like this idea. It's cute.

[kordethbludscythe 762]

i think the idea presented didnt mean the guards home tower to be located rather a tower in the existing network, i like th eidea and propose and additional part to this~ make the guard have to be of the same kingdom type of the tower in question. Not a problem on northern servers as all the towers are freedom style, but on the southern servers there are multiple types of towers and i think guards of one faction type shouldnt know locations of towers outside their type.

i also dont believe we would need a dropdown menu for the guard to just say distance and direction of a given tower

[Karrde 339]

Even something as simple and vague as "Guard gestures to the southwest" would be helpful.

[Soluna 237]

It is wonderful input, thank you for responding!

Yes, the idea is to find distant towers, not the one that belongs to the guard being interacted with. I realized after reading the comments that I wasn't clear about that, and I apologize. Normally guards remain with 20 (50?) tiles of their own tower so that tower is easy to find once you find a guard. The bigger problem is finding a distant tower that is someplace else on the server. This proposal is for utilitizing one tower to find other towers.

[DannyUK 212]

Yes this is a good idea, sometimes hard to find the towers so I agree with this suggestion.  Could be something like the village drop down menu on waystones maybe.

[Lisimba 779]

Yeah, this is a good idea.

 

I'd suggest that the right click menu should exist on the tower itself too, for convenience.

 

Also you probably don't want every tower on the server on that list. Apart from being a really big list, that seems somehow... too easy. It should just be towers that you currently have a treasure map for.

 

Or, an alternative is that the "ask" option is in the right click menu of the treasure map itself. Something like "Ask nearby guard". If you are close enough to a guard tower, one of the guards would tell you the direction where that map's looked for tower is. Or if you aren't near a guard tower, it'd just give you a message saying to get near a guard tower and try again. The advantage is that this wouldn't need a new window and is probably easier to implement. It's also easier to discover if you don't know the feature, because people will certainly right click maps and see it, but there isn't much reason to right click a tower or guard if you don't know about this already.

 

This could also give you a rough direction hint for image maps, provided you ask a guard tower that's close enough. After all, the guards ought to know the terrain they work in.

[TeeeBOMB 668]

Put the lazy tower guards to work!

 

+1

[Soluna 237]

Thank you all for your comments and Lisimba for the added suggestion. I did not specifiy earlier, but my intention was for this to be used specifically for help during the treasure hunts. Using the right click menu of the treasure map itself would allow it to only be used for the currently active treasure hunting purpose, and also tied directly to the one tower that is currently being displayed on the treasure map clue. Thank you for the great suggestion!

[amorfides 49]

+1 Would be nice!  One thing i'd suggest differently is to not have an extra window but to just activate the treasure map that references the tower, rightclick a guard and have the option to ask them about it. 

 

That feels a bit more natural in my opinion.