(Proposal for New) Street Upgrade Projects in Ur

Lots of vague feelings floating about these days - several of them coalesced in my brain into an idea! Amazing.  
Some of the vague feelings:
- Rook attacks don't have enough consequences.
- I'd sure like to have more more of a contribution toward actually imagining what exists in Ur.
- I'm hungry.
- I miss street projects - and I'm intrigued by the old Street Upgrade projects from original beta.  And man, I'd sure like to get the last few trophy pieces I need!
- I'm really going to regret the visual loss of street spirits from my activities out and about in Ur when vendors are made obsolete one day.
I'm pretty sure at least one of those was just cause I skipped dinner.  But here is the synthetic idea that I had:

       What if randomly, on a single street each day somewhere in Ur, a street spirit (possibly in cahoots with the Smuggler) beckons you over to consider a little proposition he's offering.  The street spirit would offer you the opportunity to contribute toward one of a choice of street improvement.  The improvements you were offered might include things like:
     - add a few more quoins to the street
     - change a particular quoin's variety from one to another
     - increase the value of an existing quoin
     - increase the spawn frequency for a particular quoin
     - create a random item spawn somewhere on the street
     - [possibly] create a new resource node on the street - a tree patch or barnacle or new rock outcrop.
The contributions you'd make might be in terms of resources, or currants, or possibly even iMG - or maybe you'd get an iMG reward for participating instead.  One great thing about this approach is that even though we're getting to vote-via-contribution for our choice of upgrade, unlike those old groddle street upgrade projects in beta, the devs don't have to draw art for those choices or even much new art for the upgrades themselves.  If you limited the upgrades to quoin-related things then no new art would be required.

     Now, one of the problems with Street Projects were that they got mobbed, and were unscaleable. One way to address that issue is to allow each person to make only one contribution to one or the other improvement on offer - this way that badges for being a contributor to a phase of a project could still be awarded.  The contributions could differ in value so that badges for being a top 5 contributor could still be awarded.  As soon as a "winning" vote was cast as a given contribution "buys" the upgrade, the project would be over.  A new street improvement project, somewhere else in Ur, might be offered the next Ur day.  
     There are other ways that you could avoid the crazy street-mob issue; one alternative might be that the Instigator who was first approached with the project could treat it like a party that they invite people to. In that case, only party members would be able to contribute to the project.  Regardless of the mechanism, the key idea here is that players get to make a choice about what appears on the streets of Ur.  And you could always further adjust how handing out trophy pieces works - but many basic mechanisms would mean that we'd be able to continue to achieve them.

       "But ... wouldn't we get to a point where all the quoins were upgraded, and every street would be packed full of resources and and and ...?!?!!"
>_> This, my friends, is where the rooks come in.
        You see, streets that have been upgraded would be even more susceptible to Rook attack.  Not only would rooks attack those streets more often, but the upgraded street stuff would get degraded first, and degraded fast, during rook attacks.  And after the attack is over, the destroyed upgrades couldn't be restored - they might only be re-imagined the next time the opportunity came to that street.   Not only that, but rook rolls might have a chance of destroying one upgraded quoin/resource on a street.  So Ur would be in even more of a constant state of flux, and glitchen seek out these opportunities and choose upgrades of some kinds over others, while old upgrades are washed away during rook attacks that now have real consequences and a sense of urgency to them.  
     Finally, one last fun aspect of this idea would be the inevitable player communities that would spring up based around finding the one street in all of Ur that has an upgrade on offer today, and getting there fast enough to be able to contribute.  

Anyway ... it's kind of a crazy and over-complicated idea ... but I thought I'd share :)
(edited for clarity and style)

Posted 12 years ago by Scarlett Bearsdale | Permalink