[Discussion] Town Showcase and Visibility

Hello guys,
I wanted to open up a discussion for some ideas from you guys as a community about potentially making towns and town builds more....visible and appreciated.

While I'm doing your town build migrations I am running into a ton of awesome looking towns. Some I didn't even know existed and it made me want to put together something to sort of bring our town builds and projects more to the light.
We focus heavily on economy, but towns are a major part of the game as well. Towns w/ plots help players get settled, towns with intricate builds add to the beauty and prestige of ECC, market towns enhance the player-run market and general town building drives demand for some blocks in the market.

As of now I feel like the only way people make it to others towns is if the warp is advertised, you know the user or are the one building the town. I'd like to see more activity and appreciation for the effort people put into their creations.

So my discussion point here is such; What can we do to bring towns more to light, showcase them more and bring more visibility? Assuming that is what you guys would like for your town builds. Feel free to leave opinions.

I had an idea to do some sort of Hall of Fame/Town Stall showcase, perhaps with spaces that town owners can decorate with a portal leading to their town. I want to avoid doing a massive portal tower like in the past (as that is a major performance issue) but I do feel like there should be some place people can go to explore towns easily.

I am open to all ideas, I just want to get some discussion going with you guys as a community and explore what you guys might like to see and any ideas you have. You may also ask me some questions as well.

Well...have at it, I want to hear from you guys.

 

Hey, I haven't been ignoring you all. I have been working on a couple of concepts and ideas as I read your discussions.

You all seem to be in agreement that the portal room was a great thing, it was removed because of the performance issues it caused and at the time we have no means of replacement and simply awarded each town that had a Spawn-Town Portal with a free warp.
My current plan is actually to bring back to "portal room" concept. But we will not be using portals.
We can use Warp Signs, they require simply one sign, it takes 2 seconds to set up and any user can right click the sign and teleport to the warp position in your town. It will require a warp in your town prior to apply for this but I doubt it is much of a barrier.

My current thoughts based on your discussions:
1 10x10 stall per town, the official owner will be added to it and they may add other owners.

• Owners can decorate the stall as they see fit - within rules ofc.
• There may be some minor building restrictions similar to the market to reduce lag on clients.
• Keep in mind that perms to the stall also means access to any of the TC flags. Possibilities for customization are expansive.

Town Organization:

• Towns should probably be organized by town-type, with several floors dedicated to a specific town type.
  • Town Types will be Plot Towns, Market/Shop Towns, Farm Towns and Epic Builds, user would indicate their town type upon application.
  • Each floor will have its own warp and region and be dedicated to one type of town.

Stall Allocation:

• First come first serve, this is the most "fair" way to go about it.
  • I like the idea of community voting and rotating featured towns and I still have some ideas for that but I feel like this feature, where we are aiming to raise visibility of all towns this should be open to everyone to purchase. I do not like the idea of determining which towns are "worthy" of visibility feature.

Activity Requirements:

• I am currently not of a mind to implement any, especially if the towns are split up into sections. If they were all mashed together then I could see a need, but with towns sectioned off into each of type I think not requiring activity is the best bet. I say this because we have to think about what activity requirements actually mean. Lets say we do put an activity requirement on say farmtowns and plottowns, this does not guarantee the town is being actively managed even if the user is online a lot. Nor will I ask myself or the GA team to monitor and enforce town management. Users have always been in charge of that and it feels wrong to stipulate activity in that way. I also believe that if we did move forward with the Epic Builds class - I don't believe should have activity requirements, what stops users from classing their town as an "Epic Build" to get around activity requirements. These are just a few of the issues I've come up with requiring activity/town activity to keep a stall. This also ties back to the idea of determining which towns are "worthy" of a visibility feature which I am honestly not a fan of. This should be all-inclusive.

Here's a couple of videos of the concepts I've built up. Please note these are just concepts, in no way is anything a final product. I simply wanted to illustrate some ideas and get discussion flowing some more.

This structure supports the idea of organizing towns into different types.


Notes for concept:
-Each floor would hold 12 stalls, stalls would be first come first serve, starting with the base /warp <towntype>
-Notation for "stall" could be "go to /warp <towntype> and its in the 1st|2nd row.
-Town stalls are 10x10, with 10 blocks of building space (inclusive of the 1 space into the floor)
-Each floor will have greetings to indicate which floor the user is on, instructions for moving to other floors, as well as exit messages to indicate how to get back.
-Each floor will also contain more warp signs on the 4 sides to ease navigation to the other floors/town types.

The other option I did a mockup for is to go with the old mashed up together concept of just having all towns in once place:


Notes for concept:
-Each floor would hold 68 stalls.
-There would be no distinction between town types.
-This brings back a bit of the old notation where you told user where your town was in the portal room i.e "Town Portal (Towns 5, Gold Row)"
-Town stalls are 10x10, with 10 blocks of building space (inclusive of the 1 space into the floor)
-Each floor will have greetings to indicate which floor the user is on, instructions for moving to other floors, as well as exit messages to indicate how to get back.
-Each floor will also contain more warp signs on the 4 sides to ease navigation to the other floors

I'm also working with @Videowiz92 on a travel GUI for town warps into a similar sections for users to view and explore. His original idea was to include all town warps, but that would require us to go around and ask users to determine what their town type is for us to organize it.
I'm more inclined to include warps in the GUI that also have stalls (as this would also take care of the town-type indication), but the GUI would only be updated monthly rather than after each application. We're still hashing how ideas here. But thoughts would be appreciated.

Just keep in mind nothing here is finalized. I'm merely hashing out my thoughts and ideas and putting them up for discussion.
Still open for more thoughts, let me know what you think here.