Thoughts on Isle of Dawn

[wheema]

I think your rift idea is a genius one Jakkal

[Kinshi]

IOD is most likely not going to be touched. Instead we're going to try to make starter areas as good as IOD. Now before you rage about how twinky IOD gear is, keep in mind that before F2P, that shit got significantly nerfed. Also keep in mind that most of the starter gear that was collected does not have stats on it, which is what also leads me to using IOD as a model for all the other starter areas.

Check out Dahknarg for an example, I've already redone all the gear there.

My other thought is to make some kind of teleport or riftway between the starter towns, like a level 1 rift, that would allow lowbies to join each other whenever they want/need to if they want to make separate races without having to rely on the IOD.

Could that travel goal perhaps be achieved by allowing players to go to IoD as a low-level rift destination, then use the IoD riftway as a hub to all the other lowbie areas? I am thinking anymore there really is no reason not to allow traffic to IoD from other parts of the game, given that limit was only made due to IoD being the "free demo" part of the live game and isolated it as such.

[Jakkal]

I don't think the plan is to restrict traffic on IOD. I think that depends on player behavior. If a bunch of higher level guys come in and camp some of the named, I would be kinda annoyed at that. But otherwise I see no problem with people rifting to and from IOD at will.

Edit: One thing I just thought of. I don't know if we can edit the riftway map in game. If that's the case, then there won't be a map for IOD rifting. But people could probably use the /rift command. (Whatever it was, I think it was just /rift in the client. Not to be confused with .rift which is for testing).

[Jehlicka]

Looks like I am probably the only one who used to like IoD
When VG live, I was running full set of characters. With every single new char I was thinking about the future purpose of that character. When I wanted real adventurer, I chose the starting area. When I wanted to create some support char for the adventuring ones, I chose IoD for the easy way to lvl up (mainly crafting).
It´s the same like setting the difficulty in the game - want to have easy start? Go to IoD. Want to have some challenge? Go to starting zone.
I believe once the returner players went through IoD with their first chars, the next ones will be real adventurer starting in the zone for that race.

[Kinshi]

Looks like I am probably the only one who used to like IoD
When VG live, I was running full set of characters. With every single new char I was thinking about the future purpose of that character. When I wanted real adventurer, I chose the starting area. When I wanted to create some support char for the adventuring ones, I chose IoD for the easy way to lvl up (mainly crafting).
It´s the same like setting the difficulty in the game - want to have easy start? Go to IoD. Want to have some challenge? Go to starting zone.
I believe once the returner players went through IoD with their first chars, the next ones will be real adventurer starting in the zone for that race.

I like IOD and exactly for the same reasons you mention I have no desire to see it get re-invented, especially not where there are so many other under-populated chunks that have existed since launch.