Remove the 3 stages of travel

[stiff terrace]

Hello everyone,
I want to discuss the following: giving 3 different payment options (one more expensive than the next) for players to explore the overworld to its full potential is not really a good strategy. First of all, players will figure out what is tue most cost effective option and only use that, second of all, web 2 gamers will look at that and feel like it's much... we should only have the free version (T0 etc, just the way it is now) and ONE travel option for the payed version, letting RNG determine what you'll get when the map is generated.
It would be more user friendly, don't you think?

One second option would be to make it only 2 stages, instead of 3. Much better to balance and make them feel different from one and the other.

[drifting vigil]

Not sure if this is something that can easily be changed. Also all things illuvium follow the 5 tiers and 3 stages approach. So expect 2 more tier runs on launch.

[tender cobalt]

I think it's ok that is now , something new. We don't need to make a game like every else. I don't want to "gamble". I want to pay for a specific region.

[ripe pendant]

Having played Overworld quite a bit I have to point out there's a flaw in your reasoning:

"First of all, players will figure out what is tue most cost effective option and only use that"

This isn't true. The different stages are (in it's current form) highly dependent on what you are looking for.
Stage 1 is much more cost efficient for tier 1-3 ores and illuvials.
Stage 2 is more cost efficient for tier 2-4 ores and illuvials.
Stage 3 more cost efficient for tier 5 ores and illuvials.

For different crafts and different decks you'll want varying tiers of resources and illuvials. Having fewer travel options would only serve to make the game harder to target specific things.

Also, having more RNG usually only annoys players in my experience and is generally considered less user friendly.

[stiff terrace]

rng still exists. opening a pack of cards is pure rng, btw, witch is the idea of the overworld, supposedly.

what if the map generated has 10 times or more the number of ores and creatures, covering the entire thing (instead of the "heatmap" design), making it a veeeery engaging and immersive experience to really travel around, find what you want to target and use your energy accordingly? It could work.

(i don't disagree with anything you guys said, just wanted to bring the discussion for us to think together.. the more ideas everyone brings, better the chance of us finding something good eventually – in all things Illuvium – to help the devs, who are relatively few and overwhelmed with work).

[ripe pendant]

Depends on how the packs are structured.
Most TCGs have specific rarities of cards in each pack, like 1 Rare, 3 Uncommon, 10 Common. This type of RNG is something players find acceptable compared to getting 14 completely random cards in each pack. So in those cases, adding more RNG by removing the guaranteed slots would probably be met negatively by the players.

And for reference I was talking about the game in it's current state.
With changes to map generation, everything I said above could change. But it's difficult to speculate over without a specific list of changes.

Regarding the heatmap: The previous version of the game had every resource spread out randomly across the entire map, compared to the current version where it's more clusters of resources in random locations.
This gives the game a more treasure-hunting feel, at least to me. And it makes the heatmap much more useful than it previously was (and it's worth upgrading it for more accuracy as well).

If map generation was to go back to the previous setting (with 10x more resources or something) then the heatmap would become useless, unless it could be set to only show one type of resource.
It all depends on how much effort would be needed to implement a change like this.
Personally I don't think it's necessary to change, at least not until we see the next version. The team has hinted at there being more interacive things coming to make the maps feel less empty.