Community Input: Starting Location

[Sombs]

The thing is, Liberty is and will always be the best place to start. The game developers had a reason for you to start there as well. Freeport 7 was in the effing Sigmas, where nobody cares about the system layouts. Liberty however is THE crossing of activity.

Like it or not, but this is a current representation of the activity in terms of used systems.

Green = Only New York. There is always something going on. Always.
Yellow = From central Liberty down to Bretonia and even Omega-49 is often something going on. You will often find people in those areas.
Red = Systems with either interesting layout or frequent battles, which ensure people to come over here from time to time.
Small Black = Those systems are mostly passage systems or are generally very rarely visited by players and mostly only by certain groups. The systems are less inviting due to their placement, layout and opportunities.
Big Black = You will never find anyone here.

As you can see, Liberty and Bretonia are very well visited areas. They have good system layouts, big playerbases, the systems aren't unnecessarily big and offer many things. New London for example is the place to be for PoBs, while in Liberty you always will find some PvP. Gallia is currently only interesting for PoB owners and people that are doing RP contracts, as many things can only be bought from Picardy or have a sellpoint there. The Sigmas and Taus are only interesting because of their mining commodities while they are partially very empty or boring to look at. Especially the Sigmas are a blurry mess of monotone colors. Something you don't have in Bretonia or Liberty, as Bretonia has red and blue and orange and purple, and Liberty has every big nebula of Sirius in the distance visible. Rheinland has very large systems with very unfortunate layouts, profits however from being a passageway to the Omicrons and Omegas as well to the Sigmas while having at least some variation in their starspheres, for example New Berlin and Frankfurt. The problem however is the size of Rheinland, as there are many unnecessary long and alternative trade lanes instead of crossings like you have them in Liberty (West Point, Fort Bush) and Bretonia (Kensington). That is also the big problem of Kusari. The starspheres are just blue. Hokkaido is a very nice example of how to bring variation into that. But it is literally only Hokkaido. Kyushu is just one lane that conveniently leads you out of the boring Kusari, Honshu is stupidly empty on the lower half of the map while Shikoku is actually nicely done because of the very attractive purple nebulae and the sun that fits nicely. However, even here the trade lanes are incredibly long, especially the one from Junyo to New Tokyo. New Tokyo is also just and nothing more than a passage system with just two asteroid fields and no nebula. There is nothing, literally nothing to explore here, and thus there is nothing that makes people stay here.

Gallia makes the opposite mistake. The systems are way too big and are horribly designed. Ile-de-France is candy vomit, there is no theme in the nebulae and planet placement. The systems of Gallia are stuffed with one of everything and the most atmospheric point is the Sarcelles Shipping Facility, as you find yourself in a cave of debris which actually contains some eye candy.

The entirety of the Omegas are just passage systems to reach either Gamma or Delta, same for the upper Omicrons. Iota and Major are nice to explore, so those systems are okay, but Psi is unnecessarily big and empty. The entire upper Omicrons are literally just for exploration, while things turn sort of normal again at Omicron Delta as it is literally a Delta. If I wasn't a fan of it, I'd say make a starting point there, but then again you would definitely lower the quality of RP given in this system. Pennsylvania sort of acts like a filter, just as New York does. The only lolwuts you see in Delta are Zoner Nephilims, Order and rarely no-RP-traders. And then there is Omicron Gamma, which is unnecessarily bottlenecking. The only good thing that was changed about Gamma are the capital ship tunnels in the Edge Nebula.

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

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