[crossfire] Apartment connections

[Mark Wedel]

Preston Crow wrote:
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      Here's an idea I've had floating around for a while:
     
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      There are a number of teleporters in the game to take players from city
     
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      to city, including many in apartments.  I was thinking that it might be
     
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      better to instead of having teleporters to cities in the apartments, to
     
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      have each apartment have a gateway into a room that they all share.  You
     
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      would have to pay a price to get access to this room from any given
     
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      apartment, but eventually, you could get all your apartments connected.
     
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      This would probably be implemented by having something in each apartment
     
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      where you could buy a pair of keys, one of which would open a door
     
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      letting you get to a teleporter, and one which would open the door on
     
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      the other side of the teleporter in the gate room.
     
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      Of course, the cost of the keys could be a combination of cash and quest
     
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      items, with higher prices for the more important locations (e.g., Pup
     
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      Land).
     
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      The two downsides of this are that it would require some tricky
     
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      conversion to switch over current apartments when upgrading servers, and
     
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      the problem would arise again as more apartments are added to the game.
     
     
  Converting the apartments would be very tricky, because the private apartment 
maps are saved as the entire map.  so one would have to find a way to 'patch' 
the existing saved apartments.

  One question might be why are there teleporters in the apartments at all. 
Maybe they should be in guilds, and/or in various guilds in each town, where you 
have to pay a large amount for access to the teleporter (eg, put it behind a 
grate requiring a large contribution).  In practice, players could share the 
cost (dump the money, everyone scoot through before the gate closes), but that 
perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing.  Would be a a way to use money (no pay a gob of 
money once, need to pay xyz each time you want to use it).

  Alternatively, perhaps an easier way to allow access in all apartments is to 
instead use passes, just like the library card (these could perhaps be done via 
invisible objects, so that the player doesn't have to physically worry about 
carrying them).  So you get the teleporter pass for brest, and the gate in all 
your apartments would open.

  But this still has the problem of patching the existing apartments.