Just Andunor.

[Seekeepeek]

The hub is fine. there is plenty of areas around it, were you can go if you want some alone time unlike pit town. sure you might have a higher risk of running into your character's enemies, but i do personally find conflict roleplay to be fun.

Pit town was the worst city design i seen on any server. It kinda make more sense to explain that place like a mindflayer device that suck the life out of you.. rather then a protective device that protect you against the mindflayers. i was so glad to see it go. It felt like the design mindset of the place was to "tell a story" rather then being driven by the desire to make a functional city.

i don't really like the surface character interaction setup a whole lot, since i don't want to spend 30 mins or more looking for people to roleplay with. since bendir, cordor and all the other towns are mostly empty in my time zone. i got a lot of both surface and underdark characters.. i i found i mainly play my underdark characters, simply cause the chance to run into roleplay is higher with it's more compact setting. so i guess it comes down to my own laziness.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

Sure, it settles back into "stagnant stability" after a while, but, uh, so does everywhere else in the server honestly. This isn't unique to Andunor.

[let it trip]

Honestly? I think the devs should experiment. Why not try temporarily removing the Hub? The ongoing illithid plot is the perfect excuse to have the structure collapse

WANT (temporarily at least)

[-XXX-]

People actually want ...Pit Town?!

[Xerah]

People love to look back at things and claim it's the best thing ever while actively ignoring all the bad that went with it.

[Beard Master Flex]

I really appreciate the Hub as the central area to RP in the Underdark. I don't get to play as much as I used to these days and just ended up gravitating towards Underdark RP because it had the least dead air compared to the other parts of the surface I used to dwell in.

If I only have two hours to play and spend up to an hour trying to find people on the surface its not very much fun.

In the Hub there is usually so much going on I can find something to get involved with or bump into a friend as almost a guarantee.

The more linear design of the Underdark makes it easier for me to encounter and connect with players on a regular basis. More people encounters equals more fun for me.

That's my anecdotal experience anyway.

[Eira]

People want conflict, but they don't want it too close to home. That means consequences, and we don't like consequences. Why else would there be such a red vs blue with surface?

Every single conflict turns into something huge. It's almost impossible to have smaller fights in Andunor now, where there's a winner and a loser and people accept the outcome. Someone always runs to someone bigger, and then it becomes this huge big thing where everyone has to flaunt their "I have this many allies" badge.

Andunor doesn't know how to deal with conflict. It's either an uneasy standoff that lasts for weeks, or every single person has to be involved, until it turns into 30 messages of board slander and people hunting each other in groups in the streets and once again, many forum posts about toxicity and pvp, etc, etc.

I would hope with subdual, things would be more common like:

Bob: "Screw you."

Jim: "No screw you!"

Bob: "DO YOU BITE YOUR THUMB AT ME SIR"

Jim: "HELL YEAH I DO"

Bob and Jim fight. Jim beats Bob down into unconsciousness. Bob realizes maybe he shouldn't have yelled screw you to Jim. He slinks off to lick his wounds, and keeps his head down for a bit to recover from the humiliation and being shown how strong Jim was.

Life moves on.

As Andunor is now, however, it's more like:

The above happens. Whether Bob was killed or just beaten down to 1 hp, he runs off and tells his matron, and then his matron goes "everyone associated with Jim is dead, Jim will be tortured and sacrificed, lolth tlu malla, also if anyone speaks out against this, you're wrong, sucks to suck"

Cue big hullabaloo.

Sure, maybe that makes sense for Bob to do. And maybe that's even alright in healthy amounts. But when every. single. conflict. is like that? Andunor really sucks.

So what do we do? We force the buddy buddy since few people want to rock the boat since unless you have an army at your back, you know the person with an army at their back is 100% going to slam dunk it on you. Bob and Jim hold hands, smiling and they go up to the surface to capture elf slave #33.

Yeah, it really is Just Andunor.

There literally is no breathing room. I'm not saying bring back pit town or udos. But there really needs to be some place to go. The cycle will continue on and on.

Or, I don't know, slap something in the Wikia with guidelines of how Andunor is supposed to be. Is it a trade town where money is king? Is it UDer only territory? Are there any actual laws? Because I hear 10 different things from 10 different people and everyone is trying to play in the Andunor they believe it to be, and that just leads to constant clashing because few people actually know lorewise what this city is supposed to be.

And if it's supposed to be a mess that actively inhibits common sense that could allow trade or merchants to thrive, then, well, it's doing that just great.

[-XXX-]

Looks like Andunor could really use some sort of Arbiter figure acknowledged by everyone.

That's an IC thing waiting to happen IC though

[DM Atropos]

As a player who currently actively plays a drow PRIESTESS (yes, of Lolth) who is in no way involved with most "drow" stuff, I can absolutely say that there is definitely room to do Other Things. I have had no issues getting, and staying, involved.

[The GrumpyCat]

I do get where the concerns come from, re having another underdark city. I'll even agree that there's some validity to them, but I don't think adding another settlment further away would help at all.

UD tends to work very strongly amongst racial, exclusionary lines.

This isn't neccesarly a bad thing - it makes sense to a degree. But it means that things tend to get segregated quickly. And that segregation, that eagerness, means that even if a new settlment were introduced, it wouldn't work, or at least would be extremely diffcult on the long term. to keep it as a second option for the majority of characters.

Lets use an example.

Let's say I make a halfling on the surface.
That Halfling can easily live in
*Bendir
*Cordor
*Guldorand
*Brogendenstein

Can any of you easily imagine Cordor or Guldorand saying, 'Actually no. We're just for Humans now. No one else here.'

I can't. It would be seen as an awful and bigoted move by the pc in charge. So as a halfling race, I'll always have at least three, likely four, settlment options of where my pc could live. The same is true of most races.

Counter that to Andunor. Currently Devils Table espouces itself to be 'Drow Only' (Which lore wise it certainly isn't, this is very much somethng the pcs push). The players of the Port District seem(ed?) to be pushing very much for Derugar only. The Sharps pushes hard, occasionally for 'Beast Kin' only. Outcasts are occasionally fine, then occasionally not.

Sure we could add another settlment a few screens away, but I promise you it would soon be snatched up by some group or other- likely racial based, and then it would quickly be only for drow/kobold/gnoll/human/whatever.

And yes, maybe it'd cycle through the different races occasionaly, but it wouldn't neccesarly be a 'safe harbour' for enemies of Andunor, just because you might not be of the right race as the other people.

Meanwhile it would spread the player base around, and cause further problems of segregation.

So yeah, I do get the argument? And I'm not saying it doesn't have some validity, but I don't think that just slapping down a new settlment somewhere in the underdark neccesarly fixes anything.

[Aradin]

That is some hot wisdom Grumpycat. I hadn't considered that point before.

[Wuthering]

Yeah but- look at the district’s designs. Devil’s Table is drow architecture so naturally that’s who it will attract. The Sharps is rougher and has a brutish edge so of course it usually draws Orogs or the occasional other monstrous race. Greyport is home of the Duergar embassy and has a depressing and utilitarian feel, of course they’ll be drawn to it. It’s not just the races in question who feel this way but it’s the whole UD playerbase pushing for the round peg to go into the round hole. We as players are extremely susceptible to the cues from the environment.

I’m not pushing for another city necessarily but to say some race would permanently snag it and exclude everyone else doesn’t have to be an absolute. One way to do this would be to make it neutral and possibly even maintained by a non-PC race so no one would feel they had an inherent claim to it. Even looking at the Treadstone Locks, I don’t see any race beyond svirfs who would claim that theirs (and you know svirfs could or would never pull that off.) Again I’m not saying this is what should happen but I could see the Locks moved further from Anundor and new town sprung from it with no racial bias, but instead a more pirate/nautical/lawless flavor like the Sencliff of the Underdark. Or there could be a weird and alien Illithid or Deep Imaskari run settlement with mysterious overlords or a very primitive settlement run by tribal law or other options beyond handing (say) Kobolds something they could forever claim.

[Ebonstar]

actually read through every post since im on a vaca for a while.

I dont think the hub is a problem at all and it does its job, its the hub everything surrounds it and is the central thing.

Tath brought up a question of why were their raids and such of late. Answer is simple- its what the Underdark does. The one thing that binds all the dark together is hell yes lets go raid the surface. In every example of lore drows raiders, ogre raiders, orc raiders, etc

there are even npc wild spawns on the surface in the wilderness areas and drow ambushes in the outlying areas that attack surfacers, it just what happens.

The only thing i would say needs tweaking is two things.
The Table and The Sharps need to be expanded and made larger with more quarters and manors on both sides. Why because as of right now just from the Drow pov we could actively house seven Drow houses in the table which would be amazing.

The Temple's weekly ceremonies are drawing 25-40 drow players, with the larger ones attracting upwards of 50-60 as we work with the varied timezones to include more players.

There is alot going on on both districts plates right now and even adding two decent sized manors and a couple smaller ones would be a huge help to both Table and Sharps.

The reason behind this is that both districts are the same size as when they first were made when there was the 20 players total in the UD and the avg is near 100 on weekends and never truly dips below 25 even at the so called dead timezones.

This simple enlargement would fix some of the stuck in the giant one room Hub after pvp and would make the districts a more viable but not decentralizing place.

The second tweak i mention was brought up on the first page i think, is about Freth and Claddath. I would swap them out and change their House names simply because Freth and Claddath were the exiled heretic houses in the Vault that were hunted on the regular basis. The swap would be to put the devils in the Sharps and the demons in the Table since it doesnt have to be the Devils Table since most just refer to it as the Table anyhow.

A third Minor thing would be to put a banker in the Table, since all the other districts have one, why was it not included in the district house or a cliffside stall?

[KT28]

I admittedly have not read through this entire thread but I just wanted to throw in my two cents: I was love at first sight of Andunor since my first character I rolled up there about 1.5 years ago and I still really adore it. This thread puzzles me a little because the things people are complaining about is why I really like it: the design the Hub and the city, how easy it is to jump into RP and meet people, the natural intensification of conflict due to the size, etc.

Sure, it's not perfect all the time. Sometimes it feels a little claustrophobic (I notice this especially playing a monster race; my Outcast could explore the Surface pretty freely so it was less an issue) but even so I've found there is enough diversity of groups/factions in Andunor that if you need a break from one you can explore another assuming your character has motivation to do so. And the slave/master RP culture in Andunor is still something I'm struggling/grappling with. But generally speaking I find Andunor's design to encourage RP and interaction and I wouldn't want to see it drastically changed.

Andunor is the reason I got really into this game again after a ~5/6 year hiatus even though I thought I'd never come back.