@Farlander
Oh yes, most of the old MMOs had jails. It kinda worked back then because we didn't have unlimited traffic and the jail time only passed if you were online. I had 6 hours of daily free internet (from 24:00 to 06:00). I was once in that situation, which meant I haven't played for 4days but had to keep PC online all night. The good thing is that cured my keyboard warrior behaviour instantly and definitively.
@Gothix
Well, most of the people play MMORPGs mainly for playing with other people, so balance is way more important than exploration. After 500 hours of gameplay I doubt anyone will ever care about exploration anymore. Why map clarity is a big thing in a full loot pvp game is one of those things that it's not easy to explain, but you understand it immediately when you are being ganked and get stuck on a hill that doesn't look like a deadend on the map.
Also, I don't see how home populations will have advantage over invaders. In a zvz, it really doesn't matter. This becomes an advantage in chasing situations (so mostly gankers vs traders or solo players).
@Prometheus
Glad to hear that.
-5516W / -2179N
I think it's supposed to be a passable because that place is marked as road on radar.
Most probably not, because, as @Farlander said, it's a very easy to exploit system and there's no reasonable way to implement this. If you want to kill people, just gank... Or if you care about your karma, either offer escort services or start an anti-ganking group (most of the time they avoid fighting and just go for the easy targets, so you need someone tanky to bait them).
@Gothix Another big thing is to fit into the game's graphics style.
@Kralith
Thank you! I just checked the documentation and stackoverflow for some time, but I concluded that spoiler tags are probably not implemented and html is not supported on this forum. Nested quotes should be hidden by default.
Ok, the solution is simple: maps need to be more detailed so we can plan our travels/have a chance to escape ganks, and impassable land (hills/ledges etc) need better texturing to look drastically different than passages.
This discussion pretty much crossed into the realm of mind gymnastics with over complicated solutions that don't even solve the problem in the first place and create new ones (especially for frequent randomized terraforming). And anyway, even with detailed maps you're already at disadvantage when traveling in unknown land compared to someone who "lives" there. Why would I risk losing extra money on maps in unknown areas when I can stay on an island as big as Myr and learn all the obstacles in a month of casual play? This pretty much hinders exploration than encourages it.
@Farlander
Then why do we even need a poorly represented radar and map? If the aim is realism, just get rid of them.
@Gothix
How do people create these maps? Do you lose them on death? Maps websites will inevitably appear if they will implement such professions, giving a big edge to people with 2 monitors.
PS: I strongly believe a detailed map is pretty much mandatory and does in no way interfere with exploring.
PPS: One of the important issues I raised is how sometimes it's very hard to tell passable from impassable land by standing next to it (as in the screenshot of post 6). This is related to the terraforming tool.
@DevilsDog The problem with Albion's crafting is that it revolves around focus points and resource return rate. Thanks to this, crafting is only profitable if you are high spec, premium (for focus) and craft in a town (or BZ town, but not your island). If they remove the focus points (=the need of having premium on a lot of characters), they pretty much kill specialised crafters.
I'm not saying Albion is bad, but I hope Fractured will come with a way of having specialised crafters without making it super grindy (in most games you have to invest some money to get your crafting to a decent level before you start turning a profit), and without premium being mandatory.
How exactly would exploration be destroyed by proper maps and the ability to tell if the land in front of you is passable or not? I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. Exploration will always be a thing because you can't see the spawn location of a resource on the map. On the other hand, what you see in the image below and not having proper maps will result in a lot of frustration when being chased/ganked. It often feels like many people who comment here haven't actually played a full loot pvp game and have little understanding how their opinions can affect the gameplay in a very negative way.
PS: If anyone knows what's the tag for spoiler... please share it with me.
They asked how would we feel if some new packs were added to the store, so my guess is that maybe they are preparing to add those/edit current packs by the next test.
Well, they changed their minds on big things that makes the gameplay drastically different, like FF.
Since that's the last statement we have on race, that's how things are at the moment.
@Jetah
They didn't reassure us recently the game will be a MMORPG either. Is this enough to draw conclusions? 
One of the major problems I had in the last 2 tests was that I couldn't tell if a certain area could be passed or not. When you are exploring, you only waste about 10min by readjusting the route so it's not a big deal. However, being chased can get frustrating real quick if you can't tell where dead-ends or chokepoints are by looking at the map (especially on asteroids or invasions). I understand many games have this problem, but most of those are not full loot pvp. I also understand that this is an alpha, but this issue seems to be related to how the terrain works (which most likely won't change at release), and to a lesser degree to the graphics style (this could be solved by changing the saturation of non passable areas, and correct the maps by hand; but as I understand some maps are supposed to be randomly generated). I will compare it to Albion to make my point easier.
Pressing M in Fractured (max zoom) vs the one in Albion. The maps in Albion are ugly, but once you get used to the symbols, you can easily tell which piece of land is passable and other useful information. In Fractured however, you have no chance guessing where is the passable land by looking at the map for a couple of seconds. For example, all the red marks are the impassable land I remember around my house. Most of the time I couldn't locate such barriers when traveling to a new area and had to walk along them for a few minutes.
Minimaps suck in both games, so I will just focus on the one in Fractured. There is a lot of impassable area in the radar below. Where do you think it is? How fast can you detect it while running?
And the reason why I started this thread: that's a passable area in both games. For the full image, clicky Fractured and Albion.
@maze The last time I was interested in the game, it wasn't exactly how you describe it: each zone is very diverse in mob difficulty (level), but the higher the node, the higher the mobs level cap (and better bosses).
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Nodes#Zones_and_progression
Do you guys ever read each others' replies?
@Farlander I posted the link earlier. Maybe a screenshot will help more.
And anyway, what's the point of going through the transition quest as a lich/angel/abomination if there's no benefit in it?
Going back to the original point, I think clarity is very important when it comes to a fair gameplay. What I suggested is that we should have common appearance patterns for each alignment (to give a simple example, good = angelic look, neutral = normal, evil = demonic look). And common appearance patterns for each race (bear is a big creature, deer is a slim creature). This way they can sell skins without influencing gameplay whatsoever.
In my experience you end up doing stuff wildly beyond your qualifications in small companies. I can't say Dynamight is doing the same, but looking at their team there's only one software engineer. Unless they hired new people, or the others help (learning a scripting language is usually trivial), I don't think it's possible for one person to do all the work.
These being said, adding a few more rewards on the website shouldn't take many resources (a third party may be involved tho, so it's hard to tell). On the other hand they already give quite a lot of skins and 15€ worth of gold to at least 100 - 600 people (someone who is exactly level 200 should have a better estimate). Only a tiny fraction of those people contribute with anything, the others just spam that "offtopic thread" or "welcome to Fractured" category (/forum). They even confirmed the foundation will expand to level 250 or 300. I feel like the rewards are amazing as they are right now. If I had a saying in this, I'd say the future rewards should be given more selectively to people who participate in tests and leave feedback, promote the game, or contribute to the forums in meaningful ways.
If you know Ashes of Creations (I won't say I feel scammed by their kickstarter, but it's not far from truth). Well, one of their promise was that nodes and the environment around them would evolve with the player development in that area. In the same light, if the player development in that area ceases, they would degrade. I don't know how good gameplay-wise this feature would be, but overall I'd say it's a neat idea.
