Celeste Harbour has an overall design with a city-life feeling to it. High-rise buildings with rooftop environments, nice landscaping, a bar nestled in the center, a pvp ring, a central point within the New Player Experience (NPE) missions, and most recently the addition of shops and apartments. My question to the Arkadian Community is: do you foresee the social hangout/community hotspot shifting from the Quarry to Celeste with the most recent implementation of the NPE and shops/apartments? It seems to have the atmosphere for a nice social spot with a lot of potential for community events. For example, the bar would be an appropriate place to put a broadcaster and let (or rent at an affordable rate) radio stations that have (and continue) to support Arkadia to stream their stations How do people feel about it? Quarry for life or moving to Celeste?
Either one is good for me, even I really love the bar in Harbour, but i think Quarry would be more popular because less building means less lag for some people who with older computers
My main problem with CH is the lag. I'm going to have to run at significantly lower settings if I am there regularly. Wouldn't it be nice if we could toggle between a bunch of saved graphics settings using hotkeys?
I only have lag issues when there is vehicles. What I think i'd like to see is them make Harbour and quarry free from spawning vehicles. Except maybe at quarry have a televator to a landing platforms way up in the sky above. I hate people using there ships as advertising and clogging up the place. Should be able to just use Trade Chat and then go up a televator to a level to launch plus you'd be closer to space that way too WIN WIN! Also what i'd like to see is Harbour being purely social place maybe trade chat not even allowed, and the quarry being the trade hub.
Quarry definately has an industrial feel to it. Nice for business, but not so much to hang out in. I'd love to see other urban areas on Arkadia see more use, especially for functions other than trading -- ie. social gatherings and other events. I agree with RexDaemon that major urban centers such as Celeste Harbour and Quarry should be vehicle-free, except for designated landing pads or parking lots. They are unsitely and make it difficult to find people. For me, they just deter the atmosphere a nice city with good people can have.
The only problem I see with Celeste Harbour at this point is that the layout of the terminals is not user friendly. Many of us like to stand in one spot and be able to reach all the terminals. Being able to open storage, repair, auction, TT, and crafting machine from one spot is great. Being able to open storage, tt and auction at same time is HUGE. Look at the quarry and where people are standing. At terminals.
Entropian people traditionally prefer intimate places for their trade hubs, whether it's an encircled with mountains Twin Peaks on Calypso or shadowy CND Lagoon on Rocktropia. Look what happened with Port Atlantis, it was just like that before the VU10, a square surrounded by walls with a tp at the center, and was as popular as Twin Peaks. Now it's huge and open, people like how it looks but they don't gather there (occasional parties on the balcony doesn't count). Exactly the same story with Celeste Harbor, a nice place to walk around, the face of Arkadia, but it's the stone sack of the Quarry that people actually choose for their business.
I presonally agree that Celeste Harbour is the nicer place to hang around. But what the deisgners really missed when designing the place: if you stand at the auction, your back is totally open. It sounds stupid, as it's just a game and an avatar... but ppl really don't like that feeling there. As mentioned above: they prefer "closed" spaces when they don't move around. I would LOVE to see this fixed for Harbour, as you can walk the streets, visit apartments, hang out on the roofs and still chat to ppl, would be way better for social interaction... but this would mean, that the designers need to rework parts of the space, e.g. to add buildings with 2 floor heights or trees or something to fix this feeling. This is way more work for testing etc, than you usually expect, and I assume, currently they have more important things to do.
I think it's the lag, pure and simple. Heavy use of particle effect and post-processing effects causing lag on any computer that doesn't have hardware rendering for those features. Since that includes most onboard vid cards and commodity grade PCs, it's more people than the game devs (and certain players) seem to think. There was a nice little community of crafters and others at the harbor and everyone loved the layout changes, but one by one they stopped coming, and started hanging out in areas that wouldn't lag their PC just standing idle. And of course, after a certain point, the others just quit because well, there's no one else there. The quarry is so broad that you can't even see avas standing at the other bank of terminals. People crowd the terminal banks, but there's nothing really closing in their backs or crating more of an "enclosed" feeling there than the buildings and mountains surrounding celeste harbor, in my opinion. I haven't looked for a while but I'm still not aware of a soc term in celeste harbor. Was this ever addressed? Having oen of these down near the bar or the ring might help a bit towards creating a social feeling there. Personally I would much rather see celeste harbor full and alive like it's the main city of our planet than constantly be running to the quarry to do business.
