Board Thread:Wiki/Forum Technical Support/@comment-33763020-20181103181003/@comment-33763020-20181103230449

Not sure I agree with you on either points (mining or exploration), seems a subjective matter. I also sense that "every player" means this basically boils down to multi-player servers and unhealthy player behaviour that would result in exploitation of knowing where to find what.

Exploring

When you go exploring, every discovery is new, unless you have already discovered it yourself. So I guess you mean "re-discovering" locations a second or third time, in case you decide to re-live the world. The first time, if I could get a map where all known locations are mapped by those before me on servers or their private explorations, why would I want to use their detailed map, instead of discovering it myself? Those who have weak will-power or are lazy and cannot resist doing that, will most likely copy a seed and use a given map by others who already discovered that seed, so having one map will not change that. So in my opinion the fact that there is ONE seed makes it more of a familiar experience: everyone will know the same locations, as if you were talking about your home town. Brings people even more together, when they play multi-player. For a single-player, it makes no difference, as who would want to re-discover Middle-earth several times in a row with the city locations all mixed up? The discovery is the biomes, the peoples and cultures, food, animals, etc., rather than the fact that city X or Y is located on that left hill or on that right hill in 6-18 months from now when I would want to play the game again, starting from scratch.. If you actually mean an endless cycle of playing the game with re-created maps that only differ in where the trees, houses, etc. spawn, that seems a bit weird to call it rediscovery, considering that Middle-earth is fixed, given a fixed map, biomes, cultures, etc. The slightly changed location of fixed structures does not add much to that re-living experience in my opinion.

Mining

That is indeed an interesting discussion. I know where you're coming from, but there are more sides to the story:

1. The map is huge. For a singleplayer experience, far too large to mine for all ore available out there. Knowing the location of precious ores would still mean I will have to travel to them, dig them up and unless there really is an X-ray glitch that shows exact locations, looking them up with a location finder makes it perhaps just as worthwhile or more difficult than just digging my usual tunnel, without having to purposefully check coordinates constantly. So the only interesting point would be the most precious ore, Mithril, as the other ores are pretty much goods of exchange but nothing more and can be found anywhere or bought by simpy efficient farming/trading/looting. Perhaps Edhelmir would be the other exception, since crafting Galvorn armour could be a life-saver, but Edhelmir is much more readily available, one just needs to enter caves or dig for a while in Elvish biomes. It is not a rare enough resource to make a huge difference in knowing the locations in advance, vs the work that needs to be put in to get it.

2. Mithril mining: probably the only aspect I would agree with, but not a showstopper either in my opinion. Even for mithril I would have to dig down and through (tens of) thousands of blocks to get to them, especially because it is so rare. In fact, if a multi-player server would be full of miners and the known locations are immediately mined, wouldn't that mean that the ore becomes that much more precious to look for? One would have to be rather possessed to storm the whole of the Misty Mountains for all pieces of Mithril and it may not even be that beneficial, as digging directly towards known locations instead of a mine-shaft/tunnel, you would miss on a lot of precious minerals that you would find when not directly finding the Mithril. In other words, mining by itself is a rewarding task, looking for mithril only makes it less worthwhile. In singleplayer mode, the player would be the first to discover it, so it would not be an issue of "grabbing it from someone else's nose". I'm sure that on multi-player servers it would be a matter of agreement on how to approach mining, because if there is no agreement, the same free-for-all applies to all the cities that players visit and if one player is an obsessed looter, the other players will not get to resources anyway.

3. Mithril ore digging vs Mithril loot. In my experience, digging for it is not beneficial at all, if you want to increase the quantity you have. The loot from the Barrow-downs and Dead Marshes holds actual Mithril weapons, saving a lot of time versus the time spent on mining for the ore in the Misty Mountains. Utumno Orcs drop it regularly and since NPC spawns are unpredictable, this would not be a known factor in advance anyway and looting Utumno Orcs basically provides for an endless amount of mithril. The way I see it, those who want to increase their mithril storage efficiently will be doing this through the loot system, rather than through mining. The only change that would happen is that those who liked to mine for the ore will now have to mine further away, in case the most known location all will be known and suddenly servers are full of players who will immediately storm the Misty Mountains to dig up Mithril. An unlikely scenario, if you ask me. At least, not a general trend. Then again, if this were to happen, it simply implies that one aspect of the game is changing, nothing more than that. With the existing changing seed system, it may be that the location of the Barrow-downs tombs is always somewhere else and contains different loot, but if a server has loot goblins, they will loot all the Mithril anyway, which brings us back to square one: it makes no difference whether it was a random seed or a fixed one.

In addition to above, loot is a random generated event, unlike the ores: you never know what you get. So this aspect of gameplay remains the same.

All in all, I would say that I would not worry about "boredom" setting in just because of a fixed seed where the updates come out on. The huge benefit this has is that suddenly you can populate Middle-earth with hundreds, if not thousands of player creations. That should count for something..

Alternatively, if you (or other players having these worries) are not convinced, there is still an alternative solution for those who want to have different world seeds: the official betas and releases could all be released on the same seed, while everyone would still have the option to generate a totally random seed. This would of course mess up the structures somewhat for the random seeds but the same applies to the current structures anyway.. With some landscaping of the original seed, the issues could be minimized. I am sure though that 90% of people will play on the original seed, given the amount of structures that would be able to be copy/pasted at any time.