Lhan's page

With the land rush up and running and EE just around the corner, PFO has just receive a new lease of life and, I suspect, made us all start thinking a little more concretely about plans in the future. One of the things I'd like to have cleared up is whether we'll be able to train at others' settlements, or allow visitors to train at ours. I had taken this as a given, but then I remember Ryan saying something along the lines of "Why on earth would we allow that?" and all was chaos and confusion :P Seeing as I don't have Nihimon's powers of total recall, I haven't been able to find the source for that.

Has this ever been decided definitively? It seems to me that if it is not possible, two groups of people are going to be severely disadvantaged. The first are groups like the UNC, who have stated that they are not particularly interested in running their own settlement; if they are stuck training only at NPC settlements it will lead to them being unable to train higher level skills, or force them into settlement management, which may be a path they are not interested in going down. The second group are those who are splitting off from a "parent" CC in order to form a "colony"; if they then cannot go back to their original settlement to train it may be a long time before they are able to advance their skills.

Allowing settlements to train outsiders also has upsides apart from avoiding these problems. First, it promotes more meaningful player interaction in the form of pricing (not necessarily financial) for said training; second, it allows settlements near each other to develop synergies in training with all the advantages, and risks, that this brings; and third, those with a certain type of training facility may have both a carrot and stick with which to keep the bandits (or others) in line: play nice and you get to train, behave badly and we withhold that training.

So, what's the current state of play on this one?

As a few of you may have noticed, I've been away for a while, and catching up on what has changed has been a major task. I've also managed to get a few friends who know nothing about PFO interested, and they've asked me for some links for things to read. The problem is there's so damn much of it! I can't expect people to wade their wade through every devblog and forum post - they need a "synopsis" to pique their interest. So I am asking for help...

What I'd like is for people to suggest just one blog or forum post that they think encapsulates something that excites them about PFO, that makes it different, that makes it the game that we all want to play. I could just trawl through and find my faves, but that would be very one sided, and part of the thing that I think is going to make PFO great is its multi-faceted nature. So, with the loud discalimer that everything is subject to change, I am going to start off with a post from way back on Nations, Settlements and Companies, and hope that some of you will help me out. Here's my choice:

https://goblinworks.com/blog/put-it-in-writing/