When you raze the island, what happens to your own structures on it?

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

4 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

That might lead to an interesting situation where the devs consider putting a post in the water griefing, but do NOT consider destroying some other players entire base to be griefing (and even make a nice mechanic for people to do that)  

I can't imagine any dev group sitting around a conference table talking about this idea (or some of their previous ideas) and nobody raising his hand and saying, "Uh, guys...."  

Well, maybe there's one but they're not listening to him. 

This was pretty much my reaction. Once I thought it through for about 10 mins, I was like, how did this get past the brainstorm stage?

[Winter Thorne 696]

At this point they are just trying to fix the problems caused by the fixes to the previous problems, which happened by fixing the problem prior to that.

None of this would be an issue if they had taken our suggestion of claims limited per person and company size.  

No need for upkeep, or tax, or decay on other people's structures on "your" land.  No need for claim owners to have to wipe out other players' work.

It's what happens when you start with a bad design point and then twist yourself into a pretzel refusing to acknowledge that and undo it.  This problem is not fixable in its current state.

 

[Slash78 95]

1 hour ago, Winter Thorne said:

At this point they are just trying to fix the problems caused by the fixes to the previous problems, which happened by fixing the problem prior to that.

None of this would be an issue if they had taken our suggestion of claims limited per person and company size.  

No need for upkeep, or tax, or decay on other people's structures on "your" land.  No need for claim owners to have to wipe out other players' work.

It's what happens when you start with a bad design point and then twist yourself into a pretzel refusing to acknowledge that and undo it.  This problem is not fixable in its current state.

 

Like so much of Atlas, they are dealing with questions they never bother to asked themselves when developing Ark.  Nor have they thought them through.  Like "what's the point of owning land?"  The Ark community has a very severe case of "my land, don't build near me".  That even extends into the Ark RP community.

What was the original land claim system for?  It was, in order of importance, 1) to prevent people building near you, 2) Companies with the larges number of flags would have the highest rank, 3) taxation if someone actually came on your land and farmed.  And we saw how badly that failed.  (I played a lot on a RP server where #2 wasn't a factor, but just #1 and #3 were enough to cause flag spam to be a massive problem).  They've tried to "fix" it by shifting taxation up to the most important.  They've gone from "don't build near me" to "I don't want you to build near me, but if you have to, build near me until I decide to wipe you".  As for limiting the numbers of claims per company, it's actually had a negative effect.  If the large pvp companies could still claim as many islands as they want and keeping them under control was the point, I think they would be less concerned with who was building on the islands as long as those people weren't trying to take over ownership.  So yeah, limiting ownership forces the large companies to spend time obsessing over the structures built on any give island.  That is the very reason for this change.

The question is, why should Island be owned?  I can think of a few reasons, to tie in with other features/mechanics.  But those features/mechanics, like a reputation system aren't in the game (and likely won't because the Devs actually like offline raiding and people trolling each other).  

[Whitehawk 382]

Well I personally think they are well aware of the implications this mechanic brings to pve,maybe i'm just more cynical than other people.

[eddy 4]

Ok so your new landlords gone n did the GTFO my island option, wonder what happens to the items stored in the smithy, ships resource box's, book case's etc etc. does it fall on the ground in nice little brown bags for the new island owners to pick up.....24k gold for all the loot taken from wiped bases. wouldn't take a genius to organise a loot clean up operation GTFO

[Winter Thorne 696]

18 minutes ago, Slash78 said:

Like so much of Atlas, they are dealing with questions they never bother to asked themselves when developing Ark.  Nor have they thought them through.  Like "what's the point of owning land?"  The Ark community has a very severe case of "my land, don't build near me".  That even extends into the Ark RP community.

The question is, why should Island be owned?  I can think of a few reasons, to tie in with other features/mechanics.  But those features/mechanics, like a reputation system aren't in the game (and likely won't because the Devs actually like offline raiding and people trolling each other).  

I don't disagree with too many of your points, but I disagree with the way you interpret some of them.

For pve, there is a point to owning land in a game like this .  At the most basic, players need a place to keep their stuff, a home port to run their operations out of, build their ships, craft things, etc.    You can either do that in a lawless way or an owned way. 

In social games "my land, don't build near me" is not as anti-social as the phrase sounds.  It's also used for people to find other like-minded players and group themselves together in an area.  For example, when I lived on lawless, there were a handful of really good people there - fun to talk to, helpful to other players, etc.  There were some who were trying to grief everyone else, and there were some that were just selfish and annoying, who would do things like building a smithy and storage cabinet 2 feet away from what was clearly someone's base just because it was convenient for them to gather mats there.  The group of us that got along well would have liked to find some land where we could all claim in the same area and play the game together, but at the time getting a claim was difficult to impossible.  Lawless didn't work well for us, and all those other people quit.  Claims would have worked well, but we couldn't get them.

The other thing I'd point out is that different people play this game really differently.  We've got one guy on the forums now who keeps bashing other people's builds as "Disney castles", and that probably goes along with the mentality that the game is all about maps, SOTD, kraken, and the faster you can get all the goodies, the better you are.  But building is a "thing" in this game.  There's an entire skill set built around it.  The devs feature interesting builds and reward them.  I like to build stuff and I spend a long time doing that.  I like building authentic looking northern seaside villages.  Everywhere I go, I see the buildings of the "race to the finish" guys and they're all gray and brown and they all look like maximum security prisons and mental institutions.  So yes, don't build near me, because for me, this is a major part of the game and I don't want your behemoth-sized cement box sitting right where I'm trying to build a post office or a museum, or a base that looks like a real boathouse.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  It's why land ownership matters.

So let people own a chunk of land.  It lets them group friends they make in the game near them, and lets them have control over a small part of the environment.  And if everybody gets the chance to own land, you don't need a bunch of silly rules about who can destroy other players' stuff.  You do a timeout on things where the player hasn't logged in there in X days, and you let landowners give and remove permissions for their land.  Everybody wins.

[UnknownSystemError 111]

Unless they have changed the mechanic from what has come before (and you know they haven't), the contents of containers will drop into 30 minute satchels. We had a casual neighbor on a lawless who would log in once a week to refresh his stuff and feed his animals. Sometimes he would forget and push to 9 days and his animals would be claimable. One time he got to within a day before refreshing. We knew it was just a matter of time. Sure enough, he went into decay next time. We had been watching the countdown and were there when his stuff went poof. Satchels in the air, and satchels on the ground. Made 8k gold and a shitton of regular resources by just being there at right time. (This was two weeks ago)

[Slash78 95]

2 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

I don't disagree with too many of your points, but I disagree with the way you interpret some of them.

For pve, there is a point to owning land in a game like this .  At the most basic, players need a place to keep their stuff, a home port to run their operations out of, build their ships, craft things, etc.    You can either do that in a lawless way or an owned way. 

In social games "my land, don't build near me" is not as anti-social as the phrase sounds.  It's also used for people to find other like-minded players and group themselves together in an area.  For example, when I lived on lawless, there were a handful of really good people there - fun to talk to, helpful to other players, etc.  There were some who were trying to grief everyone else, and there were some that were just selfish and annoying, who would do things like building a smithy and storage cabinet 2 feet away from what was clearly someone's base just because it was convenient for them to gather mats there.  The group of us that got along well would have liked to find some land where we could all claim in the same area and play the game together, but at the time getting a claim was difficult to impossible.  Lawless didn't work well for us, and all those other people quit.  Claims would have worked well, but we couldn't get them.

The other thing I'd point out is that different people play this game really differently.  We've got one guy on the forums now who keeps bashing other people's builds as "Disney castles", and that probably goes along with the mentality that the game is all about maps, SOTD, kraken, and the faster you can get all the goodies, the better you are.  But building is a "thing" in this game.  There's an entire skill set built around it.  The devs feature interesting builds and reward them.  I like to build stuff and I spend a long time doing that.  I like building authentic looking northern seaside villages.  Everywhere I go, I see the buildings of the "race to the finish" guys and they're all gray and brown and they all look like maximum security prisons and mental institutions.  So yes, don't build near me, because for me, this is a major part of the game and I don't want your behemoth-sized cement box sitting right where I'm trying to build a post office or a museum, or a base that looks like a real boathouse.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  It's why land ownership matters.

So let people own a chunk of land.  It lets them group friends they make in the game near them, and lets them have control over a small part of the environment.  And if everybody gets the chance to own land, you don't need a bunch of silly rules about who can destroy other players' stuff.  You do a timeout on things where the player hasn't logged in there in X days, and you let landowners give and remove permissions for their land.  Everybody wins.

When it comes to PvE I don't care.  Because I've found PvE servers/communities just as toxic as PvP, but in a far more passive-aggressive way.  And those who cause all the problems hide behind the rules.

As for land ownership, I like the one-flag rule for small island.  I do think larger island should be divided up into a few predetermined lots/territories.  I also like they are adding more islands.  The water to land ratio has always been off.  I did like when they added the ability for you to set who could build on your land under the old flag system.  I wish they would bring that back.  Part of the reputation system I keep talking about would be if you sink a boat (or cause a leak) or damage structures or kill tames on land they own, you get a worse reputation hit that say in lawless areas.  And that reputation would follow them around.

I too consider myself a builder.  Though I'm one that tries to build the "Disney castles" but my bases end up looking like a random collection of boxes stuck together, with some failed attempts at aesthetics mixed in.  

[Martyn 246]

Interesting way to put it for my island gtfo.. In Ark, I always thought of it more as "this is my area, those are my trees, those are my rocks, you can build anywhere, except in my area, my trees or my rocks and you are free to harvest from the trees and rocks that you can't build in."

Pillering was done more to protect resources than to just own all the land.. then ark became open season to other races and cultures.. those new aggressive cultures started spamming pillers everywhere.. they couldn't comprehend that pve actually meant pve.. not pvp. It took months of continual explaining, using google translate to explain to people why you piller.. what you piller and to understand what pve is.  In the end it did work, on my server at least, we got those others to remove their pillers and stop training wyverns on ours and each others camps.. although tbh.. my plantx wiped out the wyverns and gigas that were trained there.  But the point stands.. the "toxic" issue on pve and probably on pvp stems more from misunderstanding the rules than any actual toxic attitude.  People can't help how they were brought up, but they can learn to be nicer people.

As far as atlas is concerned.  As far as I am concerned, if I have to grind gold to "own" an island.. then I should be able to do whatever I want, it's my island.   I accept that if I have "allowed" someone to build on my island, that their stuff, is always and eternally their stuff.  Originally it was decided to allow new buildings to be demolished within 12 hours.  ie if someone came along and spammed, you could remove it.  If they came along and built a nice house.. you could also remove that, but from my experience so far, noone ever did.  At least not in any regions I lived in, quite the opposite.  People did remove old traps etc but not someone elses pen or house, except where it interfered with the resource rule.  Noone should build on resources.. ie metal spawns etc.   Anyone who does.. deserves all the grief they'll get for it.

I don't think of people in Atlas or Ark as being "toxic" I know people think I am.. but that doesn't really bother me.   What people think of me, is water off a ducks back.  What I think of others is however, esp if I'm wrong, which is rare I know.  Most people I've met simply misunderstand.. or make assumptions.  And those can be corrected through using words.

Correctly spelt words often helps.

This new rule would have been a great help, esp on empty spammed islands.  Contrary to popular belief.. your stuff doesn't actually get demolished after 10 days.. it actually remains.  All those traps you never knocked down, all those old houses, old pens.. all still there.  It would have allowed new owners to clean the island.  But due to the offliners complaining it would allow people to "nuke them" it's been reverted.  For pve at least.

Which means, those of us who do own islands.. have to put up with all the spam and old traps, houses, pens, shipyards etc.. that don't actually auto demo after 10 days.. or 30 days.. or 50 days.. On occasion the odd ship does vanish.. the odd piller is removed.. pillers only.. sometimes pillers with ceilings.  But all the rest remains.  And there's no fix for that on pve. 

So thankyou to the offliners who don't play anymore for your dare I say.. toxic help.

Edited July 16, 2019 by Martyn