A modest proposal regarding the land claim system

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

So in all the recent furor about the nuke option for new landowners, the one thing everyone did seem to agree upon was that claims and land ownership are a thorny issue, perhaps the thorniest issue in Atlas's development to date.  For all that I disagreed strenously with Martyn (and continue to do so) about conceptually with land ownership, property rights and settlers, he did say something that rang true and stayed with me the past day or two. Namely:

Everyone likes to criticize and make demands but people are short on offering ideas and suggestions (this isn't a direct quote but I think it fairly represents what he was saying.) So I've given this problem a lot of thought and tried to come up with at least something in the way of an idea or suggestion. I'm going to throw it out there. Kick it, prod it, poke holes in it and tear it apart if you can, I will take no offense to any fair minded criticism of this because I'm only trying to help find a workable solution.

I propose that members of the owning company on an island should have the ability to look at any structure on that island, radial menu it, and have two options for it:

Report as spam   and

Report all structures of this company as spam. 

Any reported structures would then be handled by a GM to evaluate whether the structure legitimately was spam or not. One thing that would greatly increase the efficiency of this process would be if the system allowed for screenshots to be submitted with the report, to speed evaluation, but I'm not sure how practical this part might be. This procedure would allow land owners to automatically allow any structures they were fine with as a non issue, for example pillar spam meant to protect resource nodes from building, while not granting them instant and total wipe capability which imo is far too much power and invites abuse. 

It would allow land owners to serve as filters for GM's so they didn't have to attempt to patrol and monitor the entire game world by themselves, a far too daunting task, while retaining ultimate decision making power of removal to the hands of neutral third parties.  The hope is that such a system might be initially somewhat effort intensive as existing owners report many instances and GM's must delete a lot of spam, but over time as the playerbase learns that spam is actively monitored by a two tier system, and a human being is making a decision, not a piece of code, then useless bad spam would dwindle and fade leaving only structures that are legitimate settler bases or spam approved by the islands owners.

A secondary benefit would be to reduce the responsibilities and workloads long term of both parties, as land owners would no longer have to patrol daily to meet a 24 hour window requirement, and GM's would get large scale assistance in focusing their efforts down to making a call on a report that one would hope the vast majority of the time is easy. Any reports that left the GM in doubt could be investigated further, but if you're looking at a picture of a pillar with a roof tile on top of it and the island owner doesn't want it there, it's a no brainer.

There's my idea, now tell me why it won't work and what all the problems might be.

Edited July 17, 2019 by boomervoncannon

[Winter Thorne 696]

4 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

 Any reports that left the GM in doubt could be investigated further, but if you're looking at a picture of a pillar with a roof tile on top of it and the island owner doesn't want it there, it's a no brainer.

There's my idea, now tell me why it won't work and what all the problems might be.

What about the things that aren't no brainers?  It seems like before that could be implemented you need some sort of general rule or principle about what builds should get to stay (assuming they're bing used) and what builds a landowner should be able to get rid of.

But then if you've made that rule well enough, isn't it something that could be coded and avoid GM intervention?

[krazmuze 120]

It will not work because the ARK and ATLAS devs have always had the goal of a game that does not require a GM to manage it.   They want mechanics to solve problems, not GMs.  So adding a mechanic that calls the GMs is not something they are going to do.   All you are doing is making the reporting structure to the GMs more efficient for the player, it does nothing to make the GMs job more efficient.  They still need to investigate both sides of the conflict, which takes time. In fact it will be so easy to report spam that they would need more GMs to handle all the spam spam reports.

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by krazmuze

[crazywildfire 12]

Ok so as a land owner. Say you get an island you see something that doesn't fit or whatever I mean ultimately it could be someones house at this point. But as a landowner you have a different kind of flag you can place down that covers some kind of radius around that flag. Anyone that has something built solo or if it is a small group that someone in the group can do. You get idk ex amount of days let's say 4 or 5 to protest it. But after that if nobody protest it then anything in that radius goes away including the flag that was put down. Some kind of message has to be sent to whoever items are involved and if it belongs to a group everyone in the group gets the message. 

 

I mean for most people (besides a few) they don't care about the actual buildings it is the spam they want to clear up. So most will not try to do it on buildings that people are living in. So it could help with the spam stuff.

The only issue is those that come and try to stop it on the spam stuff then you need another step involved to move forward and that step I have no clue to be honest.

Something along those lines idk 

[NOGG 1]

25 minutes ago, crazywildfire said:

Ok so as a land owner. Say you get an island you see something that doesn't fit or whatever I mean ultimately it could be someones house at this point. But as a landowner you have a different kind of flag you can place down that covers some kind of radius around that flag. Anyone that has something built solo or if it is a small group that someone in the group can do. You get idk ex amount of days let's say 4 or 5 to protest it. But after that if nobody protest it then anything in that radius goes away including the flag that was put down. Some kind of message has to be sent to whoever items are involved and if it belongs to a group everyone in the group gets the message. 

 

I mean for most people (besides a few) they don't care about the actual buildings it is the spam they want to clear up. So most will not try to do it on buildings that people are living in. So it could help with the spam stuff.

The only issue is those that come and try to stop it on the spam stuff then you need another step involved to move forward and that step I have no clue to be honest.

Something along those lines idk 

this is a exelent idea.... the whole concept of what people fear is losing everything they have done.... this could solve that issue (to an extent) by making the resources stored in the base and the building itself put into that flag... cleaning would remove the object and "disassemble" it and put the items in the flag for the owner of said structure to claim (or decay in a week idk)

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

3 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

What about the things that aren't no brainers?  It seems like before that could be implemented you need some sort of general rule or principle about what builds should get to stay (assuming they're bing used) and what builds a landowner should be able to get rid of.

But then if you've made that rule well enough, isn't it something that could be coded and avoid GM intervention?

I don’t think so because it’s kind of like that old saying about art: you know it when you see it. A human being I think can distinguish  a legit building from any kind of spammed structure on sight 99% of the time. My notion is that if the GM isn’t sure at first glance, they investigate further, but at a minimum they now know exactly where to go and what to look for. I could be wrong but I don’t think this is codeable.

Obviously no system is perfect, my hope is that this system leverages the self interest of the claim owners to make the GM’s job far easier and more manageable. The real benefit of such a system wouldn’t come right at implementation, when GM’s would have to review many reports, but over time as it becomes known putting down spam structures is a waste because they will be efficiently removed.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

52 minutes ago, krazmuze said:

It will not work because the ARK and ATLAS devs have always had the goal of a game that does not require a GM to manage it.   They want mechanics to solve problems, not GMs.  So adding a mechanic that calls the GMs is not something they are going to do.   All you are doing is making the reporting structure to the GMs more efficient for the player, it does nothing to make the GMs job more efficient.  They still need to investigate both sides of the conflict, which takes time. In fact it will be so easy to report spam that they would need more GMs to handle all the spam spam reports.

 

If your aware of any public statements to this effect by the devs, please link them, otherwise this sounds like speculation which might be accurate or might not. The reason I think this approach WOULD make the GM’s job more efficient over time is the effect it would have on player behavior if it was known spam structures were being removed promptly and efficiently. Most I bet would no longer bother. Thus over time the system wouldn’t need to actively be employed as much, thereby making things more efficient for GM’s. I’m also speculating, since we don’t know for sure, but discouraging spam as much as removing would be the goal.

[krazmuze 120]

They must certainly have said it in their streams when people asked for more GMs to solve all the trolls, they clearly stated they are in favor of mechanics that reduce their reliance on GMs.  It is most certainly a design goal - as witnessed in their most recent attempts at mechanics for eliminating spam.  In fact they are so eager to do things that way they do not think the mechanical changes thru (witness the reversion of the owner wipe function for PVE)

You are mistaken efficient reporting for efficient removal.  No good GM is ever going to remove something just because you flagged it as spam.    Maybe you are the troll and the other guy had to put down some defensive spam to prevent you from taking over his base.   A good GM needs to investigate and decide - and that takes time that has nothing to do with if the actuall pillars are individually flagged. 

Edited July 17, 2019 by krazmuze

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Just now, krazmuze said:

They must certainly have said it in their videos when people asked for more GMs to solve all the trolls, they clearly stated they are in favor of mechanics that reduce their reliance on GMs.  It is most certainly a design goal - as witnessed in their most recent attempts at mechanics for eliminating spam.  In fact they are so eager to do things that way they do not think the mechanical changes thru (witness the reversion of the owner wipe function for PVE)

Copy that, just haven’t watched much of the streams.  Thanks for letting me know. The idea doesn’t seem very consistent with their goal, but I don’t know how practical it is to run a game of this nature with no gm’s. Unchecked trolling behavior is certainly one of the things that has driven many away so far. 

[INVALID 1,037]

3 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

Copy that, just haven’t watched much of the streams.  Thanks for letting me know. The idea doesn’t seem very consistent with their goal, but I don’t know how practical it is to run a game of this nature with no gm’s. Unchecked trolling behavior is certainly one of the things that has driven many away so far. 

We don't plan to run our games that have live service aspect with No GMs, but we aren't a large team so we do like to focus on implementation that can minimize the workload on our GMs, so they can focus on other things.

[krazmuze 120]

I have had a guy wipe my base on unofficial PVE (mob dragging killed my sleepers then flag takeover against our rules).  He tried to claim to GM that I was lagging his FPS with my 'spam' - with one hut, 4 garden plots, and a sloop dock and shipyard starter base.  Of course the GM ruled against him and made him leave a chest of mats and compensation but it took hours of stress to deal with and that does not count waiting for everyone to be online.  If unofficial had mechanics that made sure we could make flag contest impossible, and leash mobs no GM would have been needed as it would not have happened (and I would not have left the server as rebuilding even with mats provided is not fun).   

Now imagine the mess it would have been if he could have walked up to my hut and reported it as spam and the GMs had instructions to delete all reported spam.

Just for our small population I feel sorry for the GMs for all the BS they have to deal with, I cannot imagine if the game actually had a 4x40k load what sort of staff would be needed

Edited July 17, 2019 by krazmuze

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

1 minute ago, Jatheish said:

We don't plan to run our games that have live service aspect with No GMs, but we aren't a large team so we do like to focus on implementation that can minimize the workload on our GMs, so they can focus on other things.

Does this idea or something like it sound like something that might help with that sort of efficiency, or are there back office considerations that make this less viable? I think one if the core things is that coding what constitutes spam seems like it would be hard while people generally know it when they see it. I don’t trust fellow players with a nuke button, but making claim owners bird dogs of sorts for spam might make the GM’s job a lot easier was my idea.

[user1 83]

i think this would be too easily abused, and even if it weren't you'd still need a mighty big GM corps.

even if it successfully solved the problem, which i'm unsure about, this sounds just too damn expensive.

divide the islands into lots, and restrict access to the shoreline.

you'd need more rivers to support larger islands with shipyards.

leave free space between the lots and place all resources and treasure maps in these free spaces and the shoreline.

you could enforce always having a couple lots reserved for special quests and emergent events.

[krazmuze 120]

Why I think you just invented flag based land claims LOL

 

[Elrood 54]

Or instead of creating completely new solution, combine old and current.


Islands claims are as is for taxing purposes and building permissions purposes (white-list for people to claim building space). Claiming, loosing stuff stay the same as now. 

Add additional, building space claims. 3 building claim per person with restriction of max 1 on single grid. Company building claims stacks non linearly by number of people. 5 persons company - 5 building claims. 20 persons - 7 building claims. 50 persons - 10. 100 persons - 20. Etc. Make company max 1 build claims per grid with increases similar to the number of building claims. Make those building claims twice the square meters of previous ones. Remove sea claims, prevent overlapping completely.  Add ability for the owner of island to destroy building claim before claim exist for 1 or 2 days. Add ability for island owner to destroy claim if owner wasn't on the grid for 3 weeks (2 weeks vacations without net? ) and other white-listed people to claim that thing. PvE - taking over someone else claim destroy all buildings, containers and items in the space. PvP - change ownership of everything in the space.  PvE - first person who started overtaking the claim wins. PvP - old rules of overtaking the claims with counters, etc.

Solves the problem of build spam - you can't spam too far. Solves the problem of inactivity. Fix the biggest problem of old system - overlapping. 

Throw in additional "claim type" for island owner called "protected terrain" with small radius. Say 10 per island. Protect resources, prevent people from claiming spots with resources/building there. 

Would love to hear holes in this idea. 

Edit: throw in new maps spawning only between claims - should be easy enough because no overlapping mean lot of empty space between.
If it will waste too much space, make claim something of a mutation between a circle and rectangle. Easier to stack together. Still leave empty space between.
Edit 2: throw in carnivorous spawning restriction inside building claim - and we have one more headache gone. 

Edit 3: Something need to be done about shipyards. For example restrict ability to build shipyards only to the owner of the island (plus make a limit of 5 - 10 per island depending on its size? ). When someone start building a ship - he locks the shipyard for some time required to build ship (like a day? ) if he fails, than bad luck. Shipyard is automatically unlocked when ship is finished?

Edited July 17, 2019 by Elrood

[Winter Thorne 696]

1 hour ago, boomervoncannon said:

I don’t think so because it’s kind of like that old saying about art: you know it when you see it. A human being I think can distinguish  a legit building from any kind of spammed structure on sight 99% of the time. My notion is that if the GM isn’t sure at first glance, they investigate further, but at a minimum they now know exactly where to go and what to look for. I could be wrong but I don’t think this is codeable.

Obviously no system is perfect, my hope is that this system leverages the self interest of the claim owners to make the GM’s job far easier and more manageable. The real benefit of such a system wouldn’t come right at implementation, when GM’s would have to review many reports, but over time as it becomes known putting down spam structures is a waste because they will be efficiently removed.

GMs have to be given rules.  There's nothing worse than hiring a bunch of people to be GMs and then letting them make it up as they go along.

The problem isn't simply pillars, or single foundations.  What if I place a taming pen somewhere that I intend to use occasionally?  To me that's a useful thing, and I use it.  To an island owner, it's spam, especially if there are too many of them.  Same with DP beds.  Same with a storage box and smithy.  Given that GS just recently wanted new island owners to be able to raze entire bases belonging to other active players, the answers lie somewhere between "a pillar" and "someone's base with workstations, tame barn, and shipyards".  But nobody has said where that line gets drawn.   GMs are people who play games like us, and they have just as many opinions about this stuff as we do.  Someone has to tell them the "official opinion".  Once you have an official opinion, it's a given that at least part of that can be automated.

At the moment there isn't really any GM presence.  There's a couple and they will only handle very specific things.  I'm not sure how many GMs the game intends to staff, but even assuming that they have full in-game GM support, the idea that some actual person will come and look at a taming pen somewhere, decide it's questionable and do some sort of investigation (what is there to investigate about that, really?) and then take some action.....well that's old school MMORPG CS.  I'd be very surprised if they did that.

Edited July 17, 2019 by Winter Thorne

[Nutcutt3r 173]

How about an island kick-vote system?

10 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

Report as spam   and

Report all structures of this company as spam

You know only the second option will get used, and it needs to be self policing not a reporting system.

An admin comes in and deletes something, he is doing the same thing that raze would do but ones ok and ones not...

Its EA and the last thing you need is someone spending time being hall monitor when he could be making the game better.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

3 hours ago, Nutcutt3r said:

How about an island kick-vote system?

You know only the second option will get used, and it needs to be self policing not a reporting system.

An admin comes in and deletes something, he is doing the same thing that raze would do but ones ok and ones not...

Its EA and the last thing you need is someone spending time being hall monitor when he could be making the game better.

You realize GM and dev are two completely different jobs right?

[wandelaar 44]

Basically a good idea.
Let's extend it a bit.

It is feasible to calculate in the background how 'spammy' a company is on any given island at any given time. [spammy = % of own structures on the island probably spam]
And if a company X has been > 50% spammy on island Y AND the owner of island Y would flag them as 'spammers' then a GM can safely approve the assessment and let them go *POOF* on that island.
If they are 83% spammy the decision is a no brainer for the GM. If they are 28% it might not be obvious, but is also relativelky less of an issue. Etc. Prioritisation for the GM is possible.

Persistence over time is important here!
Invisible reputation is important here ... all builders should be aware of these calculations and be on guard to stay clear of 'too much spamming' because they don't want to be flagged as a spammer.
Decision enabling for the GM.
Control for owner.
Reasonable safety for tennants and campers.

[camper =  temporary visitor with temporary structure for a temporary situation]
A camper is likely to be flagged a spammer depending on what they build for the night (or the tame) after a while if they don't clean up, but that's ok for both parties.

Best work with categories for this so that a change of 80% spammy to 79% spammy does not affect the assessemnt that Z is a true spammer on that island.

Edited July 18, 2019 by wandelaar

[crazywildfire 12]

8 hours ago, Nutcutt3r said:

How about an island kick-vote system?

You know only the second option will get used, and it needs to be self policing not a reporting system.

An admin comes in and deletes something, he is doing the same thing that raze would do but ones ok and ones not...

Its EA and the last thing you need is someone spending time being hall monitor when he could be making the game better.

 

No, if the landowner is in a big company then they would win votes every time. Even if you make it where one company is only counted by one vote not every single person in the company still wouldn't be right. This is a game after all. Who is one to tell someone else when, where or how to play their game. Oh you can't build here because you hardly ever on. Oh you can't build here because you don't know how to build. I mean the list goes on. So don't see it working good at least on pve.

I still feel like if the land owner sees something he can some how mark it as I said before with a flag. If who ever it is doesn't respond in X amount of time then that stuff wipes out. Not everything they have. If they do protest then it stays. So if the land owner highlights the house they live in they get a chance to protest if they do they are safe and no worries. So it keeps the landowner from trying to be a troll for the hell of it.

It keeps everything in game without getting anyone else involved. The only time someone has to get involved is if someone does protest it then the landowner can then have a option to send it in as a report and try to get it takin care of. If it is truly spam then everything would be ok if it isn't then who ever it belongs to will not have anything to worry about. Sound like a win/win to me.

The idea needs some tweaking and such like how long does it give the player to protest? 5 days? 10 days as normal decay time by then even the less casual player is at least getting on to keep things from not decaying. They sign in and see they have a message about it even have a little circle spot ir something show on the map so you know where it is on the island.  I mean I know a few landowners will say it isn't fair to them. I can't help one side feels one way and the other feels the other. You not goin to please everyone but at least this way everyone has a fair shot in not losing their base. 

[Winter Thorne 696]

Here we are tying ourselves in knots again because of a claim system that is overly complicated and open to abuse both by the landowners and the tenants.

What about a system that says all players get a chunk of land and they can build whatever they want on it?

They can allow others to build there if they want.

They can wipe out anything they want on their own land at any time.

 

Seems simple enough.  No rules, no spam, no GMs needed.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

23 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

Here we are tying ourselves in knots again because of a claim system that is overly complicated and open to abuse both by the landowners and the tenants.

What about a system that says all players get a chunk of land and they can build whatever they want on it?

They can allow others to build there if they want.

They can wipe out anything they want on their own land at any time.

 

Seems simple enough.  No rules, no spam, no GMs needed.

So, how exactly would that work given that players come and go, while land is a bit more fixed and permanent?

Edited July 18, 2019 by boomervoncannon

[Winter Thorne 696]

6 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

So, how exactly would that work given that players come and go, while land is a bit more fixed and permanent?

Not sure what you mean by that.

If a player goes his claim decays  in @ 20 days or so along with what's on it.

 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Just now, Winter Thorne said:

Not sure what you mean by that.

If a player goes his claim decays  in @ 20 days or so along with what's on it.

 

What I mean is that what happens when the number of players grows to the point there is no land left to claim? The inherent problem is you’re suggesting doling out quantities of a thing which does not fluctuate to a thing that does. Unless player activity never fluctuates significantly, this approach would encounter structural problems at some point.

[Realist 504]

22 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

So in all the recent furor about the nuke option for new landowners, the one thing everyone did seem to agree upon was that claims and land ownership are a thorny issue, perhaps the thorniest issue in Atlas's development to date.  For all that I disagreed strenously with Martyn (and continue to do so) about conceptually with land ownership, property rights and settlers, he did say something that rang true and stayed with me the past day or two. Namely:

Everyone likes to criticize and make demands but people are short on offering ideas and suggestions (this isn't a direct quote but I think it fairly represents what he was saying.) So I've given this problem a lot of thought and tried to come up with at least something in the way of an idea or suggestion. I'm going to throw it out there. Kick it, prod it, poke holes in it and tear it apart if you can, I will take no offense to any fair minded criticism of this because I'm only trying to help find a workable solution.

I propose that members of the owning company on an island should have the ability to look at any structure on that island, radial menu it, and have two options for it:

Report as spam   and

Report all structures of this company as spam. 

Any reported structures would then be handled by a GM to evaluate whether the structure legitimately was spam or not. One thing that would greatly increase the efficiency of this process would be if the system allowed for screenshots to be submitted with the report, to speed evaluation, but I'm not sure how practical this part might be. This procedure would allow land owners to automatically allow any structures they were fine with as a non issue, for example pillar spam meant to protect resource nodes from building, while not granting them instant and total wipe capability which imo is far too much power and invites abuse. 

It would allow land owners to serve as filters for GM's so they didn't have to attempt to patrol and monitor the entire game world by themselves, a far too daunting task, while retaining ultimate decision making power of removal to the hands of neutral third parties.  The hope is that such a system might be initially somewhat effort intensive as existing owners report many instances and GM's must delete a lot of spam, but over time as the playerbase learns that spam is actively monitored by a two tier system, and a human being is making a decision, not a piece of code, then useless bad spam would dwindle and fade leaving only structures that are legitimate settler bases or spam approved by the islands owners.

A secondary benefit would be to reduce the responsibilities and workloads long term of both parties, as land owners would no longer have to patrol daily to meet a 24 hour window requirement, and GM's would get large scale assistance in focusing their efforts down to making a call on a report that one would hope the vast majority of the time is easy. Any reports that left the GM in doubt could be investigated further, but if you're looking at a picture of a pillar with a roof tile on top of it and the island owner doesn't want it there, it's a no brainer.

There's my idea, now tell me why it won't work and what all the problems might be.

If they do end up keeping claims(which they shouldn’t), but if they do what they need to do is make the larger company it’s want the larger islands. As it is I think gold upkeep for a claim is stupid as well so a good way to combat this would be to lower the gold up keep of every single island regardless of size by 90%. 

Yep, every single island dirt cheap. I am talking so even a solo player can go get the biggest island out there. Then you can start seeing the larger companies actually getting the larger island and the smaller companies could get the smaller islands that are currently occupied by the bigger companies.

you might say well that would make the upkeep system worthless? Well to me it already is worthless, but this way the 50 gold per 12 hours for the biggest islands in the game could still keep the people that like the up keep quite because the upkeep would still be there.

though I am sure we would still hear. “We are not paying enough upkeep, we want more chores” lol