Feedback: Land Claim System, Snoring and Island Design

[Sklex 64]

It's quite clear by now that the land claim system has it's flaws. There are flags everywhere and quite a few people who feel unable to progress because of the lack of unclaimed land. With coming on 80 hours in the game now I've been thinking about ways to improve the game. 

I would like to see a change where the current land claim system is changed to the following:

LAND

• Land claim exists for a Company to claim governing right over the land where the flags are placed. 
  • This entitles them to set a taxation level. 
  • This entitles them to set bounties on criminals within their land. 
    • Both should require an individual building which is restricted to one per island. 
• The ability to build basic structures is not limited by land claim but instead by the Governing Companies land claim. 
• Companies can configure their land. 
  • Define what should and should-not be built within their region of control. 
  • The configuration does not stop people from building, instead it defines a set of rules for living within the owning companies territory. 
    • It would stop them from creating specific government buildings (tax office, legal office)
  • Building buildings outside of the legal list flags you for criminal activity. 
  • Governing companies can decide what to do about the criminal activity. 
    • Hunt you and kill you. 
    • Put a bounty on your head. 
• Having a claim stolen should not automatically hand over the keys to the stuff that exists within that claim. The aggressors are coming in aggressive. Make them do more than just place a contest flag to get the booty. 
• Each island should have a primary Governing Flag. This should act as the hill in the capture the hill game. If a company wants to come and contest an island, they can start by irritating the island. Taking the smaller claim flags that will reduce the benefit the governing company get from taxes. Beyond that if the attacking company want to take control of the island they need to do a full scale assault and win the primary governing flag for that island. These flags need to be position-able by the owning company as this opens up strategic decisions about choice of placement. 

This enables new people to build themselves a foot-hold on an island. It's in the best interest for smaller group of people to work within the laws of the governing company. They get to live in harmony, assuming they pay their tax and adhere to the laws of the land. It's in the best interest of the governing company to allow smaller groups to farm their land to ensure they collect the tax. It builds a stronger community. 

The community can self-manage companies who are over-imposing. If they set the tax too high or limit the buildings too much then the natural reaction will be for people to take up residence on an island with a fairer governing company. This in turn will assist in helping strengthen nicer companies versus the zerg pvp companies who just want to ruin everyone's fun which will in turn improve the game. 

Would be great to see a Market Place building added to this system. Governing Companies should be able to build a market place where people are encouraged to trade. 

SEA

• Boat claiming in the current state is flawed. You should not be able to claim a boat until there is a system in place to allow you to protect the boat in offline mode. 
  • Sentry Gun's from ARK played an important role. 
  • NPC's should fulfil this role and I suspect this is the future direction. We need this now though because people are giving up on boats knowing that they are a complete waste of time. It's fun to build a boat. It's not fun to loose 3 days of efforts in the first 20 minutes to something you had no control over. 
  • There should be some sort of offline protection in that the game should check to see if there are any players from the owning Company online. If not the timer to take the boat should increase to that of a healthy sleep. You should design this game to encourage healthy human behaviour. If the entire company is offline, then make the timer minimum 10 hours. If the company is online make is much shorter. This will encourage active engaging PVP. 

A MISSING ELEMENT IN THIS GAME - HIDING

Something I feel they did wrong in this game is snoring and flags (for a more specific reason than above). Flags and snoring ensure that everyone knows where anyone has built or logged out. It completely removes the element of hiding from the game which further makes it challenging for anyone who is not in a Company that can protect them. 

Stealth is fun. Let me say that again... stealth is really good fun. 

If someone wants to go it on their own, hunt down a notorious pirate captain and collect the bounty on them then they should be able to do so without having to advertise their camp and advertise where they log off at night. Pirates didn't always have things go their way and would sometimes need to go on the run and hide. 

THE ISLANDS ARE BORING

I feel like you already made a perfect map and have some really good experience to draw from. Ragnarok was brilliant. Every corner of that world made you want to explore it more. In this game you made a few random land elevations and plonked some trees down. MAKE IT INTERESTING! When was the last time you watched a pirate movie that did not showcase some amazing island terrain? 

I'm sure we are only seeing the surface of what is planned so far. But what we have so far, while an absolute blast, has it's game disrupting flaws.

Edited January 1, 2019 by Sklex