State of the game

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

1 minute ago, mndfreeze said:

Do yourself a favor and go look at the wiki on the software development cycle.  You will sound like less of an idiot then.

 

It seems that you should look it up.  Games missing major game mechanics...which are game breaking, isn't early access.  The problem is that industry insiders have expanded the definition to allow them to make it cover anything and everything, and be a blanket excuse.
 

Quote

 

Valve has updated its guidelines for game developers intending to release titles through Steam Early Access in an effort to ensure the quality of games isn't compromised, Eurogamer reports.

These updated rules now state that Early Access is "meant to be a place for games that are in a playable alpha or beta state, are worth the current value of the playable build, and the developer plans to continue to develop for release."

 

 

Missing a major game mechanic that is game breaking, is not early access.  Having no game mechanic to defend a ship when offline, or away from the ship, IS game breaking, with how expensive these ships are.  Had they made the ships super easy to build until they had this sorted, I could have overlooked that missing mechanic.  But, they did not think this through.  They assumed everyone would have huge companies, and rely on round the clock player protection, it would appear.  That isn't going to happen.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

Let me clue you in.  Companies need to stop trying to be legalistic about the term Early Access, and need to stop hiding behind that as an excuse.  The gamer's expectations ARE what defines Early Access, like it or not, and it is known that Gamers expect that Early Access means the only thing left is some tweaking and balancing...in other words, something more akin to Beta than Alpha.  If the game is in Alpha state, say so.  Don't hide behind the term Early Access, when they know that gamers believe that to mean the game is pretty much done as far as game mechanics go.

At a minimum, they expect you to be very open and honest about missing mechanics, and give a timeline for when you think those will be added, and they also expect that those missing mechanics will not be game breaking, without some adjustment or inclusion of a placeholder, in the meantime.

Consumers are not going to let companies get away with hiding behind the term EA, as an excuse for everything.  The fact that you seem to want that to be the case, speaks volumes for who you are.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Captain Jack Shadow

[rodarin 17]

8 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

Bahahahaha

The logical hole is you thinking that you have all the answers.  You have amazingly few, starting with you claiming to understand what early access is.  You also don't seem to understand when the problems go beyond tweaking and balancing.  The problems with this game go way beyond tweaking and balancing, and you seem to be too stupid to understand this.  An early access version of this game would have some means of defending your ship when away from it, but as I have pointed out, this doesn't even seem to have been given any real thought.  That's not early access, that Pre-Alpha.

That's a game breaking lack of game mechanics.

 

There are actual ways to defend your ship with the NPCs. I guess they will work as guard dogs on auto. Or maybe some tamed things but I imagined tamed animals dont have much of a chance against mega zergs.

 

I made some suggestions (that would never get implemented)  about how raiding should work and how 'pirate' guilds should work.

 

MASSIVE hard cap on populations of both men and ships and territory for any group that routinely goes out destroying stuff every day. Have an incentive to fight pirates or people that destroy stuff every day. Have a reputation system of some sort. At least on the Official PvP servers. Have major restrictions to alliances with timers and lock outs to prevent work arounds for people who try to bypass the restrictions.

 

But since its mostly (completely) streamers that are the biggest 'offenders' to this (regardless of nationality) its likely to never happen at least until these guys stop getting paid (and thus stop streaming) but when that happens the changes would sort of be moot. So its a slippery slope implementing changes that are anecdotal. But obviously if these mega groups continue to infest the official servers then 'rules' need to be set in place.

 

I have said it over and over again this game is unique. Its the first game that can and has been DIRECTLY impacted (gameplay wise) by streamers. Its not like some BR game where it doesnt matter who is playing with whom or some RP game with a 32 to 100 player cap (which isnt PvP based). Its an 'open world' PvP game where guys can literally recruits hundreds and thousands of people to a company or an alliance. The 500 company cap was a joke but so Wildcard. If you have 5 or 6 streamers thats still 2500-3000 people. Obviously all wont be online but it doesnt matter anyway servers cant handle more than 100 people in the first place. The 150 cap is also generous while its possible to get that and more performance drops to zero with that many people on a server even if theyre spread out a bit. But it does make the excuse (because of this limited server pop issue) that these mega companies and mega alliance 'need' to obtain and control more zones. So a 3000 person alliance would claim they need to have 20 zones to be 'balanced', thats ~9% of all the maps in the game. SO 3 or 4 of these companies would then need ~35-40% of the whole game to just support their own groups. Kind of insane.

 

But as for the 'state of the game' it has multiple issues spanning multiple areas. The performance and optimization are better but still not good. The mechanics still suck, the 'content' is non existent. The of course the player influenced problems (I just highlighted the most obvious one). Then of course the duping and the aim botting and other various hacks and cheats that go unfixed and not mentioned.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

1 minute ago, rodarin said:

There are actual ways to defend your ship with the NPCs. I guess they will work as guard dogs on auto.

We had a full crew of NPCs, on Neutral, "defending" the ship.  One man on shore sank it.  Cannons are not turrets.  Turrets in ARK were not an impediment to raiding someone.  A simple, easy to execute process allowed you to get past them.  Have you ever watched H.O.D an his crew bypass turrets in like 15 seconds?  And we have less than that.  ORP is the answer, like it or not.  That or a reputation system that punishes both individuals and companies for mindless destruction.

[rodarin 17]

5 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

We had a full crew of NPCs, on Neutral, "defending" the ship.  One man on shore sank it.  Cannons are not turrets.  Turrets in ARK were not an impediment to raiding someone.  A simple, easy to execute process allowed you to get past them.  Have you ever watched H.O.D an his crew bypass turrets in like 15 seconds?  And we have less than that.  ORP is the answer, like it or not.  That or a reputation system that punishes both individuals and companies for mindless destruction.

Yeah I wasnt exactly sure how they worked I know when theyre controlled theyre pretty powerful. But when Wildcard made the decision to not allow NPCs to control mortars they made it known they want these guys to continue to do what theyre doing. 4 or 5 NPC on mortars there would be zero offline raiding or raiding of any sort by ship anyway. Or it would require some actual strategy by raiders (ship placements) to raid someone.

 

Either way the game has a lot of problems and most of them go way beyond the 'early access' excuse.

[Sharana 8]

23 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

We had a full crew of NPCs, on Neutral, "defending" the ship. ...

That's your problem. Set them to neutral only if you don't want to auto attack other ships when visiting other islands. 

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

Just now, Sharana said:

That's your problem. Set them to neutral only if you don't want to auto attack other ships when visiting other islands. 

Dumb.  We set them to neutral.  We had to whistle them to passive when entering our port area because while on Neutral, they attacked and sank a raft parked there, owned by some random player not in our Company.

Stop making excuses for a game breaking problem  People must be able to go to bed with the reasonable expectation that their very expensive ship will still be there when they log back in a day or two later.  If not, they will leave the game.  They should not expect that one person can sit on shore, well within archer range, and shoot fire arrows at an undefended ship, with impunity.  The AI to repair the ship should have been putting out the fires faster than the person shooting them, because we had 4 on that duty, and he was one person.  We should also be able to arm all AI with guns, and bows, etc...to fight back.   Better, simpler and easier to have ORP, so people can defend their ships themselves.  But since we need to build bases inland to avoid shore bombardment from easily destroying a base, the ORP needs to kick in when all human crew are out of range of the ship.  A warning that the ship is under attack, is also a necessary mechanic.  The first message that the ship is in danger, should not be the ship's death message.  This is another game breaking missing mechanic.

This IS the ARK engine.  In ARK, Neutral is for Dinos to defend themselves.  They do not attack first.  This is what you would want when you go offline.  You do not want your ship to aggressively attack anything that comes within range.  You want it to return fire against aggressors, not pick fights with people sailing by.