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Kita Kayo

Ships are Simultaneously too Hard and too Easy to Build!

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6 hours ago, CazzT said:

My hope is that, as development progresses, ship building becomes an actual specialization.  Requiring specific materials that only ship builders are trained to create.  Require iron ore to be forged into iron ingots to create nails, that sort of thing (i know, not the best example, but you get the idea).  Allow rafts and sloops to be buildable by almost anyone (a few points invested into ship building), but anything larger would require actual investment into the skill tree.  And if you want a Galleon?  You're gonna dedicate yourself to ship building.

When I read the title, my first thought was pretty much exactly what you wrote in the opening post, OP.

 

Why would you want this? This only means someone has to sacrifice his account to do nothing than being able to build a specific ship. Big Companies won't have a problem to deal with that (and as usual alt accounts are the answer to stupid skill requirements) and the only thing it does is that people are forced into even more (useless) skills.

The "dedication" should be the time and knowledge you invest to farm/plan/secure/supply your ship. The "real" problem isn't that ships are too easy to build, it's that they are too easy to run as SINGLE person.

A Galleon should be extremely powerfull but only if you have sufficient (human) crew. The AI is in my opinion a huge problem because it is far too effective on ships. There should be huge advantages to having human players as crew but in reality it's the opposite except for repair (and even there 1-2 people are enough in most cases).

This game doesn't need more hoops to jump through in regards to ship building (especially not more grinding), it needs better roles and more involved gameplay for ship crew outside the ship captain. If an actual human crew comes important (and their skills!) then it would help a lot in making sailing (and pvp) more interesting (atm just one person -the captain- gets an interesting job out of a single ship, that needs to change).

So before making ship building even harder maybe we should first think about making it first more interesting to be on a ship because the game is atm actually dominated by land and not sea battles.

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46 minutes ago, LinkesAuge said:

 

Why would you want this? This only means someone has to sacrifice his account to do nothing than being able to build a specific ship. Big Companies won't have a problem to deal with that (and as usual alt accounts are the answer to stupid skill requirements) and the only thing it does is that people are forced into even more (useless) skills.

The "dedication" should be the time and knowledge you invest to farm/plan/secure/supply your ship. The "real" problem isn't that ships are too easy to build, it's that they are too easy to run as SINGLE person.

A Galleon should be extremely powerfull but only if you have sufficient (human) crew. The AI is in my opinion a huge problem because it is far too effective on ships. There should be huge advantages to having human players as crew but in reality it's the opposite except for repair (and even there 1-2 people are enough in most cases).

This game doesn't need more hoops to jump through in regards to ship building (especially not more grinding), it needs better roles and more involved gameplay for ship crew outside the ship captain. If an actual human crew comes important (and their skills!) then it would help a lot in making sailing (and pvp) more interesting (atm just one person -the captain- gets an interesting job out of a single ship, that needs to change).

So before making ship building even harder maybe we should first think about making it first more interesting to be on a ship because the game is atm actually dominated by land and not sea battles.

I honestly don't see the point to having people doing tasks that npcs currently do instead of just driving another ship. 

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3 hours ago, znasser said:

I honestly don't see the point to having people doing tasks that npcs currently do instead of just driving another ship. 

But that's the whole problem?

That's how you devalue ships. If everyone is single handedly able to captain a ship it will ofc lead to ship spam and that each individual ship counts for less.

It also really doesn't require any cooperation or team effort (especially not with how ship battles currently work), we don't even have freakin boarding in a pirate game due to it.

I wouldn't mind if small and/or non-combat ships could be sailed by an individual but its a huge problem for the PvP side of things and the whole balance. To this day I don't even understand why the AI gets to do the fun part (shooting cannons and thus at least being involved in the action and SEE something) while players are required to do the most boring part (repairing which doesn't offer more than a minigame that's made worse by any lag and where you don't have any idea what is going on outside or get to enjoy the carnage).

Why not at least have it as requirement that for every X amount of cannons you need a seperate player to control them. That would even aliviate some of the issues with cannon spam on ships. That is ofc just one example of what could be done, there are certainly other ways to do it but what needs to be done is to get people more involved in handling a ship, there need to be more (usefull) roles on a ship (like why don't Lookouts have a role, you could give them the ability to "mark" targets that give a buff or a bonus to speed for people on the sails etc).

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1 hour ago, LinkesAuge said:

But that's the whole problem?

That's how you devalue ships. If everyone is single handedly able to captain a ship it will ofc lead to ship spam and that each individual ship counts for less.

It also really doesn't require any cooperation or team effort (especially not with how ship battles currently work), we don't even have freakin boarding in a pirate game due to it.

I wouldn't mind if small and/or non-combat ships could be sailed by an individual but its a huge problem for the PvP side of things and the whole balance. To this day I don't even understand why the AI gets to do the fun part (shooting cannons and thus at least being involved in the action and SEE something) while players are required to do the most boring part (repairing which doesn't offer more than a minigame that's made worse by any lag and where you don't have any idea what is going on outside or get to enjoy the carnage).

Why not at least have it as requirement that for every X amount of cannons you need a seperate player to control them. That would even aliviate some of the issues with cannon spam on ships. That is ofc just one example of what could be done, there are certainly other ways to do it but what needs to be done is to get people more involved in handling a ship, there need to be more (usefull) roles on a ship (like why don't Lookouts have a role, you could give them the ability to "mark" targets that give a buff or a bonus to speed for people on the sails etc).

You say it's stupid to invest in skill points and they make alts and want it so that everyone could make the biggest.  But you do not want it that everyone could sail them.... Strange logic.

If I put the dedication in it to build it I want to sail it to with NPC's. They not that great. Human will always win from npc. 

Only thing that failed is the canons outside the Canon ports. That makes it easier with npc. Builds that never could sail in real life. Like the designs.they come with but is totally out of place.

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On 1/4/2019 at 7:17 PM, Kita Kayo said:

So as it stands now the ships are just a grind, and anyone willing to smack a tree or a rock for long enough can build a Galleon. That to me is just crazy. The game is to go on adventures, pirate, survive and explore, not to grind the same resource until you want to kill yourself. Now after saying that I'm not going to just bitch and complain about how it's too hard or too easy. Like I said in the title it's both.

So right now it takes the same simple materials to build all the ships, and they are base materials that you can find almost anywhere. Its harder to build a spyglass than a galleon because you need crystal. Crystal is a bit, not a lot, but a bit harder to find than base resources. This needs to be scaled up for the ships.

So here is my idea, we need specific resources that are from common to epic grade that is required to build the frames of the ships. The implementation of this can add so much more adventuring and questing not to mention raiding if the material is guarded by bosses according to the rarity. And if adventuring and exploring isn't your thing then STEAL THAT SHIT! You could find maps to find the dynamic spawn location of the resource. The possibilities of new exciting content and direction in the game is endless. Plus RAIDS!!!!

A sloop should be easy to make and galleon should be crazy hard. But nothing should take hitting a tree for 16 god damn hours. But ill spend 200 hours to build the biggest ships if its fun, challenging and dynamic.

Did you miss the crafting part on the game description? - Craft/survival/explore - grind at every stage here. i prefer to build a schooner than taming a rex with no kibble

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2 hours ago, LinkesAuge said:

But that's the whole problem?

That's how you devalue ships. If everyone is single handedly able to captain a ship it will ofc lead to ship spam and that each individual ship counts for less.

It also really doesn't require any cooperation or team effort (especially not with how ship battles currently work), we don't even have freakin boarding in a pirate game due to it.

I wouldn't mind if small and/or non-combat ships could be sailed by an individual but its a huge problem for the PvP side of things and the whole balance. To this day I don't even understand why the AI gets to do the fun part (shooting cannons and thus at least being involved in the action and SEE something) while players are required to do the most boring part (repairing which doesn't offer more than a minigame that's made worse by any lag and where you don't have any idea what is going on outside or get to enjoy the carnage).

Why not at least have it as requirement that for every X amount of cannons you need a seperate player to control them. That would even aliviate some of the issues with cannon spam on ships. That is ofc just one example of what could be done, there are certainly other ways to do it but what needs to be done is to get people more involved in handling a ship, there need to be more (usefull) roles on a ship (like why don't Lookouts have a role, you could give them the ability to "mark" targets that give a buff or a bonus to speed for people on the sails etc).

At least you do say: "for the PvP side of things". This idea makes no sense at all for PvE, not sure about PvP, since I don't play that. 

I do think the idea that Atlas must require "cooperation or team effort" is not a good idea for the long term health of the game. Plenty of people will not play a game that has no solo or single player options and excluding them from Atlas makes zero sense to me. I personally will play in a team when it is convenient for me, but spend most of my time playing the game solo or just with my wife. We would not play the game at all if that type of game play wasn't an option.What fun would the game be for us if we could never sink a SotD or even sail any of the bigger ships? I've tried to handle three sails without NPCs, and it totally sucks. I would even be inclined to say that that NPCs should not be required to man sails, they should always be controllable from the wheel. NPCs should only be needed to man the guns. Also why not let NPCs repair the ship when it is moving (at least for PvE)?

Edited by wildbill

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14 hours ago, CazzT said:

My hope is that, as development progresses, ship building becomes an actual specialization.  Requiring specific materials that only ship builders are trained to create.  Require iron ore to be forged into iron ingots to create nails, that sort of thing (i know, not the best example, but you get the idea).  Allow rafts and sloops to be buildable by almost anyone (a few points invested into ship building), but anything larger would require actual investment into the skill tree.  And if you want a Galleon?  You're gonna dedicate yourself to ship building.

When I read the title, my first thought was pretty much exactly what you wrote in the opening post, OP.

I think you've basically captured what the OP is trying to say, but in a single paragraph.

And I have to say, I completely disagree. I played a game very similar to what you are describing, called Wurm. It was the biggest and slowest grind fest of any game I've ever played. It has a small and loyal following, can't say I'm one of them, but I did play it for quite awhile. It had some good ideas, like making it so you could go offline with almost no worries no matter where you were (your body did not remain in game).

In some ways this game could be more like that game, which is more of a traditional MMO, but the idea that specialization should be added to Atlas. NO NO NO. This just excludes people from truly experiencing all the fun that the game has to offer. It makes you decide what one or two things you like the most and only do those. That doesn't appeal to me or I think a lot of players. It in the long run becomes so boring, that the game is no longer fun and you quit playing. If the game existed in a vacuum of no other games it could work, but when you have limited time to play games, you are going to pick the game that is the most fun, doing the same thing over and over is not my idea of fun.

The other down side of specialization, is that it forces players to create alts. The game either allows a certain number of alts, or players actually buy the game multiple times to create them from multiple accounts. Why should you need 2 or more characters in a game? That just sucks in my opinion. Having to control like 2 or 3 or more characters at one time (a common practice in Wurm) to get anything done in the game totally ruins the immersion and fun in my opinion.

Edited by wildbill

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16 hours ago, LinkesAuge said:

Why would you want this? This only means someone has to sacrifice his account to do nothing than being able to build a specific ship.

Because this is a game the relies on working with other people to get things done.  What's strange to me is wanting everyone to be able to do everything.  That's fine if you want to play single player, but official servers are not single player.

8 hours ago, wildbill said:

I played a game very similar to what you are describing, called Wurm. It was the biggest and slowest grind fest of any game I've ever played.

I've heard that about Wurm.  I don't want it THAT restrictive.  But some specialization that forces you to choose is good for the game.

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15 minutes ago, CazzT said:

Because this is a game the relies on working with other people to get things done.  What's strange to me is wanting everyone to be able to do everything.  That's fine if you want to play single player, but official servers are not single player.

I've heard that about Wurm.  I don't want it THAT restrictive.  But some specialization that forces you to choose is good for the game.

A lot of people in these forums seem to assume Atlas MMO is all that is discussed here. About 50% of the players of Atlas do not play the MMO version of the game. Those 50% of the players do not think the game is all about working with other people. Most of them play the game solo or in much smaller companies. 

So if the game only becomes the MMO style of play, you have just lost 50% of your player base, don't see how that can at all be healthy for a game.

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On 1/5/2019 at 12:53 AM, Nightstrasza said:

Blueprints are just an extra grind for up to like 30% stats boost...wooo.... The ships sink in 1-2 salvos

I assume you havnt seen the legendary galleon in EU PVP with over 60k HP per plank then.... to put that into perspective thats over 400%, not 30%. Will take a lot more than 1 or 2 salvos for that.... and thats only for legendary, mythical could be even higher. So far the best I have gotten is a 200% which I could get up to about 250% if i get a semi decent roll on the crafts.

But to get those sort of blueprints you literally need to be killing thousands of ships of the damned. 

Edited by bluelance

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2 minutes ago, wildbill said:

A lot of people in these forums seem to assume Atlas MMO is all that is discussed here. About 50% of the players of Atlas do not play the MMO version of the game. Those 50% of the players do not think the game is all about working with other people. Most of them play the game solo or in much smaller companies. 

So if the game only becomes the MMO style of play, you have just lost 50% of your player base, don't see how that can at all be healthy for a game.

This is why I stated that Wurm's level of restriction is too much.  I play FF14 and I don't expect to be able to solo current raid content.  There are certain expectations in MMOs.  One of those is "You can't do everything solo".

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1 hour ago, CazzT said:

This is why I stated that Wurm's level of restriction is too much.  I play FF14 and I don't expect to be able to solo current raid content.  There are certain expectations in MMOs.  One of those is "You can't do everything solo".

I'll be more explicit, about 50% of the players of Atlas play on private servers where most of the game play is solo or small companies. They do expect to do almost everything solo, and also they can. Given the choice between playing on the Atlas MMO and not playing Atlas at all, they would chose not at all. If they game were changed to exclude solo play, they would either find a mod that removes that restriction or stop playing Atlas.

I would guess FF14 doesn't have a solo option. Guess what the solo players are playing, a completely different game. 

In the original information about Atlas, even before you could play it, it was made very clear, it would support private servers and mods. So all this talk about it being meant to be played only with other players and working together is just talk. There is more than one version of the game. You can keep talking like the only version of Atlas is the the MMO, but that is just fake news 🙂

Also about Wurm (I played Wurm Unlimited). Most of its players also played solo, despite it being designed as an MMO. They just used multiple alts to fill in for the skills a single character could not easily learn. I think Grapeshot Games knows this, they know that to sell to the widest audience, they must sell to both types of players.

Edited by wildbill

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3 minutes ago, wildbill said:

I'll be more explicit, about 50% of the players of Atlas play on private servers where most of the game play is solo or small companies.

They're not relevant to this particular issue, then.  Unofficial servers can do whatever they want with the skill trees and many other aspects of the game.

4 minutes ago, wildbill said:

I would guess FF14 doesn't have a solo option. Guess what the solo players are playing, a completely different game. 

Neither does Atlas.  But you can play both in a solo capacity for the majority of content.  You're just being pedantic at this point.

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On 1/7/2019 at 7:55 PM, Not Happy said:

They have blueprints for ship parts? Because I have several boxes of them and the only thing I have that goes into ship construction is some improved wooden walls, floors and ceilings.

Floatsam: Blueprints for Buildings.

SoTD: Blueprints for ship parts and artillery.

Treasure Maps: Blueprints for Weapons and armor.

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2 minutes ago, CazzT said:

They're not relevant to this particular issue, then.  Unofficial servers can do whatever they want with the skill trees and many other aspects of the game.

What issue? The game currently does not have a very restrictive skill tree. You are suggesting that it should.

The game doesn't require that you pick just one specialty to build a ship, some in this thread are saying it should. 

If they adopt what is suggested in this thread, then there will be an issue for those who want to do everything or close to everything in the game. 

Currently there is just a grind to make a ship. A private server can simply up the gather and weight rates to make any ship be solo made if you just work at it long enough. Adding other restrictions like special materials, or special accomplishments to make parts of a ship would just make it that much harder for private servers to find ways to keep things open and accessible to all players.

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1 hour ago, wildbill said:

The game currently does not have a very restrictive skill tree. You are suggesting that it should.

The game doesn't require that you pick just one specialty to build a ship, some in this thread are saying it should.

You're right, it's not currently like that.  It shouldn't be as open as it currently is.  Especially with respec potions being a thing.

1 hour ago, wildbill said:

If they adopt what is suggested in this thread, then there will be an issue for those who want to do everything or close to everything in the game. 

You shouldn't be able to do everything in the game unless you're on an unofficial server.  Shouldn't even need to point out the unofficial server part, but you apparently aren't aware of how flexible and customizeable unofficial servers can be.

1 hour ago, wildbill said:

Currently there is just a grind to make a ship.

No there isn't.  It's not even a grind as a solo player.  You can build a galleon in less than half a day.  Solo.

1 hour ago, wildbill said:

A private server can simply up the gather and weight rates to make any ship be solo made if you just work at it long enough.

And a private server can also make the skill trees more restrictive, less restrictive, more skill points, blah blah blah.  So the changes being asked for here are, guess what, not relevant to private/unofficial servers.

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8 minutes ago, CazzT said:

You're right, it's not currently like that.  It shouldn't be as open as it currently is.  Especially with respec potions being a thing.

You shouldn't be able to do everything in the game unless you're on an unofficial server.  Shouldn't even need to point out the unofficial server part, but you apparently aren't aware of how flexible and customizeable unofficial servers can be.

No there isn't.  It's not even a grind as a solo player.  You can build a galleon in less than half a day.  Solo.

And a private server can also make the skill trees more restrictive, less restrictive, more skill points, blah blah blah.  So the changes being asked for here are, guess what, not relevant to private/unofficial servers.

I think we agree that as long as they just make skills harder to get on official servers (like less points or more points needed for some skills), no one that plays on an unofficial servers is going to care one bit.

In general, there are other ways to make some skills harder to achieve, than just raising the cost. I've actually created a few mods myself and have hosted a few dedicated servers for ARK, so yes, I do know what I'm talking about. Ideas like "ships should be harder to make" can actually become a thing in a game and not just by tweaking a few settings. Be careful what you wish for. Not sure it was this thread or a different one, but someone was suggesting that NPCs not man cannons. That would be a game changer that is very hard to undo on unofficial servers with a bit of "customization". There could also be changes to how a ship is crafted that make it much harder to get that can't be undone easily. That is all I'm against, not simple setting changes like you are apparently suggesting.

Heck, if all you want is a server where it is very difficult to craft a ship, that can be done right now, you can just change a few settings on an unofficial server and it can be very hard to craft just about anything. Or change other settings and you won't be able to learn more than a few skills. So far, I haven't seen any servers out there like that. Could be not many people want that.

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On 1/4/2019 at 11:35 AM, Kita Kayo said:

That is a solution, but not a good one. it requires that you are lucky enough to stumble upon a blueprint. I don't see other people trying to come up with solutions to problems just complaints and excuses.

Blueprints are easy. I've got Brigs and schooners that are legendary and mythic quality on all parts, including stairs and ceiling tiles from flotsam farming.

1 hour ago, CazzT said:

You're right, it's not currently like that.  It shouldn't be as open as it currently is.  Especially with respec potions being a thing.

You shouldn't be able to do everything in the game unless you're on an unofficial server.  Shouldn't even need to point out the unofficial server part, but you apparently aren't aware of how flexible and customizeable unofficial servers can be.

No there isn't.  It's not even a grind as a solo player.  You can build a galleon in less than half a day.  Solo.

And a private server can also make the skill trees more restrictive, less restrictive, more skill points, blah blah blah.  So the changes being asked for here are, guess what, not relevant to private/unofficial servers.

It's important to remember that games set aside realism for fun and convenience. This needs to remain a game. Not a career.

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