Claim Timers

[IvoryNatalia 0]

First off, I want to say, I am speaking in reference to PvE. I have no idea if PvP works the same way or not.

 

Yesterday, at roughly 2PM EST, my husband and I were elated - the timer for one of those "claim and flee" griefers was finally able to be contested. (It had been our land previously, but we lost it when one of the original major flag changes went through that would have had us replacing our flags. We lost it while we were at work. Oh, well, we thought - maybe they'd build something nice and be new neighbors. Nope. They laid two foundations, a bed, and then did the same thing in a bunch of other spots on the islands. Onesie twosie claims. No big deal with losing the claim, just wish we'd lost it to somebody who wasn't a spawn blocker.) Whelp, we sat down for the long haul - the claim timer said six hours, not the 30 minutes we'd previously seen on flags. Okay, we said. That puts us at 8PM. Sure, we're both sick, but we can do this. We can alternate naps if we need to.

Around 5:30PM, when we were down to 2.5 hours left, somebody sailed through the blue circle. They weren't there very long - we asked them to park down by our base for their treasure hunting, and they did. Less than a minute in the blue circle. The flag was back up - to five hours and 47 minutes. We'd lost more than three hours of sitting and staring. But, okay, whatever. That would have us around 10:30PM. We can still do that, we can still make it work.

Around 9:30PM, the same thing happened, but not treasure hunters. Just the regular group of people who sail around looking for untended boxes, smithies, etc. Now we'd have to wait until 1-2AM EST. At this point, we said, skip it. We'll try again in the morning. There was no alternating naps at that point.

I logged in this morning at 6:07AM. The onesie twosie spawn blockers had been on. At roughly 2AM, if my math is correct. Now we'll have to wait another three days, and hope to god they don't log in, and then that nobody so much as breathes on the area.

 

Backstory complete, the suggestion is this: Either make it so only the owning company and their allies can defend, or make the up and down of the timer more reasonable. Somebody passing through who isn't even part of that company or their allies shouldn't reset the claim timer by hours.

 

Thank you for your consideration in this and similar matters.

[[GP] Guybrush Threepwood 626]

I pretty much made the same suggestion earlier today, totally agree.

 

[IvoryNatalia 0]

8 minutes ago, [GP] Guybrush Threepwood said:

I pretty much made the same suggestion earlier today, totally agree.

 

Sorry for the repeat, then - I merely glanced through the topic list since I needed to boot up my work laptop and get rolling on the whole Being An Adult thing. But, yay, for not being the only one who thinks that particular mechanic is a wee bit flawed.

[Dazlarus 8]

I also posted a thing about claim late last night but with the lense of an ARK player. In ARK there are tame limits on dinos to prevent servers from lagging out but also to balance tribes so that each tribe can only have so many dinos. In ATLAS, land is the most valuable commodity. It would be nice if companies had a limit to how many claims they can make, especially on PvE servers so that as companies find the valuable islands they can claim them and leave some of the trash islands for those who are just starting out like myself. I would appreciate feedback on my ideas from someone who is more familiar with the land claim system.

[Shanks Black 2]

I know this bug happened due to integer overflow and it's clear that company claim numbers are updated on a +1/-1 basis. Solution is to implement a method in your company class to recalculate the number of company claims every time a claim is gained/lost in addition to the +1/-1 update.

[IvoryNatalia 0]

2 hours ago, Dazlarus said:

I also posted a thing about claim late last night but with the lense of an ARK player. In ARK there are tame limits on dinos to prevent servers from lagging out but also to balance tribes so that each tribe can only have so many dinos. In ATLAS, land is the most valuable commodity. It would be nice if companies had a limit to how many claims they can make, especially on PvE servers so that as companies find the valuable islands they can claim them and leave some of the trash islands for those who are just starting out like myself. I would appreciate feedback on my ideas from someone who is more familiar with the land claim system.

I'm afraid most of my 1700 hours of ARK were on private servers - we just removed the tame limit. Or rather, increased it to an unrealistic number of 10k. Because breeding for the best possible stats takes numbers. The more numbers, the better stats.

If you're looking for land, just ask each grid square as you're going through if there are available spots/unused claims that folks are willing to give away. My grid's given away at least three in as many days since the changes to the lawless regions. And, given what we've seen while going through other areas, it seems that the community, as a whole, isn't a negative one, despite what the "reviews" might have you thinking.

As for limiting the number of flags.... Part of me understands where newer players want that - they're having trouble finding land. Part of me understands where Day 1 players, such as much, would feel penalized for it. We've had three land flags, we intend to keep three land flags. We're only two players, but it keeps folks from blocking the tin resource which is the only resource in our claims.