LoneSilverWolf 15 Posted January 25, 2019 Alright, so I rarely make a lot of complaints about the game, especially because it is early access. But this is just stupid. It is ridiculous. The changes made to the stone building requirements only hurt people across the board! It is bad for PVPers, it is bad for PVErs, it is just bad. The decision was one of the most ridiculous I have seen in a video game in a long time, and I play plenty of early access games. On the PVP side of things, you have crippled people's defenses vs offline raids. Stone was at least a decent defense when coupled with a couple brigs parked outside the base. Now? Well, there's no need for even a canon anymore, to be quite honest. Even for raids when someone is online, the fact that stone can be eaten through so quickly means that a company may not have time to gather their defenses before being overwhelmed. Stone won't even really slow someone down anymore. It's basically a wet piece of paper. Add to this the insane resource cost of both metal AND organic paste, and you easily have the most idiotic patch I've seen yet. You nerf stone to the ground, THEN make it cost 30 metal for ONE wall, plus I think 20 organic paste? FOR ONE WALL!!! On the PVE side of things, look. Guns were nerfed. FIRE ARROWS were nerfed. We are basically defenseless against Alpha creatures that are hostile. Now, we can't even make a decent stone base that the Alpha's can't destroy, because of the insane cost to make stone in the first place. What is a small group of 2 or 3 players supposed to do to bring down an Alpha before it destroys hours of work? At least with Stone you could put up a wall around your base. That's not even an option now. How the hell are smaller groups supposed to make a decent stone structure? PARTICULARLY those in areas that are lacking metal or lacking sugar resources? Sail for 30 minutes just to bring back a handful of metal because it is so goddamn heavy you can't even carry enough to make the trip worth the time put in? OR, go get a fair haul of metal, only to get destroyed by a ship of the damned, because we had to sacrifice defenses to be able to hold enough metal to even START a damn stone base? Whether it be the PVP playerbase OR the PVE playerbase, these stone changes only hurt the community overall in both camps. Now it is much more cost effective to destroy a stone base. The price for cannonballs is really low, while the price for a single stone wall--let alone foundation or ceiling--is insanely high. If you DO get raided, by player or Alpha animal, the cost to rebuild far exceeds any price the attackers make for their raid in the first place. People are leaving this game. You would THINK the devs of Ark would have learned a thing or two. Apparently all they learned was how to piss people off. If you devs want to KEEP people playing, you need to stop making these idiotic decisions nobody wanted. You need to fix REAL problems, like 30 cyclones tanking people's FPS, making destruction nigh impossible to avoid when you simply get caught out in the rain on a ship (the fact that many spawn around you at all is really stupid anyway, especially when you throw in Ship of the Damned as a simultaneous threat). Or random FPS drops under 30 for literally no reason whatsoever. Or even GOOD systems struggling to maintain a constant 60+ FPS overall. Or the vitamin depletion vs hunger depletion making it difficult to keep vitamins up without killing yourself overeating. Or God-like Alpha's that are almost impossible to kill with a smaller group of people because they can regen simply by having a damn corpse NEARBY, without even having to go over and eat it. There are plenty of issues need fixing. Stone cost was NOT one of them. I fail to see just how these devs can be so incompetent when they dealt with (and for the most part fixed) these same goddamn issues in ARK. It is really getting harder and harder to stick with this game. Me AND my group of 4 others are getting to our last nerve with this crap. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Dazlarus 8 Posted January 25, 2019 The way I see it right now is that stone structures are the metal tier from ARK. Stone structures should be very expensive as they are now AS LONG AS they are strong enough to justify the cost. Currently, they are not strong enough in PvP. The only things that should be able to damage stone structures are war tames (maybe rhino and upcoming crab?) and explosives. Explosives can include grenades, canister shot, spike shot, mortar shot and any future type of exploding cannonball. If you are strong enough to have a base made of stone in it should take preparation and planning to raid, even when defenders are offline just like metal (and later, Tek) bases were in ARK. I play Atlas on PvE official servers and have my base in a very hostile area complete with lions, wolves, cobras, rattlesnakes, crocs, and vultures. Our base is built on pillars just off the island and constantly gets attacked by cobras and crocs. Getting attacked is a large portion of the fun. Repelling those attacks and repairing before things go totally wrong is an exciting way to break up the normal grind associated with this game. The entire base is made of wood, in large part because of the changes that were made to the cost of stone structures. I do not feel cheated out of a stone fortress but I do feel really bad for the people on PvP servers were offline raiding can easily happen with a couple of pickaxes. Stone vs metal pickaxe should be 1 damage per hit and stone should be buffed to have 100,000 HP and take increased damage from explosives vs conventional ammo. Blowing a hole in a wall with 2 dozen grenades to steal some stuff, I like. Broadsiding someone's beach fortress once with a galleon and reducing it to rubble, I don't like (unless they were using my proposed explosive shells instead of standard cannonballs.) Also, to be clear, explosive rounds are already more expensive than standard rounds in regards to the canister shot vs grapeshot in the swivel gun but to have what I am suggesting work, the price of explosive ammo would need to jump significantly. Having the cost per shot in metal, fire gel, and blasting powder increase would significantly help with this. Currently, the cost vs benefit of stone vs wood just isn't there. Large amounts of rebalancing as I suggest here are going to need to be considered for the long term health of the game. Increasing the cost without also increasing the benefit to appeal as an "end game" base building material has alienated parts of the community. Sure, but it is important to remember that the game is in early access and things like this can be fixed to improve the long term health of the community. PS: Wild animals should not be able to damage stone structures, period, regardless of alpha status, IMO. Obviously, this cannot be the case because of stone taming traps and alpha predator traps but I do hope that the devs can figure some way to make this a thing in the future. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
