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George Catcher

Do we actually need this huge open spaces?

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Yesterday I was sailing back to base from treasure hunt. I drove my Schooner with large speed sail (and a small handling one). The wind was strong and it was tailwind so I was enjoying my fast travel home. Yet I had a 15 minutes buff from discoveries. I crossed the border to Freeport and I was curious - how long it will take to pass whole server from south to north in all those PERFECT conditions (fast ship, tailwind, straight line, no SotDs). I used this discoveries buff countdown as a chronometer.

And got a result of 12 minutes.

I've been thinking then... if I go half atlas travel (8 grids far up/down or just left/right) and have always perfect conditions like that it will take for 1 hour and 36 minutes of sailing. The weaker wing, wrong direction of wind, SotDs, forced landings, slower or heavy loaded ships, etc will raise travel time dramatically (might be a 4 and 5 hours travel). And while you sailing in most cases you do 2 things. You dying of boredom, or playing Pacman with SotDs.

And it lasts for hours and hours.

(one guy in chat advice me to buy 2nd screen and play another game while I'm in travel state : ))). 

The question here is - are we really need those huge grids with small islands somewhere in center? Maybe it would be a good idea to compress space in future? I'm not saying about making all tiny and compact. But to lower travel time for around 33% or even 50% maybe? So the spirit of far adventures will still be here but all go a bit faster?

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They are scaling the game as it is a MMO. They want to make a huge world. With your own server you can create custom grids, and have nearly everything in it. We like this so it does not take hours to sail. 🙂

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I like the big world.  I just wish there were bigger islands.  It would be cool if there were areas where like to full zones were all land or something.  I'm not saying it should be majority water but like come on the islands are pretty small.

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Ya, like the other poster said, if you want a more compact experience, there are private servers with every biome stuffed into one grid. They don't have the kraken or the power stones of course, but you can get those too in about a four grid server.

Part of the reason everything is so spread out has to do with optimizing the servers to handle the player load. With them more spread out, each server has a lower load on it.

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I like the size of the world but i think they should have several more smaller islands per tile. 

Edited by Pallist
Changed many more to several more
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Like I said in 10 other threads, this is not a question for Grapeshot alone, but also for Nitrado. 

If they did what I think they did and that is drafting up a contract, there should be a line somewhere in the contract regarding hardware usage. The islands per grid and distance in between islands per grid has a huge impact on hardware usage. Meaning GS can’t just ‘add more islands’ in because most likely they’re contract bound. My guess is when the game launches we’ll be having a lot more (different) servers with more islands available to us. 

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Huge waste of space from the water, they have what 3 islands per grid? They could solve alot of issues with no land left for claim flags by putting more islands on there or making them much bigger.

I know people have left the game in droves, not surprising really but I'm quite happy playing on lawless, that is until the moment comes when the Chinese brings the SOTD in, it's inevitable it will happen.

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You cried to get rid of SOTD, you cried to get rid of storms, now you cry because of boredom.

Classic entitlement syndrome.

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4 hours ago, Percieval said:

Like I said in 10 other threads, this is not a question for Grapeshot alone, but also for Nitrado. 

If they did what I think they did and that is drafting up a contract, there should be a line somewhere in the contract regarding hardware usage. The islands per grid and distance in between islands per grid has a huge impact on hardware usage. Meaning GS can’t just ‘add more islands’ in because most likely they’re contract bound. My guess is when the game launches we’ll be having a lot more (different) servers with more islands available to us. 

Interesting. I hope you are right. I would definitely like to see something like this at game launch.

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4 hours ago, Nutcutt3r said:

You cried to get rid of SOTD, you cried to get rid of storms, now you cry because of boredom.

Classic entitlement syndrome.

Yeah this is a tricky thing. To the extent that one eliminates challenge, especially in a survival game, one runs the risk of accelerating towards boredom. While I do think storms every time it rains was too much, they should definitely still be something you have to deal with. I think the recent changes are a step in the right direction. Less common but more damaging.  I hope they will add in a greater variety of challenges and interactions at sea because lets face it, even unnerfed SOTD's and storms would eventually get boring too, even if they never made them any easier to deal with.

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I think the server size and grid size is fine... However I think the islands are far to sparse though and should be more numerous. I think there should be some REALLY big islands think Cuba... and then lots of scattered ones in chains and such so it actually looks more like the island chains around the globe.  It's like 95% water to 5% land. 8 Zones are powerstone islands where living would be a constant effort. The Kraken zone is all water. A lot of the island layouts on the map are copy paste slightly altered in placement and either flat, rocky, pillared, or statues. A few of the current "big' islands look like the got some effort put into them as do some of the freeports. I hope they put some more effort into the map and unique islands and features.

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The big MMO concept is pretty much dead already and you have 5-10 people in average on a server tile. Can easily go real days without meeting anyone anymore.

Servers could easily be condensed to a 5x5 or 7x7 tile world.

Edited by Shintai

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Most of the people posting these topics play PVE, you hardly ever get bored sailing on PvP, nor is there any land issues 😉

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1 hour ago, Zlax said:

Most of the people posting these topics play PVE, you hardly ever get bored sailing on PvP, nor is there any land issues 😉

I rember when I started playing this game, I was looking for gems hopping from server to server. Came onto an island, they had bears with cannons shooting at me as soon as I set anchor on this island, I ran and almost died. I was sweaty and hard with a racing heartbeat.

Edited by Bad News Bear

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I mean even pvp is pretty dead compared to a few weeks ago. Not sure what PVE has to do with the fact there is far to much ocean and not enough land in this game.

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Just now, Thor Ragnarock said:

I mean even pvp is pretty dead compared to a few weeks ago. Not sure what PVE has to do with the fact there is far to much ocean and not enough land in this game.

PvE is completely dead too. 5-8 people on tiles, people only logging in to refresh timers.

12500 peaks now, lets say 8000 average. there are 4 servers each with 225 tiles. That's 900 tiles. So if evenly distributed across servers and tiles you get 9 in average and 14 peak per tile.

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Yea I suspect if they actually push out some really big content updates or start restarting the server from scratch every couple months after really big content there might be new influxes assuming they do a good job with publicity and fixing the biggest issues that have caused people to leave so far and there are no major flukes with it. Beyond that I expect it to stay low and have surges on content and fall until they eventually get out of EA. Hard to say though I am still enjoying unofficial but will probably be moving to another game sooner than later. Looking forward to this next content update and will probably take breaks in between and come back to see what's changed between big updates. I enjoyed official for a while but got tired of the constant changes towards making offline raiding easier and easier and rebuilding harder and harder. My daily routine went from enjoying the game to just a constant rebuild cycle which got old fast.

Edited by Thor Ragnarock

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Atlas world is super boring. Every grid is almost the same. I was really hoping for a kind of continent / archipelagos map before launch. With more bundled small islands and big, even partially inaccessible, continents along with currents and winds that would make traveling faster but more challenging. That would make route planning a lot more fun. Small passes infested with SOTDs and long ways around in relative safety. I wouldn't mind 10x land as long as there is a viable option for trade and actually meeting other players like cities where you can buy or rent a plot of land or a pre-build house. 

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8 minutes ago, radosc said:

Atlas world is super boring. Every grid is almost the same. I was really hoping for a kind of continent / archipelagos map before launch. With more bundled small islands and big, even partially inaccessible, continents along with currents and winds that would make traveling faster but more challenging. That would make route planning a lot more fun. Small passes infested with SOTDs and long ways around in relative safety. I wouldn't mind 10x land as long as there is a viable option for trade and actually meeting other players like cities where you can buy or rent a plot of land or a pre-build house. 

That would have been good. Unfortunately it´s not happening now unless there is a complete redesign and change at Grapeshot. I try keep my hopes up, but looking at the player curve and how people ingame talk and react. The game seems dead.

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