Claiming system is still broken

[gumbyc 53]

There is a reason why so many players are complaining about the current claiming system. It's because there are too few islands and too many players for the available places. Sure, you may be able to rent a spot and pay taxes, and enjoy your little sliver of land, but why. I don't understand why the DEV's are ok with this except the fact they want big companies to be on the server. Bigger companies, more players and MORE MONEY. What about the other 95% that arn't in a big company. I really wounder if the DEV's even play the game. Something is wrong when players claim vast amounts of open water that is useless.

This mess has to be cleaned up. There is no reason for it. On the other side there is the Lawless regions, where people can't claim land. Instead they do this to prevent others from obtaining land.

On other islands I've been to some use pillars to protect their space. SAME problem as ARK. No place to build. I think the plan was for players to stop in the Lawless lands, gather resources, and set off to settle on their own piece of land. Good plan gone terribly wrong. No land to claim, so they settle in the lawless and have to be content with the unfair decay factor and other players that place foundations everywhere around you, so you can't expand to one of those big companies, even if you wanted.

 

 

 

Edited February 14, 2019 by gumbyc
duplicate pics

[Axden1 51]

The new claim system is to long in PvE. 21 days is insane. I went sailing finally ready to leave lawless looking for places now that the population of the game has dropped, but I have to wait a month to hopefully find a place of abandoned land.

[Ivah BlackWater 58]

It's not the fact of to many players not enough land.. the issue is companies being complete hogs and taking whole islands and many islands for themselves because they wanna be assholes about it. And a lot stems from the stupid wanting to be "top company" crap. I sail a lot and visit a lot of places and I can tell you to all the places I have been, there is NEVER anyone around but once in a blue moon. People have grabbed this land, and threw 30% tax on it and do nothing else with it but to fast travel there to reset the flags. It's boring as hell to go around and no one to interact with.

I am having a issue with the island I have now with overlapping. I can't build because of it. I have tried to get in contact with both companies on either side of me but none respond, why?? because they simply are not playing and only log into set the flags. These two have most of the island that I am on and it sucks because there is no where on there to build, oh yea and their flags are set to company only, so if I even wanted to build on their land I couldn't.

Now before anyone says go to a different Island.. I have in a lawless area in the cold. But the fact still states.. no one is around yet all these islands are hogged up and claim flags are standing at 17-20 days constantly.

I know the devs are working on a work around for this...buuuuuuuut it is kinda taking longer than more people have patience for. I knew what I signed up for when I bought the game, and I am still here if that says anything. So I do hope things change soon.

[cloWandering 21]

I don't think it will be possible for any new players to claim land without getting it personally handed to them by the owning company.  With the claim timers being so long, it is almost impossible that someone just happens upon claimable land.  The active players on that island will know about that contestable claim weeks in advance.  They are the only ones who will be getting any of those claims because they can plan ahead to be on at the second that timer goes to zero.  Our little tundra company are lucky to have found our few claims before this system got the way it is.  We have given one of them to someone who came by asking genuinely for a place to build.  That will be the only way to get land on PvE going forward.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

I agree that the current system is less than ideal, and imo the system they began with does not demonstrate to me that they learned much from the pillar spam issues endemic on Ark officials. I also think allowing players to claim open water serves no useful purpose but to allow others to tax my SOD kills. Given that SOD’s don’t currently yield much gold this is a minor issue but seems conceptually poor. Indications from the upcoming patch that they plan to expand what we do underwater might potentially make this design choice more reasonable, but that’s a tbd imo.

I’m not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that favoring large companies equates to more revenue for the developers since everyone pays the same price for the game. Ideally what they want from a marketing perspective is a game accessible both to those that prefer large clans and those that do not. I’d agree that their build out of the gate too heavily favors large clans, and this is probably one of several factors leading to the sharp decline in activity, but their statements recently indicate they acknowledge this and are working to make the game more accessible to solo players and small clans. Whether their ideas for this prove to be effective is the part that remains to be seen.

with regards to land vs player ratio, there is no known perfect solution because the problem is fundamentally finite land vs variable playerbase. I think different approaches to this can and should be tried during EA to see what works best, but I would always expect it to be a never gonna be perfect situation. 

Edited February 14, 2019 by boomervoncannon

[Caduryn 46]

8 minutes ago, Axden1 said:

The new claim system is to long in PvE. 21 days is insane. I went sailing finally ready to leave lawless looking for places now that the population of the game has dropped, but I have to wait a month to hopefully find a place of abandoned land.

21 Days is just fine, atleast for "working People" and those who want to have Vacation.

What is not fine is that one Person can place 10000000000 Flags.

[Axden1 51]

I thought the claim time was going to drop down to 3 days for people with excessive claims, but I have only saw lands with 18-21 days.

[Caduryn 46]

1 minute ago, Axden1 said:

I thought the claim time was going to drop down to 3 days for people with excessive claims, but I have only saw lands with 18-21 days.

Well at 432 Claims it is 5 Days. :P

[Lailyn 6]

1 minute ago, Axden1 said:

I thought the claim time was going to drop down to 3 days for people with excessive claims, but I have only saw lands with 18-21 days.

cuz everything is buggy and dosnt work. But some ppl with only 2 claims get -2 displayed and will lose there claim in 4 days.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

1 minute ago, Caduryn said:

21 Days is just fine, atleast for "working People" and those who want to have Vacation.

What is not fine is that one Person can place 10000000000 Flags.

I know that EU players get 2 week vacations and as an American I’m jealous, but 3 weeks is till too long. If NA players are going to concede the 2 week rl necessity for EU players, then EU players need to meets us halfway and agree that if land ownership ingame is that important to them they will agree to 15 days and make it a priority upon return from vacation to log in and refresh claim timers. Saying “ I don’t just need 2 weeks, I need 3 so that once I get home I can go the the store, get a haircut, see a movie and a play, take the wife to dinner, see the kids school play, and then maybe get around to logging back in” isn’t reasonable, it’s lazy and insisting others accommodate your laziness, detriment to the game be damned.

Even beyond that, we aren’t even talking about a concession to all EU players, just EU solo players and those that go on vacation with their entire clan (hey man, who knows what sort of weird social customs those oil rich Norwegians have?) expecting the entire games playerbase to tolerate a7 fold increase to claim flag decay timers in order accommodate this very small minority isn’t reasonable.

[Axden1 51]

4 minutes ago, Caduryn said:

Well at 432 Claims it is 5 Days.

This just gave me a thought. How about they add a flexible claim timer for people with 0 claims. 

[gumbyc 53]

Isn't it obvious that people/companies can put down too many claim flags. Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting them on useless  open water. The first step would be limiting the number of claims per. I realize bigger companies need more land but I don't know how you would set that and allow expansion beyond a set number.

In a dream world I would allow big companies to ask for their own island. The DEV's would add a small island (size dependent on company size) and let the company have sole possession.

As much as I love sailing the open seas, there is a lot of area to add islands. This would free up a lot of claimable land. I would also take some of the Lawless and make it claimable. In my dream world I don't know what to do about the spamming of foundations in lawless.

[Shintai 117]

You can uphold a massive claim base with a few minutes of game play every few days. And the bank makes sure any tames and NPCs gets what they want.

1 hour ago, gumbyc said:

Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting them on useless  open water.

Sea flags themselves should simply be removed. Give people that uses them as claims for their bases a week where they can add land flags inside a sea flag. Then just remove them all.

Sea flags got a second usage, they collect you taxes from SOD kills, flotsam and soon the new sea biomes.

[Asanna 86]

While I agree with most parts I will play devils advocate and promote myself.

There are people who sell land and rent it super cheap to help those in need. I do this myself as well as many others in my alliances. I've also gone hunting for land and found plenty open spots which I have claimed for specific people asking in Discord. Only to have them tell me "oh I dont want to live there" hence why I'm stuck with the amount of land I have.

Granted this is me speaking from the PVE standpoint. I could go sailing right now and find at minimum 4 spots. It's there it's just hard to find if you dont know where to look.

I will agree i think companies should have a limit placed on them (maybe like 5 flags per company member) to limit the abuse.

That being said no matter how a solution could be mentioned theres still the possibility of griefers over lapping and making building impossible for you, theres the lawless foundation spam, there are ways around things like that and people will abuse it.

I also do agree the 20 day timer is harsh. Jat said it would be two weeks. 14 days =/= 20. I know vacations are important. And it sucks if you're a solo player and want to go away if they make the timer 2 weeks, but they should enable ally's to refresh your timers as another benefit to an alliance

Edited February 14, 2019 by Asanna

[gumbyc 53]

It's obvious that a lot of us don't have your skill set and don't know where to look. I spend many hours sailing and stopping every once in awhile and look just to find flags with long timers on them. I hope they do something soon or many more will give up.

[Asanna 86]

4 minutes ago, gumbyc said:

It's obvious that a lot of us don't have your skill set and don't know where to look. I spend many hours sailing and stopping every once in awhile and look just to find flags with long timers on them. I hope they do something soon or many more will give up.

All I do is watch the heat map for a couple days and head to the server with the least amount of players and start searching. Pretty easy strat considering.

I have land in tundra if you're on NAPVE and want it.

[gumbyc 53]

Sorry I'm so stupid. Whats the heat map.

 

[Gindorf 111]

23 minutes ago, Asanna said:

All I do is watch the heat map.

A heat map you say? Where might 1 find that?

[JotaCe 44]

Don't waste time about system claim, there is only 1 solution: Limit the number of claims people and companies can have. Thats all.

[gumbyc 53]

I'm out looking now and just came across a player with 67 flags and nobody around. They have to limit and amount of claims.

[MeatSammich 214]

11 minutes ago, gumbyc said:

I'm out looking now and just came across a player with 67 flags and nobody around. They have to limit and amount of claims.

Its not even 2pm est on a weekday, Valentine's day, no less. Probably not the best time to gauge how often people are around. I went through 3 servers a bit ago, and the player counts were 4, 2 and 1. So cold and lonely. Hold me?

Granted, 2 tropical and a temperate servers having 3, 1, and 0 players besides me at any time is never a good sign in and of itself.

Edited February 14, 2019 by MeatSammich

[MeatSammich 214]

One thing I will say, is that the claim overlap system is a big part of why I personally am not willing/able to give up land. Out of my 7 land claims, I have 3 that literally serve no purpose, and would be willing to give up, however, the way the claims were set up when I took them over, they all overlap so deeply, that giving up my unused spots, would result in cutting my base or dockyard claim almost in half - and thats assuming that anyone other than me would even be able to place a flag, due to the overlap, even if they were unclaimed.

Since no one was on in my grid, I spent a good chunk of the morning trying to spread out the flags some, and re-arranging them, but all 1 was able to do was make the overlap about 1/3 into the spots I want to keep, instead of almost 1/2, due to other claims surrounding mine.

[Ivah BlackWater 58]

For those looking for the heat map, this is one of them

 

https://atlasgame.info/

[haseo 14]

3 hours ago, gumbyc said:

There is a reason why so many players are complaining about the current claiming system. It's because there are too few islands and too many players for the available places. Sure, you may be able to rent a spot and pay taxes, and enjoy your little sliver of land, but why. I don't understand why the DEV's are ok with this except the fact they want big companies to be on the server. Bigger companies, more players and MORE MONEY. What about the other 95% that arn't in a big company. I really wounder if the DEV's even play the game. Something is wrong when players claim vast amounts of open water that is useless.

This mess has to be cleaned up. There is no reason for it. On the other side there is the Lawless regions, where people can't claim land. Instead they do this to prevent others from obtaining land.

On other islands I've been to some use pillars to protect their space. SAME problem as ARK. No place to build. I think the plan was for players to stop in the Lawless lands, gather resources, and set off to settle on their own piece of land. Good plan gone terribly wrong. No land to claim, so they settle in the lawless and have to be content with the unfair decay factor and other players that place foundations everywhere around you, so you can't expand to one of those big companies, even if you wanted.

 

 

 

not too few island, just too many flag for 1 company, you have more ppl in lawless than the rest of the world... some companie have many grid unused of course

and claim conpletly broken, today i see a flag with 3h, i wait at 0 i try to claim and i cant, now its -30mn so get a land once get a land forever?

[Asanna 86]

1 hour ago, Gindorf said:

A heat map you say? Where might 1 find that?

 

1 hour ago, gumbyc said:

Sorry I'm so stupid. Whats the heat map.

 

A heat map is a tracker map that shows current player counts upon refresh. The person two replies up above me linked a good one to assist

Edited February 14, 2019 by Asanna