Why no settlements and player shops for pve?

[Inari the Scot 2]

3 hours ago, Nutty Grandad said:

The Devs seem to be trying to re-invent the proverbial wheel - it never works!
Even on PVE there should be a claim system and player shops!
Look at history - In Lineage II and EVE Online, these 2 games thrived for many, many years (and still do) on player trading! Player trading in PVE makes it all worthwhile and the better the economy the more interest it brings to the game.
Player shops should be able to be made ANYWHERE in the game - there is no point to have them on spawn points or lawless areas only! Just won't work and will result in another wipe probably? 
So my suggestion is that the Devs take a few minutes and "steal" winning concepts from other games and apply them - after all it would be to their benefit!
This game has the potential of being super-awesome if they just could only think 'out the box'!

I agree to this, the devs seriously need to look into this!

[Winter Thorne 696]

On 3/4/2019 at 8:05 PM, wildbill said:

I think I can understand the logic of no claim flags. So they are changing the claim flags to be only for settlements, and settlements are for an entire Island. You must pay upkeep for a settlement, so you need the Bank for that. Players can build anywhere in PvP, the claim flag no longer prevents building, it is just to control the area that has the limited 9 hour war window. Also the owners of the flag can attack and destroy any building built on their settlement at any time. They will only let people build there as a means of collecting taxes to help with upkeep. In PvP, like always, you limit where people can build on your settlement through threat of destroying unwanted buildings. I assume companies will use billboards and such to show where building is allowed.

I hadn't looked at the changes in that way, (probably because I wasn't focused on the pvp parts), so thanks for posting that.    It does look like they've done a major redesign based entirely on how they want things to work on pvp.   In pvp controlling land IS the game, so they've basically said:

Fewer people get to own land.  Every island will only have 1 owner.  That's somewhere around 580 landowners, some of whom may be the same person.

Everyone else will just build anywhere they want, although the landowners can destroy your stuff.

Maybe that works for pvp.  There's no way in the world it can work for pve.

 

On 3/4/2019 at 8:05 PM, wildbill said:

So since claim flags don't restrict building, there is no purpose for them in PvE. Using the normal way that PvE/PvP works, nothing really works differently between the two modes, some things are just enabled or disabled or have setting adjustments. So since claim flags can't work differently in PvE, they can't exist. They can no longer work the prior way that they did in PvE when they are changed in PvP. Two problems, 1) They claim an entire island, 2) they don't restrict building. The 2nd could be made a setting that is enabled/disabled, but the first would be hard to enable/disable I would think.

So no claim flags, no banks.

I can live without the claim flags, but give us shops!

Who says claim flags can't work differently in pve?    If these changes are kept for pvp, then they have to, or there's no pve game.

[wildbill 142]

4 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

I hadn't looked at the changes in that way, (probably because I wasn't focused on the pvp parts), so thanks for posting that.    It does look like they've done a major redesign based entirely on how they want things to work on pvp.   In pvp controlling land IS the game, so they've basically said:

Fewer people get to own land.  Every island will only have 1 owner.  That's somewhere around 580 landowners, some of whom may be the same person.

Everyone else will just build anywhere they want, although the landowners can destroy your stuff.

Maybe that works for pvp.  There's no way in the world it can work for pve.

 

Who says claim flags can't work differently in pve?    If these changes are kept for pvp, then they have to, or there's no pve game.

Ya, they could work differently, I'm just stating what I've observed from several games that use this same game engine. Stuff never works differently in PvE except it might have a multipliier, like 2x gather in PvE, 1x in PvP. Or it might be enabled or disabled. Those are the only two things I've seen. I don't recall a feature ever working differently between PvE and PvP. You'd have to ask the devs why they wouldn't do that.

So based on this observation, they disabled claim flags in PvE, not changed claim flags to block building. But still, if they did somehow code in a flag to enable or disable claim flags blocking building, there were still tons of issues with the flags that they solved by having one fixed location flag per island. With a single player able to own a whole island, how could they have it block building and still have room for all players?

[MeatSammich 214]

A buildable shop building would be okay. In a perfect scenario, it would be a purchaseable NPC that you could place wherever you wanted in your base, that way you could build a shop for them that fits the aesthetic of the rest of your base, or hire multiple of them to sell different types of goods.

[Winter Thorne 696]

21 minutes ago, wildbill said:

So based on this observation, they disabled claim flags in PvE, not changed claim flags to block building. But still, if they did somehow code in a flag to enable or disable claim flags blocking building, there were still tons of issues with the flags that they solved by having one fixed location flag per island. With a single player able to own a whole island, how could they have it block building and still have room for all players?

I'm confused by this,  but here's where I think the confusion is happening.  You are looking at differences for pve as in "what flag could be flipped to make the pvp claims work better on pve?"  So from that perspective, you'd have to not do 1 claim per island, you'd have to block building on someone's claim, etc.  In effect, you have to undo everything you just did for pvp, put it back the way it was and set claim flag limits.  It seems like a lot to ask them to undesign the entire redesign they just did for pve and have 2 completely different designs.

But here's the way I'm thinking about it.   PvP isn't really getting redesigned claims.  They're getting some entirely new thing called a "settlement".

They just did a completely new design for pvp, and called it a "settlement".  Sure, ok..let's stop calling it a claim.  It's a settlement.  Claims are still there, but all the claim stuff is turned off and you run with this settlement design.  On pve, you load the exact same code, but you turn off all the settlement stuff and turn the claim stuff on.  (And you've adjusted claims to be limited, etc..)

In the future, if these designs aren't working out, or you want to add something that's just for pvp or pve, you have the flexibility to do that by altering the claims design or the settlement design any way you want without affecting the other server.  Maybe you even decide you want to run one of the servers with both of those things in place, and you can adjust the "settlement" flag  so it's being called a "city" flag.  You'd still get claims, 1 city per island, etc. etc..  There are a lot of possibilities with that kind of setup.

[wildbill 142]

40 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

I'm confused by this,  but here's where I think the confusion is happening.  You are looking at differences for pve as in "what flag could be flipped to make the pvp claims work better on pve?"  So from that perspective, you'd have to not do 1 claim per island, you'd have to block building on someone's claim, etc.  In effect, you have to undo everything you just did for pvp, put it back the way it was and set claim flag limits.  It seems like a lot to ask them to undesign the entire redesign they just did for pve and have 2 completely different designs.

But here's the way I'm thinking about it.   PvP isn't really getting redesigned claims.  They're getting some entirely new thing called a "settlement".

They just did a completely new design for pvp, and called it a "settlement".  Sure, ok..let's stop calling it a claim.  It's a settlement.  Claims are still there, but all the claim stuff is turned off and you run with this settlement design.  On pve, you load the exact same code, but you turn off all the settlement stuff and turn the claim stuff on.  (And you've adjusted claims to be limited, etc..)

In the future, if these designs aren't working out, or you want to add something that's just for pvp or pve, you have the flexibility to do that by altering the claims design or the settlement design any way you want without affecting the other server.  Maybe you even decide you want to run one of the servers with both of those things in place, and you can adjust the "settlement" flag  so it's being called a "city" flag.  You'd still get claims, 1 city per island, etc. etc..  There are a lot of possibilities with that kind of setup.

Ya, if programmers only coded that way. I've worked with them, I test their code for a living. I've written a bit myself. More than likely, they change the way claim flags work. They didn't add a 2nd type of claim flags for settlements. That would probably have been the smart thing though.

Still, were you happy with how claim flags worked in PvE? You want it to just stay the same? Personally I tried the officials, but when I saw what they had implemented, where essentially they added a land claim mechanic, which you'd only typically see in PvP to PvE, I immediately started looking to see if there were any unofficial servers up. When there were I left and never came back. Lots of threads in these forums complaining about claim flags and many of talking about PvE officials. Lots of suggestions though, like limiting the number of flags. Not sure why they didn't go that route, but there are plenty of threads on it.

I think this thread is about why no settlements, and I think what I discussed makes sense as to why no settlements.

Why not limited claims? That could be a whole other thread. I'd comment on that there maybe.

[Winter Thorne 696]

7 minutes ago, wildbill said:

Ya, if programmers only coded that way. I've worked with them, I test their code for a living. I've written a bit myself. More than likely, they change the way claim flags work. They didn't add a 2nd type of claim flags for settlements. That would probably have been the smart thing though.

Yeah, I know.  lol.  Nobody ever seems to write code while also thinking about, "What if I wanted to change this in the future?"  But..they haven't changed the live code yet, so there's still time for somebody to do something smart with it instead of hardcoding every darn thing they can think of into it.

 

9 minutes ago, wildbill said:

Still, were you happy with how claim flags worked in PvE? You want it to just stay the same? Personally I tried the officials, but when I saw what they had implemented, where essentially they added a land claim mechanic, which you'd only typically see in PvP to PvE, I immediately started looking to see if there were any unofficial servers up. When there were I left and never came back. Lots of threads in these forums complaining about claim flags and many of talking about PvE officials. Lots of suggestions though, like limiting the number of flags. Not sure why they didn't go that route, but there are plenty of threads on it.

I think this thread is about why no settlements, and I think what I discussed makes sense as to why no settlements.

Oh hell no.  I don't think very many people were happy with how claims worked.   In fact we've been talking about that on the forums for what seems like ages, with 2 major camps emerging on it -  add upkeep  vs. limit claims.  Sorry..I thought you had been involved in some of that.

 

11 minutes ago, wildbill said:

Why not limited claims? That could be a whole other thread. I'd comment on that there maybe.

It already is a whole other thread..more like 20 or 30 other threads.  Nearly every thread just before the changes were announced talked about limiting claims, and many threads since then have talked about that.

[wildbill 142]

1 minute ago, Winter Thorne said:

Yeah, I know.  lol.  Nobody ever seems to write code while also thinking about, "What if I wanted to change this in the future?"  But..they haven't changed the live code yet, so there's still time for somebody to do something smart with it instead of hardcoding every darn thing they can think of into it.

 

Oh hell no.  I don't think very many people were happy with how claims worked.   In fact we've been talking about that on the forums for what seems like ages, with 2 major camps emerging on it -  add upkeep  vs. limit claims.  Sorry..I thought you had been involved in some of that.

 

It already is a whole other thread..more like 20 or 30 other threads.  Nearly every thread just before the changes were announced talked about limiting claims, and many threads since then have talked about that.

Ya, I didn't mean to imply I haven't read those, I have read many.

Not sure if I commented on the upkeep or limit threads. I'm just adding my two cents here as to why I think having settlements on PVE would be a bad idea, or at least without also having lots of other changes to make them work. 

I'm thinking there is no simple solution for PvE that could be implemented in a few weeks to make PvE work.

It does work on private servers, where they add rules to limit the number of claims, so a fairly complicated system of claim limits could work. The problem is on private servers, they will make soft rules like not more than 1 water claim per grid and 2 more land claims. If it is a water claim, you must have a shipyard and a base with it, etc., etc. Really hard to code that sort of stuff in as rules. The private servers have admins that resolve stuff and just boot players that don't want to play by the rules. You can't easily run an official server like they do a private server. The private server also make all kinds of exceptions to rules when needed. They do stuff like sell a whole island for actual cash to a player to keep the server afloat.

[Pax 83]

Just added,,,,,,