Speculate on how company and alliance changes will impact the meta

[Smokey Bones 5]

In Captain's Log 22 the following changes to companies and alliances will go into place:
 

• Company limit has been reduced to 250 members
• An alliance now only contains a maximum of 4 companies
• A company can only be in 2 different alliances at a time.
• There will be a hard limit on the total number of claim flags per company. For example, 20. Numbers can be adjusted.
• Settlement owners must set a window of vulnerability, currently set to 9 hours, where their island is raidable. Outside of this window, players, structures and ships will not take damage from other players. 

I'd like to hear some opinions on the following topics in relation to the changes listed above:

* Do these changes help or hurt small groups of players?
* How will the limited alliances impact the overall activities in the game?
* How will larger groups work around these limits?
* What will smaller companies need to do in order to survive wartime?

[Talono 434]

A) they hurt small groups of players, By now you can at least take revenge on the megatribes and sink their ships offline. After the wipe they are safe 15 hours a day but you are not.

B) Not at all, 8 companies allied are 2000 players. 

C) With their discord server

D) Not take part in the war, build high on a rock out of bear cannon/ship artillery range, store valuables on a secondary mule char in a freeport, have your main base in lawless and only a shipbuilding outpost on a claim island

[Smokey Bones 5]

@Talono wouldn't you say that the 9 hour raid time window benefits small groups more so than megatribes?  Smaller groups typically have more/larger windows of time when they are susceptible to an "offline" attack.  Megatribes typically have higher player activity and can react to "offline" attacks more reliably.

From that perspective, after this change will benefit small groups as they will be less susceptible to an attack they could not defend?

2,000 player hard cap on allied players seems incorrect to me. 

* An alliance can have 4 companies
* A company can be part of 2 alliances
* At maximum, each alliance will include your company. Count the unique companies these two alliances, a total of 7.  

Alliance 1: [ company1, company2, company3, your_company]
Alliance 2: [ company4, company5, company6, your_company]

7x250 players = 1,750 is the _hard cap_

This is still a stretch imo.  Do you think that one company will find two alliance with no company overlap in both alliances where all companies in each alliance have max players?  I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think typically an alliance will have some number of active players lower than the cap.

[Meerkat 33]

It seems obvious to me that these changes are meant to limit larger companies from creating super companies or super alliances so I am a little confused when you ask if it will help or hurt small companies. It will definitely help.

Is it enough to give the little guys a fair chance? Probably not, you will still need to work with your island and claim owner to protect your land. But at least it’s a step in the right direction. 

[WilliamGrayton 6]

The hard cap on company members or alliances a company can be a part of does not limit anything really. You can populate entire islands with non company member company members,  a hard limit on alliances does not prevent alliances outside of the cap from working together or having an informal non-aggression pact with discord to bridge the communication gap between non allied companies. Instead of 1 mega company controlling the #1 spot on the leader boards or all the land you can now have 1 mega company controlling all spots on the leader board while still controlling all the land. Logistics become more strained or difficult but nothing is actually capped. Just because they do not have the same name wont mean they are not all the same people.

 

EDIT:

As far as help or hurt small groups, imo nothing really changes in regards to small companies

Edited March 5, 2019 by WilliamGrayton

[Smash 25]

9 hours ago, Talono said:

A) they hurt small groups of players, By now you can at least take revenge on the megatribes and sink their ships offline. After the wipe they are safe 15 hours a day but you are not.

B) Not at all, 8 companies allied are 2000 players. 

C) With their discord server

D) Not take part in the war, build high on a rock out of bear cannon/ship artillery range, store valuables on a secondary mule char in a freeport, have your main base in lawless and only a shipbuilding outpost on a claim island

A) small tribes get offline more because they are actually offline. Also, if you are a small tribe and you get wiped or buy a big tribe it will be pvp. You know.... Fun. 

B) you can have 8 tribe in an alliance.  I know it feels like you can, but trust me, you can't. 

C) maybe, the current meta with do not grief lists is hard to administer and generally just pisses everybody off. That's only going to get harder. 

D) this isn't ark. Going to a free port every time you need a rare mat or Blueprint isn't practical. 

[Icedlance 16]

I am not a PVP player, I'll put my fe cents as a PVE one:
Company limits are... okay I quess? 250 is still a lot of people.
Alliance number limit is actually alright as the alliance chat implementation is garbage.
Alliance member limit is just awful. I live on an island with a lot of small 1-4 member companies and we're all very friendly, but pretty incividualistic, so while we do like to group up and help each other sometimes, we prefer to have our own stuff and just have one big alliance. We've already agreed to find each other after the wipe, but might have to make one bigger company rather than an alliance, hich makes me personally feel less secure. As it is no if I lose a ship I lose my ship and no one cares. With a company I'll feel bad about losing one.

Now I ould like to adress these 2 points:

9 hours ago, Smokey Bones said:

wouldn't you say that the 9 hour raid time window benefits small groups more so than megatribes?  Smaller groups typically have more/larger windows of time when they are susceptible to an "offline" attack.  Megatribes typically have higher player activity and can react to "offline" attacks more reliably.

From that perspective, after this change will benefit small groups as they will be less susceptible to an attack they could not defend?

Alliance 1: [ company1, company2, company3, your_company]
Alliance 2: [ company4, company5, company6, your_company]

7x250 players = 1,750 is the _hard cap_

This is still a stretch imo.  Do you think that one company will find two alliance with no company overlap in both alliances where all companies in each alliance have max players?  I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think typically an alliance will have some number of active players lower than the cap.

I'd say 9hr window is more unfair for amall companies because 9hrs is still a lot of time. Chances are a small company can't maintain a sufficient level of presence during those 9 hrs to defend itself. Big companies on the other hand will likely have all of the 9 hours covered, but they're also protected of the retaliatory offline attacks of smaller companies that they pissed off enough that they ould want to offline raid them as only form of retaliation they can do.
So there you have it, big companies got their one vulnerable point covered.

As for alliances:
here's a system we had in some browser games with limited groups and alliances:
Main Branch 1st alliance: [Main Branch, West Branch, East Branch, Other Branch] and [Main Branch, Ally Main Branch, Other Ally Main Branch, ...]
West Branch: [Main Branch, ...] AND [West Branch, South-West Branch, North-West Branch, West Academy Branch]

You get the idea, pretty much a tree structure. Just gotta manage Branch names carefully and make sure you let everyone know the name of your allies.
That also solves problem of permission management, as fresh joins will likely get assigned to "Academy" and will not take your full Mythical galleon and sink it on a sandbar.

[MajorAvatar 28]

Mega companies will always have an advantage over smaller groups, they simply have the numbers so they have more attackers, more defenders and more resources available than smaller companies. How to fix this? that is pretty hard to do. Maybe war can only be declared against companies of similar size? or some incentives to attack other mega companies?

Companies of 250 Players (or more) would work if there are 40k players and multiple such companies that directly oppose each other, it does not work if there is a 1k company alliance on a 2k or 3k total player world.

Edited March 5, 2019 by MajorAvatar

[Percieval 1,067]

I must still see if it’s 9 hours per day. If it is, you can be attacked 21 hours or 33 hours non stop. What’s the whole point of this system then.. 

[Talono 434]

1 hour ago, Percieval said:

I must still see if it’s 9 hours per day. If it is, you can be attacked 21 hours or 33 hours non stop. What’s the whole point of this system then.. 

The new system is trash. Making all land lawless would be the best solution as suggested by many, so the ARK approach with all its pros and cons.

But still the best.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Talono

[Arykos 50]

8 minutes ago, Talono said:

The new system is trash. Making all land lawless would be the best solution as suggested by many, so the ARK approach with all its pros and cons.

But still the best.

no and no. and aehm no.

[Percieval 1,067]

24 minutes ago, Talono said:

The new system is trash. Making all land lawless would be the best solution as suggested by many, so the ARK approach with all its pros and cons.

But still the best.

The new system could be something very, very good. Just needs changes. 

[znasser 81]

18 minutes ago, Talono said:

The new system is trash. Making all land lawless would be the best solution as suggested by many, so the ARK approach with all its pros and cons.

But still the best.

If you want an arklike game aproach but just adding ships and changing the theme yes, it would be the best. But if u want a deeper game, similar to what eve online is,  that just won't work. 

[Talono 434]

10 minutes ago, znasser said:

If you want an arklike game aproach but just adding ships and changing the theme yes, it would be the best. But if u want a deeper game, similar to what eve online is,  that just won't work. 

EVE ONLINE would mean safe islands to build in PVE and high risk islands with rare ressources in PVP.

What we receive is a strange construct to protect the property of the megatribes together with a feudal slave empire system.

Disgusting.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Talono

[aladinf 11]

It will be a mess. Especially because of the 4 company alliances restriction. Small Companies will never have a chance to be part of a bigger alliance. If they defend their Island with all other settled companies there will be alot of friendly fire.

[znasser 81]

5 minutes ago, Talono said:

EVE ONLINE would mean safe islands to build in PVE and high risk islands with rare ressources in PVP.

What we receive is a strange construct to protect the property of the megatribes together with a feudal slave empire system.

Disgusting.

Maybe eve has changed a lot since 2014 when i left, but i don't remember it that way. They use to have player stations and starbases, where they were completely safe 24 hours a day, and small groups could do nothing about it. Let's give a try to this new system, cuz the one we have now it simply doesn't work.

[Sneakydude 143]

Would be cool if we could see less "kissing mega tribes Asses" and more i got 250 guys so do you lets fight... instead it seems to me 1000 members + 250 kiss assers, with another 250 kiss assers... learn to play and win a different way, and dont be known at the mega alliance Kiss assers.

[Noodled Jenkins 15]

1 hour ago, Sneakydude said:

Would be cool if we could see less "kissing mega tribes Asses" and more i got 250 guys so do you lets fight... instead it seems to me 1000 members + 250 kiss assers, with another 250 kiss assers... learn to play and win a different way, and dont be known at the mega alliance Kiss assers.

This is so true it’s the major problem with the entire setup. They need to cut the company size down to 50 or something.