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SilkBD

solution Problems with PvE Changes, and a Proposed Solution

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So I've identified some problems with the upcoming changes on the PvE side of things and I wanted to list them here simply and with clarity:

 

1. Because there are no claims, people can pillar off someone's base very easily, pillar off their entrances and pathways in and out as long as there's a patch of ground within a few meters away from their foundations.  And there's nothing they can do about it.

2. Because there are no claims, people can place pillars and ceilings around someone's boat in their own port, forever blocking their boat in and preventing them from using it.  And there's nothing they can do about it.

3. This already happens in Lawless zones (it happened to me today), and there's nothing that can be done to solve the problem.

4. People can put large tames in front of other companies' gates and doorways, blocking them in from using it.  They can use tames to block parts of their base as well... forever.  And there's nothing they can do about it.

5. With the new system, they can just slap down an auto-repair structure next to their griefing pillars, and keep it repaired... indefinitely for as long as they choose.  And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

 

So, this is a non-trivial problem with the PvE mode of the game, and has greater weight given that there are no active Admins managing each server for things like this.

 

I'm not going to post a bunch of problems without proposing a solution for consideration and nitpicking.

 

My proposed solution:

1. Allow claims on all islands including the current lawless

2. Make the claim radius around 50% to 75% smaller than the size it is currently

3. Limit claims to 1 flag per island per player

4. Allow ships to temporarily pass through other companies' structures and ships, as an explicit emergency toggle for 2 minutes on the ship's multi-use menu

5. Allow a company to eject other companies' tames from their claim that have been there for over a hour (or whatever arbitrary time is reasonable for balance reasons)

 

That's my proposal, feel free to poke holes in it, I'm only one perspective.

Edited by SilkBD
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2 hours ago, SilkBD said:

5. With the new system, they can just slap down an auto-repair structure next to their griefing pillars, and keep it repaired... indefinitely for as long as they choose.  And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

We still don't know all the details about this.  If we can only have one, I don't see a lot of people using this as a method of griefing.  Jat and Dollie popped into another thread and they've said they're aware of, and listening to, our concerns about the changes and they're discussing how they want to move forward due to the concerns from the players.  Hopefully everything you've listed here will become an irrelevant concern.

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2 hours ago, SilkBD said:

 

 

My proposed solution:

3. Limit claims to 1 flag per island per player

1 flag per island and per player it's to small, we have play with only one claim and the radius are just ok for a smaller compagnie, 2 or 3 claim is for me a good Deal, but @Jatheish and other dev have say, make a low limite are difficulte, when you read the captain log, on PVP they have a HARD limite for 20 claim per compagnie .. for me on PVE a Hard limite to 5 or 10 are a good deal too. i hope dev will make a special claim for PVE because it's cool ! 

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I like numbers 1, 4 and 5 but 2 and 3 feel overly restrictive.

Honestly I don't think that limiting claim flags is the solution at all. We're all here because we were sold on the concepts the devs promised when they advertised the game. One of those concepts (the only one that concerns claim flags) is the ability to build an empire.

Even on PvP they're implementing a hard limit of 20 claims per company, but those are entire islands. With the new islands per grid, thats 4-5 grids you can control out of a possible 225. That might be a nation, but I'd hardly call that an empire.

Limiting flags is a stop-gap solution at best, that will help make the game better as it exists now but will bring us no closer to fulfilling the promises the devs made and the potential the game has.

The only real long-term solution is to make renting land more appealing from both a land-owner and tenant point of view. It's a design that would work well if the underlying systems were better fleshed out and more robust, offering incentives to both parties (and not taxes, large companies don't need resources) and better protections for both sides.

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1 flag per person, increase flag range by 2 times and additional buff so other players can't place a flag next to your flag. Remove sea flags. All flags will have an upkeep cost. If you join to the company you flag cost add to company cost with the condition if flags are next to each other and will cost 50% less to unkeep. So you don't have to check each flag. Unkeep cost is essential because if the player stopped playing the game so the flag will disappear together with buildings so someone else has a chance to find land. Also, remove the leaderboard system with flags.

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I think the solution at the pve server is simple.

1. Change the radius of the building back to the original radius.
2. Unconnected buildings can be demolished immediately.
3. The lawless area of the pvp server is changed to a neutral area, while the lawless area of the pve server is changed to a pvp-capable area.
4. Limit the number of automatic repair boxes Or the number of buildings that are automatically repaired increases as the number of people in the company.

Edited by mishma
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I think they should run it like warframe does there clans you can have x number of claim flags a say level 1 company you can only have x amont of players and as you level up you company(if you want to) you get x more claims but also you can have x more players in the compant to. but the up keep goes up and you nee to have the repair box to fix the flag/builds

also to fix the the bloking for port the kick out of claim area was pretty cool like  yo could make is so boats cant anchor or what not in you port area

 

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I think the solution is even simpler.  Just limit claims reasonably.  Here is the math, done by MeatSammich:

Quote

We wanted limited land claims. 50 claims max for companies over 100 people, 25 claims for companies 25-100 people and 10 claims for companies with less than 25 people would give everyone enough space to build.

If you use those numbers, and just take the land from the top 10 companies, thats 8500 claims freed up, minimum - and I know that the majority of the top 10 didn't have over 100 players, so in reality, it would be a lot more. Add in all the 2-10 man companies that had 100+ claims, and there would be more than enough area give land to literally everyone who has played PVE, or is likely to play PVE in the future - not even counting  the 200+ new islands worth of land coming.

The major hurdle to this is dropping the idea that Atlas is a game about simple land conquest (on pve).

 

6 hours ago, Kidori said:

Honestly I don't think that limiting claim flags is the solution at all. We're all here because we were sold on the concepts the devs promised when they advertised the game. One of those concepts (the only one that concerns claim flags) is the ability to build an empire.

Limiting flags is a stop-gap solution at best, that will help make the game better as it exists now but will bring us no closer to fulfilling the promises the devs made and the potential the game has.

The only real long-term solution is to make renting land more appealing from both a land-owner and tenant point of view. It's a design that would work well if the underlying systems were better fleshed out and more robust, offering incentives to both parties (and not taxes, large companies don't need resources) and better protections for both sides.

I understand this point, that there ought to be some type of "empire building" in the game, and that pve especially needs some kind of competition in it, but I think the idea of tenants and renters was a bad way to go from the start, at least the way it's thought of now.  No new player starts the game with the idea that they'll get in there and be the best tenant farmer ever.    It's just not a good goal. 

Much better would be if they allowed some higher forms of organization than companies, and based them around claim proximity.    Let all the people on an island decide to form a town.  Let them have to work really hard together for that, and then give them some great benefits when they've done that.  Let them hold elections if they like and have ranks or assignments handling things.  Let all the islands in one zone do that and form a country.  Give them a tiny new island with a capital building..   Give them shops and traderoutes, and diplomacy and enemies for their navy to fight, and base their benefits off their economic status on that stuff.  Rank them based on what they're able to accomplish.  

So much more interesting than some guy grabbing up a bunch of land and everyone else stuck renting from him.  (With both of them having to wonder who is going to grief who first)

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I understand the drive to expand claims (claim size and number of claims) but for anything less than 10 players in a company, you're not gonna be building an empire or any meaningful sized civilization.

It's reasonable for a company of less than 10 to have at most 1 claim per player continuous.

Right now we have companies of 3 owning large masses of islands that they never lose simply because they just walk through it once every 2-4 weeks.  This isn't reasonable.

Ideally, your claim ability should grow and shrink with your company size along with the decay / resource upkeep.  Your upkeep rate should be in line with 1 claim per player and if you have more or less your upkeep is modified (maybe exponentially) up or down.  This incentivizes being at or below 1 claim per player without placing an artificial hard limit.

 

Empire building is for large groups, not a 5 man tribe.

Edited by SilkBD

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8 hours ago, mishma said:

I think the solution at the pve server is simple.

1. Change the radius of the building back to the original radius.
2. Unconnected buildings can be demolished immediately.
3. The lawless area of the pvp server is changed to a neutral area, while the lawless area of the pve server is changed to a pvp-capable area.
4. Limit the number of automatic repair boxes Or the number of buildings that are automatically repaired increases as the number of people in the company.

1. As long as you're limited to 1 flag per player per island, that's not a crazy idea

2. I would say give it a 6 hour decay timer (with no ability to refresh) so that taming traps/pens can be used

3. Yeah, this is only a good idea on PvP if there were less Lawless areas... since it's nigh impossible to avoid lawless if you're not interested in pvp right now.  You know these areas will end up griefer central.

4. Or exponentially increase the cost to repair with the amount of auto-repair boxes you have.

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5 Flags per person. Limiting it to 1 with the size of the tames is a terrible idea. Not to mention the shipyards and ports. 

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8 hours ago, Robotukas said:

1 flag per person, increase flag range by 2 times and additional buff so other players can't place a flag next to your flag. Remove sea flags. All flags will have an upkeep cost. If you join to the company you flag cost add to company cost with the condition if flags are next to each other and will cost 50% less to unkeep. So you don't have to check each flag. Unkeep cost is essential because if the player stopped playing the game so the flag will disappear together with buildings so someone else has a chance to find land. Also, remove the leaderboard system with flags.

The problem with increasing the claim size is that it makes it exponentially harder to place a new claim in a spot that a smaller claim size would fit.  Smaller claim sizes means more people can claim and there are less no-man zones that can't fit a claim.

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What stops a Chinese conglomerate spamming flags across the whole map, un-hindered by man power, but everyone else encumbered and limited by man hours / flags?

What you're doing there is stopping the poor getting anywhere, and letting the rich run with impunity over each and every island in a region.  You'll just end up with 2 or 3 conglomerates milking swathes of islands, and everyone else gets griefed and bullied into lawless.

Which leads to the devs choice to make everywhere lawless so the majority of players aren't pushed on to few lawless islands in the first place.

 

:classic_huh:  *shrugs*

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3 minutes ago, Harryplopper said:

5 Flags per person. Limiting it to 1 with the size of the tames is a terrible idea. Not to mention the shipyards and ports. 

If you have a company of 5, then you have 5 claims.  1 player should not be able to claim a huge expanse of territory, that's exactly why we're in this mess.

Just now, Vorxius said:

What stops a Chinese conglomerate spamming flags across the whole map, un-hindered by man power, but everyone else encumbered and limited by man hours / flags?

What you're doing there is stopping the poor getting anywhere, and letting the rich run with impunity over each and every island in a region.  You'll just end up with 2 or 3 conglomerates milking swathes of islands, and everyone else gets griefed and bullied into lawless.

Which leads to the devs choice to make everywhere lawless so the majority of players aren't pushed on to few lawless islands in the first place.

 

:classic_huh:  *shrugs*

Are they doing that now?
 

There's plenty of claimable land right now, and if they open up all Lawless to be claimable, as well as all the new islands their adding, things should be no worse than now unless you're expecting a huge playerbase increase.

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I see one main issue that everyone is seeming to overlook. The main issue with the system as it is now is this. 

1 PVE leaderboard was introduced to push the bigger companies to claim stuff they did not need. 

2 Claim flags were circular and waisted a ton of space. 

3 Flags were being used to grief and steal resources.

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2 minutes ago, SilkBD said:

If you have a company of 5, then you have 5 claims.  1 player should not be able to claim a huge expanse of territory, that's exactly why we're in this mess.

Are they doing that now?
 

There's plenty of claimable land right now, and if they open up all Lawless to be claimable, as well as all the new islands their adding, things should be no worse than now unless you're expecting a huge playerbase increase.

There isn't though.  Right now if I sail in to a non lawless area.. all i see is red.. everywhere..  literally everywhere.  We have travelled, we went on a treasure spree, and each and every island was the same.  Infact, a couple of months ago, I came to the forum, and pretty much begged anyone, somewhere to relinquish a scrap of land.....  it coinsided with the changes, so all the timers were messed up.  Hopeless.   Lawless isn't any better, each and every mm of coastline is spammed with shipyards.  We're lucky... we found a swampy area of coastal hell in one of the lawless zones and bulldozed the trees and shrubs to get a shipyard up ourselves..

I still can't think of a solution to any of this, however.

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4 minutes ago, SilkBD said:

If you have a company of 5, then you have 5 claims.  1 player should not be able to claim a huge expanse of territory, that's exactly why we're in this mess.


 

 

Do you even own tames? Ships? You want every to be confined in what a 10x10 block radius? The size really does matter. Tames are huge and require a good deal of land to store them. Same for Ships. 

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Just now, Harryplopper said:

I see one main issue that everyone is seeming to overlook. The main issue with the system as it is now is this. 

1 PVE leaderboard was introduced to push the bigger companies to claim stuff they did not need. 

2 Claim flags were circular and waisted a ton of space. 

3 Flags were being used to grief and steal resources.

1. I agree, the PvE leaderboard in PvE needs to reflect those companies that promote community and help others rather than have the most claims.

2. interesting, the only shape i can imagine helping the situation would be a dynamic polygon that molds to claims around it if they're within the radius... but that could be hard to develop and have unintended consequences.  What did you have in mind?

3. I think the bank system is awesome, i think that should still be a thing... territory control of valuable land is awesome.

2 minutes ago, Vorxius said:

There isn't though.  Right now if I sail in to a non lawless area.. all i see is red.. everywhere..  literally everywhere.  We have travelled, we went on a treasure spree, and each and every island was the same.  Infact, a couple of months ago, I came to the forum, and pretty much begged anyone, somewhere to relinquish a scrap of land.....  it coinsided with the changes, so all the timers were messed up.  Hopeless.   Lawless isn't any better, each and every mm of coastline is spammed with shipyards.  We're lucky... we found a swampy area of coastal hell in one of the lawless zones and bulldozed the trees and shrubs to get a shipyard up ourselves..

I still can't think of a solution to any of this, however.

Right, but you don't check.  I goto any non-lawless and find claims about to expire, i come back at the right time and take it.  They're everywhere.  I'm not talking out of my arse, I'm being straight with you.

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1 minute ago, SilkBD said:

1. I agree, the PvE leaderboard in PvE needs to reflect those companies that promote community and help others rather than have the most claims.

2. interesting, the only shape i can imagine helping the situation would be a dynamic polygon that molds to claims around it if they're within the radius... but that could be hard to develop and have unintended consequences.  What did you have in mind?

3. I think the bank system is awesome, i think that should still be a thing... territory control of valuable land is awesome.

Brings me back to MC days and towny. Make it a square grid add a hotkey in to show your params and anything built outside that area can be destroyed by anyone. 

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4 minutes ago, Harryplopper said:

Do you even own tames? Ships? You want every to be confined in what a 10x10 block radius? The size really does matter. Tames are huge and require a good deal of land to store them. Same for Ships. 

I have only the amount of ships and tames that i need, plus one extra of each species as backup for emergencies.  I don't collect tames just to have them sit there and look pretty.  And I have just enough room to hold them all by building upwards with a ramp to store them safely from predation.

If you need more land for your tames, then either you have more tames than you need or you need more players in your company.  But that's just my opinion.

Edited by SilkBD

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1 minute ago, SilkBD said:

I have only the amount of ships and tames that i need, plus one extra of each species as backup for emergencies.  I don't collect tames just have them sit there and look pretty.  And I have just enough room to hold them all by building upwards with a ramp to store them safely from predation.

If you need more land for your tames, then either you have more tames than you need or you need more players in your company.  But that's just my opinion.

Breeding? Selling? Trading? Many different reasons to have a lot. 

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3 minutes ago, SilkBD said:

 

Right, but you don't check.  I goto any non-lawless and find claims about to expire, i come back at the right time and take it.  They're everywhere.  I'm not talking out of my arse, I'm being straight with you.

Impossible to execute that level of mindless island trawling with our manpower vs time constraints.  So again, we have those that are 'time wealthy' creaming everything, and of us that hook up with mates on a Friday night after a busy week for some R&R time just see walls of red outside lawless.

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There's no need to restrict it to 1 claim though.  Have a look at the math MeatSammich worked out.  If you restrict it to something like 5, and with caps for companies at various levels, you'd have enough land for anyone has played the game so far or who would ever play the game.

I know restricting it to one claim would eliminate small spaces that would go to waste, but with that much space, restricting it to 1 claim would mean huge amounts of spaces would be "wasted".  And having "space" isn't really wasted anyway.  It's what makes things look decent.  If you want to see what 1 claim per person looks like with no extra space, just swing by one of the golden ruins and have a look at the ship tenements there.  Nobody would want some of those small spaces anyway.  They're interior, or straight up a cliff, or where all the alpha cobras spawn.

If there's enough land for everyone to have some breathing room, let them have some breathing room, especially on pve, where someone's imagination is the only limit of how they want to play the game.

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3 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

There's no need to restrict it to 1 claim though.  Have a look at the math MeatSammich worked out.  If you restrict it to something like 5, and with caps for companies at various levels, you'd have enough land for anyone has played the game so far or who would ever play the game.

I know restricting it to one claim would eliminate small spaces that would go to waste, but with that much space, restricting it to 1 claim would mean huge amounts of spaces would be "wasted".  And having "space" isn't really wasted anyway.  It's what makes things look decent.  If you want to see what 1 claim per person looks like with no extra space, just swing by one of the golden ruins and have a look at the ship tenements there.  Nobody would want some of those small spaces anyway.  They're interior, or straight up a cliff, or where all the alpha cobras spawn.

If there's enough land for everyone to have some breathing room, let them have some breathing room, especially on pve, where someone's imagination is the only limit of how they want to play the game.

Yeah... you're not wrong here.

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Just out of curiosity and this might be a tin foil hat thing entirely but can they actually limit claims? 

Since the stream and with the massive lack of feedback from the Devs I've started to wonder why they didn't limit claims right from the get go. Its been kinda bugging me and at first I kinda settled on it being an over site and it just might be, but could there be more to it that we're just not being made aware of.

Is it out of the realm of possibility that limiting claims per player/company just isn't something that can be coded in a short period of time with breaking things?

Gonna have to start making appearances on the official discord if thats where most of the QA stuff is happening I guess...

 

Edited by LoneXS

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