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Thurston

A "little" rant.

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First of, sorry if this isn't allowed, and if i'm crossing any lines. I'm just venting purely because I enjoy the game & i want to see it get better.

So, just to preface this at the time of writing, i have 39 hours of playtime, and i played Ark for a substantial amount of time, so the issues i am raising aren't to do with me being educated, but more what i think should happen with the game to make it more fair.

Although there are a LOT of issues with the game, i just want to say i am extremely happy with the progress the developers have made & the time they have done it in, especially in such a stressful time of the year for anyone, now with that all said and done time to get into the actual issues! (I'm going to break it down into sections)

 

Gameplay Issues (The biggest):

- You can raid stone bases with shields and shovels. Any Pickaxes and Axes/Hatchets don't do any damage to it whatsoever... but a fucking shield and shovel does?! - this needs to be fixed immediate, its an extremely game-breaking bug. I have been on the receiving end of people 'abusing' this, and i just watched the base i spent 2 days grinding for disappear. This may come off as salty (and yes, i am a bit) but i'm sure you all would be too.

- This may come off as a bit 'racist', but i do not intend it to come off as that, but in my honest opinion, i feel as if China should be region-locked to their own servers. This is because we get massive zergs (20-30 people) duping, hacking etc. And all of the reports i have seen are 90% reports about Chinese players. With this change (although people will more than likely dislike it), i do wish we would get a wipe, too. On EU PVP and NA PVP there are Chinese Zergs with maxed out Galleon which is just insane in 2 days. Not just that, it gives everyone an equal chance now that the servers are semi-stable for everyone.

- Resources still don't re-spawn if you're on the island. We sat on an island for a good 2 hours waiting for trees, etc to respawn and barely any did. We also waited for metal nodes to respawn, but literally none did until we came on the day after, then only half of what was there came back.

- Climbing Picks are way too overpowered. I managed to rush them and raid someone within the first hour of me playing, and that got me geared (yes it was an offline raid, but oh well!). I feel as if they should be at least mid-game, or requires a "rock climbing" skill under survivalist, shouldn't be able to get it too early into the game.

- People are able to claim whole island, so i suggest either making the map bigger to allow us to settle in places where others aren't, or limit 1 claim per company or person, which can be upgraded with gold to be able to place more. (I'd prefer company, that way it requires you to ally with others to claim).

- The default lock-on PVP Camera is extremely annoying, i know you can disable it, but in all honesty i'd prefer the melee/pvp system from ARK. It feels a lot more balanced in my opinion.

- On some islands, way too many animals spawn. Before we got raided, our base was in F11 (which has desert islands) and at 1 time, we were all getting chased by like 6/7 snakes, 2 crocks and 3 vultures. It shouldn't be too 'easy' to claim an island, etc but that's just ridiculous, especially since we were fresh spawns, hitting level 20 snakes with spears.

- Its way too easy to destroy ships. We had a Schooner with 4 total cannons and 4 total swivel guns. Another, idol, Schooner took around 8 shots before it sank, its too much of a grind to be sunk in such little shots in my opinion. I feel as if it should be more shots in order to destroy the bigger boats.

- Tying into my previous point, there is no way to protect your Schooner whilst you're offline, sure you can place it in a Freeport, but people can just ram it (Yes i've seen the patch notes, and i know they're fixing it), but we took our Schooner to a Freeport, and when we logged on, it was gone. This can also be used for trolling purposes, so i'd recommend making a place where you can store your boat in the Freeport for gold (and it just globally makes it invisible for everyone, like the bodies, etc), that way we have a sure way on how to store our boat, and it requires some-kind of grinding so we can have a 100% way to keep our boat, that we spent days grinding for, safe.

- The vitamin system is very good, but pointless considering people literally just kill themselves and respawn to get all of their stats back, if this is how the game was intended to be played, no change is required. A change i would suggest would be just to remove the system entirely or to make it less 'advanced' as its too hard to manage it all in a game like this, so dying and respawning is the easiest way to do it.

- When you purchase an AI from the Freeports, they get stuck and you have to 'tame' them with gold, since they count as AI (just like animals, etc) people can kill them, so its pretty pointless getting them, or you have to travel to a Freeport with no one in it to even buy one.

- On some Tundra islands, there is a severe lack of fibre, in a place where berries, tress, etc can thrive it doesn't make sense that fibre is the only thing that can't thrive, even though they can thrive in harsh conditions in real life.

- The ship collision on the sea floor needs a bit of a nerf. Even though you're clearly not touching the floor, you can sometimes get stuck (only with the Schooner+), i experienced getting stuck multiple times, and required us to just sit in place, rotate and wait for the wind to push us out of the stuck area.

- There is a severe lack of items such as wheat, etc. There is no documentation as to where they spawn, and the map is too big to be searching every island to find it. Its also like this with a lot of other resources, such as gems/crystals, etc.

- Taming is close to impossible, one of my crew-mates got the whole tree for taming, and we bola'd a wolf and attempted to feed it bones, but whenever we got too close, we'd just get bitten and given a severe amount of knockback. We searched around the wolf, and the only accessible place to feed it bones is by its head. I suggest in the taming tree that we are able to make a 'muzzle' kind of item that we can place over the wolfs head (and has the same action as finding water/reloading), and you have it hit it all green for it to work.

- There is a massive lack of general information about the game. No idea on respawn times, item locations, etc. We searched for a good 4 hours to find some gems yesterday, and we didn't find a single one, now that could be because of bad luck/someone has already mined them, but it's annoying considering its required to progress, and we're expected to search throughout the whole map to find 1 ingredient we need. Additionally, there is an extreme lack of information about farming/irrigation, music and how to find it (and what i even does), etc.

- Doors and Ladders are annoying to open and climb. You have to look directly at the interaction point for it, i don't remember it being this annoying in ARK.

- For some weird reason, gates are MUCH louder than anything else in game, which is.. very annoying especially when its like 2am, everythings quiet and you just get the shit scared out of you by a gate (yes it happened to me lmao).

- The fishing system isn't fluent. We have no idea on how to do it, etc.

 

Network Issues (Its smaller!):

- Randomly, the server/instance crashes/restarts. I know the developers are constantly working on fixing and improving the networking side of things, but yeah, its still annoying. When the servers crash, it rolls us back anywhere between 5-10 minutes (Experienced a 20 minute rollback before)

- Servers refusing connections is a very big issue. At the time of writing this, a LOT of people are experiencing this issue (more specifically, people who have logged out in Freeports). E12 has been dead for the past 7+ (or so) hours. I haven't been able to connect, and i know a lot of other people are experiencing the same issue, but no comment from the developers side whatsoever. I've scouted Reddit, Twitter and even the forums and there has been no reply except for Jats tweet (https://twitter.com/Jatheish/status/1078031356494524417).

- Just a very big issue with people not being able to connect, and extremely vague lost-connection issues.

 

This "shit post" wasn't/isn't intended be a dig at anyone. Its just me more expressing my thoughts and opinions (and venting as i stated above!). This post was also created to help the developers in identifying the pressing issues that us, as players, are experiencing. But i do really, really hope for a wipe, even though i'm sure some of you are against it. I do have my crew working on another base, so its not just because we got raided. It's purely because it makes it more fair.

 

Last thing, congrats to the developers for hitting 53,000 concurrent players today!

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First: This is a pretty stable review you wrote there! I can agree with most of the points.
Especially the claiming needs a rework in my opinion.
I saw another thread with somebody suggesting to limit the amount of placable claim flags to the amount of players in a tribe.
But I got the feeling that this could be abused pretty hard.

Let me help you out with the fishing system. It's exactly the same system as it was in Ark.

You learn the skill "advanced tools" and craft a fishing rod in your inventory.
Now you may collect sap, honey or sugar canes and pull them in your inventory over the fishing rod. These are your baits! (Won't work, if the rod is already equipped in your hotbar)
Get yourself a chair, put it on top of your raft, sloop, whatever and sit down.
Put the rod (now equipped with your bait)in your hotbar, do a left click to equip it like a weapon and aim at the water.

Tip: There gotta be fishes in the water. You ain't gonna get vitamin D from nothing.

As soon as fish bites into your bait, a "Quick Time Event" will start and you gotta press several keys on the left side of your keyboard to pull the fish out of the water.

Good luck an' good catch!

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1 minute ago, Chaplynn said:

Let me help you out with the fishing system. It's exactly the same system as it was in Ark.

Yeah, i never fished in ARK, appreciate the help, thanks!

 

2 minutes ago, Chaplynn said:

First: This is a pretty stable review you wrote there! I can agree with most of the points.

Why thank you! I spent a good hour or so writing it, reworking points i thought were too either directed or harsh, etc!

 

2 minutes ago, Chaplynn said:

Especially the claiming needs a rework in my opinion.
I saw another thread with somebody suggesting to limit the amount of placable claim flags to the amount of players in a tribe.
But I got the feeling that this could be abused pretty hard.

Yeah, i see how that can get abused, but that just gave me another idea on what to possible do. Under the 'captaining' skills, maybe make it so there is a skill you have to unlock to claim land? It wouldn't be too hard, but it'd sure prevent the early-game abuse & also implement the "have to unlock more slots via gold" part of it in there too

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Wow, pretty accurate review so far.

But i would suggest 1 or 2 other little things.
First when you spawn in a lawless region you spawn more often in the middle of nowhere or even in the bottom of the ocean. It would be great if spawn can be adjust to prevent those kind of think. It happen to me several times and i had to die a several amount of time to get to the shore.

For the claiming flags oh my god......... like you said 1 per survivor / guild or even buy them at a merchant in town for like 25-30 golds so people cannot spam them and for claiming a land you'll need to explore and really play the game instead of spamming F1 for 1 hour.

For the ressources...... i would do somethings like made them respawn at a certain rate even if building or boats or claim flags are around but do a radius ( no spawn within 5 meters of a foundation or something like that)

But overall they do an amazing job atm.

edit: Do a map wipe server seems to work fine and everyone could have the same chance at the beginning

Edited by Angel
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Just now, Thurston said:

Yeah, i never fished in ARK, appreciate the help, thanks!

 

Why thank you! I spent a good hour or so writing it, reworking points i thought were too either directed or harsh, etc!

 

Yeah, i see how that can get abused, but that just gave me another idea on what to possible do. Under the 'captaining' skills, maybe make it so there is a skill you have to unlock to claim land? It wouldn't be too hard, but it'd sure prevent the early-game abuse & also implement the "have to unlock more slots via gold" part of it in there too

There's just one problem.
You gotta find land in the early game to get yourself a shipyard and build at least a sloop to move more than 3 people around.
Me and my crew are as 3 and temporarily claimed land to build ourselves a sloop.
After that we turned our backs to the mainland and set sails.
We got nothing but 4 chests, a preserving bag, a mortal and a water barrel on board.
We use smithies and other crafting stations on abandoned rafts we find on the sea.
We can make a livin' of it.

How about people need to advance in level and skilling captining both to unlock more claim flags?
Or buy them with gold dublones?
This way we could be sure than most of the players get a chance to get themselves the most important things and everyone who wants to build a harbor or sth gotta work for it.

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Hows the decay on the sloop leaving it in the ocean (or wherever you leave it) when offline? I havent left the freeport yet but I know the boat decay there is pretty high.

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Just now, Skorpa Bloodhair said:

Hows the decay on the sloop leaving it in the ocean (or wherever you leave it) when offline? I havent left the freeport yet but I know the boat decay there is pretty high.

Pretty sure there is a skill under Captaineering, it's called "Ship Maintenance", you can upgrade it 3 times to increase the decay rate. Pretty sure the default decay rate is 3 days, though (at least, that's all i've seen! I haven't gone down that skill tree, someone else in my crew did)

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15 minutes ago, Thurston said:

Pretty sure there is a skill under Captaineering, it's called "Ship Maintenance", you can upgrade it 3 times to increase the decay rate. Pretty sure the default decay rate is 3 days, though (at least, that's all i've seen! I haven't gone down that skill tree, someone else in my crew did)

Ah that makes sense, thanks very much! Im planning to go a little nomadic with my small company initially but didnt know about the viability in terms of decay. Thanks again!

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Stop hating on the Chinese...learn to communicate with people of other ethnicities. I formed an Alliance today with a huge chinese company that was attacking another chinese company. They had one guy with them out of like 20 that actually spoke English and he was rather nice. You don't have to be Chinese to be a hacker nor have a big guild.. We have over 20-30 that sail with out NA company...

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Sigh

I'm not specifically hating on the Chinese, but they're the ones causing 90% of the problems. The 2 biggest clans on both the EU and NA PVP servers are KNOWN hacking zergs from ARK. They all got globally banned lmao. They done the same shit there, as they're doing here. Region locking China would be in the best interest for this game.

Yes, i know that you don't have to be Chinese to be a hacker or have a big group, but the matter of the fact is i'm not the only one upset it with it, if you even have a look at reddit literally 90% of the posts on there are about the Chinese hackers and Zergs. We play this game to have fun, they play it so others can't have fun. It's an annoying, but simple issue with a relatively simple fix.

90% of the populous are here to hack, cheat etc. Its been proven that there are over 1,500 members (All Chinese may i add) that are in those 2 groups combined. Just because a small % of the players from China aren't here to be assholes, hack, dupe, etc doesn't mean that we shouldn't push for region lock. We should. They should be locked to their own servers as its ruining thousands upon thousands of peoples enjoyment of the game.

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I have one to add. How about making the dangerous actions like 'Demolish' take a little longer to happen because it can easily be activated on accident.

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12 minutes ago, Thurston said:

Sigh

I'm not specifically hating on the Chinese, but they're the ones causing 90% of the problems. The 2 biggest clans on both the EU and NA PVP servers are KNOWN hacking zergs from ARK. They all got globally banned lmao. They done the same shit there, as they're doing here. Region locking China would be in the best interest for this game.

Yes, i know that you don't have to be Chinese to be a hacker or have a big group, but the matter of the fact is i'm not the only one upset it with it, if you even have a look at reddit literally 90% of the posts on there are about the Chinese hackers and Zergs. We play this game to have fun, they play it so others can't have fun. It's an annoying, but simple issue with a relatively simple fix.

90% of the populous are here to hack, cheat etc. Its been proven that there are over 1,500 members (All Chinese may i add) that are in those 2 groups combined. Just because a small % of the players from China aren't here to be assholes, hack, dupe, etc doesn't mean that we shouldn't push for region lock. We should. They should be locked to their own servers as its ruining thousands upon thousands of peoples enjoyment of the game.

Ok so they are known hackers right? Region Locking does absolutely nothing. Especially if your stereo typed as a hacker, you should definitely know how to use a VPN to bypass region locks. Dont @ me

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I mean, that's not really for the topic of this post. That's just about being more careful what you click, this is more for 'broken/unintended' aspects of the game

1 minute ago, Jah4L said:

Ok so they are known hackers right? Region Locking does absolutely nothing. Especially if your stereo typed as a hacker, you should definitely know how to use a VPN to bypass region locks. Dont @ me

Of course i know you can use a VPN to bypass, but the developers can easily put contingencies in to block VPNs as a whole. And at least that'll force them to deal with even worse connection than what they're experiencing before, etc. You're making an argument out of nothing.

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