boomervoncannon

If you view the difficulty as getting to the location, that's a pretty straightforward issue of getting comfortable with climbing picks and grappling hooks. If you are talking about the potential difficulty of defeating the spawn without a bear that you can't get up there, or because you don't have proficiency with firearms, then yeah, that's pretty tough.

He's not giving them credit, he's doing actual research into activity. Your view is based on....your view, not any tangible information beyond your own personal experience. I played both official and unofficial servers and spent significant time looking at server populations for both when doing searches on battlemetrics. I also ran an unofficial cluster of 4 servers for about a year and a half and I know exactly what activity was like on it because it was whitelisted and to be added to the list you had to be personally interviewed by me. While it's true that many unofficials have a transient existence in Ark, it's also true that there are many stable, well run, long term active unofficial servers. I know this for a fact because I kept in contact with a number of them. We kept each other informed about problem players, common issues with mods etc. Even if three quarters of all unofficials are little used personal wastelands with insignificant activity, Battlemetrics currently shows 50k unofficials to under 1200 officials. This means even if you ignore 75% of all unofficials as dead, you're still talking about ten times the number of official servers which are active, and that's if you count every single official as being active, which isn't the case. The numbers make it plain that the majority of activity in Ark is on unofficial servers. Considering the strength of Ark's modding community and how punishing many players view official rates as being (my servers btw used rates of 3x on harvesting/taming/xp 5x on breeding to make it bearable), this should surprise no one. My personal feeling is that Atlas is a similar game with a different emphasis (ships and exploration vs dinos and technological progression) I'm of the opinion that Atlas would be better if it leaned away from Ark more and became it's own thing, instead of leaning on taming, building and other shared aspects. Given the current state of Atlas I can see how many see it as being merely an outgrowth of Ark. I agree that Atlas should focus more on the ships and even underwater content and less on taming/breeding and land based building.

Right. Exactly what I said, 14 10 days for structures. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Great post with interesting points. Food for thought. One question: How did you arrive at the 15% of Ark’s playerbase being official number, because I never found a reliable source for that info or came up with an accurate way to guesstimate it, and I was always curious.

The existing decay timer is 14 days. If you’re gone a week you’ll be fine.

Fixed.

To be fair you also can’t grab half a dozen friends, gather the materials and build a galleon in the space of a few days. It’s fair to say that for the sake of gameplay time is condensed in numerous ways. This a fairly typical aspect of gaming vs reality.

“....and that kids, is how your dad spent Anthem’s release day. Now put the shades down, bring me some Gatorade, and if anyone calls in the next 48 hours, tell them I’m dead.” Also I got ten doubloons that says it was the least compensated person in the room who had to show all the big shots how to activate the god powers with cheat codes.

I bartendeded for many moons in years gone by, which has some of the same frustrations but more ability to deal with customers who were being unreasonable more directly. Anyone who thinks “the customer is always right.” Is anything but a PR philosophy has probably never worked that kind of job. The customer is frequently a childish unreasonable jerk. In other cultures they are less hesitant to tell boorish patrons to piss off and it works fine. In the US it’s a quick way to get fired. But if you’re gonna work in game development and pay any attention whatsoever to what players say, you better bring a thick skin to the party. Atlas’s community is neither the best nor worst behaved I’ve seen over the years. But I’ll tell you who I would put my money on to sabotage their own project these days: anyone working for EA. “Oh what’s that you say? Our CEO is paid way out of all proportion to the size and profitability of this company and just laid off hundreds of workers after our most profitable year ever? The company forces workers to work insane hours without proper air conditioning AND is engaging in anti consumer practices like loot box gambling to such a degree that governments are forced to pass laws to protect children from their predation? No thanks I’m skipping my lunch break to spend extra time screwing up every possible thing I can on this project.”

I sincerely hope this thread doesn't get lost in all the furor over the new claim system change. This is an important point about designing any game with a crafting system that hopes to foster any kind of economy. The current skill system goes in the opposite direction as Nari as very cogently laid out.

Ah its entirely possible I misread what the OP was asking for, if so my apologies for misunderstanding.

very true. I just wish they had reverted all the way back to the version of Coke that had actual cocaine in it.

/signed This seems way way too fraught with trollish potential for very little upside. At the end of the day, island owners may want a clean slate, but if you want people to settle on those islands, settlers will need some protection from capricious or indifferent owners. Letting pre existing settler structures be unwipeable as long as the players are active and telling new owners they must purchase islands as is is entirely fair. If you want an island with a solid existing tax base that will provide you resource income, buy one with settlers. If you don't, buy one no one lives on. That's reasonable. Making all settlers live with the possiblity of no warning wipe isn't.

Wonderful. So it's "Hey look, you used to have a place here, but some @#$% named Martyn bought it and since he's the owner and can do as he pleases, the way any 4 year old insists they can, you no longer have a place. By the way, your new landlord Martyn says to get a job loser and start paying rent, because he doesn't understand how the taxes you were paying would have benefitted him."

The peacetime bit I took to mean that part only applies to pvp, since peacetime is a redundant concept on pve, but if pve settlers do get some notification that is better than I thought.

No. You are misunderstanding the patch notes. This change doesn't give tenants 48 hours after the wipe is triggered to remove their stuff, it just limits the new owner to a window of using the option from 48 to 72 hours out after acquiring. There is literally nothing in the patch notes that indicates settlers get any notification or option whatsoever. So, a settler could be gone for a few days (you know, that rl thing that seems to come up for a lot of people.) and return to the island they inhabit having changed hands while they were gone and the new owner having razed everything they did without warning. Show me the patch note indicating settlers are given a direct notification when island ownership changes hands. Show me the patch note requiring new island owners to communicate their intent to existing settlers. Stop stamping your feet up and down and insisting it's your island you can do as you please. In the real world, if you buy a building with tenants, your rights as an owner do not entitle you to knock the building down 2 days later with no notification whatsoever. Ownership in a civilized society has limits and clearly should. This is not meaningfully different.

This. I have contemplated this change in deep meditation overnight (no I wasn't just sleeping, quiet you) and have decided that while acknowledging this change is an attempt to address a potential issue in the game, I don't think this is the way to go. Settlers need to have more security than this leaves them, and I don't say this because I am a settler (who so far has had zero issues with anything related to being one), I say it because the point about needing a reason to settle claimable instead of lawless is a legitimate one, and this change strongly disincentivizes settling by creating an ever present overwhelming risk to doing so.

For someone not actually playing the game but just standing back and observing from the forums and seeing how other players react to systems and changes to them, this isn't the worst idea I've ever seen you put here. Claims certainly seem to be a headache so far. I think land ownership is a far easier thing to navigate from a development perspective for pvp than pve. In pvp saying "If you don't like what someone's built, go destroy it." Is a perfectly workable overall directive. In pve land ownership becomes a thorny problem.

So you're saying it's kind of like how the title of The Walking Dead is a double entendre because it's really meant to refer to the characters rather than the zombies? Atlas, a survival MMO, where the challenge is to survive the devs?

Sure, and I have seen this development team make some pretty boneheaded moves. My ten doubloons says this isn’t happening because the level of boneheaded that would entail is can’t tie your shoes bad, and no one that brain dead can write code.

Will bet ten doubloons this doesn’t happen.

Nope. We all just gather here on the forums to pretend to complain about issues in a game we don’t play, provide suggestions for a game we don’t play, and set up trades within a game we don’t play. Realist is the only one here who actually plays Atlas. Why do you ask?

I second this motion.

Be that as it may, you chose to post something positive, so thank you, and welcome back.

The reason for the fee is to create a disincentive to screw over existing tenants for no reason other than it's conveniant. yes you bought it, you own it, but they were there and doing perfectly fine, and presumably your newfound ownership is not something they have any say in, so the idea I *think* is to put a significant fee in to give them *some* protection. That's my guess on how they're hoping it will work, but who really knows? Also to compare this to real life, let's say you buy a piece of property that has a building already on it. The building is old and decrepit, and you wish to knock it down and rebuild fresh. It's your land, you are free to do so (leaving zoning out of it for the moment), but no one is going to knock the old building down and haul away the debris for free. That will cost something.