boomervoncannon

I think you will get a LOT of pushback from people not cool with the idea of eliminating alliances, and not just from megas wanting to keep their defacto mega intact. I also think forbidding of giving resources is extremely hard to enforce. So outright giving is forbidden, but what about trading a galleon's worth of resources for one stone? The devs cannot possibly personally monitor all transactions to ensure they aren't resource transfers and if you try to track that, how do you set the tracking perameters? It seems a can of worms. I'm not saying it's impossible, merely that it seems quite difficult and I think the idea would not be popular because of unintended consequences on legitimate trading.

I was only objecting to the notion that college athletics makes a good analogy to Atlas because scholarship athletes make student populations largely irrelevant, whereas in Atlas company size matters far more directly because highly skilled Atlas players aren't paid by their companies to sit in front of their computers all day and pvp. I was never objecting to your underlying argument, only the example as poor. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about whether everyone should be on the same server in Atlas. Since I tend not to pvp much in Atlas, it is a fight in which I don't have much of a dog. I will ask this: How would you propose to segregate servers by company size? It strikes me as a thing that seems difficult to enforce, given that megas can always use external means of cordination such as discord to work around arbitrary ingame company size limitations.

Okay but now we're talking about two different things: the validity of college athletics as an analogy to Atlas and how money affects competition in college athletics. If you want to talk about money affecting college athletics, you are preaching to the choir. If you want to talk about how the little guy still occasionally pulls off the upset, you should know you're talking to a 3rd generation App State grad who can tell you exactly where he was and what he was doing when Corey Lynch blocked Michigan's final field goal attempt (Screaming my head off and subsequently trying to call everyone I ever went to college with all at once and scream incoherently into the phone at them).

The distinction between divisions is far less about student enrollment than about level of school resources affecting the level of financial aid available for student athletes and therefore the level and quality of competition amongst those schools. Note this link to explanation of divisions: https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-complete-list-of-division-2-colleges-by-state and in particular I will quote this paragraph from that page: There are about 300 schools and thousands of students who participate in Division II sports. Division II schools offer athletic scholarships, but there is less athletic aid available in Division II than in Division I. The majority of athletes at Division II institutions are on partial athletic scholarships. So again, the distinction that truly matters at the collegiate level is about scholarship athletes who represent the schools and who are recruited to do so, not about teams formed from the general student body. Yes Division II and FCS schools are generally smaller than Division I and FBS schools, but schools can and do move from one classification to the other as schools such as Marshall have demonstrated. This movement has far more to do with the athletic program at that school building prestige and resources over time that allow it to step up to a greater level of competition in a new division than about growth or change in the student enrollment. The distinction between the divisions has far more to do with the level of financial aid provided to student athletes at each division level than about student enrollment size. Example: Davidson College is Division I and the alma matter of NBA star Steph Curry. Curry nearly lead Davidson to the Final Four, narrowly losing to eventual champion Kansas in the Elite Eight round. Davidson's enrollment is currently 1950 students. Johnson C Smith University, just 30 minutes from Davidson's campus is division II, per the linked page. It's enrollment is currently 1624 students. The level of competition is different not because of student body size, but because of school prestige, athletic program prestige and resources afforded each program, particularly financial aid for it's players. As an analogy to Atlas this makes college athletics poor because scholarship athletes aren't pulled from student bodies at random but are specifically recruited and rewarded with financial aid to attend and play and they are the primary determining factor to athletic success, not student body size.

I wasn’t cherry picking at all. College athletics are in no way divided competitively based on school size. Athletic scholarships make student enrollment irrelevant to competitiveness. Coaching staff reputation, recruiting ability, athletic program reputation and prestige and school prestige are factors that affect recruits choice of school far more than school size, largely irrelevant to their decision, and it is the competition for the most talented high school players that is the key factor in athletic success or failure at that level. High school athletics would tend to be a much more valid example for the point you wish to make because it is divided based on student enrollment.

College athletics does not have different leagues based on school size. It has conferences that were formed by the various member schools voluntarily and school size has nothing to do with it. Duke University is a perennially dominant national basketball powerhouse and its enrollment is far less than arch rival UNC or conference doormat Georgia Tech. The conference it belongs to, the Atlantic Coast Conference was originally formed based on geography but schools have been added to the point geography is a very limited factor ie Notre Dame now belongs to the Atlantic Coast Conference (motto of Indiana where Notre Dame is located: 4 billion years tidal wave free) NCAA basketball draws on over 180 schools of vastly varying size, which are all eligble to play each other in both regular season and tournament play. Football is the same. Powerhouse programs routinely schedule 2 to 3 games per season against much weaker opponents dubbed cupcakes. The cupcake schools sports programs are far less prestigious but student enrollment at those schools may be more or less than the the powerhouses. I know this is a side note, but the example you used doesn’t support your argument due to flawed assumptions about the example. The reality is that in college athletics the small schools DO suck it up and play the much larger schools, often whipping them soundly. This is because Zion Williamson wasn’t chosen at random out of the student body at Duke to play basketball for them but was heavily recruited as a highly sought after high school standout. Your argument may or may not be valid but the example you chose does not support it at all because college athletics does not work at all the way your post presents it.

YES

Agreed. Jat has posted saying they heard us on the feedback of this, but why it wasn’t immediately changed in the next patch is baffling. I can’t imagine it should be anything other than changing a value in a field. Meanwhile one of your latest and most anticipated pieces of content goes universally unused because of a disconnected from reality initial rent structure.

Welcome back Dragon. Good to see your name here on the boards again. My suggestion is while you are out scrambling to earn the gold needed to pay upkeep, actively market your island. It may be desert, but that doesn’t mean no one will live there, just that it’s less desirable for most players. Figure out what is marketable about your island and use that as your sales pitch. Main point is don’t assume that because passive ownership has garnered you no tenants so far, that you’ll never be able to get any.

*sniffs* You peasants and your cheap unimaginative Black Peaaarl boat names. Use a little creativity and come up with something original for once in your dull lives. Your jealousy is palpable as I sail by in the far more tastefully named Blak Perlz. What up now Dog?

Would the item be craft able or naturally present in the zone? If craftable would it be limited or unlimited uses? Would a ship be able to use it while underway or would it need to drop anchor in order to run up the balloon? Also how can I personally make money off this? Please PM to discuss mutually profitable licensing of in game balloon tech to Boomer Inc.

Who steps the ship in this scenario? Oh and don’t call me Shirley.

Atlas notes: The twitter of 1642

Okay, but would you agree that Megas aren’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon, and that throwing up our hands and attempting to improve nothing because of any and all issues Megas create won’t make things better? Rome wasn’t built in a day. Patience grasshopper. This is one suggestion to adddress one problem area of one new system. I agree there are other things that need to be addressed as well, but this is what I came up with in the shower this particular morning. World peace is Tuesday.

Okay your point is so disjointedly stated that it’s hard to follow, but this much is clear: while it may be about landlords and tenants, it’s not really about the suggestion I made in the OP, but about other aspects of the system. No one was arguing that landlords have it easy and tenants have it hard, you are arguing against a position no one has taken. What is being discussed is that many players have expressed hesitation about being tenants for the reasons stated. The suggestion is designed to address this legitimate concern. If you wish to discuss other aspects of the system you should feel free to create your own thread to do so, but so far your posts and points here do not seem germaine to the topic. Either increase or decrease the meds.

So you're completely overlooking the main feature of the new system, making it obvious you didn't read my OP: tenants now lengthen the time between rent payments being due for the landlord. In your illustration the landlord isn't getting screwed, because you've overlooked or left out how the tenants presence reduces how often he has to pay rent. So the landlord hasn't spent 500 gold for 50 honey, he has spent 500 gold he was going to spend anyway to own the island, but your presence there not only gets him honey but reduces often he must pay the 500 gold. Before you criticize others for not understanding a thing, you should probably understand the thing being discussed.

So I’ve been thinking about the new claim and tenant system and the reality there is still a lot of apprehension about the fact landlords can destroy anything a tenant has built without warning. I like the idea that tenants increase time between rent payments rather than reducing overall rent. I think this approach will give the system overall more flexibility since there is a floor to how far rent can be reduced (zero), but not one on time delay between rent payments. This means there is always an incentive for a landlord to acquire more tenants. My suggestion is to add to this system by giving a further bonus for tenant tenure. The longer a particular tenant stays with a particular landlord, the more he increases that delay between rent payments. This means that tenant and landlord could try each other out in the short term, make sure they get along, and then over time the tenant would have ever greater reassurance his landlord would be unlikely to evict because of what he or she would be giving up. Simply replacing a longtime tenant with a fresh body wouldn’t provide the same benefit to the landlord, giving the tenant ever increasing peace of mind while ultimately leaving the landlord final say over his land. Thoughts?

I think this is an oversimplification of something that has multiple factors affecting it. If it's incumbent on megas to be the peacekeepers and never raid, we can pretty much count on that never happening. It would just run counter to why the vast majority of pvp players even play. Pretty sure almost no one got excited about Atlas and signed on for EA because they thought it was a diplomacy sim. I can just see the marketing slogans now: Sit through hours of complex multi party negotiations delineating breathtaking territorial and travel rights treaties! Threaten small guilds with the gaming equivalent of a time out if they don't play nice with each other! Become the school yard cop, using your muscle to keep bullies in line preemptively! Enjoy the adrenalin rush of slow incremental progress toward hegemony and peaceful cooperative play!

I agree that players don't have the right to tell each other how to play as long as they are staying within the game's Code of Conduct etc, but if you think no megas go after smaller companies, then I have some questions for you: Do they have a post office in your world? Local government? Or is everything just run by the pink elephants? Your friend's mega may not go after smaller companies, but this is nowhere close to universally true. In fact I would wager heavily that it's closer to the opposite. Most megas in a competitive environment will go after low hanging fruit, that is just the nature of competition for finite resources. By the same token that Realist doesn't have the right to tell others how to play, you don't get to piss on our legs and try to tell us it's raining. Your friend's mega may not target smaller fish, but that would make them more the exception than the rule.

Bunny Pirate Lords sounds like the band at a furry convention. Furries give me the creeps.

Shipyard quality now affects how many levels a ship can earn after it is built. As far as specifics, you know as much as anyone else this early in the process.

*Capsizes Del*

Galleons are fast (weirdly inconsistent with reality), they can carry more and bigger guns than anything else so yeah they should be able to fight SOTD’s, and they can definitely carry a ton. Their downside for the purpose of this convo is their aggro radius, which is significantly bigger than a ups other ship. When you are trying to haul cargo, this can be an issue.

Yeah I’m pretty much thinking what you’re thinking here. Agree this is odd and weirdly counterintuitive. I have a theory based on nothing more than a hunch, so take it for what its worth: Most of the dev team has seen the metrics and the player feedback and are actively working to move the game in the direction most strongly favored by the playerbase, but there is this one guy who looks at it differently. For the sake of discussion we’ll give him a name picked at random: Jeremy. Jeremy doesn’t just see things the way the other devs do, he is a creative genius, and he has a “vision” for Atlas. His vision isn’t exactly reflective of the reality of what people want, but never mind that because geniuses with vision never see things the way the little people do. They must not be weighed down by the mundane realities of plebeian wants because they are after all special. Jeremy’s conviction of the absolute rightness of his vision is bolstered by the reality of the success of his only other game, for simplicity sake we’ll refer to it with a simple name picked at random: Ark. Ark’s success has boosted his ego to the point where he believes he knows better than others, and so his vision is his overriding guide. The problem is that he is the guy that ultimately is in charge and so his voice is not one of many, but the voice that ultimately has the final say. Others are able to convince him to move in the obvious direction the game should go up to a point, but Jeremy refuses to give up his vision entirely, and so he periodically makes random decrees that such and such will be done this way, regardless of how weirdly inconsistent that may be with everything else. This is my off the wall theory on why they do stuff like this. It’s either something like this or they’re using a magic 8 ball to make major decisions. But that is just a wild theory, your guess is as good as mine.

“When will then be now again?” “Soon.”