Jean Lafitte

11 minutes ago, haseo said:

yea so have to rent you re land for week.... and nothing say you re not going to change you re mind or destroy everything like almost all ppl in claim land...

Oh jeezus, you got me there!  All those massive resources you gather and the structures you build... I could OWN THEM ALL!

We have over 80 claims, 8 elephants, 5 rhinos, gobs and gobs of horses and bears, a small army of pigs, and more ships than we have players.  Do you seriously think I have the time or even give a shit about a shanty on a beach?

Let me give you a lesson in economics.  We have, like most everyone else on the island, a 20% tax.  If I give you a waterfront claim, I get to collect taxes on the claims behind that that you farm.  It would be STUPID of me to block building on a claim when I collect taxes off the 20 claims behind it.

My concern is assholes.  We don't have any on the island where we live and I don't want any.  Prove to me that you're not an asshole and you get the claim.  It's just that simple.

*edit*

Hell, I've even offered a free bear and a horse to anyone who moves on the claim to compensate for the taxes.  But you know what the problem is, it's in the tundra and everyone seems to have this idea in their head that if they're not getting a silver spoon shoved up their ass, they want no part of it.

Again, I have no pity for these 'no-land' posts.

5 hours ago, Xmun said:

Hi im new on this game and i love it, but i have an issue with it, did more than two days trying to find an island with a small place were i can claim it so i can build atleast a small house.

Sorry, I no longer have pity for these 'no land' posts.

For weeks I've been trying to give away land. All the person has to do is stay there a few weeks and prove they're not a griefer or asshat and aren't going to piss off the neighbors and I'll give them claims.  Do you know how many people have responded to my post?

0

2 minutes ago, Archsenex said:

They tried a fix, it... went a little wild (deleted WAY too many ships, they had to roll back) they're supposed to be working on attempt #2, so they do have something in the works for getting rid of inactive ships

<- * impatiently twiddles his thumbs *

2 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

Atm I wouldnt regard breeding as really implemented. Stop even attempting to breed animals and my guess is when the developers see no incoming data on breeding from the live servers they will adjust the mechanic to make it more reasonably accessible. If you actually endure such a trial of tenacity, it will only give the devs data which suggests someone is willing to do it.

Exactly!  Stop breeding and proving that this system is tenable.  It isn't.

Ok, so the situation went from bad to worse.

• First, there were ships being sunk everywhere due to griefers.  That needed to be fixed.  I get that. However, the net result of that fix has backfired.
• Over the weekend I went with some others to the FoY.  They were able to get it, I was not.  One of the HUGE reasons I wasn't was lag.  That lag was caused by the hundreds... yes HUNDREDS (I'm not exaggerating) of ships parked around the FoY entrance.  Now I don't have a great video card, I've got a good one.  Trying to render all of those ships, I was barely getting 5fps.
• For over two weeks I had an abandoned schooner parked in my harbor blocking a good portion of it.  It took a support ticket to get it moved.
• I still have several RSloops and rafts parked along my claims. One RSloop belongs to a company that has 0 members (we invited them to the corp and didn't 'merge').
• Travelling around the map I've encountered numerous lawless islands that look more like a ship salvage yard than a collection of harbors.

These ships cannot be moved, sunk, boarded, SotD'd, hurricane'd, shark smacked... etc.
They are more that just an eyesore. They are a render and server lag inducing mechanism that needs to be fixed.

Proposal:

• If your ship is parked on your claim, it does not decay as per current rules.
• Freeport decay rates begin 2 hours after arriving in a freeport grid. That gives you 2 hours to conduct your business.
• If your ship is parked on a claim you do not own after 72 hours, it begins to decay at freeport rates. 
• For each ship parked on a claim you do not own, the decay timer is is divided by 2. 4 ships on a claim you do not own, decay begins in 9 hours (making raft spam much less of a problem).
• If your ship is parked where no claim exists and you have not been in the area, after 72 hours it begins to decay at freeport rates.
• For each ship parked where no claim exists, the decay timer is is divided by 2. 4 ships on a claim you do not own, decay begins in 9 hours (making raft spam much less of a problem).
• If your ship is parked on a lawless and you have not been in the area, the same with structures, it begins to decay after 3 or 4 days (not sure what the structure time is on lawless) at freeport rates.
• If your company has build rights on a claim, it does not decay as per current rules.
• Ships that exist on a claim when the ownership of that claim changes, after 72 hours they begin to decay at freeport rates.

Alternate:

• Instead of accelerating the decay, the ships become unanchored and thus, sinkable or claimable.

Whatever the solution, something needs to be done to fix this.  The number of anchored ships that do not go away is becoming untenable.

I'm still trying to figure out how so many animals get on the islands in the first place.  I mean it's obvious that no living creature can possibly survive birth without human intervention.  So how are all these animals reproducing???

Seriously? They expect us to sit within render range of recently born creatures for what, 36 hours straight? Feeding them constantly, lighting fires all over the place like we're having a barbecue, taking shifts... is this seriously their idea of entertainment? How can staring at a NPC bear for a day and a half be considered fun?

They keep saying this is a game about sailing and piracy. Ok, so how does sleep deprivation experiments involving newborn wildlife have anything to do with piracy???? 

I'd love to get into animal breeding. Right now, the mechanic is beyond playable, it's fucking stupid.

4 minutes ago, Pizik said:

Shouldn't you be posting this in the section for Bug Reports and up-voting it so it gets fixed?

You mean that section where you post the report and it's instantly cycled to page 16 where nobody sees it?  Good idea.

1 minute ago, Shintai said:

Go jump in the sea?

Nope, this one:

Yes, there is.

You forgot the event where you get 1 point or no points from whales. 

One of my crew got 50 for each whale type, two of us only got 1 or none and we were on the same ship.  So, I submitted a ticket.  Can you guess the response I got?

So those of you with the git gud posts, let me point out a few things before you condemn the op as sucking.

1. Where I live, SotD form conga lines. I've see 7 of them surrounding my ship at one time.
2. Fog. I was was just on a run to pick up some metal. The fog was so thick that I saw the cannonballs coming at me before I saw the SotD.
3. Speed. I've been running a brig with 2 speed and 1 handling sail. In crap winds it BARELY outruns a SotD. Which means, When I'm surrounded and left with few choices, I tend to eat a few cannonballs before I can get out of range.  The other option, which I'm doing now, is to anchor on some island and wait for winds not to suck, which is not my idea of entertainment.
4. Waste of time.  I've noticed that in middle latitudes there don't seem to be as many SotD.  I'm assuming you guys in temperate and tropic zones keep them pretty well under control. In the tundra, where for example, we have 2 metal nodes on an island with 20 odd companies, we find SotD's to be a waste of cannonballs because the loot utterly sucks for the metal we have to expend to kill one.  It's simply not worth the effort it takes to run to a polar region, farm metal and then, run back to our tundra just to kill SotD's.  Was out with a fully gunned galleon last night. The owner lives in a temperate. He had no problem unloading a broadside onto a low level SotD just to get rid of it.  In the tundra, that's an extravagance we can't afford.

Therefore, before you condemn someone for speaking their mind and describing their particular issues, please consider the fact that where you live, the circumstances may be vastly different.  

4 hours ago, SheepThrillz said:

WHEN ARE WE GETTING RID OF THE HACKERS?

Just as soon as that filthy human species is eradicated from this planet.

I've had it happen both with and without npc's.  Got stuck in an inlet yesterday with a brig.  Had to rip half the planks to bits turning it around because it wouldn't back up.

Just now, Mahakmar said:

just had to do c6 foy and well time to remove ships -.- there is hundred of ships blocking any hope to get anchored

Yep... because they came up with a half baked idea about making people float when on someone else's ship. Now, they're discovering the problem that caused.  Hundreds of abandoned ships that nobody can sink, claim or move and don't even deteriorate.  And now that you can't even get SotD's to shoot them, it's going to become even more of a mess.

45 minutes ago, Wh33ls said:

Sexual battery? I don't think you know what that term means. 

Good boy... exaggeration. You caught it. Kinda like saying that cleaning the guns implies gun violence. You're smarter than you sound.

50 minutes ago, Wh33ls said:

So, I slapped the baby the women behind me was holding and kicked a puppy on my way out the door.

And yours portraying sexual battery and animal cruelty?  Touché?

Today's Wikipedia lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_who_live_in_glass_houses_should_not_throw_stones

1 minute ago, Wh33ls said:

Whoa, whoa, whoa rager. Calm down. 

It was an analogy. I see that mine was way more effective than yours.

36 minutes ago, Wh33ls said:

Anecdotal.

That was a really horrible anecdote.

A. If I bought underwear, used or not, and found skid marks you can bet I'd be going back to that thrift store and raising hell.
B. If my underwear were stolen from a laundry, I'd be calling the police.
C. If that thrift store told me that they wouldn't replace those shitty underwear you're goddamned right I'd be pissed. I paid for underwear, not shit.
D. If the police told me they weren't going to investigate a theft, you're goddamned right I'd be pissed. Don't wallow in the public trough if you're not going to provide the service you're being paid to provide.

And if EITHER of them told me to move to Canada until we get our shit figured out, I'd start cleaning the guns.

55 minutes ago, corpse said:

Did your hosting company just begin a 2 year development cycle?  Did they let you know right from the beginning that there would be bugs, crashes and loss of information?  If so, I think you chose... poorly.

You are correct. They are a well established company. But I bet they didn't get there by telling their customers to, 'shove off' either.

In 2005, Sprint merged with Nextel.  Not long after, their customer service turned to shit.  It was described as being in a 'free fall.'  In one year alone Sprint lost over 30 MILLION customers (I was one of those) all because of poor customer service.  Their stock plummeted 66%.

One Sprint employee described it like this: "the numbers-driven management approach implemented after the combination led to poor morale and deteriorating customer service. Even bathroom trips were monitored. They would micromanage us like children."

I am not saying Grapeshot is anything like that. What I am saying is, when a company becomes so focused on any aspect of their business that customer service is tossed out the window, then they are doomed to repeat history.

So, I was just working on some code to bind to a specific port and send a UDP request to a server using PHP.  I kept getting a 'not permitted' error.  I put in a support ticket with my host with a sample of the code I'm using.  Within the hour I had a reply. Because of the technical nature of my request, it got shot straight to their CTO.  And this isn't exactly a small hosting company.  The CTO mind you, replied with very technical specifications as to what they allowed and what they didn't and then asked me for my requirements.

It was a timely response.  A personal response. It was an informative response. And I got the impression that, depending on my needs, they may make accommodations.

I pay these guys a whopping $5.00 per month.

Had I gotten the response... 

"I'm terribly sorry but we have a limited staff and can't be bothered to deal with your issue. We do thank you for reporting it and if we get enough complaints, we may or may not fix that issue.  If you don't like this fact, please find another host for your websites and come back when we have our head out of our ass...."

I'd be backing up my websites in preparation for a move instead of writing this post.

6 hours ago, Pizik said:

Jean, some fantastic work. I was having a scroll down the list and spotted that two of the accounts have the same image. Any way you can do an MD5 or similar hash of their profile images and then create a "Linked account" part that names those who have used the same profile picture (excluding the default steam account picture ofc)

Anyway, love the site

Thanks.  Ok, problems I see: First, there's no guarantee that a player using one image is the same as another person who's using the same image.  Secondly, the Steam API only provides links to the images which is what you see on the site. In order to hash them, the script would have to physically download them.  And since they can be changed by the user, that means the script would have to download them every single time it runs.  There is a small image that can be retrieved but even then, downloading 500+ images would likely cause the script to go past the time limits set by the host and crash unfinished.

Good idea, don't seem practical from the code side of things.

1 hour ago, chiconanni said:

Ok. Someone parked at my base and its been a long since the boat was abandoned there. I Can't claim it, can't sink it, and now cant even get on board... any idea how long do i have to wait to claim in lawless? Or how to sink it?? Thx in advance!

Right now, I know of no actual way to do it. You can't claim it because when you get aboard, you're floating and can't stand on the deck. And even if the anchor were raised and you could stand on the deck, you still can't claim it because that's bugged.  You can't damage it, you can't climb the ladders, you can't toss any weight onto it to sink it because it's anchored, you can't use climbing picks or grappling hooks, we tried.  And with a recent patch, you can't lure in SotD's because they won't attack anchored ships and hurricanes apparently don't damage anchored ships.

We had one sitting in our harbor for over 2 weeks and in that time I saw it's planks take less than 300 damage.  From what? I have no idea but at that rate, it would have taken months to sink.  We tried attacking with pets, luring in sharks, bears, etc.  None of them could be enticed to damage it.

Because it was blocking half our harbor, I finally submitted a ticket.  A couple of days later we found it unanchored and floating out in deep water.  It sunk a day later.  Whether a GM moved it or the owner logged in and moved it (we had been sending him out of game requests to do so), I have no idea.

I still have 2 other ships, a RSloop and a raft, on another claim I can't get rid of.

My suggestion. Submit a new ticket for every single one you need moved.  The more tickets that get submitted for something that should have an in-game solution, the more likely they'll fix it.

1 hour ago, Murreth said:

Hey all, just wondering if anyone has any experience using Bears to attack Yetis, just curious if they hold their own against them or if it's just a waste of a bear.

Thanks for your time.

Yup, bears work just fine. If you have the taming perks, taking on 2 or 3 at a time with a 50'ish lvl bear is doable.  It just takes a while as yeti have a lot of hp.  The trick is to get the bear to higher ground so it knocks the yeti back further when it attacks.  The biggest problem is when a yeti decides to run.  Chasing them down can be interesting.

8 hours ago, Token said:

My company is looking to purchase or rent to own claim. 

5 hours ago, Thor Ragnarock said:

I scrolled through them and saw at least one NSFW photo as a profile picture. So may be best to not include that if they do this but otherwise looks good. Nice work. Interesting to see how many accounts were made and banned within a few days to a week. 

Yep, I saw that too. All of those images are provided by the Steam API. It appears Steam doesn't police that.

I have two claims in neighboring grids. One tundra, one polar.

Ownership of both is possible... keep reading.

The Tundra Claim

Tons of basic resources except fiber and metal. There is some fiber but not a lot. Very few metal nodes but gobs of metal 1 grid away on the polar claim. Gobs of fiber 2 grids away.
Very low predator count.
Bears, horses, pigs, cows, chickens, crows, albatross, a few wolves and lions to tame.
A few snakes but not many.
Large and small shipyard already on the claim.  I can unlock them for your usage or you can build your own.
There is an abandoned RSchooner and raft on the beach.
Large single waterfront claim with multiple adjoining claims deeper into the island that can be opened up if you need.
It's in the tundra so you'll want some fortitude. It does get cold but I run around in the daytime in hides.

The Polar Claim

The polar claim is also a deepwater claim. There are rocks and trees. It will let you establish an outpost near metal nodes and gobs and gobs of sunstone (the sunstone is unclaimed and not taxed. Neighboring claims are.. and they're not ours)  The polar claim is completely undeveloped with no tax house on it.

Here's the deal.  There's a 20% tax on the tundra (which I may remove. I'm still undecided as to whether it's even worth it to collect), 0 tax on the polar. I'm looking for someone to use these claims. We have TONS of claims, more than we can develop, and are looking to open some up. These two claims, we have no plans for.  The deal is, you stay on the claim until we're satisfied that you're not an asshat or a griefer (est. 1-2 months), that you're not going to piss off the neighbors (our allies) and that you're not going to vanish and make it a pain in the ass to get the claims back and I'll demolish and give you both if you wish (I'd suggest studying the map before you decide, there is overlap on both). If you're worried that we'll lock you out, that'll only happen if you become a serious dick. We have no need for any resources, structures or ships you plan to create or collect. We have too many of all of those as it is.

The tundra claim is on the opposite side of the island from our main base so you won't have to worry about us knocking on your door every day but you will have the advantage of our resources. I'm pretty sure our cook can spare you a few seeds if you decide to become a pirate with a green thumb.

Bonus: Build an animal pen and I'll give you a bear and a horse.

Requirements:
No asshats.
Respect the claims.
Respect the neighbors. We're all pretty friendly and help each other out.

4 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

I guess this means i’ll have to develop a drinking problem.

*sighs*

I quit drinking heavily cause I got tired of waking up nude on the hood of my car with my keys up my @$$.

Aye! A few pints of Guinness and ye won't give a damn what yer wearin or even feel those keys.  And if ye do, have another pint.