Winter Thorne

What's not puzzling us is the nature of his game. As my friend Daemon says, I'm 100 years old. But la plus ca change... I watched with glee while your kings and queens Fought for ten decades for the gods they madeI shouted out, "Who killed the Kennedys?"When after all, it was you and meLet me please introduce myself

Are there other new things besides island geo rework and cats? I went back and reread the Captain's Log and see that I've missed cosmetics and a new pistol, but those aren't going to be any different re. pvp/pve. They do have a habit of announcing things in other places...is there more? That's why they only opened one server. The latest server populations didn't provide enough bodies. If you only open 1 server you get the max. number of players you're going to get. They had @ 3000 players hitting the servers at the same time to get into the game. If they had opened more than one server they'd have split that number. Some companies use software to simulate thousands of attempted logins happening as well, so they may also be doing that. But "testing the network" as they say they're doing is more than just logging into the game, because every time you change zones, you're really making a network transfer to a new server. And now this is happening with a new xbox client, and they need to make sure that the client handles these transfers right, and that their networks are configured properly to let that happen. They also need to make sure that when they changed things for the new client, they didn't screw up anything for the old pc clients. (Which seems to be the case with the zone full problem they found) So you need a decent number of people connecting to the servers to put pressure on the network, but you don't need to do that exclusively with xbox connections. The xbox client is the real new big thing here, and it could probably use a much better function test, so I'm guessing any problems that come up post-relaunch will be found there. That's probably more explanation than anyone can stand, and I don't have admin access to those servers to verify it, but it's basically what should be happening with the test server. It's really only a small bit unfair to some xbox players who wanted to play on NA PvP. They can always go to EU PvP if they really want an empty server, but more important, this is another aspect of testing the game. If this game is successful it's going to have new players joining all the time, and it's got to provide a way for new players to join a pvp server without having "fresh meat" stamped on their foreheads. Grapeshot frequently does not anticipate issues, but needs to be shown them before they act, so if the new xbox players get crushed, this is something GS (along with every other gaming company in the business) will have to figure out - how to prevent newbie ganking.

Looks like you're mad you can't play. I get this. I'm mad they wiped for new islands and cats, which means they wiped for no benefit to the players. But you're not right about the testing. If they had opened all the servers back up, here's what would happen: The new xbox people would get no even start on any server at all Each server would only have a couple hundred people on it, which is not enough to test anything having to do with the networking at all. This is why they did it in the first place, because a couple thousand people did not go test on the ptr simultaneously. They've already found and corrected one issue where some of the servers, mostly the freeports, were reporting they were full, and a routine was kicking in that auto-moved players to other random servers. It was nasty. Would they have found that with 200 players per server? Probably not. This testing is mostly focused on network testing - connectivity for xbox. Jat said the devs are running xbox clients on it for the test. There is not very much if anything that needs to be function tested, because there's not new content. In another post you said that they should have done this on pve because things work differently there. Very few things work differently there. If you're changing claims or changing game rules for combat things, sure, you want to make sure you haven't screwed up the different ways those things are used in pve, But that's not what's happening here. For the purposes of this test, a pvp server contains everything you can do in pve , plus the pvp stuff. So it has all the components, while a pve server does not. Testing the limited additions of island shapes and cats makes sense there. If you're mad you can't play, you can just say that, and you'd actually get a certain number of people to agree with you. Some may make good suggestions, like Jack Shandy did. But making bad arguments about the testing just makes it look like you're grasping at straws because you're afraid to say you're mad you can't play. There's plenty to be mad about. I'm mad about the wipe. Still.

I'm not excited about it. Most of it's already in the game with the treasure map mechanic, and unless they change the way it works it will only provide content for a couple weeks, and then you'd never see them again. Look at adding (pve) content this way: 1. Completely simple/unsophisticated approach. (Game Design 101) - Add more NPCs to kill 2. Slightly more sophisticated - Write quests involving killing NPCs 3. More sophisticated, yet still very basic - Write more complicated quests involving new geography, new animals to tame and more NPCs to kill But all of those approaches miss the point. Pve players want conflict and drama just as much as pvp players do, they just don't want it to involve killing other players and destroying their stuff. So what's left? How do you "win" pve and become king of the hill? Economics, crafting, artistry, and personality. Real additions to pve give the players an official structure to compete in those areas in the game. This would require deep and exclusive crafting skill trees, a real economic system with benefits to gaining gold, a system to encourage politics and fame, and better outlets for people's artistry in building, music, and changing the landscape. The best game design for pve goes above Game Design 101 and recognizes that pve players do want to compete against each other in a game. I swear, there are many game designers who think pve players enjoy killing 40 rats for some meaningless gain and then sit around pretending to serve each other tea. The funny thing is that we talk about this stuff as pve content, but this is also content that makes it a richer game on the pvp side as well. All these pvp/pve argument always ignore the fact that the pvp game is a superset of pve. Pvp gets whatever pve gets plus all the pvp aspects as well.

I've seen games where pvp and mixed pvp/pve work well. This is not one of them. It requires strict rules and a large active moderator/god presence on the servers to enforce them and prevent griefing, abuse, and toxic behavior. Private servers are tailor-made for this type of setup, and can have active moderation. Grapeshot has already said they don't intend to do very much, if anything with live GMs in the game, hoping to prevent any bad behavior procedurally though coding. I wish them a lot of luck with that, but the best way to achieve it is by designing a game that doesn't automatically fit into the category of "highest potential for abuse". If they start to attempt that by choosing a game mode so flagrantly ripe for bad behavior, they've already lost that battle.

It's a ridiculous idea, and it's clear that you've approached this with a pvp mindset lacking the ability to put yourself in anyone else's shoes. As pve players, we have a whole server for claims, exploring, and adventuring. You think it's a good idea that we share that server with all the pvp players so they can all rush over there, grab claims, and hold pissing contests about who ran away from whom in general chat. And you know they'll all want a pve claim. They get the whole world and the choice of pvp or pve. Pve players are not as a group eagerly wanting a choice to pvp. So from our perspective, we don't get to share the whole server without giving up being a pve player. We dont' want claims on the other side. So they get both worlds and we get half. UnknownSystemError was spot on with his analogy. If you are really trying to sell this idea as "a player gets tired of either pvp or pve and wants to go play the other mode", then what you need to be asking for is character transfers, which are already coded into the game. There's no reason to force pve players to put up with having all the pvp players use their server as well as their own, if that's the point of your long, complicated, strange idea with more rules than Calvinball. In the interests of making it crystal clear - The main benefit of playing on a pve server is that there are no pvp players and no pvp happening. Your idea doesn't even recognize that. You should consider that in future suggestions for improving pvp.

A pvevp server is a type of pvp server. If it all stays over in pvp land nobody cares. If you put pvp on a server it's no longer a pve server. If they take away the pve servers, the pve people will quit and no pve players will buy the game.

No they don't. No it doesn't. It gives pvp players the new option to go to the pve servers, along with lots of new options for where, when and how, they want to pvp. There are no new options for pve players, except forcing them to have pvp happening on the pve servers, along with the inane toxic environment that brings with it, which is not exactly something all the pve players are crying out for. Here's a suggestion - if pvp players want pve areas on their servers, let them start bugging grapeshot for that flavor of pvp. Quit trying to pull unwilling pve players into the scheme. We're fairly free of grief and troll abuse now as it is. We don't want yours, and we don't want to be your fodder either. Leave us out of it.

If I were managing the project, I probably would have done this. 1. There are not enough people on the ptr to shake this out properly 2. This forces everyone who wants to play over the next 10 days to play on one server. Many people may do this just to see the new stuff, even if they don't intend to stay there. 3. The pvp servers have things that need testing over and above what the pve servers have. As for picking NA pvp over EU pvp, I'd flip a coin. Xbobs may not have to worry about joining NA pvp when this is over. The population on rush day was not terribly high, and it'll be even lower once the sightseers leave. A full 12 hours after the servers opened up, there weren't many islands claimed at all.

Steam says the 24 hr peak is 2,521. Where'd you get the 10k number from?

Thanks It's definitely a pve build. I got tired of seeing everything brown and gray and looking like maximum security prisons everywhere. Lots of coastal towns are very colorful, so I was copying a few of my favorites. Seems like nearly everyone is but me

I don't suppose anyone else would be interested, but Boomer wanted to see screenshots of this build out when it was finished. It never did get finished, but I took the screenshots for posterity. The harbor and the boathouse. The ship parked there is the "Malevolent", built by my perfectionist friend Daemon, who fingerchecked when it came to the name, destroyed the ship and rebuilt it. (Because you can't rename ships) The post office - Atlas Mail. "Let's Go Postal". Post office interior. The marketplace - Public crafting stations, ice machines and shops. The post office was off to the left, down the boardwalk a bit. The museum and carriage house were to go in between the two. The boardwalk took forever to build. It's all triangular foundations built out along the water. Building anything at all on top of triangle foundations is a royal pain in the ass. There was also my friend's base, a farm with a barn, and a large barn elsewhere for the animals, in addition to docks near the cliffs with an elevator for moving cargo.

You're making too much of it. It was a throwaway verb. I'm saying it dismissively because, aside from you, I don't think anyone cares about it. I can't imagine anyone ever saying , "Oh, I heard there was a new island in J4. I'm going to sail over and have a look at it."

Regarding player retention, remember that those 90 days included announcement of the first wipe. There are some xbox players with the foresight to think about how it might feel to be wiped twice in 9 or 10 months time in a survival game and it might prevent some of them from buying the game, but the devs have cleverly and transparently tried to head that off at the pass in the announcement by declaring no more wipes till release. Translation - "We only wiped those other people twice. We wouldn't do that to YOU. So, as one of the "other" people, you may understand that today is the day of pissed offedidness, and allow at least 24 hours for some righteous indignation about that. I'm glad you like islands. Truly. Personally, I like my OWN island very much. I enjoy seeing a pretty island occasionally as I travel around. Aside from that, they're scenery. I don't come to know them and appreciate each one as the individual little gem of some graphic designer's dreams. Some of them have nice mats on them. Some have good bears. I don't give them much thought on my day to day gameplay. Cats? I am currently enslaved to 5 former feral cats, which are all I could take from the colony I managed at my old house before I moved. I'm a dog person. I thought I'd be moving with 4 dogs, but it took so long they all succumbed to old age, and now I have 5 cats. Do I need more cats? In any case, I understand your approach to not scaring away the new players. Luckily there are not hordes of them here yet, if ever. They're xbobs. They'll probably be on one of the other communications channels. Your posts are being made from someone with possibly a longer timeline on this game than me, because it sounds like deciding to stay is a no-brainer for you. From my perspective, there's a decision to be made about that. Are my friends staying? Can I get my island back? Is there any other decent game to shift to? Do I have any confidence whatsoever that these developers are going to make all of this worth my while at some point? Those are the decision points. I don't expect they care, based on recent history. New people considering plunking down some cash are entitled to that viewpoint as well, and if that doesn't filter back through the players to the developers, how do you ever expect some company to develop a game we'd actually like to play?

I'm sad that I have to agree with that comment. I've been thinking about it, and I think there's probably a pretty good probablility that they intended to wipe all along and were just stringing everyone along with the "if techincal reasons" bit. Here's why I think that. If you look at how this game is set up, there are 4 official "servers", each comprised of 225 actual servers. That's 900 servers. Last week they said they were so busy getting ready for xbox and working on the PTR that they weren't going to turn on magic mythos. That seemed pretty weird to me, so I've been thinking about that. How busy do you have to be to not be able to run a script to flip 2x on some of the multipliers on the servers? This leads me to wonder if they are even using scripts to manage 900 servers. If not, it explains an awful lot, including why they can't preserve player data and inventory at least, or mitigate a landscape wipe in any other way - because someone would have to log onto 900 servers to do that. So sure, I could be wrong on that because I haven't got root privileges on those boxes, but it's something that makes you go hmmm.... If that's not the case then one of two things happened - they either decided to wipe to boost the marketing effort for xbox, or they really did decide to just rearrange all the islands for no great player benefit and wipe everyone out really for nothing at all. None of those is good.

This doesn't make it any less boring. One more NPC to beat up. Reskinned AoD, basically. The game needs competition. On pvp that might mean better combat mechanics and getting rid of offline combat. On pve that means better trading mechanics and more exclusive crafting professions.

Fixed that for ya.

Srsly? New islands are not thrilling. Cats are not thrilling. New game mechanics are thrilling - skill trees with specialization, new levels of player organization , ie. towns and cities, new modes of tension and conflict for both pvp and pve, new ships, better use of crew... Maybe. Maybe not. First, they've indicated that they expect to do more things like that without wiping in the future. Second, you can wipe a landscape without wiping player data, and that includes possessions, as we've already seen them do in Ark, and as you can move a player, including possessions, in single player. But mostly, even if it is technically required to make these changes, these are changes that don't fundamentally add anything at all to the player experience. These are best worked in when they can be combined with something for players to look forward to. It's like wiping the servers to make the oceans a little bit more blue. Nobody gives a rat's about it. If I had any doubts that this was not well thought out, the rolling start puts them to rest. You have Xbox players complaining that it's unfair not to wipe, especially on pvp, so they'll choose a pvp server to start up first, a week before xbox launch, and all the pc players get a head start on it. Every decision degrades the level of confidence that smart decisions are being made and everything will come out right in the end.

Cripes. If they wipe everyone for that, there will be wigs on the green.

What's the point of the new map? Is there a benefit to it?

I used a haiku generator. It didn't produce a great haiku, but it gives you reviews of what you wrote, and the reviews are perfect. https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/haiku/ Vitamin - A Haiku by Anon Achromatic isle A complex, vitamin sail in spite of the bear The reviews: Auto Praise for Vitamin - A Haiku "The juxtaposition of vitamin and bear is truly inspired." - The Daily Tale "I don't like short poems. So why am I reviewing a haiku, you may wonder? Well, I liked the title - 'Vitamin'. It went down hill from there." - Enid Kibbler "Amazing how so few words can set a scene so perfectly. I close my eyes and all I can see is the colorless islet." "I felt that I was a vitamin. It was spooky. I hope to read more by Anon. Perhaps next time, something longer." - Zob Gloop "I've always wanted to write a haiku about a vitamin. I can't belive Anon has beaten me to it." - Betty Borison

Some of those comments ought to come with a crazy speculation and bad data analysis warning. Maybe a handful of pvp players looking for somebody to gank. Is there some other large group somewhere all excited about getting to play with xbobs? If so, please post links. Or is this just you, contemplating the adoration and anticipation of thousands of players just waiting for you to join the game? I don't know where you come up with some of this stuff. Yeah, those 3 guys you quoted from the stream are a massive crowd. You keep saying this when it's clearly not true. Steam numbers in Feb. - 11,385 Steam numbers in March when a wipe is announced - 3,029 8356 people left the game when the wipe was announced. Steam numbers post wipe -April - 5736 You think that number shows that 2707 new people started playing the game because they liked the wipe. What it really shows is that after the wipe, only 2700 out of 8356 people came back because they didn't want to start over, didn't like the new claim system, or had given up on GS being able to produce a decent game. Player wipes do not improve player numbers. That wipe killed the server population, and it's never recovered from it.

There is no point in doing WPE on the official servers as they're designed right now. It's a one-off game mechanic assuming the servers are even reasonably (not even fully) loaded. Any island someone would actually want to claim will be claimed, and if that claim runs out, someone else will be waiting in the wings to grab it. The idea of using them on unclaimable islands with a rare resource is a good one, and doesn't require a wipe. Since WPE are for claimable islands, it only makes sense for single player as just something else to do. Claiming doesn't matter there. It's really just for dedicated servers. If they wipe the official servers to bring a mechanic which will only matter for a couple weeks, it would be probably the worst decision they've made so far. SystemError is partly right - if they announce a wipe to add a ridiculous game mechanic, people will leave en masse, because they've been wiped, but even more because the devs will have proven they can't be trusted to produce a decent game. The only kind of wipe which doesn't start a mass exodus is one that is bringing lots of really good things to the game - things good enough to overcome people losing all their claims, buildings, tames, ships, levels, discovery points, quest completions, etc. We haven't seen any ideas that good yet.

I'm not bashing the idea. I think upkeep is fine for non-claimed land. Buildings on claims are already controlled by the flag, as you pointed out. But if we had a sensible claim system, structures on claimed land wouldn't need any form of upkeep at all. If a person could only have one claim, and everyone could have a claim, then you don't need upkeep to tell when they've abandoned the game. The game itself knows how long since a player has logged in and the timer can just be set against that.

I hope that's only for things not on your own claim. There's no reason to charge upkepp like that for buildings you put on claimed land.