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Winter Thorne

Pathfinder
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Everything posted by Winter Thorne

  1. You're right. Describing it as "good people and bad people" is way oversimplified, and that question has very little to do with anything. A long timer benefits the people on vacation and people who only log in occasionally. It hurts new players who will have a harder time finding space. There's no sense in calling any of those people good or bad. It's just a matter of trying to be fair to all of them, finding a balance, and creating enough assets in the game so there's enough for all the active players.
  2. Yeah, wasn't talking about claims and settling, which is a whole different subject. IF they insist on keeping this faulty claim system, they need to do something entirely different about that issue apart from the regular inactive player timers.
  3. Based on that silly question, I'm now leaning toward option 2. The answer, obviously, is because those people haven't been demanding that everyone else get wiped for the past 4 months.
  4. I don't understand how someone can make a decision on a game like this to set timers for buildings, ships, tamed animals...everything, that makes them disappear after such a small amount of time that people can't even go on vacation, or business trips, or become ill. How does that happen? They all sit around a table at a meeting or something and someone says that items are remaining in the world for too long and it's causing performance problems and trashing up the place. And then with no concept of how a player actually experiences the game (advancing in building, shipmaking, taming over a period of months, maybe 2 or 3 hours/day, 4 or 5 days a week, and thinking, when this is done, I'm going to move on to discovery points, or advanced BPs, etc.), they decide that it's ok to wipe that stuff out if the player decides to take a few days off or sail around the world instead of rendering in all of their stuff every 10 days. No discovery points or advanced BPs for you - back to punching a tree and rebuilding it all for the next 4 months. 10 day timers are ridiculous for anything other than random small bits of building not found on a claim. Players who have claimed land should be able to be confident that things on their claim remain long enough for them to conduct their lives without losing everything. 30 days is a reasonable amount of time to assume someone has quit playing the game. 15 days is a reasonable amount of time to assume some structure not on a claim was a temporary build. There is no reason to have different timers for builds, ships, and animals. If the mishmash of short timers seems necessary to the devs to keep the servers clean at the current population level, then how do they anticipate doing that if the servers are fully populated? 3 days timers? It makes no sense. Another thing that makes no sense is this - This is pretty rich coming from a person who has been demanding for months that all the existing players should suffer a complete wipe when he gets to start playing. "All your work must be erased for me, but if mine is ever erased, even by a valid game mechanic, I will quit." It displays a level of un-self awareness and selfishness usually only found in toddlers. Either that or it's one of the most sophisticated trolling jobs I've ever seen, where someone successfully creates a caricature of the most entitled self-centered person they can imagine, finds a profile photo to match, and plays the role to the hilt all over the forums.
  5. I think you've mistaken my meaning. Why would anyone be loyal to the developers? It's not "loyalty" that keeps people around. The people who stay do so because they like the idea and the potential of the game, and are hoping the game becomes what they want it to be. There's a few of us that post comments here from two different perspectives - one from the personal player's view of what we want to see, and another from whatever we imagine the industry viewpoint to be. While I understand from the developer's point of view that certain actions make business sense or techinical sense, from a player's point of view, I just want what I want. In the end, if they can't produce that, I stop being a player. Some of us are more clear than others about when we're posting our personal wishes for the game and when we're talking about the development environment and the industry in general.
  6. Well, that's obvious. They've got to build on what they've got. But you won't get a decent base if you treat them as disposable.
  7. The argument that GS has collected PC money and now doesn't give a fig about PC players because it's after xbox money is too simple, and doesn't take into account all the factors that play into this. It only considers a timeline that's a few months out, when, if this game is going to be successful, somebody's got to take a much longer view than that. You can only play the xbox trick once. Then what? In addition to Boomer's future cash shop point, it should also be said that games like this require a certain base number of players to succeed. After an initial rush from a new market, nobody is going to join the game if they find out there are only 100 people on the servers and they never see another single player ever. Xbox players are as fickle as anyone else. Many of them will speed through all the content and/or get annoyed about something and leave, and if there aren't enough players left to generate critical mass, then new players won't join the empty servers. It's just as important to build a decent base of long term players as it is to launch a one-time marketing push.
  8. If I'm adding them up right, it looks like that "wipe confirmation" was 3 players saying they wanted a wipe. Through the transformative properties of wishful thinking, we get that translated into "definite wipe per Dollie" on the forums. I am really hoping that GS takes into account the track records of logical thinking on the part of people urging them to do a complete wipe, all servers, all data. Would you take advice from someone making these kinds of conclusions? I wouldn't.
  9. The funny thing is he completely fails to mention that the devs have said the xbox release will definitely be delayed until sometime in 2020, and performance and new content are being prioritized ahead of it. They're doing that because all the existing players will quit if they don't. Didn't you hear that too? I'm sure I heard them say that.
  10. Dollie says there's no decision on a wipe and it's mostly based on technical factors, and yet here we are again with people confidently stating that she's confirmed a wipe. If I wasn't fairly certain that you all live in different geographies, I'd swear they're putting something in your water.
  11. It's not done yet. But here's a pic of the bear nursery.
  12. No. Some of us don't want to play pvp, and don't want to have the game restricted where only pvp players get the best stuff and the whole map to play on. If they want to make one server like that, fine. If that's the only way to play the game, there's a number of players who just won't play.
  13. If I were you, I'd go even a little bit higher on points for a 4 person company. After you get going on maps, the gold is not a problem at all. As for your other points: 2. I don't think there's any biome where you can grow everything. Now that we have ice, stuff will keep a very long time in a bag, especially cooked food. Grow and harvest what you can wherever you end up and sail for the rest. It turns out to also not be a very big deal. 3. Nice to have...hard to get with the rest of your restrictions. 4. Yep. Absolutely. Don't know why they made islands like that in the first place. 5. That's a given, considering that we've been talking about claims. You are being kind of picky, but everybody's got a wishlist for their perfect island. I think back when claims were being reworked, we counted up the number of claimable islands and compared that to the population of a decently loaded server, and we were estimating that only about 1/3 or so of the players were going to even get to have any claim of any sort. (and many of those would have to be in bigger companies) If you start with that, then reduce it by the percent in your price range, then add in the other restrictions, you'd probably have @ a 2% chance of getting that after a wipe with a full serverload of players starting at the same time. Big companies can claim smaller islands, and often do, and they have prearranged tactics to do that during a land rush. You'd be amazed how quickly they can do this. I'd say your best chance of getting most of what you want is right now, with a dwindling population and little to no competition, and more islands becoming unclaimed every day.
  14. I often play without sound, but sometimes I turn it up while sailing, just because of the sounds effects. Having spent some time on some old schooners and sloops, they sounded absolutely real to me. Thanks for letting us in on how that was done. Those and the waves are great. Very much like the real thing.
  15. Well, I disagree with some of eeeceee's response to you, and I'm no fan of the current claim system. The current claim system means that it's impossible for *everyone* to have a claim, and the devs intend that some of the players are going to be settlers on someone else's claim. A wipe wont' fix this, that's just musical chairs. Having said that, I think it's funny that only someone who hasn't played the game has liked your comment, and eeeceee has fallen into the trap of assuming that what you say is true, while my first reaction was "How can that be true with such a small server population?" So I went into the game and had a look at the Atlas. First, with a company of 4, I'm not sure why you set yourselves up with a restriction of of sub 45, because there are islands at 46 points, just one point above that. One point is a meaningless distinction. (You also have many more points to use, so even 46pts. is kind of a low bar). So, looking at the Atlas quickly, here are the claimable islands I found. (I tried to exclude freeports, lawless and other unclaimable areas without spending a ton of time on this, so you may find one or two errors) A - 1, 3, 13, 14, 15 B- 1,2,3,9,15 C - 1 D - 1, 15 E - 1,2,6, 14, 15 F - 1,5,6,11,15 G - 1,12,15 H - 1,5,9,15 I - 8,12,14,15 J - 4,5,6,11,12,13 K - 6,7,10,11 N-1 O-12 Some people complain about polar, so I highlighted all that aren't in polar zones. It looks like there are a decent amount to claim, and there's probably not a good reason to bump yourself up to the 53 pt level and add even more to the list. It would be funny if you claimed an island on this list after looking fruitlessly for so long, only to see the devs announce a wipe because someone else also wants to play musical chairs with them. As for Realist egging you on, you should know you have a better chance of claiming land now with a low server population than you would during a new start land rush. Until and unless they change the claim system again, this is what we get.
  16. The only thing that's clear from that statement is that they are talking about technical issues driving the decision, not, as previously stated, wiping old players simply for the benefit of new players. As for the OP, and the forum posters that have contributed to his misconception, I'm sure if I had the time I could go back and pull many many quotes from a few people stating authoritatively that the servers would be wiped, as though they possesed inside knowledge of that. I'm suprised no one's broken an ankle with all that backpedaling going on.
  17. I think it's probably just some language barrier thing. I'm still trying to figure out how getting the best stats on tames is an "economy". I just don't get the arguments being made. I'm not bored. The mail is still running, if there are ever any people around to send any. I just rebuilt the post office and it looks fabulous. Next up is the stables for carriage rides around town, and the Rumrunner Hideout Museum and Hysterical Society.
  18. What economy? There's no economy here. So you go crazy trying to sell tames and get a lot of gold. And then what? Even if there was an economy, what other MMOs regularly wipe out all the existing players so new players can come in and not have to work their way up to compete with them? Aside from a handful of "conquer the world" games, you dont' see MMOs wiping their servers every 4 months because new people started. Imagine WoW wiping every few months. The problem is there's only X months of content in this game right now. If you speed through it, you're done. Then you're bored and you think starting over might be fun, but it's not enough for YOU to start over, everyone else must start over too, even if they're not bored with it. If you're bored, wipe your char and start over or don't. Forever? Aren't you the guy that wants to wipe the servers when you get bored? What's the point in going after any high quality stuff if it's all gone every few months? At least try to make a consistent argument.
  19. This game has outstanding looking graphics. The scenery is so good I just stand and look at it sometimes. I often push for more/better development on the forums, because the potential for this game is so high. I've been playing since launch and still enjoy it, partly because I've deliberately not worried about progression and there are still a ton of things I haven't done yet. I enjoy building, sailing, goofing off and doing silly things, and have had a lot of adventures with friends that started out to be something simple and wound up being epic stories. I am currently building a museum to memorialize some of these events. Heh. Yep. Still fun.
  20. I guess my view is based on a project mgmt perspective. I know nothing at all about how GS operates, so I'm using educated guesses along with what the decision points would be if I were running a project like this. First, you're asking them to stop building something that is already in progress, and has been in progress since before the new guy signed on. This is a money-generating effort. You want them to stop working on this in order to work on the new stuff. They can't build the new stuff, because it's likely they don't know what the new stuff is yet. However, what they can do is design the new stuff, make decisions about directions for things like claims, how NPCs will be used, enhanced levels of player cooperation (towns&cities I hope), what the new skill trees should look like, etc. The people making those decisions are not the same people working on coding and network for Xbox. So those two efforts are running concurrently. I don't know their timelines or schedules. If it's the case that the new stuff can be released soon after the xbox release, I'd say they're doing the right things. Even 4 months after the xbox release should be ok, as far as your concerns go. The farther out that date moves, the better the "new stuff" has to be, but it can still work. Even tired players will stick around if there's big new features on the way and they can make that announcement whenever they need to to spark interest. I also don't know what their competition will be releasing for Xbox over the next 4-6 months, and that's another fairly important data point. Keep in mind, the next effort after the xbox release is not new content, but performance improvements. There's not much point in doing those before the xbox release, as you'd likely have to retune the whole thing again after xbox. After that comes new content. This means that some of what's happening now is a prereq for what will be hapening later. You can't add a bunch of players, a bunch of npc content, and attempt to get large groups of players together without improving the performance, and you can't improve the performance in a streamlined way without getting xbox started. That's not to say that the work on the new content hasn't started yet. Design phase is first, and it's worth it to take the time to do that right and make sure the various pieces of it work together. What you're predicting about the xbox launch and disaffected players may be true or it may not be. But I don't see any sane project path to avert that, so it would just have to be recognized in the risk assessment and planned for.
  21. It takes some time to iron out a design and then implement it. My point was that maybe that's what they're doing while the xbox release is rolling out. The amount of time it takes to do that isn't increased notably by letting the techies continue to work on the xbox rollout. If you really wanted the improvements first, then nothing at all would be happening until at least the end of the year. So if that's what's happening, I anticipate the xbox rollout, followed imediately by some mop up of xbox rollout technical issues, and then some big announcement about major game changes coming up soon-ish. Xbox players are going to have at least a couple months of "newness" to buffer any complaints. Of course, that may not be what's really happening. If not, that would really be a shame, since it would indicate a pure cash grab.
  22. Lots of people are saying they want wipes (without exactly saying "I'm bored", but you can tell that's what they mean), and you'll find a lot of posts around here claiming that scores of players will come back if there's a wipe (again boredom). It's a silly idea, because the last time they wiped nearly everyone quit. I didn't quote you about the boredom wipes, I was just addressing that idea and others in general. You're not the first person to talk about them. If someone quotes you directly, it looks like this comment does, with a quoted box in it. That's how this forums works. In the end, I was basically agreeing with your original comment, for whatever that's worth, and the followup has been to clarify. If not everyone knows about quotes, they should.
  23. Look to see if you're being quoted. That means someone is replying directly to you. I wasn't in my previous comment but I am now.
  24. I think the devs have already said that if there's a hard technical reason for a wipe, there will be one, and they're hoping not to have to do that. What about all these other reasons for a wipe that people keep putting up on the forums? This means: They're not gonna wipe because you're bored. They're not gonna wipe because you want a fresh start on a blank server. They're not gonna wipe because you're a sparkly and special player and eveything should be perfect and new just for you when you start playing. There are people who don't know this, and some of them come here and read your crap and decide they don't feel like playing the game. Crying for a wipe and also complaining about low server population means that you're illogical to the point where nobody should take anything you say seriously at all. (Not that anyone had been, but you never know)
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