Winter Thorne

Doesn't work if the boat is anchored, so anchor your boats. Also, remember to lock up your boat containers if you haven't been doing that.

Gee, really? Who would have thought that? I've not been talking about what they release or the order things get worked on. I'm talking about communicating the overall design to the community. You know if they did that, and the players knew what was coming and liked the direction, nobody would be saying, "Oh, look a Mega Cat and the plague. Thanks." because they'd be in it for the eventual goodies. As far as we know, there aren't any eventual goodies, and this IS the design plan, and it's a cat, and new hats for penguins, and everybody has to tame a snail next.

You keep talking about what you know about the game while I'm talking about what our average new player encountering the game on Steam knows about the game. This is not about you. Statements that a dev throws out during an interview are not communications to the community or potential buyers and they're not design specs. The stuff about civilizations, etc. on the steam page is very general but it sounds great. So a new player sees that, expects that, gets in the game and where is it? It's all full island claims and mega companies. Maybe they wait through 3 Mega Updates for news on it and nope...taming and end game bosses. Where's the communication on the design direction for what should be a major feature? My **opinion** is that they consider they've already given us this with companies and claims, and if they do expand it, it'll all be based on companies anyway so it won't be much different. Still..who knows? They say nothing about it. That's exactly my point. If they communicated their vision, people wouldn't be wasting time and having arguments over things that aren't in it. The noise level would go way down, which would help everyone. Until they do that, people are going to complain and suggest all kinds of things. (Also, taming whales isn't really part of some "vision". It's a tid bit detail in a game. Vision is an overall plan for a game..taming is part of the vision. Taming ants is a detail.) Oh, so the cats may apply to pve then. In a terrible way. Great. If what you say is true, for people who don't like taming it's another mandatory taming task and another addition that's all stick and no carrot. Cripes. Note to devs: If everything added to the game is going to be endgame bosses and taming, please let us know right now. Some of us had hopes of other stuff.

That's a great example of how the game marketing means something different to everyone and is not specific enough for players to know if it has the elements they want to see in a game. Everyone who buys it has an expectation colored by their own background and what they'd like to see. The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever There's nothing in there about claims or Ark or pillar spam or raids or tames. These are the things YOU expect because your frame of reference includes Ark and "reliable sources". Your average player cruising Steam for something interesting to play won't assume the same things about the game. If their background is ESO and LiF, they're going to assume something different. You've taken your assumptions about the game and driven them pretty far down the road, imagining exactly how claims need to work and colonies need to work, and everyone one else does that too, all in their own directions, leading to people stating with an air of authority that "this game is not for you" or that this game "is meant to have something or other" and if someone else doesn't like it, they should just leave. But none of that is true, really. So they cast a wide net and scoop up all these different people for EA with different expectations, and they never really tell any of them what the grand design is and what it's not, and we find out a few bits of things along the way, some of which are true and some that aren't. Jat says tames aren't going to be important in the game. The game makes tames a feature of mega releases and they become the meta for maps and mats. Sailing and ships, which were one of the more reasonable expectations, don't get a lot of focus. A mega update is billed as having a focus on small groups and solos, but it doesn't. These are the things that confuse the community and convince them that the devs are leaving the design up to the players and the squeaky wheels are getting the grease. (Along with constant hints from some players of having secret personal meetings with the developers that no one else is privy to) Everyone either leaves or becomes a squeaky wheel. And the community gets blamed for squeaking. It's not a good environment. There's always going to be discussion and disagreement over game features, but the more specific that gets, the more productive it gets. If the devs had provided a basic framework for the design saying that there would eventually be cities with governments, the whole claim discussion would have been different...and better, knowing it needed to fit into that. But still...until the whole government design comes out in a Captain's log, it's just something some player is saying, no matter how much authority they project in saying it. They need to tell everyone where the game is going and get our feedback on the details of how that gets accomplished, rather than letting us continue to squabble over what kind of game it's supposed to be. I like cats. I don't like cats whose only function is to allow plague rats for pvp servers because it's just another example of expectations being unmet. (If you put up pve servers, pve players expect to be better than 2nd class citizens) How many mega updates have to go by before a casual small group pve player gets something interesting in one? The cargo racks were exciting until we found out how they worked.

I'm talking about bigger picture stuff than whether there's a cat in the June update. Some details about what elements of mmorpgs they want to include and what aspects of survival they want to include. Crafting - important and a big deal or no? Taming important and a big deal or no? Their sales pitch didn't include any mention of it being a territorial conquering game, and yet that was their first real emphasis. If I know a game doesn't contain the elements I like, I don't play it, and vice versa. I bought this game because it looked like it might contain some of the elements I like. It's been out 6 months and I STILL don't know if those are supposed to be in the game or not. Would be nice if someone provided some direction, but I suspect they can't because they are making it up as they go along. You don't see people jumping on the Civ forums complaining that there are no dungeons, because they know it's not part of that game. This game? From the description and some of the things that have implemented/unimplemented we have no idea what it's intended to be, so everyone complains about everything they don't like. Direction and information dials down the noise. Cats? Not so much.

I read that article too. They did it to themselves, most of them. Game development used to be funded with the expectation that player sales would give a return on investment, By the time a game is presented to paying players, it should have a business plan, a project plan, a defined theme and some structure in place for support and communications. Many of them don't. In an attempt to get as many bucks as possible, they've made the players the investors and pitch the game to as wide a market as possible to get the dollars flowing in. When you charge people for a game, you can scream EA all you want, but if you haven't even defined your genre fully, have little to no support, and show no signs of any real plan to develop the game, then sure players are going to jump into that arguing for what's most important to them to try to influence direction and get attention to bugs and cheats. Hell, sometimes we know so little about how elements in this game are actually supposed to work we can't tell if it's bad code or bad design we want to complain about. There's no spec. But we do complain and push our ideas about how the game should be. I do it. You do it too. We're all Joffrey. So if you're tempted to put his picture up, be sure to apply that to yourself as well. Some companies don't do this. If you buy Resident Evil, Civilization, or Grand Theft Auto, you know what those games are about and what the major features will be. OTOH, if some company bills a game as The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever So that's going to mean 100 different things to 100 different players. And when some of them come in here wondering why the hell there's no piracy or roleplaying, or civilization building in the game, and why people keep saying that statement means the game is built specifically for mega guilds, it's pretty unfair in that context to say the players are acting like King Joffrey. The problem is that the development is acting like they're flying by the seat of their pants, and it's pretty clear by now that there is not some grand design that handles all this, because nobody has ever said so in any coherent and formal way to the playerbase. Gaming communities are normally pretty rambunctious, but when you try to pull something like this on them they get crazed. They don't have to give every individual person exactly what they want, but they DO have to spell out what it is they are going to give and how they expect it to work. If you don't want to deal with King Joffrey, a dev team acting like responsible professional adults who communicate fully with the players goes a long way toward preventing that.

It's also an issue in PvE. The issues are a little different, but they're there. You're still supposed to do the same things if you are solo or in a mega. Same goals, same rewards. I see a lot of people yelling in these threads that smalls and solos just can't expect to achieve the same things that megas can, but the problem is they've not given them anything else to achieve! It's not a one to one matchup between smalls/megas and casual/hardcore players, but they align a good bit. Hardcore players can do things that take more than a couple hours in the game, like organizing huge raids with big groups and breeding animals that require someone be online for insane amounts of time. They can do things that must be done with no interruptions. Casuals require things to do that can be done in smaller amounts of time, and most are happy to do that, even if it takes them weeks to complete. Those things usually bore hardcore players, and they consider them "grind" or useless chores they need to do to get to the fun parts. They're happy to have those kinds of things put into easy mode while asking for the things they like to do to be put in harder mode. Games attempting to cater to the smalls/solos/casuals often use skills like crafting, exploration or speciality farming to appeal to those players, but this game has not done that so far, with weak and shallow crafting lines, exploration rewards of xp only, and farming mats en masse. Hopefully that will change.

Rather than asking for more for "solos and smalls" I'd ask for more things that aren't just a new boss raid with loot for it. Overall game improvements - new ship types for example. First on my wish list would be a crafting revamp making crafting more exclusive with deeper crafting trees, a bigger variety of items, and things that are actually worth putting in a store. Craftng rewards (BPs, improvements and special items) ought to be rewards for doing a crafting thing, not a boss mob thing. The side benefit is that this is something solos and smalls can put time into and get good at and gives them some goals to go after.

Depends on your perspective, I guess. A newer player, especially one who never played Ark might find the playstyle choice of a pirate having to kill everything with a tamed bear to be unusual. A few months ago, I thought it was a really unusual choice too. I was having a hard time with maps, the devs were saying taming wasn't a major component to the game, players were saying taming was awful and broken, and people on the forums were calling me crazy for not taming and doing maps with bears. To my mind that spoke of incredibly illogical game design, something that one would normally expect to be addressed early in EA, as it impacts everything else. But...~shrug~....I suppose I'm getting used to the goofy ideas now, although I still wouldn't call wanting to be able to use pistols or a carbine in a fair fight against the undead an unusual choice. Given some of the design choices here I view future updates with trepidation and the expectation that we'll all be forced to travel by farting into hot air balloons next.

I didn't want to do the whole taming thing either, but ended up having to do it because it's the only type of combat that works. It seems silly. I don't understand why everyone is jumping all over the OP for saying that. It's a valid opinion to have that a pirate game ought not to insist that everyone keep a menagerie, and it's perfectly legit to put that opinion out in front of the devs. Keep in mind the devs originally said tames weren't supposed to be a "thing" in this game, even though they were in there. I don't see any problem with someone wanting some additional path to battle that doesn't include them. They don't really fit the genre anyway. In the end, a game that provides multiple ways of fighting including firearms and melee weapons, but makes it so the only way to succeed is with a tamed animal is kind of strange.

But it made me laugh. That's never a waste of time.

Because this game and your participation in it are all about ME. I haven't paid for the game or played it yet, but my glorious authority on the game stands without question. I am glorious. I will continue to seek out new products that I cannot use and go around speaking as an authority on them, and telling everyone who uses them to just shut up, and anyone who doesn't like it is a snowflake. I used the Google nonsense translator so you all didn't have to. You're welcome.

And once again we find ourselves in the position of busily doing something while some guy who has no clue about it and can't do it himself feels free to wander around telling us all how to do it. Now I'm having massive career flashbacks. Thanks a bunch.

Thanks for the replies. I had read the bit about the water pipes in the patch notes but didn't know they had taken the other method away!

Loaded a grill with wood, berries and full waterskins...it doesn't highlight the dyes as being ready to craft and doesn't allow crafting them. Moving all the ingredients to a cooking pot allows crafting.

Thanks. So you're saying % is everything, and a higher percentage legendary shipyard BP would produce a better ship than a mythical BP with a lower percentage?

What benefits does a ship get from an improved shipyard? And is it better to use a lower quality BP at a higher percentage, or a higher quality BP at a lower percentage?

Doesn't matter if 3 people can do it or if 1 person can do it. If this is how all the additional content is going to work, it's boring as hell. There are (should be) other elements to this game besides running around pew pewing things, but the other elements are shallow as a mud puddle right now. Crafting, exploration, building...there are whole skill trees for some of that stuff, but no progression in them or depth or accomplishment at the end. Let's see some mega update that is all about adding levels to the crafting tree with some great new stuff at the end of it that rewards time spent and persistence rather than mega zergs.

I tried relogging..didn't fix it. Bows worked, punches worked..just not spears.

Spears have stopped working. If you attempt to hit or throw a spear at an animal, it registers no damage, and the health bar doesn't turn on. When you equip a spear it no longer has the melee option and only performs as a thrown weapon. Throwing it has no effect, even if it hits.

Isn't it true, that if you threw everyone out of your company you'd own everything except what a person could carry in their personal inventory? Who really owns the ships, the buildings, the tames, and all that? Two things - That "vision statement" you pointed to is really a reach. It's an interview from December where in the entire thing, Jeremy mentions the words lord and serf once in answer to a question about how to keep new players from being steamrolled on a pvp server. It sure isn't a "vision statement" about how nobody is entitled to land except company owners. Companies should share resources. If you have a mega company where everyone "owns" their own fleet of ships and stable of tames, that's not a company, it's just a way to pump up your numbers so you look big. It sounds like you have an entire mega company made of lots of solos all doing their own thing. So maybe you need more land than one claim. ~shrug~. Or maybe you need to work with what you get. The amount of land people should have is debatable. The point that really jumps out from your comment is that you feel that although other players should be happy to settle for owning nothing, you must never ever be a tenant anywhere. You have to own every bit of land you want to use, and are unwilling to be a tenant yourself. Nothing says you must only play one role in this game. You get an island. If you're big you get a big island. If you need more room, and you think being a tenant is just fine and dandy for other people, then it should also be fine for you. Go talk to some landlords and get some more space if you need it. This idea that because you're big you get to own everything is going to keep other players from playing the game. Everybody who buys the game deserves to have a space if they want one. You can't keep telling everyone being a tenant is good enough if you're unwilling to do that (even as a secondary measure) yourself.

PvP and PvE are 2 separate games. There's 2 issues here - what is fair to the players and what is good for the game. When I propose 1 flag/1 company that's about the issue of what's good for the game. Bigger companies still get an advantage because they get bigger islands, and the size is proportionally greater when you consider that solos each need their own shipyard, own taming pens, own animal enclosures, etc, whereas 50 people in a company can all share, giving them much more space. The game really needs more players now, especially on NA pve. Who wants to talk a few friends into starting a new game where there's already no land left to claim to get started? The income from 100 players split into 20 tribes is the same as that of a 100 member tribe. When we talk about what's fair there are different issues. Megas already find it way easier to do things that small companies struggle with. If you have 100 people in your company, it's guaranteed that nearly every day someone is sailing by some island that has salt. They can grab some and bring it back. For smaller companies, salt can be an expedition all by itself. So when you give these things to the megas, they aren't such a big deal for the megas, and you can see this all over the forums where they are saying "Gold isn't a big deal" "The Powerstones aren't a big deal", etc. They do things easily, eat up the new content fast and then are unhappy. Meanwhile, the small companies working much harder to do things see that benefits keep getting put in the game that don't help them at all. Why should 100 people in 25 small companies never get anything that really benefits them when 50 people in a big company get all the improvements? Last, when we're talking about how many players benefit from a change, there's something you always have to keep in the back of your mind - when a solo player earns a benefit (like a sub, etc.) , then one player gets that benefit. When a mega tribe earns a benefit, then ONE player, not 50 or 100, gets that benefit. That's how the game works. I think players largely forget this, but all it will take is the first mega leader going postal and dumping everyone and these forums will be all torches and pitchforks calling for changes. That's already happening with another issue - bad behavior. Right now the only thing a person belonging to a Mega owns is the bad behavior of every other member of that company. So...for counting the number of players who get to own that new ship, new animal, new benefit, Megas truly only count as one. The fact that many leaders have been benevolent overlords and let everyone play with the toys so far has been hiding that.

I like that vision for the game too, but I don't like that it's being designed for pvp. At some point they've got to realize that pvp and pve are really 2 separate games. It does make sense to do the pvp design first, because it's more complicated and more prone to abuse, but if that isn't followed each time with a pve modification, they're making a big mistake. I've been saying for a while that there needs to be a game mechanics layer for organizing along towns/cities and some additional content to go along with that. If they do as you say and once again decide megas rule over all the other tribes for this, I'll be really pissed off. There no reason 4 companies of 5 people each shouldn't band together and form a town, elect leaders, etc. Can you link the article here? I'd like to see it.

I'm sorta not in favor of handing more things to the megas if there's some other way to do it. They really could just limit island claims to one per company, make the bigger islands a little bit bigger and call it a day. If the megas want outposts, let them go around approaching other landowners asking for a place to build as they keep recommending everyone else do.

Or go with a carrot and stick approach - bigger islands are better, and your costs go up dramatically depending on the number of islands you take.