Winter Thorne

I didn't say the megas owned too much land. They are just taking the wrong kind of land. Clearly, the small islands were meant to give smaller companies somewhere to claim, but as you say, the megas hold enough people to claim every small island in the game, while the larger ones just go unclaimed. The problem they were trying to fix with this claim system is that there wasn't enough land for all the people who wanted to claim land. There still isn't. This new system was specifically designed, so they said, to help smalls and solos. It didn't. The problem isn't fixed. The system isn't working.

Some of the stuff you say is hilarious to me, Lotus. We've talked about this before. Solos and smalls DO want to play with other people, they just don't want to be in big companies. Our island has 3 solos on it. We do all kinds of stuff together, and also hang out with a couple other islands full of solos and smalls. We set up by ourselves and we CAN hold what we have. The small islands are made for this. You know why some other people like us can't do the same thing and are unhappy? Because the larger companies are greedy and take too much. They chewed up all the small islands within hours of relaunch and now the smalls and solos have nowhere to go. Could it be that the megas have such enormous egos that they think the whole game is for them? It makes me laugh that you talk as though the non-mega people don't put effort into things. It takes a lot of effort to do things with a smaller group. And weren't you just bragging about how you wanted higher level tames and just told your minions to go do it all for you? Your posts were better when you weren't trying to throw shade on all the other players in the game, and pump yourself up so much. The claim system has issues. It's not great. Many people quit because of claims. They also quit because of griefing, the wipe, hacking, and lack of trust in Grapeshot to work through all those things successfully and listen to their players. Seems to me Grapeshot is making improvements. They still have a long way to go, and some of the things they do make you wonder what the hell they're thinking, but on the whole I think it's improving.

Autorun.

Or he drops 3 pillars and now you can't build in front of your door.

Anyone hearing any status through all those channels I don't monitor?

A friend and I have a game design that merges pvp and pve, but it also includes active present admins in the game.

I can't believe someone took that suggestion seriously. There's no way you keep pve players in a merge. It's not the game mechanics, it's the environment.

I think your suggestion is hilarious. Your server pop is too low so you want to merge servers, but you don't want to merge with the other pvp server, you want the pve players to all play pvp instead. So, ok.. what if they merged the pve and pvp servers, and the pve people got the whole map with pvp being given 4 zones down in the SE corner. And you can only craft things in pve, because pvp isn't about crafting, If you have a base in the pvp zone, you cannot enter the pve zones without killing 3 whales, 20 Std, and the Kraken each time, and you can only stay for 2 hours. Oh, and you're only allowed 3 chat lines per visit. That seems like it might work.

Does it have to be massive though? (Or maybe could add a smaller pub that does the same thing)

And sells food to players (which it keeps in some type of preservation box to make it last a long time)

Won't they just split up to avoid that? I think if they want multiple small islands they'll have them no matter what the system is. It bugs me because I would really like to see the alliance system improved because that would greatly help smalls and solos, but if you improve it too much, then it can become the alternate company system.

Agreed. From the outside, the design process looks like a bunch of kids in superman capes about to jump off the roof saying "Hey, THIS would be really cool" and throwing stuff into the game. What's lacking is anyone with any sense having a final look at things with an eye to "What could possibly go wrong?" We're starting to rerun all the original claims system discussions again because all the elements of claims that we thought landlords wouldn't like are starting to make landlords unhappy. We haven't got round to reruns of all the things that would make players unhappy yet, because there aren't enough players, but that will be next if the numbers come back up. This isn't an EA thing. Put something buggy in the game? Sure...EA..patch it. Put some minor thing in the game that nobody is screaming for, yet which can easily produce massive XP exploits? That's not an EA problem, it's a judgement problem, and those don't go away just because a game moves out of EA.

That's not a great problem analysis. Could be his network, could be a configuration setting, could be a problem peculiar to his graphics card only when combined with a particular setting, etc. You don't just run out and buy a new pc without looking at those things.

They won't have any reason to even start rethinking it until or unless the servers start filling up again. That's when the settler complaints will come in. I think it only seems more unfair to landowners now because there are so few settlers that if a landowner is a jerk to them, they can easily find someplace else to go. If the servers were full, and all the islands were claimed, and every landowner could set his island to alliance only, the settlers, especially new ones would be miserable. As a landowner, just as a rough guess, what percent of the people looking to settle your island do you consider to be unsuitable? (Meaning, you don't trust them not to trash the place, or to be civil to your other tenants?)

Jean's not a newbie. He does know how to do this stuff, and some of what he's saying is true, especially with severe graphics lag. If you get an unlucky sotd spawn and you're graphics lagged, you're dead, that's all there is to it. If you're chopping a tree in freeport and a pig wanders up at the wrong time, and you're lagged, you're going to hit it. Does sound like a pc config issue of some sort though, since nearly everyone is not having those kinds of issues anymore.

I agree with some of what you say, but I'm not sure we can say that the new system allows most people to have a space to build yet, because the servers are nowhere near fully loaded. When this new change came in, a number of us predicted that everyone would think it was fine afterward just because so many people have gone. It looks like we were only half right about that. We had listed all the ways this new system was unfair to both landlords and tenants, and all the things that would annoy each group. It turns out that the things that are unfair to landlords are evident even without a fully loaded system, so now we're seeing the landlords' complaints and suggestions for changes, each of which make the tenants situation worse. But the tenants won't speak up until the population numbers are up, so it's a bit unfair to not consider them. I'd wait to see what it's like when/if the server numbers come back up. To put some of these suggestions in perspective, you have to review what happened and how we got here: The first claim system had smaller unlimited claims with no upkeep. The earliest people grabbed all they wanted and later people reported they couldn't find land to claim. After a while the player numbers started dropping and various expiration timers were put in place for claims. It became a little easier to find a claim, but the fact remained that fully loaded servers wouldn't have a claim for everybody. The devs came up with a change designed to allow everybody not to have a claim, but to have a place to build. The idea was not popular, as what people really wanted were claims, and this change made even fewer claims available than the last system. So the devs new philosophy of "build anywhere" was implemented. Not only was it unfair to both landlords and tenants, but there was no way to resolve any of that without making it even more unfair to the other group. You and Lotus are both approaching this from the standpoint of how to be more fair to landowners, but your solutions make it even less fair to tenants than it is already. Of course it's not fair to landowners that they only get 24 hours to remove structures. It's ridiculous. People need to be able to be away from the game for as much as a couple weeks at a time for various things. But if you change that, it's even more unfair to a tenant who has spent a lot of time starting to put a base together and then has somebody just wipe it all out. The idea of being able to set permissions of who can and can't build is even more unfair to tenants on a fully loaded server, and it just won't fly under this system, because the whole system is based on the devs' idea that anybody can build anywhere. That's the whole bit that made it possible to have fewer and bigger claims and still give the other players a way to play the game. They promised people they could build anywhere. (They never really meant it though, or they wouldn't have given other players the power to keep people from doing just that.) Doesn't matter..that is as much a part of this new system as claiming an island is. If you do away with "build anywhere" by using permissions, and then give the land owners an extended destruction timer, then what does the complete new claims system look like? It looks like the old system, with far fewer claims than before, with claim caps and upkeep. You still haven't got enough claims or now even enough land for all the players on a fully loaded server, and you've put over half the players subject to the whims of the other group who get to own the claims. It's like we said back at the beginning of this change - there are things in it that are going to make both groups very unhappy, and it looks like the devs had a goal of making everyone unhappy equally rather than making everyone happy. The unhappiness is balanced. If you start tinkering with that balance in favor of landlords, you'll make tenants unhappier and vice versa. I do applaud the ideas about making alliances a lot more useful. I think they were designed with pvp in mind, but for pve they are the "town structures" in the game, and need a lot more detailed permissions, chat options, etc. I also think the idea about increasing upkeep is good, but needs more discussion. There needs to be an incentive for bigger companies to take fewer bigger islands than more smaller ones.

Someone really said that? I hope you reported them. I see your point, but what if the new island owner IS one of those two guys? Should they be able to start kicking people off an island they've been on for 6 months or a year?

So of course, this morning those tiles weren't missing as usual and I'm not seeing any new ones gone. I guess one surefire way to make a problem go away is to start trying to reproduce it.

Yeah, was going to add to the bugs thread, but I thought I'd get some discussion going on it first to see if we could provide some more info about exactly when and where it's happening. The ones that I've got disappearing continue to disappear after I replace them, although I get more every day. There are some that have been gone 3 or 4 days in a row now when I log into the game.

I've seen it happen without destroying anything, and it's almost seeming like there's some sort of timer going off for it. I think I'll watch it closer for a while and see. I was thinking it might have something to do with support too, because support pillars under triangles don't count. (Don't know if it was always that way or just lately). I've been building a walkway with a lot of angles in it, so lots of triangles. What I think I saw was this - you get a few sections of all triangles going, then you need a support for the next. Can't put it under a triangle, but the next section is going to be a square....if only you could get there So I hang a square tile off the side of the triangles, put a pillar under it, add my next row of squares , put a pillar under them, and then remove the temporary one on the side. Those are ones I'm pretty sure are disappearing.

I know this has been around a little while, but is anybody seeing even more of it lately? Seems to be getting much worse. Looking through the patch notes, I'm wondering if this has anything to do with it - Optimized bUseNewStructureFoundationSupportChecks resulting in server performance gains and elimination of multiple stalls for structures. (These gains will be present on Official Servers)

A crafter's name is attached to everything they craft. Seems like a db search could pull up levels, items crafted or anything else they wanted to search on. A clever person could even use that to feed a destroy command to target anything made illegally.

Well, we were talking about better loot. Nobody wants a thatch BP even if the environment is attacking your house. Still, I think there's enough "environment" (as listed above). I'd rather they not make the environment harsher just to get some use out of a few of the building BPs. I'd rather they make the BP drops on pve more suited to pve.

The BPs would be worth something if they allowed you to build something completely different than the basic skill tree structures. But just for improving hitpoints on a thatch wall? Nobody cares about that. Even if the environment attacked your buildings you're not going to improve thatch or wood, you'll just go to stone for the strength. There are plenty of environmental hazards in pve anyway - attacks from animals, cold, heat, storms, whales and sotd at sea, hunger, vitamins....it's not like there's no environmental stuff happening so we need to destroy buildings. I agree with you on the mods,.,we need more variety in building pieces, paints, and items, and I'd be happy if that came from flotsam and shipwreck BPs. Not so interested in having a month's worth of work on a big build chewed up by lions though. After spending a month building you really want to get back out doing other things, not sitting there repairing everything for the next month or so.

Not true. In the early days, I had animals destroying structures on lawless. They still do it just a bit, although not enough to completely wreck the place. But there would still be no use for most of those BPs. If animals could still destroy your buildings, who would ever build in thatch or wood anyway? Can you imagine running around finding different mats so you could build an improved thatch wall? It would just be silly.