Winter Thorne

Has anyone ever seen a GM managing a lawless island?

I appreciate all the replies. Did @ 4 of them ...they're really fun! Now if I could just get better at that sextant buff.

ok..thanks guys. I didn't see a way in, but I'll give it another shot.

I hadn't done anything with the procedural shipwrecks yet and thought I'd give them a try today. Are these things bugged or is there just something I'm not doing right? I get down there, and I can see the treasure text, treasure is in the aft hold...but I'm not getting any way to get to it. Can't destroy the ship using the pinwheel or tools, can't access the treasure to do an E on it. Am I missing something?

Actually, it used to be bigger. The protection area was reduced on lawless at one point (too lazy to look it up on the patch notes). Last time I checked it was around 4 tiles. In the beginning I think it was more like 8 or 10.

Why call it anything at all? It's someone else's feedback. It's got nothing to do with you. The guy simply stated he'd reached his wipe limit. Calling people names is what makes a place toxic. Please think about defending calling people names for saying they can't take another wipe.

So many people call any post they don't like "whining". Look, the devs want feedback on the game and on the EA. The other day some guy posted a really angry rant about his boat destructing near an island. Everyone guess he drove it full speed into a rock. Probably that's what happened..maybe it wasn't. Who knows? But it's feedback. The devs may use it or not, they may tuck it away for future reference. If 35 people post angrily that their boat fell apart on a coastline, maybe the devs will decide so many angry players is not a good thing and change something. There's no need to call the guy a whiner and tell him "learn to sail". There's no need to tell him over and over again it was his own fault, because that doesn't even matter. The feeback is - this happened to me in your game and it really pissed me off. Let the devs make of that what they will. Same thing with wipes. Everybody has their wipe limit, and it might help the devs to know what those are. If you're posting on this thread calling people whiners, you just haven't hit your own wipe limit yet. But people have the right to provide this feedback on the game. That goes for nearly any opinion somebody has about the game. It's feedback. It's what players are supposed to be doing, aside from reporting bugs and attempting to have a good time playing the game. If you disagree with their opinion, you could try giving your reasons for it, instead of posing as the carnie who can guess everyone's age and weight.

You forgot to add the whole "entitled millennial" rant with a side of US politics into your response. Please do better next time. Poindexter's theorem - Anyone trying to prove adult gravitas after having made baseless assumptions about another poster's age or other personal attributes gets an automatic fail.

I think I've just seen this issue while I was holding stone walls in my inventory. I died, and came back, and the walls were gone, but I was holding the mats. I'm going to see if I can reproduce this.

The area the pirates sailed was much bigger than you think. They were all over the east coast of NA anyway, with a good number of them in New England and the Canadian maritimes.

Yes, I'm very aware of why it was designed. There are probably 500 posts complaining about the original claim system, then the next one after that, and now this one. Many of them are mine. But that's why it was designed, not how it was designed. It was designed to give landlords control over who built on the island, and indirectly, where they could build and how they could build. The developers seem to think that this answers the problem of people not being able to claim land, and that people will be able to find a landlord that suits their playstyle as well as buildable land that suits them. They never said every landlord would allow every tenant to build anywhere, and it's ridiculous to expect that will happen. That's still why it was designed, and even then you're wrong about that. Nobody ever said any player could build on any island in any biome and that nobody would have to use leftover land nobody wanted. It's a ridiculous notion, but if you want to argue it, put up a dev quote. Why would they put in a system that allows landlords to destroy your builds if that were true? I don't think this even helps solos and small companies, really. There aren't enough 15 pt. islands for them, for one thing. All of what you said here has to do with how you want the design to work, not how they actually designed it to work. Surprisingly, I agree with you,. They should have just kept the claim system and put limits on it, If you take a stroll back through the past 3 months of forum posts you'll see me, as well as a ton of other people arguing that exact thing. In pve, it used to be called griefing if a player destroyed someone's stuff, or a player annoyed another player by spamming pillars at them or building right over the top of them. Now it's no longer griefing, it's a design point, and the devs have added it to the game on purpose. So now we're stuck playing with the design they implemented. You can't go around calling people assholes for playing the game the way the devs designed it to be played. It's more appropriate to call them names for designing such a rotten system, although I wouldn't recommend that. Your beef is with the design, not the players who, like you, are stuck with it.

No, that wasn't the point of this recent change, otherwise they wouldn't have given the landlords the ability to destroy things. The point of the change was to try to make sure people had A place to build...not anywhere and anytime they want. You don't think the person having to come up with gold to pay for the island should get to decide what spot(s) they want to build on? Or who they want building nearby them? You think if they don't let anyone build anything wherever they want, they're an asshole? You think this system was designed to not allow landlords to decide how things work on their island? What a bunch of weird opinions that is. I don't own an island, but I live on a small one. It was days before the island owner could even think about where he wanted to build because as a low level, no skill player, he had to come up with a whole bunch of gold first to claim it and keep it. There are only @ 3 decent building spots on the island. If people had sailed up and started grabbing them, I would have wiped all that out immediately. It's pretty freaking rude. Speaking of rude, if I owned an island, and someone named "Sexy Grandpa" or "P3nius Pirate" (both actual names I've seen in the game) landed there and started building, I'd throw their asses out of there so fast it would make your head spin. That goes double for the company that griefed a bunch of us previously in lawless. I'm not interested in spending my free time with people like that. I don't know how people can read that new design, see where they've given landlords the power to destroy stuff, and then claim the design is so anyone can build whatever they want, wherever they want, any time they want to.

The weather needs some work. For one thing, it changes too fast - hot one minute, freezing the next, sometimes both at once....everybody has to keep an entire wardrobe of clothes around and change more often than a victorian socialite. I don't think the fog's too awful. It adds a little risk when sailing if you're trying to avoid SOTD, and shallow coastlines with rocks, but fog should roll in, it doesn't just appear in a flash out of nowhere. I was hoping the tarot skill line would have weather prediction or even some weather control in it.

Phaaaaarrrrrrp

It would basically work the same way. When you join a company, you lose your personal claims anyway. Even if a company of 10 gets 10 flags (assuming 1 flag per person), that's not YOUR flag anymore, it's the companies. When you join a company, if the company wants the piece of land you currently have, they arrange it to take that flag, and drop another. Either way, you lose your personal flag when you join a company. (And you get it back if you leave the company), so it's not a big change for someone.

Since even a single player is technically a company (or can be), if you just set the limits per company rather than per player it covers singles as well as multiples. If you wanted to do 1 claim per player and 5 claims for a company 5-10 players, then if I'm a company of 1, and I have my claim, and then join with a company of 4, we'd collectively get 5 claims. One of those could be my old one, or not..we'd have to work out which claims we wanted. Edited to add - you'd arrange this...form the company, lose your flags, and reclaim them under the new company name. It's the same way people worked it before when giving a flag to another person.

You have to put a company cap on it, otherwise they'd just just the majority of every island...free travel anywhere on the map, etc. There's nothing wrong with a company cap really. When you're sharing boatyards, storage, taming pens, etc, you don't need that much room, and it would encourage them to group their claims together and build bigger, more planned stuff.

Well, the game mechanics are just bad. But in defense of the landowners (who may or may not be nasty), you said you were going to build a taming pen and tame and then you disappeared. Did you tell them you'd be back in the morning? Maybe the landowner knew he wasn't able to be in the game in enough time to dismantle it if you didn't. Who knows? If I had been the landowner, depending on what you told me, I might have done the same thing.

It's even weirder because the devs have said more than once that it's a play style they support. Just because you're a solo player doesn't mean you don't play in groups. Solo players want the ability to own a piece of land. They want to be able to share resources and crafted items with their friends. They want to be able to communicate with each other so they can group up and do things. The game hasn't made any of those things very easy.

The first notice said a couple weeks. The second said a few weeks.

That's not "what I want to do". That's is how I'm telling you solo players play. We go along doing our thing, and run into people we like, and a group forms and we hang out together in the game. You seem to think people who aren't in companies never group up to do anything, can't do this content or that content. That they play all alone never speaking to anyone. All the solos in the forums keep telling everyone that's not how it works, but nobody listens. It's got nothing to do with hick towns and not getting out enough. Everything to do with game mechanics that don't support groups. There are many problems with trying to do this in the game. Until recently, you couldn't board each other's boats, for example. The alliance system provides you all a way to communicate with each other, but it also needs to allow a much wider range of permissions for anything lockable. How do you all get together to build some big building when only one of you has access to the storage cabinet. (Without having to risk the pin code hackers). Having the alliance chat works again for pve now, but damn, it's a struggle trying to get even the devs to understand how that's used and why it's needed. It just shows that nobody really understands or considers solo or small group play, even when they say they want to.

The funny thing about gold upkeep for claims is that the only reason it's needed is because everyone doesn't get a claim, so it's for balance. You get a claim, he doesn't, you have to do upkeep, he doesn't, etc. If they used a claim system where everybody was expected to be able to have a claim, you wouldn't need upkeep. Everyone just gets one by virtue of paying for the game and playing it. The only real purpose of upkeep and decay in a game like this is to make sure that once people are gone from the game, their stuff gets removed. All that takes is a simple rendering timer like we have now for ships. You don't log in and visit your stuff in X days, it goes away. No need to reinforce that with upkeep and decay, it works all on its own. Yet another reason to go back to claims with limits: Everyone gets to own land No upkeep or decay needed on claims More frequent turnover of land so new people can find a claim easier No trying to balance ways the haves and have-nots can grief each other. He can delete your stuff, but you can spam pillars, etc. (Who the hell invents a system where you have to balance griefing anyway?) People get to concentrate on having adventures rather than fighting passive-aggressive pve battles over land and pillars, and worrying about having their stuff destroyed.

Solo players do play in groups. They just don't join companies. (said for the 50th time) Here's another guy with a private hotline to the devs apparently. (After they said they were making changes to make the game more friendly to solos and small groups) It doesn't make things more true the more you repeat them. Otherwise I'd be rich now.

I think you've mistaken solo players for "players who want to play alone". Most of the solo players will tell you that they enjoy making friends as they go along and working with them to do things in the game. Just because a person doesn't want to join a company doesn't mean they are not playing the game with other players. Half the things solos have complained about with this game have to do with the game mechanics making that very difficult to do.

Yeah, but that's 24 hours for each storage, each piece of each building, etc. People keep talking about it like once they've been on the island for 24 hours, everything's good, but that's not how it works. You could be there a month, go to build a taming pen, and the landlord decides you're taking up too much area, and it's gone. Not might be a big deal to some people, I guess, but it would bug me having to wait out a timer every time I built something new. I like the idea of basing claims partly on activity, but you need to be careful with that other idea. There are really good reasons for running some tenants off the island, and people may get pretty unhappy with a ruler who lets anybody at all set up a base there. Individual claims with limits are just a much better idea. They foster more frequent land turnover for one thing, they remove the threat of what landlords might do, and if they're done right, they prevent people from blocking you in and building too close to you. Just look at all the work-arounds people are trying to come up with to make the island claim thing work, complicating things to the point where it becomes some sort of Rube Goldberg construction, when all anybody wants is just a big enough piece of land to do their stuff, without interference from players who may or may not be jerks.