Winter Thorne

Utterly foolproof is a strawman argument. Nobody is asking for that. What's being asked for is a fix for already discovered problems. They have already produced some of those, it would be nice if the new claims system at least acknowledged those problems. If people put up pillars all over your game and you hate it and the players hate it, then you can't possibly design anything that prevents pillars yet because it's still the start and preventing pillars doesn't occur until "development", is that what you're saying? It's almost as if you've discovered a way to avoid learning anything about what's going to happen while arguing with everyone who has taken the time to read about it and given it some thought. In the process, you've managed to disrupt a number of threads where people were coming up with some decent ideas about systems that might actually work. If another such thread starts up, I hope everyone will ignore that and just continue the discussions.

Martyn, it says that right here in the captain's log: There is no manual task for pve. Read the highlighted sentence. The only accomplishment here is that maybe we can finally talk about the new claim system without having to listen to crazy objections from people who can't even bother to read the captain's logs and see what it is.

No. After the 12 hours they can't destroy anything on pve, because that is not how pve works. And actually, before the 12 hours is up, they do have to go to where the thing is and find it, because that's how the pinwheel works. They are talking about extending the 12 hour period on pve because things can't be destroyed after the timer is up. Of course they didn't make this pinwheel destruction specifically to target smaller groups and solo players. They stated that this design was supposed to help those groups. (although many of us don't see how that's possible). It doesn't matter what their intention is. It matters how it can be used. Nobody has said this will happen across the board. We've all met good decent players in the game., What we are saying is that it doesn't take this happening all across the board to ruin the game experience for many people. My spot in lawless had around 8 great people and 3 stinkers in it. Nobody was happy there at all. Doesn't matter if it's only 20% stinkers, because now they can Build Everywhere(tm). Again it's down to individuals and how they can get on with people That sounds like a preemptive strike at anybody who's going to be griefed in this new setup. "Oh, you can't get on with people." It takes two to tango. You can't blame one of the good players for being unhappy if they've got to tango with a stinker to try to have any land. Or if they object to sailing endlessly around the map encountering only full islands and stinkers for their first week in the game.

Good gigglywiggly.

I have no idea why anyone would think this new design is completely unknown and going to be some sort of huge surprise. Here's what we know. Some people will get a claim..now called "settlements". A settlement will be an entire island. Bigger companies will get multiples and small companies and solos will only have enough points for one. If you get a settlement, you are the landlord. As the landlord you get an 12+ hour window to destroy everyone's stuff by using the pinwheel. After the window expires you can't destroy anything. If you are not a landlord, you can try building wherever you want. You can build multiple bases all around the map and take up as much room as you like. If a landlord doesn't delete your stuff within the window, you get to keep it. It will have upkeep and you will pay taxes to the landlord. You can be both a landlord AND go around the map building wherever you want. If the server population returns to full strength, there will probably not be enough land for everyone. There are not "alot of questions as to exactly what a landlord can or cannot do". It's right there in the patch notes. That's what they can do. There aren't many questions about how these things could be exploited, because we can list all the ways they have been exploited so far, and the only question is what new exploits will this add to the list. The people who like to grief and exploit haven't left the game and never will leave the game, so they'll be trying some of these things. There is no rule against it and no code preventing it, so it will happen. You keep saying people are focusing on the negative. I don't think that's true. I think people are focusing on the problems with the earlier claim systems, and focusing on what they want, and comparing that to this new (known) system to see if that fixes it. And it doesn't. So people are pointing out all the ways in which this new system is not giving them what they want. It's puzzling why you keep trying to shut down all discussion on that as if other players are not allowed to bring their concerns up where the devs can see them. If you think this new system is going to be wonderful, why don't you have a look at what the devs said it was really going to be instead of imagining things that aren't there, and then post all the things you like about it? You may give some people some ideas they hadn't had before and change people's minds. Going around just telling everyone their concerns are all in their minds and not useful and that they should just shut up and wait for the wonderfulness is pretty silly. People have a right to give feedback tot he devs. That's what we're here for.

I wasn't talking abut the doom and gloom. I was talking about the people who are saying, "well you don't know what it's going to be yet! It could be permissions or the landlords might have a simple push button to destroy everything at once..or..or.." But we know that's not what's happening because the system is there in the patch notes. We know what it's going to be.

I don't get this idea that "We don't really know what's happening until we try it on the ptr" I mean, I agree that we won't know the results of how the players will use and abuse the system, but we do know what the system is, because it says it right there in the patch notes.

It's a bit early to be pouring that stuff into your coffee innit?

What is it you're saying might be a permission thing? I can't tell what you mean by it.

That's not evidence. I play on pve. I've seen plenty of potential bad landlords there.

I was talking about the fact that the game is being balanced for things like weapon damage, treasure maps, etc. based on the fact that everybody is hunting with tames. "It's no wonder you can't do treasure maps, you don't have a bear!" Complain about shooting a cobra right between the eyes with a carbine and it taking 3 hits to kill it "Why don't you have a bear?" When some new structure takes an insane amount of mats to make, they're assuming you're using tames to do that. When you put a tool like tames in the game, all the balancing is going to assume you're using them. So there's not really a choice of just not taming if you don't like taming. BTW, I still do gather mats by hand. It drives everyone around me crazy, but I do it anyway. Can't do the treasure maps though, and killing the hostile wildlife is a pain. I just wish if they had to put tames in the game they could have done it in a more optional way.

In the first sentence, I think you've misunderstood the comment. The rest is pretty incoherent. Are we at the point now where people are just stringing bunches of random words together for an opportunity to use"whiny babies", "snowflake" or some other pejorative? Probably.

Because they become mandatory. The game gets tuned to the assumption that you're using them to fight and gather mats. If they were an optional thing, I wouldn't mind them at all, except that they keep pushing them towards dino-mode when that looks ridiculous in this game.

People are complaining about a number of things, not just getting kicked off an island. Landlords don't have to sit 24/7. They only have to check in once every X hours. (Used to be 12, now it will be longer). It's easy as hell to get someone off your land if you care enough about it. Pinwheel their stuff, then build enough things there that they can't come back. It's also easy as hell to make a landlord's life a misery by continuing to try to build when they don't' want you there. That's some great game design for passive-aggressive stubborn people, isn't it? Do you have any evidence of that? What does "properly" mean anyway? If I'm a landlord, I don't want ugly box builds and I don't want d00d-type players that can't follow the code of conduct and have creepy character and company names. So I'm kicking those people off my island. From their point of view, they are a player who keeps getting kicked off an island. Neither one of us is very happy about it. If I'm not a landlord and my landlord plays "properly" by not kicking people off the island, I'm stuck living next to d00d-types and ugly boxes and pillar spam. So nobody is complaining about getting kicked off an island, but now it's just like lawless and nobody liked that either. It's just a terrible system where everyone can be equally griefed by whatever bad players wander by or grab up some land.

It's not a matter of what you focus on, it's a matter of good game design and logic. You can't leave the player experience, especially the new player experience, up to the whims of the playerbase. Is there any question that a number of players behave badly? We have history proving that. Spamming, griefing, toxic behavior, passive-aggression, there are lots of examples of that in the few short months the EA has been going on. Even you admit that this goes on. So why put a system in place that that does not take those things into consideration? If your job is to ensure that the game has a large playerbase of people having good game experiences, you HAVE to look at that kind of behavior and design a way to prevent it from making your players unhappy. If there is no design preventing this kind of behavior, and no code of conduct preventing this kind of behavior (with GMs to back that up), why on earth would anyone think they are preventing this kind of behavior when it's already fairly prevalent in the game? It's not good enough to tell those players being griefed, "Well, look over here, THOSE players are not being griefed. Isn't that good enough for you?" If someone took a checkpoint 4 months into this new design and found that only 30% of the players were being griefed, would that make this a good design?

I don't think that's how it works. You can try putting up foundations and pillars, but if it's not your land, the landlord can just destroy them. It's not going to be up to you what your area is, unless you have a landlord who just doesn't care what happens, and then yes, the place will be full of pillar spam. If you have an active landlord, you get what he says you get, you don't get to "claim an area". It's always been like that in general, but I don't think it applies to the new tenant/landlord system. If you're a tenant, you're not in the landlord's company, and once the 12hr/Xhr limit is up, they can't just take your stuff and destroy it. If you are in the landlord's company, they could always do that anyway. That's a bogus argument. For one thing, this is a game. Games have rules designed to make them fun. They don't have to mirror real life. For another thing, they system you're talking about also includes over 5000 years of bloody warfare. That system is in use on the pvp servers, because they can have bloody warfare. On pve, you can't, so it can't be the same system. Pve provides no mechanism for taking someone else's land.

From March 12th - But still, how long do you expect people to sail around trying to find land? Sail for a few hours, drop anchor, leave a note, wait 24 hours..no reply or bad reply, rinse repeat..all just for permission to build on someone else's land and follow their rules, pay them taxes, etc. (.keeping in mind that people joining the game expect to start out, sail off, and find a piece of land they can own and develop they way they like)

Well, we'll see if it works out that way. Maybe it will. Maybe there will be no place else to go when you need to pack up and go. I'm wondering how many "good" spots there will be. Drop all the bad landlords, drop the ones not in your timezone where you can't ever talk to them, or the ones that don't speak the language you do. Drop the ones who have already let people build that you wouldn't want to be anywhere near, and I'm thinking it's not going to be so simple. And the effort involved in figuring all that out at each island you go to is going to be big. Much bigger than just looking for a claim. People get frustrated with it after a while. I don't mind taxes. I mind them less to someone who's area I'm just running through gathering mats than I do to someone who owns an entire island just by virtue of getting there first, but even that I don't mind so much, because they're getting taxed for the place. I really don't see landlords that will be spending all their time making sure everyone is happy instead of doing what they want to do for themselves. Sure, they'll have daily duties - they need to patrol for spam and unwanted newcomers, but that's just protecting their own island. If there are more than 1 or 2 playing island concierge, I'd be surprised.

Taxes are the least of my worries. Some people have said they're looking forward to the changes so they can "have land" or they can build. I'm not sure they understand what that means. In the old system, a claim was a certain size. You're not guaranteed that amount of space now, or any space at all really. Whoever owns the island can give you enough space for a medium shipyard and a hut, or no space at all, or what seems like a good space, but then destroy all your buildings if they don't like them. The owner could let someone build almost right on top of "your space", or all around it. Some people will find decent landlords and get a good space and be pretty much left alone and be happy. Some will not. Because the game isn't giving you a space, some other player is, and you're going to be dependent on other players to behave well. So, what the hell, let's give that a try. Maybe we'll make gaming history.

If the ptr is only up for a week, with smaller maps and limited testers, it's going to be a function test - find the parts of the code that are broken and need fixes. It's not going to shake out many issues with the design changes, if any. The population vs. land mass won't mirror the live servers, and there won't be enough time to see what happens with the new claim system. Are there people complaining they can't find a place to build? Well, that's because the map is small, or that's because a week isn't enough time to find a place. Were the landlords able to keep up with destroying pillars? Great..that worked. (For a week, because they made sure to stay in the game and find them all for 7 days) Is lawless still a mess? Not enough time to tell. It'll be at least 2-3 months before any problems with the new design get big enough to cause a fuss.

You forgot the ants. Not fatal, but so annoying.

Where did the one-click thing come from? Was it in the patch notes or something? I thought they'd have to target the thing they want to destroy and pinwheel it.

Yeah, that's true. But with nothing to do in the game , people tend to hang out here gabbing, so I guess that's gonna happen. This has been one of the best threads though, with everybody being very reasonable, kicking around their ideas, no trolling..etc. I've enjoyed reading it and seeing other people's ideas about some of this stuff. When you look at some of the other threads on the boards right now...cripes..why would someone pick THIS one to come in and complain about the conversation and try to shut it down? It's too bad, really.

I would have liked to start in the tundra! Didn't work out. Maybe next time. That probably wasn't the best photo to show. The boats are wrapped up for the winter, and many of those "village" buildings aren't what I want. Condos in ATLAS? (Shhhh...don't give them any ideas!) This one's closer:

As an older woman, I've been told all my life to "smile". That's not a phrase destined to win friends and influence people. My post is based on not only what you said, but where you said it - in a thread where people are calmly and intelligently discussing issues with the game. You walked into this thread and said there's a lot of entitlement going on explained to all of us that this is a business told us the developers know best and we should accept their decisions (rather than giving rational feedback as is happening in this thread) called people trolls and whiners What did you expect the response to be? I did not "perceive" you to be condescending, it just was. I don't need to reread your post and smile to have a better day. I'm already having a very good day. But I do have a suggestion for you. If you think this thread is full of trolls, whiners, entitled people, and people who don't understand Grapeshot is a business, go have a look at this one, and try telling them the same things you told us -