Winter Thorne

From a PvP perspective, I suppose that's true. From a PvE perspective, it's the devs that keep wiping you out so you have to rebuild. Yes, it's EA. Everybody expects there to be a lot of churn and expects a wipe might happen if there's no way around it. But in previous EAs, betas, alphas, and other unfinished games, it has always seemed to me that a wipe would happen in order to enable some big new thing everyone was looking forward to, or fix some really rotten thing everyone hated. Our first one here was to put in a new claim system nobody wanted, and our second was to fiddle around the edges with reconfiguring some of the islands and adding a few more. Pretty disappointing reasons for wiping everything and everyone out, and the player base has shown their opinion of it by heading for the door. That's from a PvE perspective.

I think you missed one point. Based on this: I'm thinking I understand the complaint better. (Either that or I'm way off base, but it hit a chord) I make these mental lists of the things I want to do in the game. We've been wiped a few times now and each time when I get restart, it seems like an uphill climb to get back to where I was before the wipe so I can continue working on my list. It really feels like you're making no progress at all when you're doing the same thing for the third time just so you can feel like "Ok, NOW I can restart". In that respect, yeah, sailing for mats to rebuild the same ship and buildings you just had wiped out seems like it would deserve a fast-forward button. If that's the case Grapeshot CAN control it, using any of the ways I listed previously in a rant-filled anti-wipe post. As a general game mechanic? No. No way would fast travel with inventories be a good thing for this game. But as a wipe sweetner, a one-time ticket for a boatload of mats post-wipe wouldn't hurt.

The dynamic is different in those games. In Atlas, if you wanted to be the best shipbuilder on the server, you'd have to get lots and lots of different kinds of mats. In most of those other games, having the best of something would involve dungeon crawls or big raids or whatever brings you the chance for mega-loot. So the equivalent would be giving those other gamers a machine that would just dispense mega-loot to them. I guarantee if they put that function into those games, it would stop nearly everyone from playing. What's the point if you can just have everything handed to you?

Yeah, there's definitely some tuning and balancing needed. Some of us have been noticing worse performance since the system updates they did. Those "surprise" renders for whales and sotd are bad. I'm not sure how your playing time changes things. Either there's a time cost to accomplish things in the game or there isn't. If you want to craft a high level BP, part of the effort for doing that is gathering all those mats. If you can just teleport somewhere and back with them, it kind of defeats the purpose. I mean, I understand the feeling...I want to build a barn or a big ship or something and ugh..here we go again..gather woodgatherwoodgatherwood when what you really want to do is build something. But what's the alternative? Press a button and get a ship resource box crammed with everything you need? About the best compromise you can get on it is to set up some remote bases with basic sets of supplies in them and a disposable ship there, fast travel to it , get your stuff and sail back, making the tip 1/2 the time. Sailing for mats is part of playing the game. It may not be a part you like, but it's part of the game. If I didn't like fighting the army of the dead, I might be pestering the devs to just change it so you dig up treasure chests around your base. But if everybody succeeded in getting rid of the bits they didn't like, we'd have no ghost ships or whales, fast travel everywhere with inventory, 600 tames or 0 tames, you know? It just doesn't work.

In the game or on the forums? We've seen a bunch of new faces here and have been seeing some newbie-type questions. In the game, I'm seeing more people in general , more activity and more visitors to my island. It's strange though..people have said that xboxers don't do in-game chat, and they may be right. Although numbers of people in various zones seem to be up a good bit, when you say hello or ask a question in chat, you're not likely to get an answer. We've routinely got 6 or so people in my zone who have not ever spoken once.

Adjust your expectations. You shouldn't be able to sail around the globe in one game session, anyway. If you need to get 8 grids away, then plan some stops along the route. There is always a good reason to stop - discovery points, alternate materials for high end BPs, trading with the locals, finding a level 30 tame. Sail 3 zones, and make a stop for something. Log on the next day and sail a few more zones and do something else. Sailing needs some balance, but it's what the game's about. The trip IS the game.

I thought you might be an imposter, but that response is too reasonable. It must really be you. Welcome back.

Wanted to see if anyone else was seeing this - 3 different grids on NA PVE with new issues today - Very choppy sailing with boats bouncing around above and under the water, laggy sailing speeds. Completed boat in shipyard with no launch option Tames put on follow moving in slow motion. If anyone else is seeing this I'll write it up as a bug, otherwise I'll assume it's me and just log out for a while.

Partially related - I understand that losing and gaining visibility is part of the game, but it seems a little overdone, at least in the cold areas. The fog is constantly rolling in, and as soon as it clears you get a cold snap which also causes reduced visibility for some reason. Why is there a pixelation/blurring effect happening for cold snaps? In reality, the colder the air gets, the clearer it becomes and the farther you can see. Cold air holds less moisture.

It's taking me a long time to get everything set up, but I'm going to put guest docks out in safe spots in my harbor with green buoys and a settlement message directing people there. The number of sand bars , rocks, glacial moraines and whatnot under the water at my island is ridiculous, and if you manage to avoid all those, you're probably in a spot too deep to anchor. It's pretty nuts. Does anyone know if you can anchor a boat in a deep spot if a floor has been built up a little underneath?

Put enough points into piracy to get grappling hooks...much easier to get on a boat with those than the ladders anyway. If you have building skills, build something next to your boat you can use to climb up on it. Re. Army of the Damned - use a tamed bear.

PM me if you're looking for a nice place to set up on NA pve. There's a nice guy there whose company has gone, and I'd be happy to set up a meeting for anyone wanting a decent place to settle.

If I were doing this, I'd make varying sizes of them and include a couple of curves and angles. When a road piece is placed it would choose the highest elevation point in the coverage area, place it there, and fill in to ground level (or below) along the whole piece. I don't know the engine, but it shouldn't be any more difficult for a dev than something like putting a hill or a river into the landscape. Rivers probably do this already, and with animation. But again, I'm just guessing. The benefit of it is that the player doesn't have to try to fit the whole thing together using squares and triangles one at a time, and the game only has to render 10 pieces rather than 200 pieces. It's the same idea behind them making huge wall pieces available. If you're going to build a huge wall anyway, better it be one piece. (Now if they'd only allow us to build smaller walls, smaller gates, etc., that would be good too)

So make a cost to build them. That makes it no different than blocking resource spawn with foundations and ramps. From a building perspective, placing a bazillion foundations is a rotten way to spend a lot of hours, and being separate pieces, it causes a lot of lag. (Not to mention that getting the things to snap into each other and follow the land contours, avoiding resource spawns, makes it nearly impossible at times.)

I can verify it. I gave myself a couple bumps in INT, and just picked up 2 bottles...both higher in ievel than on the ground. So there's either a bug in the bottles or higher int kicks them up a notch.

My claim flag is giving me the standard info - 1 settler, time till next payment, etc. There's enough gold in the flag for a couple weeks. But in the upper right corner of the screen it says - Unclaimed Settlement. Has anyone else seen this?

Well, that's the thing, really. I don't know why so many game dev companies don't understand that pve needs player competition as much as pvp does. It's just a different kind of competition - economic, social, political (if anyone would even try doing political systems)...there's a whole bunch of ways to go about it.

So if we had fantasy type fortune telling that was portrayed in great movies, that would fix it, I guess. I never knew that 50% of the world was completely ok with hacking and killing other people and animals, hanging them with nooses, chopping their heads off with a guillotine, imprisoning them in cages, and seeking out spawns of The Damned, but flipping a card to pretend it's predicting the future??? No way! That's just a step too far. Perhaps the people objecting to that could all go back to playing Grand Theft Auto.

No need to be rip people about something that's just a personal preference, Chuck. Nobody's cry cry crying over anything. But it's like anything else, if it's not the game I want, why would I play it? If I hated fish I wouldn't go to a sushi restaurant. Crying has nothing to do with it. Re. predictable AI - that shouldn't have as much to do with anything as it does anyway, in a sandbox game. Some people's idea of "content" is just different shaped things to hit with a stick. Pretty boring. I'm not here to run around hitting things with sticks.

THAT doesn't sound like THIS So, ok...if this whole thread was meant to be a "Gee, I wish I had more time to play the game", maybe you could file that away as one of those millions of inner thoughts everyone has every day that don't really need to be shared with everyone else. Like when you're brushing your teeth in the morning and thinking about what you might want for lunch today....we don't need see all the inner angst about that decision along with irrational demands and abuse of people who aren't really involved in it. At the very least, learn that rational rants are sometimes entertaining, while incomprehensible ones are not.

I've been around most of the day. Nobody else has shown up to grab them, and not a single bottle floating around. Anyone else seeing that?

You should be able to harvest resources anywhere.

lolololololololololololol

Maybe I'll make a grand voyage over there someday. At some point I'll be needing a giraffe and an ele. There's no way I'll be taming them myself with everything else I've got to do.