Winter Thorne

My tip is to get rid of the skellie p0rn.

What I see is increasingly complicated justifications for having the game developed in a way that each player doesn't get to own their own base. Removal of a motive - the motive for griefing is griefing. Plenty of griefers are not in that very specific example you're using, of a company owning all but one or two claims and wanting the island. To pretend that giving them the whole island solves the problem doesn't address griefing in general, and it's just bribing bad players and hoping they behave themselves. What about the company with enough points to own 3 islands, and they've got 2, and now they want mine? There's lots of them, and only me and maybe a couple of my friends to defend it. And now it's build everywhere and I get to do some useless "treasure hunt" every morning trying to find where they hid all the crap. And that's just one other example of a motive for griefing. What about the guys who just want to be jerks? Your solution to this problem is - give those guys islands and let them build on anyone else's islands they want and maybe they'll stop. My solution to this problem is - The game is run on ()*#ing computers! Computers can do this job quite easily you know. Computers already keep a log about what happened in your company, they surely know what killed a player or what killed a tame, and can be made to know even more about what happened. This kind of thing does not take a CS person a whole day with the proper tools. Takes an hour maybe. If a gaming company gives a rat's ass about customer support they have tools to do these things. You're right, it's better to prevent it in the first place in the game code. This new update does nothing at all to prevent it, and in fact opens even more holes to abuse in the "build everywhere" logic. We both agree that build anywhere is bad. But if they get rid of it, we are right back where we are now, with having to beg permission from some company to get a place to build. The players didn't like that on the last two iterations, but let's just keep trying it until they do. If the choice is between giving more and more to griefers trying to keep them happy enough to not annoy other players (and then just ignoring all the complaints because "the design of the game allows that, so it's not a hack") , or giving everyone a claim that nobody else can build on, and then using a CS tool to investigate someone hacking and doing it anyway, I pick the second option. They've gotten rid of the griefing by designing a solution that encourages griefing so now it's an accepted tactic. It's a question of what is allowed vs, what is not allowed in the game. If you start out by telling griefers they can build anywhere, and they do that, you've fixed the griefing problem by changing the definition so it's no longer griefing. And at the end of the day, you still have players on pve wrecking other players' games in a situation where they can't fight back.

I already know it exists. Not the specific details you gave, but in general, I know that stuff happens. Where we differ is in what to do about it. Your solution looks like putting the fox in charge of the hen house to me. You know this specifically about some of the bigger tribes, yet you want this solution to let them own the most land, be landlords who get to tell people what to do, and make them GMs with a hotline to Grapeshot. I don't see the sense in it.

Not fixed. 1. They haven't broken the land down into small enough chunks for anyone who wants to own land to have it. The larger chunks also make it so the upkeep will be too high for smaller groups and solos to have land. There won't be enough claims for smaller groups and solos anyway. These are things that many players said they wanted. They aren't getting it. So....not fixed. Anyone interested in game design has to drop the "to me" and consider "to everybody". There are a ton of players who didn't consider that a good solution. Someone needs to consider them. You post a lot about what would make you happy, but it would be interesting to see you take a few of these earlier complaint posts and work out what would make them happy. Here's a question for you - What if each island of medium or larger size had to be at least 50% non-company tenants, or you lose the claim? And what if every island had a vote of the tenants each week, where if they were unhappy with the landlord, the landlord had 7 days to pack up and get out? It shifts/equalizes the power dynamic. Wouldn't appease the players who just wanted to own land because they wanted to own land, but might help the ones that just didn't want to be at the mercy of overlords. I'm afraid you're right. They can only make such a major change so many times before it's just too late and ridiculous to change it again. It'll end up being a job of how to mitigate all the problems and complaints that's going to bring. I'm not sure that's possible, or how many players would stick with it through that whole exercise.

Doesn't matter, really. I think the original intent was a global conquest competition. I think the players figured out pretty quickly they didn't like that idea for pve. The intent now has to be just to find something that makes the players happy before they all leave. Back to the drawing board.

I think things have gotten overly complex and out of hand. It might be a good idea to remember what started all this and go back to the beginning. I think it's great to have a place to talk about overall game ideas and feature expansion, but not a great idea to combine that with this first critical issue that needs to be addressed. Players were complaining that they couldn't find a piece of land to claim. They also complained about griefing and pillar/foundation spam. Nearly all of them just wanted a cap on claims to free up enough land for everyone to find a claim. That solution is more efficient for Grapeshot than implementing some complex system of a cap with owners, renters, build-everywhere, discourage lawless. (And then having to deal with the fact that this does not eliminate the complaints about griefing and spam or the complaints about people not being able to own land) That solution is also more fair for everybody than setting up a system with owners/renters and leaving the policing to the players themselves. What could be more fair than letting everyone own a claim? Fun to play? The players complained that they weren't having fun if they couldn't claim land and the spam wasn't fun either. Any solution that doesn't fix those is still not going to be fun for those players. A lot of these future design ideas hang off the claims structure. Doesn't mean it's bad to blue sky some of this stuff, but until the claims structure is really fixed, it's not so productive to plan out the rest. We don't agree on the solution for that yet, so it's hard to participate in a larger design exercise.

I'm too tired to read unsupported wishtheory. And yet I did. I think I'll go around today telling people the moon is made of green cheese. If they don't wanna accept that they shouldn't try to argument against it.

I don't know if they intended it to go that far, but who knows? (Unless you have some information about it that I don't) It's kind of a leap from having a landlord in charge of an island to having mega-landlords policing other companies with a direct line to Grapeshot CS. I mentioned in another post that game companies really need to be careful with even employee GMs, and that volunteer GMs are incredibly tricky to set up right. The possibilities for favoritism and abuse are huge. And, you know, you may be the perfect kind of person for that, but you can't base a game on one guy. All those people need to be vetted and you've got to have strong policies in place for them. The bigger companies are being held up as the current "winners" of the game, and to have them policing the rest of the players ...you can imagine how people will feel about that. That application idea was put up sort of tongue-in-cheek. It IS very close to what's already in place, where players have to go around looking for already claimed spots and checking to see if the flag is set to build or no-build. It just adds a communication element to that. But people aren't happy with that idea in general, so it wasn't meant as a real solution to the claims problem. I still think people just need to be able to have a spot that they own, and they won't be happy until they get one. I keep trying to run my suggestions through a filter of "how would I feel about this as a big company? a small company? a solo? A new player starting on a full server? What would the experience be like?" , etc. I like the idea of apply like you put an app in. I really like that like I could work that into my idea post as a hey this area is an area I want somebody to build on. So that's the view from one of the bigger companies. I think the view is different for some of those other groups.

That's an interesting idea. Not sure I like every detail, but the direction is interesting.

I only want to be a landlord if I don't have to have any tenants. I will make the snakes pay TAX!

4 days is a short time, to me. Yeah, I know. I lived in Lawless a long time too. If Lawless is the place they want the new people to go while they're searching the globe for land(lords), and they make it too hard to keep things up, that won't be good. At some point it could take people weeks to find a decent place if they stick with the game that long. It's going to be a toss up between getting in game, farming mats for your own upkeep and the landlords or getting in game and repairing your stuff. Both chores you need to do before you can do the thing you want to do, but necessary to prevent....well, crap, I forgot what that was supposed to be preventing. But you get the idea.

Always had to do that anyway, because the mobs eat them, the decay was more rapid, and you had a short-day timer for all your stuff to expire. If they jack it up so high it's impossible to live there, then I guess it'll just have to be "revenge of the boat people". Hope you have plenty of space in your harbors. This is what happens when you don't just let everyone have a claim somewhere.

We're all very proud of you, here at The Institution.

Given that the only way on lawless to reserve a spot is to put down structures, pillars, foundations, etc., and that some of these things are trivial to maintain or replace, why do you think lawless areas will be free of structures and pillars? This is the pve version of pvp. Fight your neighbors (or your landlord) for the space you need with pillars. Fight your tenants by destroying their stuff. Fight your lawless neighbors by enclosing their resources in a hut. If I can't get an island in the land rush, I'm thinking of going back to lawless. When I do, the first thing I'll do is mark out the area I want. I've maintained that before and see no reason why I can't do it again. It's pretty arrogant for people with real claims to go around complaining about what's happening in the lawless slums. People live there too, you know. That's someone's base. (Unlike the greedy landowners who want storage and a bed on lawless as well and just go around trashing the place putting down whatever ratty little shacks they want, and then go home to their pretty bases with all the HOA rules) "You all who couldn't find an island, be sure to keep your place pretty so it's nice when we come to take your resources free of tax." Feh.

That's a fine sentiment, but it doesn't work. There's nothing in that design that stops griefing landlords or griefing tenants. There's nothing in it that stops new players falling prey to one bad attempt after another to find some place to build a base, and leaving the game in disgust. Sometimes I think the people who keep saying this have some idea of Candyland in mind, or Mister Roger's Neighborhood. Half the unhappiness and changing design decisions around claims/lawless were ideas to keep people from acting like jerks. This new idea doesn't even pretend to try to do that. The devs are just pinning their hopes on some of the landlords policing the islands enough to make a few small places that are nice. Remembering the old forum arguments - "There's no land" "There is so. You're just lazy and stupid". I can't wait for the new forum arguments - "This claim system sucks. There are pillars and spam everywhere and these guys keep destroying everything I build." "There are no pillars where *I* am, and I can build everything I want, so you're just too lazy to find the perfect spot like I did." Welcome to Lord of the Flies.

I agree, having just gone through a big painting exercise at my base. I like the idea that the paints are more of a penetrating stain than a paint though, and wouldn't want to see a whole bunch of bright candy colored crap, but some of them just don't work at all. You can't paint either stone or wood black...or white. Most of the colors just disappear on stone. I should have taken a screenshot of this, but at my base I set up rows of stone foundations with one stone wall each, and a wooden sign in front of them with the color names on it, and painted each one a different color to see what they'd look like on wood and stone. (Then I put a sign out front saying "Welcome to Sherwin WIlliams") I am trying to achieve something like this: And so far, I've got this: It's not bad, but it's not right. The building in the middle (Atlas Mail Delivery - We're going Postal!)TM is supposed to be a white wood frame buidling. Meh..

1. You can't base game design on the behavior of one player who starts in EA. You just can't. Lotus may treat everyone wonderfully, but that doesn't mean everyone else will, and it doesn't mean Lotus can police the rest of the players to make them behave well. And the day Lotus decides to leave the game, there goes your design. 2. I play on the NA server during off-peak hours. Even at the beginning, I didn't see a lot of people around, and many of the ones I did see weren't English speakers. How the hell is somebody like me supposed to have a personal interview with every landlord who owns a place I want to set up a base? I'm not going to sit around in my boat for days waiting for someone to show up at 6AM EST to talk to me, and I'm not going to go to some great lengths to be able to log in at some time I'm normally sleeping to see if anyone is around to give me permission to build. If this is how you think things should work, it should be supported in the game systems, and you should be putting up proposals for some sort of mandatory communications system to build on someone else's land. They sail up to the lighthouse, select "apply" on the pinwheel, and fill in a form. The landlord has a reply, and if they're allowed to build it highlights an area of the island they can build in. But that wrecks the "anyone can build anywhere" plan, and we're right back to the last claims system with flags settings for permissions to build and nobody liked that.

Tried it. Not impressed.

But with your idea, the bigger tribes just farm immense amounts of mats and claim it all anyway. If you have X claims per person with caps, at some point that bigger tribe will get capped, and not be everywhere taking everything or blocking everything. People in the shadow of a big tribe will move to spots where the other companies are smaller or solo. You adjust the cap level to make that happen. Re. instances - I wouldn't want them too playable. Sailing all over the map without any answers to "Hello" is kind of sad. Might be nice having a place where you can go figure out how something is supposed to work without having to take chances on your "real" boat or base. You could even do things there like temp. respec to try things. But...it's not really anything to do with the claiming system, so for me it goes on a list to look at later. As for a lot of the rest of it, I like the event and invasion ideas, but the reason I'm not jumping into that yet is because I'm looking at this like basic building blocks , and then structures that go on top of those and connect...kind of like legos. I think the basic stuff needs to be done and working...new player experience, starting progression, claims, skill trees, etc. Once you've got that all in and working, you want to add content, community, contention and cooperation and you move on to things like trading systems, events, invasions, bigger organization structures that overlay the simple player-->company one..things like craft guilds, towns, alliances. Each of those needs to have mechanics behind it to make it "playable". Look how the invasion idea can change based on a simple solid base vs. a base plus the addition of towns and traderoutes. Right now, there is no mechanism in the game for 15 small groups who claim an island to work together to repel it. If they are a town, though, they may work together to raise their economy and their town level, allowing them to make town defenses against something like that, install an early warning system, hire NPC guards..all kinds of stuff. So the more of these systems you lock in on top of the basic one, the better the experience is and the more the players work together, But you have to get that first basic things done...bring players in..give them a good start and somewhere to settle and make a base...then all these other things can happen.

Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't everybody think of that? When I remember all the "land is available" "no it's not" wars....

Good point. I think if there's a pve PTR, the timeline is going to be a problem either way. People are concerned that delaying the wipe will drop the numbers more and more, but if the PTR goes live without finding the issues with it, and the players hate it, that could drop the small group of castaways that's left playing too. (Because if that turns out very badly, it probably means another iteration and another wipe.) I think it's better to put up with a drop in numbers of people waiting for the wipe, make sure the next update is really going to make everybody happy, then restart and hope the numbers start coming back up.

And what's the claim mechanic? Limited? No limits? Restrictions? Claim an island, be a landlord? What are you envisioning claims would look like in your design? Because when I read that it seems like you've stuck a private starter island on the front of the game, but it's unclear what you're doing to fix the claim problem. Giving everyone a private starter island won't make them not care about having a claim. The private starter island could actually be a separate design suggestion not related to the claim issue at all.

Re. Forums vs. discord and Twitter - Sometimes people get excited over newer technology to the point where they aren't thinking about how well it suits the purpose. I have to laugh at the evolution of twitter. 140 chars, then 280 chars, and people trying to use that to communicate complicated, nuanced things. So now there's string tweets, where someone will make long multiple 1/6, 2/6, 3/6 tweets that don't read coherently afterward, have a lot of repetition. (Unless you use a special tool to reformat the thing). It's like deciding to build a table using only tweezers. Just the wrong tool for it. Discord for something like this is kind of silly. It's fine for just making sure you have a "presence"...a "hi, how's everybody doing? kind of thing. But transmitting critical information through it is sort of insulting to the players. It's saying I am so much busier and more important than you, that you should just go to this place and wait to see if I show up to tell you anything. And using a time-dependent medium to communicate with people around the world in all timezones? Pffft. Not the right tool. Livestreams and videos - don't get me started. Not just for games, but in general, if there's something I want to know about, and it would take me 5 mins. to just read about it, I really do not want to have to sit through an hour of someone chatting about whatever they think will promote themselves as some sort of personality. Oh sure, it's fine for "color" and promotion, and that sort of thing, but for critical announcements, I'm glad that for Atlas, the devs follow that up with a Captain's Log for those of us not interested in the circus. I tried to do a quick search the other day on a certain painting technique, and all the hits were videos. HI, I'm Susan and this is my cat, Muffins, Say Hi, Muffins! Today we are going to talk about priming wood trim. Oh and here's my friend Julie. Julie is my best friend. She doesn't know how to prime wood trim either. Hi, Julie! FFS, I just want to know what kind of primer you're using! It would take 2 seconds. Show the can. SHOW THE CAN! ~Sound of head hitting desk~ Well, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Sounds like a certified old person, doesn't it? Oh, and.. Get off my lawn!

If the PTR is only meant to find the big technical issues and bugs, one week might do it. If it's meant to show up any social issues with the design, it's not enough time. People will have only just got past the rush and started to settle in. I think the PTR needs to be at least 3 weeks, if not a month. That's how long it took to really see what was happening with claims the first time around.