Winter Thorne

What makes you think there will even be smaller islands left to take after the first hour or two? At most, if they include lawless there will be around 800 islands. If they don't include lawless it will be around 500 islands. If the player population comes back up to a normal level, less than 10% of the players will get to own land. So the guy who is working and can't log in until 6 hours after the servers open gets nothing. The guy with a slower connection - nothing. The guy in a zone that has a lot of rubberbanding - nothing. The new players who start playing months after launch - nothing. Arguing about taxes is stupid. If you want to stop people being unhappy about taxes, let everybody have their own claim, collect their own taxes...that'll shut down most of the unhappiness with it. People are only unhappy because of this system of haves and have-nots.

First I would make 10,000 islands....

Well, I read your whole story and I liked almost all of your ideas. When I said "original claims", I guess I was talking about the most recent ones, minus the bugs. You set a claim, you get to keep it with a 21 day timer. If you don't show up within 21 days, we assume you are gone and someone else can take your claim. I'd prefer that the claim just disappear after 21 days rather than having to be challenged. I don't like all the upkeep stuff. If you're an active player, you get a claim. You get to keep it as long as you're active. Simple, no huge sets of rules and limits and possible downsides to counteract. It's like Oprah. You get a claim and you get a claim and you get a claim. I enjoyed the COPY PASTA, because I like pasta. Especially pasta alla vongole. Damn, now I really want pasta alla vongole.

You know that's not what I meant. Cap claims in the original version of them, so everyone gets to own land. Use the build radius on important resource nodes, discoveries and spawn points for treasure maps. Problem solved. Everyone gets to own land, nobody get to pillar spam someone else. Everyone is happy. Simple. Instead we get overlords who can tax you, destroy you and deny you entry. You don't mind having one of those. (Because you have your nice big base someplace else)

All they had to do was cap claims. Really. Look at the crazy huge mess of stuff they put in place to do this, and all they had to do was just cap claims. I agree with MeatSammich - it's almost like we're being punked in some sort of wacky experiment for someone's Psych thesis.

I'm not surprised you think it's an improvement. You are assured of having more than one claim to own. I hope you can see how the people with no hope of ever having a claim might be unhappy with it. It's good that you're a benevolent landlord. I imagine there will be some very nice landlords in the game, as well as some complete bastards, and some who are just too busy or lazy to do the job right. For most of the rest of us it's going to be luck of the draw, and some of us are going to get griefed just as hard as we used to back in the days of lawless....only now it'll be approved behavior. I am currently in a very small company, but most of the time I've been solo so far. Doesn't mean I don't play with others or make friends. I've made a number of friends and had some good times already with them. But if none of us manages to snag an island in the big land rush, we'll probably never get to play together again, especially because they've done away with alliances, so we can't even talk cross-server or join each other on ships. That stinks. Let's talk about how this will be if you're not one of the overlords. Days 1 through who knows how many - You sail around looking for some land, and everybody's gonna have their signs up. NO LAND HERE, or Land Available - you must not do this or this or this, and you must join the company or must contribute X in taxes each day, must interview with the owner, must use discord, must speak Mandarin, etc. So you finally find a place you think you can deal with, and they give you a small spot. The next day - you realize all the spots are within 10 tiles of each other to prevent pillar spam, and it looks like a tenement, or they've left more space, and random people come around every day and put storage and beds or pillars and foundations on it (which the owner will get around to removing when he logs on after you've already left for the day, and they get replaced right after that so that you always see them there. Just like the good old days in lawless. You didn't think this would fix that, did you?) After that - you wait X number of hours to be sure the landlord isn't going to wipe your stuff. Then you can finally start to build something. (Unless that thing is a nice seaside village with a restaurant and shops, because you aren't going to get that much room and there's some ugly bigass concrete box right next to it anyway). Who knows what the next day will bring? Maybe the landlord will give you a new neighbor just 10 tiles away. Maybe that new neighbor won't be named Dick McP3n1spants, and it'll be just another day in paradise. I hope you can understand why many of us are not seeing the "improvement" with this.

As I said in another thread, I just don't remember anybody ever living on lawless and saying "If only they would appoint some player with the power to destroy our bases to come in here and tax us and tell us what to do,. That would fix everything!" And that's what we're getting. And you wonder why people are raising their fists? Good grief.

That's a lot of assumptions there. I don't mind assuming numbers and playing with them, but I don't think there's any way the cost will get doubled, because if you did that, the megas would just split up to avoid that. So for every mega with 100 people in it and 100 points to spend, they get maybe 3 or 4 entire zones of islands - each zone would have a couple of 1s, a 5 and a 3 or a 4. But that's assuming points are anything like your example. Who knows what they'll really look like? I think your total number of islands is off a bit. Currently the game has 143 regular claiming zones, and 56 lawless. Each zone has around 3 islands ( so @ 429 regular claim islands right now, and 597 with lawless) and they are adding one to each zone. So if they don't include lawless zones, there will be @572 islands, and with lawless @ 796. But you go on to calculate how many people those islands will hold, which you really can't do (and which misses the point of all the shouting here today with people unhappy that all they'll ever get to be is a tenant) There's no point to any exercise saying how many people an island can hold. It will hold as many as the landlord wants it to hold. You can't do math to find that number. So we still have no idea if there's "enough land" for everybody, but we sure do know that for most people, they won't want that kind of land anyway. They've said so. You also have to take into account that it won't allow any player to be anywhere. Players won't be neatly assigned into islands that suit their size. If the big companies choose to use their points to buy up many more small islands than fewer big islands, then the small companies and solos have no choice at all. They have points that are impossible to spend. And sure, the big unknown is how many players will there be? Will any come back? Hell, if only 1000 people are playing, everyone gets all the land they want. Until they shut the servers down. So..I'm not sure what to think of your calculations. Could it work in a theoretical, math sort of way? I guess so, but people weren't concerned that they'd get one spot somewhere on some grid to build a boat. They wanted to own land, to have control over what happened on that land, and to have a base that belonged to them. To my mind, the numbers don't matter as much as that.

That 's only for pvp. On pve you can't attack buildings. That's why he was saying they were going to make the timer more than 12 hours for pve.

Because there are far more players than islands and big companies or smaller berserkers can claim multiple islands? The numbers are (very roughly) 800 islands if they convert lawless and maybe 500 if they don't. If a server has 5000 active players, less than 10% of players will ever get to own land.

You say that as though people get land. Mostly they don't. All that stuff about points and who gets what applies to such a small percent of the playerbase, I'm not sure why it even gets discussed so much. If they include the former lawless servers in this there will be somewhere around 800 islands that can be claimed, with no limits except company size, so that's somewhat less than 800 players who will get land. If they don't include lawless it'll be somewhat less than 500 players. It'll probably be around 600 or so players with lawless and 300-400 players without it. Everyone seems to be starting with the idea that they will definitely be one of the landowners and then basing feedback on that. When talking about this generally we should be saying, "Here's how claims are going to work. You won't have one. You will have an overlord who can delete your stuff, and you will have to pay him taxes. If you don't like him, there's nothing you can do to him, but you can try moving away to try your luck someplace else." Because for the vast majority of the players, that's how it'll be. (Until the server numbers are down to 500 players each, then everyone gets a claim.)

I was just asking because this has happened a couple times now and it just puzzles me. With the first change they were going to make, there were a few guys all happy about it because they had tried to claim land and couldn't find any and they hated living on lawless. I pointed out that the change made *everyone* live on lawless and they didn't seem to care. They were just happy there was a change. On this second change, you're saying you like it better than lawless. But really, for most of the players it's just lawless with overlords. I guess you could get a decent overlord that made sure there weren't trashy builds, but then again, maybe not. Or maybe you'll get one that doesn't like you and destroys your stuff. I just don't remember anybody ever living on lawless and saying "If only they would appoint some player with the power to destroy our bases to come in here and tax us and tell us what to do,. That would fix everything!" Well, maybe I'm being a pessimist. Maybe your issue with clutter and trash will get fixed. I just know that when I have to spin the big wheel of overlord choices, it's gonna land on one that drinks heavily on the weekends and goes into incoherent rages and wipes out anything painted yellow.....or something like that. Or maybe one that doesn't speak English, who tells me 10 times not to build on the east side of my base, but I do because I can't understand him, and then he wipes all my stuff.

Well, that was the message from the forums. Who knows what they've been saying in discord or in some of those private convos that supposedly some of the more privileged are having?

The weirdest thing about removing alliances is that they are doing it just at the very moment you need it most. Have you found a group of friends who would like to try to stay together when the new servers start up? Can't make an alliance and try to coordinate with them for the land grab. Now you're on a new island with strangers and maybe you're even the claim owner, and you want to do something cool, like work together on ships and organize things around the resources and harbors? No private communications, no sharing ships, no communicating cross-servers. Taking it away is bad, but the timing is really bad on it. It needed to stay and this new claim setup really just begs for an additional layer of permissions that could have been done in the alliance mechanism. Not that this would make the new claim system ok, but if you are going to do those changes, and can imagine how the players might need to interact, why take away the only tool for that?

This is very much just like lawless, only with double upkeep and an overlord. What was it you didn't like about lawless?

In the shorter term, what's the first thing everyone does when they get land? Start building their base. So you let them do that because they are harvesting stuff like mad for it and you're collecting the taxes. As soon as the destruction window is getting close, wipe everybody off the island. Rinse and repeat. Nice fat tax bank and no ongoing responsibility to have to manage players and their squabbles. Sooner or later word would get around about how you behave, so for step 2, you let a couple carefully chosen people stay and then you can claim all the people you're kicking off were trying to grief the others and you're the good guy. As a side benefit his will lead to many un-entertaining forum threads with much "he said-she said" argument on them too.

Not everyone.

You understand that it's still mostly no claims, right? Most players will never get to claim land. There's only going to be @800 or so islands, if you include all of what's currently lawless and they add 1 island to each server. (That's on an avg. of 4 islands per server) And big companies can claim multiple islands easily. What's they've done is put a small number of claim owners in charge of preventing griefing and toxic behavior..if they like you..and if they feel like it. If they don't , they'll just destroy your stuff, but that's not called griefing anymore.

Even though I made suggestions for it, I'd still not want to play on a server like that, I think. One of the big differences between unofficials and officials is that the good unofficials have active moderation to prevent people from annoying everyone around them. You won't get that on the official servers.

I had a feeling they'd just port the pvp changes over to pve. It's an....interesting change. We will be making @ 800 claims available to the first players that can grab them. One of our goals was to help the smaller companies and solos, so if you're a big company, go for multiple claims if you can manage it. You smaller guys could really use something like an alliance to help even the playing field, and we will be working on something to help you with that, targeted for much later after the land rush. For the majority of you who will never get a claim, we've heard your concerns and we know that you disliked the idea of living on lawless because of the quick decay rates and the fact that everyone can build anything anywhere. So we've changed the claim system so that anyone can build anything anywhere and added upkeep for all your structures, and we've given you an Overlord wielding the Mighty Pinwheel of Destruction who can destroy anything you build. Oh, and you have to pay his upkeep too. Just don't call it lawless. It's not lawless. There's an overlord now. All snark aside, my initial take on it is that, faced with a problem of how to implement a "no claims" system and prevent players from acting like asshats, they've just outsourced that job...to the players. If you get a claim, you're supposed to keep anyone from acting like an asshat. Unless you ARE the asshat, in which case, it's a pirate game, you're a pirate! Everyone knows pirates are asshats. Lost along the way seem to be the previous gains we made in convincing anyone that regular normal people do need to be away from the game occasionally for business trips, vacations, surgery, and other inconvenient reasons. We achieved the 21 day timer, but seem to have lost that due to double upkeep and short destruction window restrictions on the Mighty Pinwheel. On the bright side, player shops and secure trading is good.

I'd like to see way more depth in the crafting systems and tie that into some of the other suggestions. Crafting should be more exclusive. If you're a top animal tamer, you shouldn't also be able to be a top shipbuilder. Same for weapons and armor, food, etc. You shouldn't have to be able to make something to use it. (And shipbuilder really needs to be a "thing". You should be able to make them and sell them) There needs to be more levels for each crafting specialty and more difference between them. There ought to be only a handful of people that can make unique top tier customizations to things. If you're going out to capture an NPC town or do a difficult trade run, you can do it much more easily with well-crafted gear, ships, and the right food, and you might being back some rare crafting mats or designs afterward. If we really were to end up in a pvpve world, something like that would help do it right. Otherwise, you've just squashed 2 playstyles together with no reason at all for them to interact, and lots of reasons for them to avoid each other. If pvp relied on skilled craftsmen from the pve side to do their thing, and pve relied on fighters from the pvp side to get them what they needed, that would help. If a settlement had it's own economy that had to be raised through sales from the player shops, and had to use that money to build defenses and wage wars, then everybody has something to do to contribute to that. Groups of players (or factions) ought to be able to change the state of the world. There should be some accomplishment your group could do that would give you a temporary advantage - sail a difficult path to the pirate king and bring him some treasure or something, and you get good weather, 2x gathering, relief from giant snake spawns, treasure bonuses, etc.., until some other group gets there and gains favor. Somebody upthread pointed out the different kinds of timelines in pvp games....pop in for 20 mins and do some 1 on 1 fighting for no reason and get back out, vs. longer timelines of spending days and weeks working up to do something big, using strategy and coordination. This suggestion definitely belongs to the second path.

Well, based on your answer you probably won't understand any of this, but for the edification of others: You're joking, right? I've played pvp games. I've won, I've lost, I've had the snot beat out of me, and I've had fun. It's got nothing to do with that. Let's say it's Friday, and I'm glad it's Friday, and I'm going over to my favorite pub/restaurant for dinner. There's usually a good crowd at the bar and people come in to have a drink and just shoot the breeze there. So I walk in the door and the place is full of 16 year old boys, pointing their fingers at everyone and going "pew pew" yelling racist and homophobic crap, and nasty stuff at any woman who walks by. When they run out of that they tell poop jokes and try to find rhymes for penis . There's no way I'm spending my hard-earned Friday night like that. I turn to go out the door and as I do, some drooling goober points his finger at me and yells, "Pew pew". You think I left because "they are beating me over the head" and "I can't take loss". You think they are "winning so hard" at something. Funny, that's what the drooling goobers think too. I think I just don't like spending my free time with juvenile dimwits. And with this you show that you have no understanding of role play in 2019...at all. What about some guy who just loves the part of the game that has to do with ships and wants to be the best shipbuilder on the server? Except he can't, because in a game about ships and sailing, there's only 3 levels of shipbuilding, almost everyone can do them and everybody gets the same results. Just wanting to be the best shipbuilder on the server is roleplaying. The mechanics aren't there for it. It would be a better game if they were. If you had understood anything I said, you would have challenged me to describe how adding pve mechanics to pvp would make a better game for the pvpers as well. The challenge you issued makes no sense in the context of my comment. No matter what scenario I come up with, I would not be happy running through it in a room full of drooling goobers who are "winning so hard..pew pew". So in the end...nevermind. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

This demonstrates how low a bar we've set for game developers and how little imagination exists in the player base. If the first thing that comes to mind for pve content in a sandbox game is "scripted content" you're already failing. PvP players get game mechanics designed around pvp. They use these mechanics, like warfare and company structures, to "create their own content". PvP players are never really happy with what they get either. They always want more protections or fewer protections or things balanced differently. Things are never balanced either ,so there's a never ending hunger for THOSE changes. Pve players don't even get mechanics. Most games make a pve server the afterthought. They remove the pvp bit and add no mechanics for pve. If pve had the same amount of underlying mechanics as pvp, those players would also "create their own content" especially in a sandbox. If a developer puts as much time and thought into systems for economics, politics, and trade as they do into warfare, alliances, and pvp rewards, they'd find that not only have they given the pve players limitless things to do, but that the pvp players can use those as well, and make their game much more than pew pew. Oh, and the pve players I know are not playing pve because they can't handle loss. In fact, they'd love something to fight for. What they can't handle is the toxic environment of today's pvp games, the demands that some pvp games make that are over and above what working adults can give, the constant arguments between pvpers about who killed who and why and the inevitable d^*k waving that follows. The mind-numbing idiotic lack of reasoning behind the conflict, with nothing more than "I'm a pirate so I kill everybody". Not fun. Not our thing. So if you want to talk about pve players and pve content, a better knowledge of the subject and a hell of a lot more imagination would help.

They have to do a reverse on it, otherwise nothing works. Upkeep doesn't work, and causes more problems than it fixes, so if they don't reverse their decision, they can add upkeep all they want and the game still won't be worth playing.

My solution for upkeep - No upkeep. Put claim flags back in. Limit flags. Problem solved. Repairs for damaged structures..sure. General upkeep? Nope. There's no need for it.