Winter Thorne

First, it's not "released". As we get reminded constantly, it's EA. Second, I'm not buying this argument. Like many many others, I didn't get any advantage. My first 3 days were spent relogging and crashing, and being griefed. By the time I finally got underway, virtually every single piece of land in the game was claimed because claims were free and unlimited. The next 2 months were spent being griefed on lawless, making a few friends, and watching them all quit the game. Finally when things had just started to settle down, GS decided to wipe the servers and leave my server down for over a week so they could placate the pvp crowd with multiple flavors of pvp. You want to talk about smelly feet? That's smelly feet. That's a far worse scenario than xbox players would face on release on combined servers, given the current player numbers and the way the player base has settled down, the patches put in to prevent sinking ships with weight, etc. There is land to claim, there are plenty of resources, and at least on pve, there are plenty of people inclined to be helpful to newcomers. As a player who has stuck with the EA while the rest have quit in droves, it would be ridiculous for GS to say to players like me....sorry, but the xbox people want a clean server to start on, and all your stuff is in their way, so we're just going to remove it all and make it nice and clean for them. It's bullshit. And not to sound like a broken record, but so many of the design decisions on this game have been made with the premise that everyone playing the game will start on day 1, that some of these systems need a real shakeout with a view to how games really work. Everyone doesn't start on day 1. You need sales on day 100 and day 200 and 365 to keep a game going. For example, how is the island claiming system going to work for a group of 5 friends starting on day 200 when you've let big companies claim all the small islands? Will there be enough churn in the player base for incoming players to carve out a spot? This is not something you want to find out after the game has been out a year, and you've put out a great new feature, done a steam sale, and get an influx of 5000 new players. I can't believe anyone even tried to argue that wiping the servers for this would be a "given", and that so many other people just followed right along with that like it was totally reasonable and expected.

feh. They have just been throwing giant sales on steam. All those players have to come into an established world. If the game succeeds, then every single player joining after the first rush will have to come into an established world. If that's the reason it's bogus.

So let's say it's my birthday and I decide to throw a big cocktail party for it, and some idiot brings his 20 year old son and his friend who spend the entire thing drowning out the music yelling obscenities, chugging expensive booze and throwing up all over my house. When I say I'm not happy about that, you say: "Wow that...is very entitled of you. You should just drink alone" Listen, I have no objection if you'd like to argue the fact that pve and pvp are NOT 2 different games, that the players don't want different things or that it's completely fair to tell pve players just to suck it up and put up with the abuse or turn off their sound, their general chat, and never travel to other zones. You want to debate a point I made that's fine with me. I even change my mind sometimes if someone's argument is good enough. But don't bother coming back with nothing and just flinging personal insults like a monkey throwing poop at the zoo. Cause that means you got nothing, and it makes you look like you're in way over your head. Personal insults are the last refuge of people too ignorant to actually respond to someone's points.

I don't know anything at all about Xbox versions of things. I know quite a bit about IT. What, exactly about crossplay necessitates a wipe?

Why don't you just ask them for the ability to export your player back and forth between pvp and pve then? The servers are already set up. Export is already in the game for single player. These other two quotes really make my point. The "old lady" also doesn't want to listen to a lot of teenagers threatening to <insert obscene vulgar action here> each other and yelling about who was griefing who and blah blah blah. It's why you don't commonly see mature grownups hanging out with random large groups of kids on their days off. (And vice versa) Why push two very different groups like that together and force the one to have to deal with the other? Because that's what happens...as Pegleg says...in this situation, the grownups have to shut down another part of the game. You don't like the other group's behavior? Don't go to these zones, don't participate in general chat. The pvp group gets to do whatever it wants, and the other group just has to put up with it. I guarantee you that if the game started making rules the other way around and restricting the pvp group, they wouldn't be happy with that. The two groups are very different. The pv and pve games are actually quite different. Shoving them together serves no real purpose. If all you want is the ability to travel back and forth between pvp and pve zones, ask for an export and save everybody else a lot of grief.

Unless you want to do the powerstones, or collect high level tames or masses of mats, which are all in pvp . Aside from that, if you're PvE, all you have to do is play the game on half the map or less and it's all good, unless the pvp guys claim up all the pve land and wage their smacktalk keyboard warfare all over your general chat. So let me get this straight..on a merged server, the pvp players get the whole map, get to play the type of game they like, get pve safe zones for when they want to play pve style or collect mats, breed tames, etc without interference, pve players to gank whenever one of them is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time...sounds perfect. What do pve players get? They've lost at least half the map, they get shoved into the toxic environment they don't like, they lose access to the best mats, tames, & quest zones in the game. Sure, they get to make boats for the pvp players. (Something you seem excited about) What else? Tell them what they've won, Johnny!

That doesn't prove anything. Many PvE players dislike the PvP environment as a whole. It can be pretty toxic. On a private server you have the option of GMing your environment to keep griefing, exploiting and toxic environments in check. The only real successful mix of pvp and pve keeps them entirely separate, where PvE people dont' get stuck having to rely on PvP aspects of the game to progress, and they don't have to put up with the bad behavior and chat. If you keep the two entirely separate, then you might as well just put them on different servers. There's no benefit to combining them, especially if it means the server pop. goes up enough to make land scarce again. Most of the suggested designs give the PvE players the short end of the stick when that happens - a claim anywhere design, where PvP essentially gets both areas and PvE only gets one of them, etc.

I would be. First someone has the brilliant idea that any ship that hasn't been anchored/unanchored in X days belongs to a defunct player. Nobody abused them of that notion. Next they implement auto destruct on those ships with no notice in game or decay timer or indication at all. Then they fail to get onto their official website and say, "Look folks, at the moment if you haven't anchored/unanchored in X days, your ship is gone." Then everybody just gets to figure that out for themselves losing mythic builds and things they've spent a ton of time on. And you know what? At this point I'm still not sure what the exact parameters for having a ship disappear are. People say it's anchor/unanchor every 3 weeks. Maybe they're right. Somebody says some dev said something somewhere. Maybe they're right. Who knows? Everybody is just posting their reports and people are making guesses at it. How long does it take to put out some sort of official statement on it? Two minutes. My expectation (even in EA) is that if you do something like that without even bothering to communicate it is that one CS person starts taking these reports, looking it up on the logs, and replacing the ship, or at least the components for it. You put up an official notice. One week later you can consider yourselves off the hook.

I think they went way overboard because of all the spam complaints and in the end couldn't see the forest for the trees. At least they walked back the landlord wipe. Seriously, all that's needed is to set a good goal for what you want to achieve and then code to that. 1. You want to remove junk from players who are no longer playing the game. 2. You also want to remove junk put there purposely to annoy other players. 3. You want to protect legitimate stuff belonging to players who currently play the game, especially on land that they own. The first and last one are easy. The middle one is a bit tougher, but so far it looks like all the rules and timers are being set according to that middle goal, which makes no sense. How much time can a player stay away and still be considered playing the game? Let's say two weeks. Buildings, tames, ships anchored ..anything at all that you own...if it's on a claim owned by your company stays there until your claim expires. Claims expire 2 weeks after the flag runs out of money. This handles #3. If a player does not render their possessions in 2 weeks, everything they own that is not on land claimed by their company decays and/or becomes claimable. This keep people from having beds and taming pens they've used once and never again from persisting in the world. It also gets rid of junk from players who have quit. This handles #1 The middle one is difficult because the answers change based on whether the servers are full or lightly loaded and whether everyone has a reasonable chance to claim land. But you can't rewrite the rules for all the regular ownership and abandonment issues in #1 and #3 just to solve this, which is what it seems like they're doing. Why should some active player who has claimed land and built on it have to run around the claim jumping on and off boats and tames, making guesses about unspecified actions at some unspecified intervals just so their stuff doesn't disappear?

I can't answer the last question, but regarding the build, it's built like Fort Knox. Multiple layers of stone foundation, etc. (Having started out on a desert island infested with cobras, I guess that's become a habit now) Even so, I saw the top 1/3 of a cow rising out of the floor in there the other day. It looked more like it had spawned there than warped in through the walls and floor. It's not surprising. I've stepped onto rocky areas and sunk in up to my waist not too long ago, and have been stuck inside pigs and bears too, so there's definitely something off with collision detection.

I believe in general he's talking about the kinds of thing people build to fight aoD, not structures in general. For example, you enter a clearing in the woods and there are stairs to nowhere with a platform on top of it...it's likely built for Aod, but the AOD are actually spawning away from it where the structure is now useless, so that's not a static spawn spot. Same with ramps up mountains. You know it was built for an aod spawn, but when you get there it's on the next peak over instead, or halfway down on a ledge. I've seen this on our island too. The spawns can happen in a pretty large radius, and he's right saying that on a small island, if you take all that area into account, there can be nowhere left to build. We've had people spawn aod inside our barn before, so I'm not putting too much faith into the enclosed vs not enclosed ideas.

That's not necessarily true. A coder can also fix a bug in the code. People who work on art/graphics or other aspects of design can't fix bugs, sure. But if you coded a bug in, you can fix it.

I don't mind wood having a weathered appearance. In fact, that's much better than everything looking all new and shiny and plastic-y. But the problem is the colors don't show up. Of all the different colors you can use, maybe 3 or 4 of them even give a little bit of a tint to it, and those are the brightest most garish ones. Sky blue and white don't do anything at all. On stone walls it's a little bit better but not much. The wood walls themselves look like adobe or stucco anyway. It's impossible to get the effect of a wood sided painted house. ) Or even a wood building for that matter) The interesting thing is that if you paint a wood roof, the colors show much better on the underside than they do on the top. That's a good thing, because for some weird reason the undersides are all sort of blue to begin with.

There's a lot that needs to be done to the building system to make it decent. Smaller pieces, more angles, better textures. The scale of some of the building pieces is so oversized it's hard to build anything that looks like it would fit into a normal "pirate-y" landscape. Everything's dino-sized. Paint doesn't work well on most of the building pieces and everywhere you go, it's a sea of brown and gray. That's especially bad in the tropics where you'd expect to see some caribbean tropical colors..

This is something that every game has to plan for - the number of players vs. the resources (both real and virtual) of the server. More population DOES justify it! It justifies a lot of things. In any game you need enough game resources to satisfy all your players. In this game, one of those resources is land. You can't just keep adding players without having any land for them. But you don't do it on "expectation" of players, you plan for it ahead of time and then execute it when the players are actually showing up and they're starting to run out of resources. There are a number of different ways they could expand if they needed to, and each one has drawbacks. IMO wrecking the server performance or having a full wipe are both way more harsh than adding to the sides of the grid and causing someone to have to sail one extra zone to wrap the globe.

I'm not sure how you could have both systems in place at the same time. If people are claiming islands, then how is someone supposed to do a flag claim? "Build anywhere" is just a bad mechanic. It's too griefer prone. If you have a working claims system you don't need it. As far as I know, this is something that isn't even worked out yet for the current claim mechanic. It should be though, assuming players come back. If there's a calculation that runs every month or every 2 months that checks the company size against the claim size, it could reduce or expand the claim size for each company and make that the current allowed size. If the players know that's coming on the 1st of every month they get 48 hours or so to replant their flags, they can adjust accordingly. If you're a smart company leader, you make sure all your important stuff is in a central location, and if you have to reduce, you preserve that. It's nothing close to a wipe. Not even close to the raze feature they were going to roll out. You have control over your company, you can see what's happening with the size, you can control how your base is built, etc.

There's no reason to do all that and no reason to offer rewards to big companies which will be seen, somewhat rightly as another slap to small companies. The game design is supposed to encourage the types of behavior you want and discourage other types of behavior. For most of the things the game wants to discourage, the new twists are fairly straighforward - rules to not allow overloading boats, proposed rules to allow landowners to raze an island, etc. There's no reason to make this more complicated than it has to be, with encouragements and enticements that won't be universally followed. They didn't want single players to claim large islands, so they limited their island points to prevent them doing that. If you don't want large companies having small islands, then don't allow large companies to claim small islands. No need to get so coy and fancy with dangling shiny objects at them.

Assuming the game is that populated, they would have to add islands or a new server. It's not a bad problem to have. What's the alternative, also assuming the game is that populated? Using your original example, not everyone gets to own land, people build wherever they can, and landowners complain to GMs that people are spamming their island, and people complain they have nowhere to build. There is no scenario under which land, a finite resource, doesn't run out on a heavily populated server and produce a result of people having nowhere to build. Meatsammich did some math back in the early days of claim discussions and found that really decent sized claims, limited by person and company would produce enough land for everyone 4 or 5 times over, back when the servers had a good number of regular players on them.

Not sure what you mean by that. If a player goes his claim decays in @ 20 days or so along with what's on it.

Here we are tying ourselves in knots again because of a claim system that is overly complicated and open to abuse both by the landowners and the tenants. What about a system that says all players get a chunk of land and they can build whatever they want on it? They can allow others to build there if they want. They can wipe out anything they want on their own land at any time. Seems simple enough. No rules, no spam, no GMs needed.

GMs have to be given rules. There's nothing worse than hiring a bunch of people to be GMs and then letting them make it up as they go along. The problem isn't simply pillars, or single foundations. What if I place a taming pen somewhere that I intend to use occasionally? To me that's a useful thing, and I use it. To an island owner, it's spam, especially if there are too many of them. Same with DP beds. Same with a storage box and smithy. Given that GS just recently wanted new island owners to be able to raze entire bases belonging to other active players, the answers lie somewhere between "a pillar" and "someone's base with workstations, tame barn, and shipyards". But nobody has said where that line gets drawn. GMs are people who play games like us, and they have just as many opinions about this stuff as we do. Someone has to tell them the "official opinion". Once you have an official opinion, it's a given that at least part of that can be automated. At the moment there isn't really any GM presence. There's a couple and they will only handle very specific things. I'm not sure how many GMs the game intends to staff, but even assuming that they have full in-game GM support, the idea that some actual person will come and look at a taming pen somewhere, decide it's questionable and do some sort of investigation (what is there to investigate about that, really?) and then take some action.....well that's old school MMORPG CS. I'd be very surprised if they did that.

What about the things that aren't no brainers? It seems like before that could be implemented you need some sort of general rule or principle about what builds should get to stay (assuming they're bing used) and what builds a landowner should be able to get rid of. But then if you've made that rule well enough, isn't it something that could be coded and avoid GM intervention?

You don't understand the problem. It's dp beds and beds left there for other reasons as well, and taming pens and 2 foundations with a smithy and storage box on it, and..and..and... The problem is not simply dp beds, and just nerfing dp (a system that's already getting a lot of complaints) doesn't do anything for the rest of it. There needs to be some way of determining what's a meaningful settlement from what's just someone's convenient junk.

No, that doesn't fix it. The DP bed was just an example of the kinds of things people leave on an island that are not a "base". Trying to anticipate each thing that might be left and coming up with a separate rule for each one isn't a good way to go about this. As for answers or suggestions, those are best left to the people that understand the game and understand the problems.

Because there are other people playing the game who need to claim islands too. Some of them are groups of friends who would like to play the game together. Some of us find it more fun to play with 5 or 15 or 20 people that are friends than 200 people that are strangers calling themselves a company. Island claim system= system devised to make sure that everyone had a chance to claim land, especially designed to help smaller groups according to the devs.