Lifedragn

Honestly, I've never been able to play an open pvp game on an official server without murderhobos crippling what it could become. There are a sizeable number of roaming reavers that do not seek the challenge and glory of pvp. They seek to hunt the weak and feast upon their tears. There is another group that strategically attacks the weak to keep them weak. Ensuring that they never rise to become a threat or sometimes as leverage to get them to join the larger group like some form of empire. This is more legitimate but still annoying as hell. Losing a ship or a base has a cost, and it does drive an avoidance of fair fights. But some people are just jerks and it's hard to fix that without harming the spirit of the game.

Water height seems odd. Portions of land hidden or revealed that shouldn't be. Waves do not lessen in shallow water. Impossible to anchor ship during storm due to waves. Waves cover freeport cities during storm. Waves ground/wreck ships in shallows during storms.

Went whaling between the 35% redux and the 17.5% fix, and it really wasn't too bad. Still worth doing at that point. As for the health increase, a few points into damage levels on the ship and a better ballista blueprint will make up for it quite a bit.

The 24 hour window is basically you simulating not letting them move in in the first place. If as a landlord, you let someone build it is going to cost you to remove whatever you don't want on land.

Renaming ships is generally considered bad luck. And pirates were no less superstitious than other sailors! That said, we need ballista sized grapple ammo for ship to ship boarding maneuvers.

Yeah, I really would like to see the melee work better.

I tend to agree with this. Tames are rather crazy in this game. Too much of the ARK heritage of them being too effective. Riding a horse, sure. Tamed attack wolves I can see. Bears are a little more iffy. Wooden carts carrying cannons across wild terrain at high speeds is just crazy. Would be snapping axles and breaking wheels all over the place. There's a reason armies used to move so much slower than people could walk. Getting artillery to the front line was a slow and arduous undertaking prior to combustion engines and tracked vehicles.

I think there was a big opportunity missed for adding several of the super-small islands throughout other zones. There are 5 point mini-spaces in the polar zones which would be great for small groups if they were anywhere but polar. I really think the system is better than the old claim flag system, but I still think we're going to see tons of abuse from the the large groups exploiting the meta to hold more than they should.

mid-size company with small PTR presence.Was busy playing and then sleeping, and then working. So from my angle, Silence is a good sign. To be honest, my play times align with our Combat Window as it is, so I cannot say I've seen much difference defensively during my time online. Had a couple unfinished ships taken down at anchor during combat phase window, but that was our fault for leaving them unguarded so everyone could do a treasure map. I will say we were caught off guard by the gold requirements. When they said taxation would gather resources to pay upkeep we thought upkeep would be actual resources gathered from the island like fiber, thatch, wood, metal, etc. But apparently "resources" meant only gold. I do like the full island capture. This is more in line with what I had first envisioned for territory claims when I read about companies claiming islands and setting tax rates on them. Much better than the old circle claims.

Eh, I would not consider this a measure of anyone's skill. Nobody I know is taking the PTR PVP seriously. If you are, then that is an obvious reason you have an edge right now. Most of them are just focused on scouting and learning about what has been changing.

Traditional hostilities with megas that I saw play out happened as such... Small group of players start crap somewhere. Offended group counter-attacks. Small group complains to their Mega allies. Mega declares war on you for daring to attack an ally (that had attacked you first)

The problem was that the game was already bleeding out. Watching the Stream Charts, you could watch Peak Players steadily dropping week over week. If you go look at https://steamcharts.com/app/834910#3m it is hard to even note when the wipe was announced. It is a pretty smooth downward trend line. The actual period it happened in had roughly a 1K week over week user drop before hand and then a sudden 2K week over week user drop and then continued to decline as normal. Is it really a kiss of death if the patient was already terminal? Perhaps activity would have stabilized some. Perhaps they did announce the wipe too early. But emergency surgery was very much needed to save the patient. They did not believe the changes desired would take quite this long to prepare, so there was little they could have done better at the time. Hindsight and all that. Our group is also wondering how many of our comrades will return post-wipe. There was a lot of excitement and affirmations right after the announcement, but it has grown quiet with how long the wait has been.

So much this. A pure pirate MMO where everyone is pirates would be a dud at worst and a PvE game at best. If all anyone did was pillage and plunder, nobody would be generating the sources of pillage and plunder. Granted gold and blueprints of heavily PvE sourced and they do have improvements that could be made, but much of the production in the world is in the hands of players. Pirates don't produce, they take. The grand design is that there are settlements and companies that trade regional resources with other settlements and companies. Pirates attempt to cut in and profit from hijacking trade ships. Companies retaliate by sending out pirate hunters and armed escorts. But everything broke down because nobody wanted to play the Trading game. Partially because the mechanics to properly engage in trade were absent and moreso because the game was approached as a territorial conquest game. Claiming an entire island was supposed to be a large company endeavor. A whole server square a megacompany endeavor. Instead, we had small companies wanting whole islands and mid-size trying to secure whole servers while the megas were aimed at global domination. Nobody wanted to trade. They wanted to claim territory where they could get resources. In fact, the trouble of moving resources delayed the adoption of using blueprints until people realized how much of a difference it would make. Because value was tied to land and not to resources, people focused their PvP efforts on land. Instead of trying to rob trade ships, they offlined ships and bases to weaken holdings and eventually steal the land claims. The game being designed and the game being played were becomming different things. And thus very few were satisfied with the result.

It never really was a pirate game. It was a trade and exploration game left open for piracy as content. Also, all kinds of technology is likely to be recovered through the course of the game as the introductory lore backstory speaks of us all being descendants of those who survived their advanced civilization falling from the sky ages ago and entering an era where technology regressed.

Never bothered with the ARK PvP because I knew I would suck at it and the cost of losing a high level tame was too high. And at the end of the day that is all ARK PvP was. Who had the highest quantity of high level dinosaurs. Because everything from combat to harvesting resources was purely about the tames. There was almost no point in character levels. The only real character skill involved was sniping. My concern with Atlas is in how tame dependent it seems to become the further in you get. Once you have a bear, nobody wants to sickle down fiber. Once you have an elephant, no one wants to harvest wood. The tames are so superior in harvesting for production of ships and structures that not having them is essentially a non-starter. Heck, people won't even treasure hunt without a tame to do all the work of killing enemies for them. It's rather frustrating because I actually enjoy getting folks together and walking out with swords, guns, and bows to take down the damned.

I see you speaking of what large cannons were in the real world, but no discussion on how you would see them balanced to improve the ship combat meta. Large Cannons at present do not have enough negatives to account for their power. Thus the discussion on balancing them. Real world facts do not bring game balance. But they can inspire it. My idea for two crew to operate a large cannon was inspired by your statement that large cannons required multiple operators. Weird swivel discussions aside, we are looking for ways to make Large Cannon vs Ship Cannon a meaningful choice. As it stands, the swivel and gunport of the ship cannon does not measure up to a meaningful choice against the benefit of having both power and range.

If one vs. two people on a heavy cannon makes the difference between ATLAS and Blackwake, then maybe we should. But I suspect there is more to it than that. Please be more constructive when shooting things down so that actual discussion can happen. Do you feel that heavy cannons do not need further balancing? Do you believe that they do but that two crew per heavy cannon is the wrong solution?

Requiring two crew to operate a heavy cannon would go a long way towards balancing them. Especially as the options to increase ship resilience and damage come into play. Having to pump a lot of levels into crew means levels not going into other useful aspects.

I enjoy having bases. I enjoy defending them, when I am able to defend them. We defeated and/or made friends with all of our neighbors until our nearest opposition was CSTG. The problem there was that our time zones didn't match up. They were most active when we were not and vice versa. So a lot of the base defense fell into offline castle defense games where each side set up NPC defenses and hoped they'd weather the night.

Where were you playing at? I know the northeast temperate lawless zones were occupied by megatribes. I had a nice little setup going, a little space to myself. I was forced out by CSTG. Had a little more luck in the desert lawless regions, but Lawless was already at the mercy of megacompanies deciding whether they wanted your space or not. Having upkeep on them makes much more sense to me than the four day timer anyways. Large companies would build massive lawless bases and have a bot set to bed port on rotation to keep things from decaying. Lawless zones already belonged to big groups. They were just nice enough to leave you alone. To be fair though, Lawless was not supposed to be a permanent living area. They were supposed to be intermediate areas and staging grounds. The place where you prepare to settle lands and make claims. Or the place where you regroup when you lose a claim and you need to prepare to find another.

Or at least the ability to apply multiple coats to increase opacity at the cost of more dye. A lot of dyes, such as white and other light colors, are useless on structures.

Hate to burst the "this is going to ruin the game bubble" ya'll got going on in here, but the old pvp rules were alreadying ruining the game for a huge chunk of players. Prior to the wipe announcement, average player connections were down over 50% over the previous thirty days. And they were still bleeding off about 1K a week for peek connections consistently. That is not sustainable. Something had to be done. Did they make the right call? Time will tell. Did they make the right call for you specificall? Probably not. Personally, I am in favor of checking these changes out. What was essentially a free for all was not very fun. Folks from my alliance would go and poke at nearly empty CSTG holdings with little to no fight back because none of them were online. Then they would come and poke at our nearly empty stuff when none of us were online. They had more players to go about replacing ships and restocking resources more quickly, but I would not be surprised if they found being the target of offline raids just as frustrating as we did. Our group had either defeated or befriended anyone nearabouts our size. The rest of the groups were either non-hostile, too far away to worry about, or mega-companies that would be silly to attack when we were already defending against CSTG. For all intents and purposes we were only actively PvPing by placing or assaulting static emplacements. Like some kind of weird turn based castle defense game. It wasn't very fun.

Already insanely easy to assault shoreline bases and defenses. Mortars are the only things that prevent everything within cannon range of the shoreline from being levelled. They already require a player to be manned and are thus not automated defenses. If you want to assault harbors and land holdings, bring a ground crew. Or should we also be asking for power stones and fountains of youth to be things we never leave the ship for either?

1 is not even a company. But humor us on what you consider small/medium/large? 10 people active daily would be small. 10 people total with only 2 or 3 active at a time is tiny. I would say 40 is getting into mid-range but is far from large.

Has anything been said as to the state of war declarations? I was under the assumption that war declaration was intended to impact claim flags, and potentially anchored ships. I'm pretty sure on PvP you are going to be able to kill individual players and participate in navy battles without a war dec.