krazmuze

8 hours ago, Percieval said:

What do you mean with slaves then? I thought there were no flags on Pve, so no tax bank. 

Maybe the tax bank would be repurposed for PVE - they said nothing about it?

Our unofficial left it out of our server, it only functions in PVP if the slaves can revolt against their master.  In PVE it is more about people would leave if overtaxed if there was actually somewhere to go.  It is rather unfair the first come first serve gets gold from treasure maps that they do not do - that was a PVP mechanic to create valuable locations to be fought over.

8 hours ago, Abysian said:

Remove claim stealing ? So you can't even take someones base if they're inactive ? 

flag decay solves that problem if someone is inactive then their flag vanishes and their base is now free for all as it decays.   The more flags the faster the flags decay.  There is no need to have a claim stealing feature on PVE.   Just repurpose those claim stealing timers as flag decay timers.

8 hours ago, MeatSammich said:

is it possible to lower the current islands about 3-6 feet deeper in the sea, or raise the sea level the same amount?

There is not a Z coordinate for islands, only sublevels have Z coordinate (things like shipwrecks and docks)

But you are trying to solve a problem that is a feature not a bug.  They put water hazards into the game by design; be they pirates, water spouts or rocks.   The entire point of those features is that you cannot sail AFK, you have to watch where you are going and scout out foreign harbors.  It is also a defense mechanism for base locations that ships unfamiliar with your base might sink or ground themselves due to their poor navigation scouting.

So reading too much into a statement about "general adjustments of other biomes" that really just meant moving some islands around for more copy paste room,  which is what they said on the stream they are planning for the other biomes.  They cannot change any of the island templates waterlines that unofficials use as that would cause a base flood (wipe), which they are on record as saying unofficial would not wipe.

I was talking about PVE, there are no base defenses.    spam is not an issue on PVP.    You cannot wipe people in PVE (assuming there is no new exploit with damned or ship sinking).  All you can do on PVE is watch them grief.   That is why as broken as flags was, their intent was to keep people off your land.

How could the devs possibly think the griefers will not do it because of the decay and repair machine requirements when it is actually easier than it was in ark?  Put a bed next to your tax bank, grab all the mats your island slaves have been harvesting for you, move it to the repair machine.   Teleport to the next island.   Profit in the tears of those grieved.     The repairs do not have to be done manually at each spam, and even if that was the case did not stop it in ark. 

Or maybe the tax bank goes away because no flags on PVE?     Repair mats for foundations on an island are probably less than that needed to repair your base, who do you think will win that repair fight?

3 hours ago, WilliamGrayton said:

Did they also say it was going to be open homeport anywhere to remove the freeport bottleneck for the first few days? or was that going to be a forever homeport on any server? I was sure I read or heard that somewhere

No they said every server will be a home >server< not a home >port<.    It will be exactly like when lawless was turned into home servers at the start to handle the overflow.   You will get dumped in the ocean on top of a pile of bodies eaten by sharks and crocs.  While they could change the island templates to copypaste the same ports used by freeports - that would cause unofficials to have to wipe (else someone gets buried by a port), and they said this is an official network wipe only.

I think this is only a temporary measure to get everyone back in the game, as everyone has been complaining about bed teleports to the front lines.  I doubt they would leave the homeservers up for free death teleports to sloop to any front line anywhere on the map for an entire company without even any bed limits.

Atlas islands are shapes placed on the ocean floor using a map editor.  The biomes are local to the island, which makes it different than Ark which had mixed biomes on the same island.   To theme the biomes over the same set of 40 island shapes, the server loads different rocks, flora and fauna. The map editor just loads these variant islands as library references.  Islands can be added to any grid,  and southern/eastern grids can be added live without wiping.

Eastern tundra is not changing existing island library references as that would force unofficials to wipe - and they specifically said unofficials are not being forced to wipe.   This is how eastern/western tropical was already done by expanding the variant set, they just did not do it for tundra at release.   The only islands that exist in eastern tundra right now are copy pasted western tundra and those would get deleted and replaced with eastern tundra islands so that the biome region lives up to its name at the expense of a tundra wipe.   Island additions do not cause a wipe and they clearly said on the video that the additional islands outside tundra will be more copypaste - there are no other new islands and no map based reason to wipe other servers.

The only reason for an unofficial to wipe tundra servers is if they wanted to mimic official and replace western tundra with eastern tundra - but there is no need for them to do that.  Unofficials can put the eastern tundra in with existing western tundra without wiping - many of them do not have enough servers to have massive biome regions and instead prefer more dense grids and much smaller biome regions.  For unofficial it is purely just a different island template they can add into their existing grids without wiping or they can add southern or eastern grids without wiping.   Same as the trench - find some empty ocean and drop it in the map editor.

I say this as the map  creator for our new 5x8 unofficial, we have no intention of wiping.  We will just add eastern tundra and mix it in with western tundras, or expand to a 5x9 and add it as a row depends how many new islands there are.  Unless our players in eastern tundras plead to have their copypasted western tundras wiped so the carefully balanced map is preserved - no need to wipe.

Even if unofficial used the same 15x15 map, they need not update to the new one, otherwise it would wipe tundra.  But there are very few full size unofficials.

Where in the VOD did they say anything about redoing islands for safer harbours, that seems to be just wishful thinking.

The only thing being wiped on unofficials is the flags and I am not sure they want to add a setting to use the same old buggy flags.   Even though they work on unoffical because they have rules and admins that prevent flag abuse.

48 minutes ago, MeatSammich said:

Plus, if they heard the complaints about the islands, and change up the shorelines a bit, to make them more ship friendly, they'd have to wipe due to structures already in place, plus, the new biomes they talked about.

There is no island redo because then unofficials will also have to wipe which they said was not the case.   They are removing copypaste in eastern tundra and replacing those islands (wiping) with ones that missed release, but everywhere else is just more copy paste (not a wipe) .  So outside of tundra there is no map reason to wipe the other servers.  Listen carefully to what was actually said in the VOD

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One flag per island is designed for PVP conquest, it is not suitable for PVE.    How do you decide who gets to be mayor of the island?   The megacorps (now deconstructed into discord allies) that got there first when the release they patch while you was asleep and then once you could get on you spent hours treading water because they will not add spawn docks when they make every grid spawnable?   Have people forgotten how we got into this mess in the first place?

How do you kick a bad mayor and tear down their flag?   How do you deal with the absent landlord bed spawning to move mats from the tax bank into repair bank, that does not actually live there?  How do you keep people out of your garden?

That is why they did not adopt the one flag per island for PVE - how do you make it work without PVP conquest?

The only way to make flagging work is PVE flagging different from PVP flagging.   There are many good suggestions on how PVE flagging was a good idea with a bad implementation, but that required Jat to start having a discourse on these forums about this or that and pros and cons.

They still need to wipe even if they retract the PVE change to repaired lawless, because of the mess of bugged overlapped and non retroactive claim flags they need to at least wipe the flags.    The real reason for wipe is exploits, and they do not want to have to fix the flag exploits and maintain a PVE flag system that is different than the PVP flag system.

Set flag limits, set bed teleport limits, set flag decay, remove claim stealing and the flags would be a decent system.   

You still need sea claims though because there are too many shallow harbors, but they could also just allow the land claim to be placed where docks can be but that would require more land claims to reach out to deep water.  So just make the existing land claim the size of the sea claim.

You cannot achieve the same thing as a flag with a structure radius.    Many like to have open farms that are marked no build.   Just because someone did not build there does not mean they are not using it.

It is possible for them to not have to wipe because of the map change if all they are doing was adding another island or two to each grid.  But to change tundra they need to change the island template, and they likely did not restrict themselves to cosmetic only changes.   The regional map always has had eastern/central tundra but they just did not have it ready at release so they copy pasted western tundra.   

Even eastern tundra that uses the same outlines requires at least a soft map wipe like ark did at biome changes (risk of losing base in those grids to new rocks).   The real reason for the map wipe is the changes to claiming systems.   But if they are wiping anyways that gives them the freedom to rearrange islands within the grid, rather than just copy paste in a new island.   But that can be a lot of work to redo all the discovery zones and points that got moved, so I doubt they will do that.

Best to look at it as they are finishing the map rather than it being a new map.   Less copy paste in tundra with more copy paste elsewhere.

speed and aggro are really the same thing, if they cannot turn on you or catch up to you - they cannot aggro you.

Lerp is aggro, the smaller it is the further they will aggro.   That is why if not enough people are killing them you want a high number, so at least they will leave players alone unless they are intentionally drawing aggro to fight them.

try something like this in your json (use the map editor if you prefer) as grid properties for the desired servers.

DifficultyMult does the obvious it makes even yellows rare, Num reduces the pack size, while DifficultyLerp higher decreases the aggro.  These particular numbers are half inversed from official powerstone modifications to increased damned.    Reducing Floatsam with less damned is of course optional.

      "ServerCustomDatas1": "NPCShipDifficultyMult,NPCShipDifficultyLerp,NPCShipNumMult,FloatsamQualityMultiplier",
      "ServerCustomDatas2": "0.25,4.0,0.3,0.35",

I have no idea if this will still work with the March update to damned.  But since it is obvious in hindsight that the recent AI behaviors of them spawning in packs was part of that change - this did help.   You still have the problem they will build to the max 40 per grid if nobody is killing them, but I do not know how to change that.

We did this after a redis wipe.....

Yes lets use snap points.  How about snap  just like ship of the damned since that is cannons are used for.  Let me check...oh wait they got cannons on all sides of the top deck just like OP is saying is a dumb idea.  How about we first restrict our AI opponent to broadside gun ports before putting that change on our ships.

just use very high decay?    There maybe a no build setting but it is not something I am aware of so someone else will have to help.

Not sure what you mean 'considered as freeport rather than lawless'.   ishome means you can spawn there like freeport the other two mean no claim flags with 4d decay like lawless.  This is exactly how officials did it when they allowed spawning in lawless to deal with freeport overcrowding.     The name of the server is irrelevant to how it behaves.

ishome flag in the json, it is a checkbox in the grid editor (ctrl-click). 

Token upkeep does not work to eliminate flags, look at wurm online where to have a deed you have to deposit game silver, which is either bought from the cash shop or from player trading.     The first thing they did is allow prepay because of people complaining they did not make it to the flag on time (forgot or traveling or server hopping) and lost the deed.    So what happens then is that just gets used as a place to store you excess coin and you can easily build up to months or years of prepay.    Devs liked that because it encouraged large cash shop purchases, players liked it because they could take game vacations (wait out bugs, play the new hot game, etc.) .  Meanwhile the server is full of pristine deeds that are not decaying even though they are clearly dead.   Got so bad that the only way to solve the problem was opening up new servers, only for that cycle to repeat and people start crying no land need new server.

Getting rid of bed fast travel would solve it because then the population of the megacorp needs dispersed to all their land holdings, the larger they get the harder the logistics become at mustering to fight (PVE fighting over flag does not require combat - it just requires you to be present).   Is the little guy fast traveling to their resource base willing to take that hit for the greater good of the server?

The problem with sea claims only if touching land claims is it is bugged.   

I tried to fine tune my land claim placements after overlapping them with sea claims, only to lose the land flag because it says your land claim is overlapping a sea claim and it would not allow that overlap - even though the sea claim had overlapped the land claim to being with!

There are many places with wide shallows that land claims cannot reach where your shipyard and docks need to go.

Sea flags do not count as land flags even if they cover land, so I get to enjoy max 21d timers as my land flag count is zero.

Change the top10 to be the most gold not the most claims.   This is supposed to be a pirate game.   The one with the most gold wins.     Hoarding gold will not win the game, as just like IRL you spend gold to make gold.

The only place I am aware of that the  same island is repeated within a grid is in freeports - they always have the same island repeated 4x and yes that does make freeport treasure mapping annoying - but you do not have to sail those you can take the free ferry.

So what island was you actually in, as it is likely you just did not notice that it was a unique variant.  I would like to investigate exactly how different they are.

They have to improve client/server performance first, that is the drawback on our unofficial as it is denser than official at fast speeds sublevel popin becomes a problem.  We had to stop flying and get into real boats to test our density was OK.   And of course base loading is even worse so more land means more bases which means more popin.  So there is a limit how much more tightly they can pack the map, I bet they add expansion grids before they retrofit.

The amount of actual cut paste is usually 2x from some north and south replication although tundra is more like 4x (there is no western/eastern/central tundra as region map indicates -  it is all the same)  with freeports being 8x.  Each island shape has biome variations that loads in new sublevels (mountains, rocks, buildings, statues etc) that makes it look entirely different, and often there might be even four variations within the same biome so that even if it is used in same region it looks different.   

There are indeed hundreds of unique islands when you consider sublevel and resource variations.    Equatorial has no mountains and maybe some easter island style statues, east tropical and west tropical have three variants of the same shape with different mountains and rocks and each of those are in turn multiplied for resource variations.   So even though they might all have similar palm trees and ferns named differently, they still feel different.   Likewise Northwest vs.  Northeast Temperate also has a different feel much like on earth temperate rain forests can be very different.

I have flown the entire map and observed the true uniqueness of these isles that share nothing but a footprint, even from the air it is difficult to realize it is the same footprint.  Even that larger island with a very distinctive bay you would be hard pressed to guess  you are on the same shape 

What we did for our unofficial server is push isles together jigsaw style, even for freeports (we did not need 8x copies).   So even though a north south freeport might be true copypaste, it looks very different from the docks because we created a new harbor using another isle.  We actually spent weeks of time air traveling to make sure each grid had a similar theme as there was many islands to chose from.   

Part of the problem is the map - it is only showing the base island shape.  It is not showing the sublevels - like where the freeport dock is.  It is interesting how they reused the sublevels to make things look different - even the same sublevel like that equatorial skull freeport - that same skull gets used elsewhere.

This thread was worth necroing the game got a bad rap for copypaste from those who only compared shapes without visiting them in the game.   I think now that more have the island editor for their own maps using the hundreds of library islands that people know better