Captain Jack Shadow

Get over yourself and use logic. I do not say it is dead. I point out things in the game that need to be fixed, if the game is to flourish. Many others do the same. We may not all agree on what is wrong with the game, but there IS plenty wrong, that needs to be fixed.

I do keep it to the truth. I would like to see this game become a great game, but too many things stand in the way of that. I could create a really long post on that, but let's keep it to the important stuff. Hire somebody who knows how to program good AI. The ARK/Atlas Devs are incredibly good at making good looking environments, and incredibly bad at AI. Thus, we have SotD that look like Evil Corporate Yachts with swivel Cannons, and Merchants with paddle wheels. You and I both know this is because they don't have anyone who can create AI sailing ships. To get around that, they free up the AI from having to actually sail with the wind. Taming mechanics that are absurd, and bear no resemblance to real taming. In fact, they look more like animal abuse. Zero control over the player base. Thus we have people ringing islands with large gates and using pillars to destroy ships that sail into the area...even areas that should be expected to be safe to sail in. Absurd mechanics such as tames counting as crew, and a single crew member more than allowed, and the ship starts sinking. I mean, WTF? No sailing ship in history ever sunk because it had one too many crew. Yes, let's allow people to ring an island with large gates, but then keep a ship from looking like a boat full of refugees by implementing an absurd mechanic like this. And what about when the enemy board your ship? Sorry, but no ship ever sunk from the amount of people that boarded, nor the weight they brought with them. Ships should have weight restrictions, and the heavier, the lower in the water, thus increasing stability, but reducing speed. You overload your ship, I can sail away from you and nothing you can do about it. Yeah I get why they did this...maybe. You don't want a Company to have so many people on board that they can repair so fast you do no damage. But then, that's where weight comes in, and boarding parties. If the ships last long enough, it increases the likelihood of a boarding action. Work on the mechanics to get this going. Not absurd arbitrary mechanics that punish me for bring a parrot on my shoulder. Or make me have to kill an NPC because one of our guys spawned onto the ship. These mechanics need a complete rework, but I won't hold my breath. Wonky animations. Jumping 10 feet in the air as you exit the water, is absurd. Should have been fixed in ARK. I have little faith that it will be fixed here. Building structures that won't snap into place because why? Why is it so bad for a building structure to collide with anything? It's literally the worst building system I have ever seen, making it impossible to build good structures in many areas. Luckily, most unofficial owners set noclip so that these are not an issue. Why is it an issue in the first place? Because people find exploits? Deal with those exploits without making building structures refuse to snap into the terrain because collision. The last picture shows how absurd the system is, when you can't even place a ladder into a hatch it's designed for. Ahhh...but EA...amiright? Lions jumping out of the water, onto my large shipyard. Yeah, the lion's jumping is absurd. I'm going to post a video on Youtube the next time I see a lion run down the hill, jump, and launch itself over my schooner in the bay. It's a bird...it's a plane...no...it's Stupid Kitty! Put a red cape on them. At least the sheer absurd numbers of them were reduced, and Alphas aren't supernatural. 3 bears should handle an Alpha Pig, especially when assisted by a handful of people with guns. No delay timer on decay at Freeports, yet there are things to do there besides just spawn into the game and get your first ship. Merchants, and Treasure, to name a few. So a delay, with equal cooldown timers, makes sense. But we don't have them. And furthermore, you DO want some big ships to be seen there, as it is inspiring to the new players who log in and see a variety of ships at anchor. You just don't want it to be overcrowded, or used as a safe space. Lack of ORP, encouraging PvE action instead of PvP. ARK and ATLAS aren't much in the way of PvP, and most videos prove this, for anyone who hasn't experienced it. Most raids are not by large groups against large groups. They are against empty bases and ships, or lightly defended bases and ships. AI does nothing to stop this because AI is fallible and predictable. Ever watched HOD bypass somebody's defenses in ARK, in less than 15 seconds? We play on a 5x5 unofficial, and had a reset to fix many issues. With a vanilla Brigantine, before the reset, we demolished somebody's entire fleet of schooners, Brigs and Galleons, as well as some AI towers they have created with Cannons, and NPCs. We did this with one Brigantine, and 16 small cannons. 12 on the gun deck, 2 facing forward on the Fo'c'sle, and 2 facing aft on the Quarterdeck. It was an amazing defense they had put in place, but was easy for us to cut through it. Completely wrecked the fleet, and the base. Now we have ORP. It makes sense. PvP should be about PvP, and for that both P's need to be there. A skill tree that makes no sense. Volumes have been written on this. It sucks and drives people from the game when they can't do what they want to do, in the game. ARK did not allow you to do everything, but you had a lot more freedom to alter what you do each day, without a mindwipe.

NO! No...they hide behind the title of EA, which is a bullshit way of getting people to buy an Alpha, when most gamers think of EA as more of a Beta. The fact is, the term EA needs to go away because the whole point of it is to confuse players into thinking they are buying a more finished product than they actually are. We already had Alpha, and Beta, and people know what those mean. The term EA was created to confuse people into buying an Alpha, thinking it was a Beta. And then their soldiers go out and try to make an excuse for every bad decision, with the BS excuse that it is EA. Being EA excuses NOTHING.

People don't whine so much about how hard something is, unless they just feel like the risk vs reward is bad. For instance, when you couldn't even take a tame outside of your base because if an Alpha lion came along, your tames were dead. When 3 bears, and 4 people on foot, with guns, can't handle one Alpha pig before the tames are dead, something was wrong. This was completely out of balance, and would NOT have been changed if people didn't voice their concerns that it was ruining the game. This is the problem with an EA survival game. The Devs start off making everything so damn difficult that at first it is challenging, but then it becomes a monotonous drag that frustrates players. Players want to be challenged, and experience new things in games, but too often, survival games use monotonous repetitive grinding to make up for lack of unique game content. If they can make you spend 2 hours doing chores to get something done in game, you may not realize that all you did was grind, and didn't actually do anything that's fun. Thus, smacking a metal node a whole lot of times, for little amount of materials, which over burden you, so you have to drop some, so you can run all the way back to base, and then have to go back and do it again, and oh, you got killed by that Alpha Wolf, so now you have to go back and get your stuff, which took more time, and so at the end of the day, you didn't actually go on any adventures in your ship...you just spent the day grinding. Fun fun.

This is one thing I respect about CiG, and Star Citizen. They don't try to fool you into the game by calling it EA. They straight up tell you..."THIS IS AN ALPHA, and many things WILL change, and many things are not even in the game yet. Oh, and here's our Development Roadmap. We will release an update every three months, and here, you can see what is scheduled to be in that release, barring any unforeseen problem." https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen

Agreed. How do you know if they are good guys or not? So yeah, when you ask to build, they are good guys, and say sure, thinking they will benefit from the taxes. But then, you have build a big base, and play a lot and so you are getting the majority of the metal, and are taming the best tames in the area. So the people in the other company complain to the leader, and so he fixes the situation by removing your access. Now, your stuff is no longer yours. Now, you have tames, and materials, with no place to put them. You are screwed. Not a smart way to run a game. These Devs seem lazy and seem to think that everything can be handled by the game community. No, it cannot, and never will, in games, because of metagamers, who twist every good intention in the game, to their own benefit, regardless of the damage it does to the community. Thinking that communities can police themselves is like thinking you could get rid of your local police department. How long do you think it will take before the criminals and gangs start making life hell for the common folks that just want to live their life and be left alone?

And yet, Freeports aren't just tutorial areas, not should they be. It is exciting for a first time player, to log into a Freeport, and see all manner of ships there. He will instantly think...yeah, this game was a good purchase. Freeports are also places you do trade, recruit, do some mining and gathering, and also do some treasure hunting. We went after a very high level treasure that was on top of one of the tall rock pillar formations. It was not easy, or quick to get up there. I shouldn't have to do a lot of ship repairs just because we were there for an hour and a half to buy some stuff, gather some stuff, wait for a recruit to show up, and get some treasure. The obvious fix is what I posted above. A delay timer, with an equal cool down timer, to prevent gaming the system.

This! And the obvious answer is to allow you to stay there for a given period of time, with no damage. Maybe 2 or 3 hours, at which point the damage starts kicking in. Add a cool down timer that equals the delay timer. So let's say you are in the Freeport for 2 hours. When you leave, you can't just re-enter with a fresh timer. No, the timer begins to reverse when you leave, so if you were in the Freeport for 2 hours, it takes 2 hours for the timer to totally reset. This prevents gaming the system by having somebody log in every three hours to take the ship out of the area, and then back in. This would not work as he would have to keep the ship out for 3 hours to reset the timer. So this system would work really well, even when there are more than one freeport in a grid. You go in one, do your business, and leave, and while on the way to the next one, your timer refreshes while enroute to the next one. So if you are in a Freeport for 30 minutes, and it takes 20 to get to the next one, your timer is only at 10 minutes when you enter the next one. It would serve the intended purpose, and yet still allow people to move about and use Freeports for what they are intended for.

Don't want people to feed through walls, don't allow animals to glitch through walls. Kind of absurd how in this game, you have to build an extra layer or two around your tame pen because hey, while you can't interact with the tame on the other side of the wall, and predator can damn sure stick it's head through that wall and bite the tame. Seen many people's tames go down this way. I've seen people quit playing the game over it. We had a husband wife team in our Company, and he and the wife were doing their own thing beside one of the lakes. She no longer wanted to play because everything was 3 steps forward, two steps back...and in a really bad way...like tames getting killed through walls. So when she quit, so did he.

Baloney. That's on the Company that sets the flag. If they forgot to set it otherwise, too bad for them. The problem is the ability to tell somebody they CAN build, and then later, deciding to just take everything they own, by changing the claim status. That's absurd. It removes the incentive to build on somebody else's claim. There needs to be rules. You allow somebody to build there, than can build there, period. You benefit due to the taxes. And taxes on tenants should be capped at 10%. Sure, set it to 30% if you want for the transients, but the tenants are there all the time, and always providing to you, so that should have a separate cap...lower cap, as an incentive to build on somebody else's claim. They should also make it such that you can open up some claims for use by a tribe, and you allow them to use that specific claim, or set of claims. This should also make them an automatic Ally. So long as they have structures in your claim, they can't break the Alliance. This prevents the use of this mechanic to build a forward base to attack with. Why is this important? Because this fear is one of the biggest reasons people will not allow somebody to build on their claims in PvP.

Yeah, OK, so let's say you are in a group of 100 people. You are one of the newer recruits. The group decides to build a Galleon. Once done, are you going to get to command it in battle? Not a chance...not in 99% of the large Companies. You would be wasting your points if you put them into Captaining. And part of this is also the nature of the beast. Everybody can't be an Admin. You do have to restrict a lot of people. So for instance, let's say I am trying to build myself a little personal base, or building. I can build...but because I'm not an admin in this scenario, I don't have the ability to demolish. So I have to go find an admin to have him demolish the pieces I need demolished when I decide I want to do something different with the build. And this IS necessary because in a large Org, you can't allow everyone access to everything because of the risk of insiding. And look at how many points it takes to be able to ride a tame. At least in ARK, you could be one of the slaves and still ride a great T-Rex the breeders created for the Tribe. You could cook things for yourself. You could make your own armor, with the blueprints that were found. Etc... This game locks you into small defined roles, and if you think Companies aren't telling people what to spec into..."for the good of the company," and if you don't think the favored few at the top get their choice first, I don't know what to tell you.

This! Yes, the taming system needs to be reworked. Completely. First, it looks more like animal abuse than actual taming. Hey, I know...put romancing in the game to procreate humans, and the male character has to take a club and knock out the female so he can drag her off to a cave...yeah that'll win her heart for sure. Where's the facepalm emoji when you need it? I didn't think taming could get any worse than ARK, but they have proven me wrong. I have not met anyone who LIKES this process, other than that it takes less time than ARK. Not enough to win me over. The process is absurd. It's unpredictable. It's amazingly glitchy. It's completely annoying. Taming needs to be more than some annoying mini game. Build it on the imprinting code for babies in ARK. At irregular intervals, the tame will act either very aggressive, or very docile and affectionate. If it acts aggressive, you crack the whip at it. Use the mini-game for reloading, water, etc.. If it takes more than three tries to hit the sweet spot, you lost some taming effectiveness. You weren't intimidating enough. Once you hit the sweet spot, the tame acts docile, and you can now feed it. Viola...you just imprinted. The higher level the tame, the more times you have to do this. Eventually, the tame wants a hug, or to be petted, and it is now fully imprinted. There's your mini-game, since some think everything has to have a mini-game, and it would feel more immersive, and more enjoyable than what we have now...which is utter garbage for a taming mechanic. There should be more than one method that works for getting the taming process going, but for all of the aggressive tames, it should start with tranq'ing them. Their waking up would start the process. They can give us more sizes of that cage, to cover the different sizes of animals. The largest tames, Giraffes and Elephant cage could have an open top. The animal remains in the cage until fully tamed, and is fed through the cage. Each tier you spec into gives the ability to make the appropriate cage. You should be able to transport tames back to your ship, keeping the tame tranq'd until you have it at your base, where you can now allow it to wake up to start the taming process. Or, you can tame it where it is at. With present taming speeds, maybe no option to take the tame home would be needed. I like the option of transporting a tranq'd animal to the ship where it is kept tranq'd until you get it to your base, where you then cage it and tame it, after it wakes up. Maybe lower level tames you would risk doing in the wild, but since higher levels take more time, you would want to move it to your ship. Wouldn't be anymore more ridiculous than an elephant on a sloop. This could actually open up trading of animals. You capture it, but don't tame it so that somebody else can tame it, and imprint it. But then, there would need to be some imprinting boost for taming the creature...just not as high as babies get. Maybe half.

Oh, you mean I am living in fantasyland because I think Devs should police their own game? Sorry, been there. I have played games where small dev groups did in fact, police their MMOs. WWIIOL, for instance, where in game, you could literally type .report into chat, and get moderator action to deal with somebody cheating, being racist, abusive, etc... Never had to wait long for a response, and action taken, if appropriate, such as the rare times I witnessed a speed hacker. Person was banned before I could even post screenshots on our Squad forums. But you see, that takes Devs who are invested in the success of their game. WWIIOL is not going on 18 years old, and is still going. And it's not the only game I saw policed well by the devs. Star Citizen is also what can be considered an early access game, and there are over 40,000 Squads in that game already. And the Devs police it quite well, given those numbers. I captured video of a guy shooting me in the spawn area where he should not be able to shoot me. He was banned shortly after I sent them that video.

Because the Devs don't know how to make a game that is not directed at Megas. They assume the Mega will have their people work in shifts to raise a baby...for many many hours. They have no concept, it seems, that this is a game...not a job. For the life of me, I have no idea whey anyone plays official. Get to an unofficial, where this buffoonery doesn't have to happen.

Sounds like they need to make some code for this. Something that makes it so this only lasts for a set period of time. People should not be able to hold you hostage for an indefinite period of time.

Why would you do or say racist things? I mean seriously...how old are you? Do you realize how easy it is to take a screenshot if somebody says something racist, or abusive in chat? Any moron can do it. Or maybe you were doing it in local voice? I can turn on Shadowplay in a split second and record the audio and video very easily, and have it uploaded to YouTube in a private video to share with the devs, and not take long to do that. Why not just play the game? Why do people feel the need to be fucktards in game, to vent their real life frustrations? Sane people go to games to get away from that garbage. I hope you learn from this. There are consequences for being an A-hole. Try not to be one in the future.

Meaning?

Permanent, I would think. You might have to look at some unofficial servers. Unless the ban extends to those also.

Might just want to create a new character.

Add this to the list of not so well thought out mechanics.

OK, that's funny.

keep doing that to kill yourself, right?

Incorrect. The proper process would be to allow the community to help with the policing. You screenshot the offensive post, and send it in. Or at a minimum, give an accurate description of the ship, company, etc... The Devs can then look into it. And, to make this easier for the DEVs, they make a very crystal clear TOS covering this, stating that it is up to you to when in doubt, do not upload it. They make it clear that offenses will be dealt with severely and swiftly...deleting offending ships, and even deleting offending companies if it happens again. I have learned that people rise to the bar that is set for them. People do these things because they are allowed to get away with them. We had a griefer join our Company, and name our ship something very offensive. He was immediately kicked from the company, and I notified the devs, here and even talked to one in game. The person's name was known, and nothing was done. They didn't even change the name of our ship for us. We had to sail with it for 3 days until the SotD zerg happened and destroyed the ship. Competent Devs would have banned that person from the game, and changed the name of our ship ASAP. It was that offensive. But they didn't. Couldn't be bothered it would seem. Good games get wrecked by people when Devs think it isn't worth their time to police the community they have created.

If they have enough people, that's a mistake, IMHO. Sure, if you are a small company, you might need to use NPCs to make up for your lack of numbers, but large tribes should be using as many real players on cannons as they can. There are many benefits to doing so. The offline stuff could be addressed, but the devs are too inept to do so, it would seem. These are the Devs that made AI ships with no sails because programming AI ships that know how to sail, is too hard for them. Unlike so many other games I have played where you can enter and exit the water, they have a ridiculous transition from water to land. They have an absurd taming mechanic. People are ringing islands with large gates. People are using pillars to sink ships. People are using broken game mechanics to sink ships in PvE. A monkey/parrot/rabbit/bear/elephant/wolf/etc., counts as crew. If you spawn onto a friend's ship, who has a full crew, you have to kill one of the NPCs or the ship will sink. Horrible building mechanics, not fixed after years of ARK experience (Building structures that can't collide with the terrain). #JustTheTipOfTheIceberg The game is full of absurd mechanics. When it isn't the Devs, it's the community that is trying to wreck the game.

That's an issue for the Devs to solve, that should have nothing to do with this. The Devs of this game seem to be very lazy about dealing with such issues.