mndfreeze

Keep grabbing bottles and doing treasure maps and stuff. You can build up gold fairly quickly. Just make sure you get a decent amount of it first so you don't run out miday through a sailing adventure or something. Also the costs CHANGE depending on what they are assigned to do. NPCS sitting on cannons cost more per hour than lazying about the deck. I think sails also have a different cost.

Considering the mechanics aren't even in the game yet so no one has any idea how it will all work past what the devs vaguely stated you probably should wait to get all worked up about it. Breeding was a big thing in ark with the dino's. It will be in this also. Looks like they are going to somehow work the breeding mechanics into players somehow or you use the FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH if you don't want too. Bam, solved your problem.

I'd also be fine with this. Basically I just want a semi-logical mechanic around it with some gameplay stuff on the player side to account for this magical wind. Hopefully this is just a temporary fix with the game being so early in it's EA and they plan on giving it a more perm solution later. Whether its momentum, oars, or buffs and skills it doesn't matter to me as long as it's SOMETHING player involved. That's half of what made tacking good. It's a legit, real world mainstay of sailing, and you had to actively do it as a player. It didn't just happen for you.

YES. I was sad when I was drowning (against my will for once) and a bunch of dolphins swam up and I thought "sweet! just like the ark dolphins maybe they'll try to nudge me to the surface!" NOPE. I died down in davey jones locker.

She plays PvE man. Explosive barrels are useless. haha.

Nope. I've been using pistols pretty much since the moment our company could craft em. I rarely use a blunderbuss or carbine, though they have their uses also. I do also carry a bow though and a sword, sometimes knuckles depending on how I spec'd that level.. (the torpor damge special hit from brass knuckles is pretty lol and OP if you can hit em) I interchange my back slot items fairly often, but I never swap out my pistol.

Darkfall! I played the shit out of that with a fairly large group and it was a lot of fun, especially once you got a big ass base established and stuff. Wish it had gained more popularity. I too like the mechanics of this being a team oriented game. You do actually have to work together and stuff. I have just as much fun running around our brigs repairing and bucketing as I do sailing it and none of the boats our company has are any one persons. They can all be taken by whomever, whenever, to do stuff. Company before individual. I'm getting so tired of hearing all the solo players complain that they picked a game designed for large tribes, politics, raiding, etc that didn't set their expectations of what it really is and will be for them and then asking for changes to be made. Especially so when the mechanics ARE actually in the game for them to do this stuff, like sailing a big ship solo. NPC crew were put in for that specific reason.

I can only assume since I'm at work but it will probably be all claim flags that float on the water with the barrels under em.

Freeports are PvE zones. Lawless was not intended to be nor should it be a PvE zone. That's supposed to be your first outing into PvP. If you want a safe space PvE experience you should play on PvE servers. Decay rates are intended to keep people from living there full time in a PvP game where stealing peoples loot is the norm and part of the goal. I'm 100% against anyone having a safe space to run too after destroying my ship and looting it right across the server border. At least now I can go raid their base or destroy their ship to get my stuff back. I don't think your mortar suggestion will fix anything.

I mostly like the change but wish it was implemented better. 30% is too much for being against the wind. You should be punished for being in that position at least on pvp servers. It is a legit used tactic for naval battles in the current game. 10 ot 15% would have been better, still encourage tacking, and then added buffs via the sextant navigation buff or captaineering skills. I don't want them to "dumb down' the base core mechanics too much unless it's just temporary while they add in more robust features to support it.

I don't feel like I'm playing an ark reskin. I feel like I'm playing a new game with similar mechanics that were improved upon or will be improved upon. I like the survival aspects of the game and am glad they are tougher and have more meaning. In ark they meant absolutely nothing. Once you got even a beginner level handle on the harvesting and some metal tools the game turned into super easy mode and became a 3d pokemon game all about collecting all the dinos. I rarely died to anything PvE in ark, even in the beginning, once I got that first mount, unless I spawned in a very tough area and accidentally fell into a t-rex. The animals in this still need some tuning and the alphas do spawn a bit too much, but I don't think it's nearly as big of a deal as people want to make it out to be. There is a lot of hyperbole on the forums and reddit, with every person struggling a bit acting like the devs designed the game to specifically make their life miserable. Most of the time those people just need to adjust how they play. Until things are balanced out a bit (most likely as we go and as they add in new creatures) it's part of playing EA. I died 6 times to 3 alpha creatures yesterday, but I also leveled twice trying to kill them off and kite them away from our other people. Instead of looking at it in a bad light, I looked at it as fun. I hear you about the toxicity. I dislike it too and ran my own Ark/Conan/D&L servers so I could just relax and game with some friends, but I also missed a lot of the main points of those games with the pvp and the encounters. In this game its designed for that, built for that, not for small tribes or solo players and with that comes risk, work, and toxicity. I think a lot of the issues people are complaining about now will get resolved over time. Dev's can't just magically wave a wand and suddenly the game is balanced, complete and finished. We have 2 years of EA to play the game, find bugs, show where things need improvement and what sucks. That said I don't think its fair to expect to play on an official server of this size and just get to cruise around sailing all day like its sea of thieves. There are people who actually like having to grind to earn things and IMO, big guilds shouldn't get punished because small guilds don't have enough manpower to compete and have to work harder to earn the same things. Things will always be out of balance in this regard and doing something like jacking server rates isn't actually a fix, not that you suggested it but it gets brought up as an example quite often here. The ORP idea doesn't work very well on 24/7 PVP realms because we don't have regional servers, people don't play at the same time and would get locked out of the primary content focus of the game. On top of that you should NEVER have a way for people to raid you, jack your stuff, then run back to some server protected area/mechanic where you have no way to get your stuff back at all. Freeports have enchanced decay so people can't use them as protection spots for ships, which are giant moving storage. Just think back to all the pvp mmo's that have banks. How people would sit in high traffic areas near/outside of places with a bank. Gank people heading to auction houses or popular loot areas then high tail back to the bank to deposit the shit they stole from you. Even if you killed em later you were never going to see your stuff again. I do like the idea of NPC's having more functionality and I imagine they will over time. The crows nest thing makes sense, and while I don't like any sort of 'auto alarm' feature to tell me (or my enemies when I'm attacking them) that their ships are burning, if there was an NPC watchman I'd be ok with it. Then at least I have a target to snipe if I'm attacking, and upkeep if I'm at home asleep. Also, if you build your cove correctly your ships are pretty safe. I see a LOT of people leaving ships just out on an exposed beach with no land protection, no gates or walls, no harbor of any sort. We have a naturall cove that we turned into a harbor with towers, cannons and mortars all around the entrance. No way a ship is getting in there to cannon our stuff unless they manage to kill our npcs, avoid our players and allies, etc.

All game companies reuse assets, code, tools, framework, etc from prior games unless they are starting an entirely new project that is so far distanced from their normal IP's they can't. Fallout 4 uses fallout 3 data. Battlefield does it every iteration. So does call of Duty. A few exceptions to this would be games that have massssive time scales between them. Like the first game came out in 2005 and only now we are seeing the next one. Thats how games evolve and its a terrible way to "judge" a game. If grapeshot/snail/wildcard suddenly decided to do a card game like hearthstone but with ark characters we would see minimal reuse. If they make another 3d game you can be sure they will port over, update and alter existing stuff. The devs also said on day 1 or 2 that they didn't expect the huge number of people to want to play, which is part of why everything was such a shit show on release day. We are probably a lot closer to their expected projections now on player count and therefore adding servers most likely isn't a good business decision and won't happen. As they add features and make the game more stable/less laggy they will probably put out some huge update or DLC to draw in people again and it will grow. Around then we might start seeing an additional world or two get added in, perhaps with different settings like increased rates or limited company sizes. We may not ever see any at all and they may expect the unofficial server community to handle that sort of stuff. I'm fairly certain there is a way to see steam sales, but I dont know how or where to look for it and it might not be available for EA titles.

Weak against players, sure. But I literally just outlined a way that works fine against wolves and shit.

I imagine the harvest/tophat thing was more them trying to make up for the ships of the damned absolutely wrecking so many people lol. Helped everyone have an opportunity to rebuild and get back what they lost. They will probably start doing a increased xp/rates weekend thing at some point, but probably not anytime soon.

Only special events for holidays and stuff that the devs put out. There are abilities and buffs you can get though that do things like increase damage resistance, make navigation better, etc.

Dear god yes please. The map is not that great for finding beds because you can't zoom in far enough and it doesn't always seem to want to respond properly and bring up the bed list regardless of how open those beds are.

Officials were meant for guild gameplay so that was most of your issue. It's hard going, especially for not being there on day 1 release, for anyone solo or in a very small group. AS for your raft issue, that will happen on any server. Park your raft farther away from land so most mobs ignore it. Glad you found your niche though. On ark a few friends and I who played got fed up with officials and I just went and made my own. Have a good 3k hours on it at this point and it was a lot of fun even with all its whack ass bugs. This time around we joined up with a big company that formed out of our previous alliances in Life is Feudal so we have the numbers to establish ourselves. As someone else said though, you CAN make it as solo, you just have to contest someones land and hope they are gone, or entrench yourself into their friendship.

I mostly agree. I'm not a fan of gate spam either but our company uses them because we have to in order to stay competitive. We need better alternatives to wall off areas than the small wall sections besides just massive gates. I wonder if you can sail any ships through the gates and if anyone has tried...

Check the patch notes. Listed in the 'upcoming' is limited companies to 500 people max. Not that it helps the issue much, but its better than 1k companies right?

Don't even need that. They just need to implement that only company members are allowed on a ship at all while in a freeport zone. Consider it the guards preventing unauthorized people from boarding or whatever. Decay however for sure needs to stay the same or even be sped up a little. Freeports should never be a free place for people to hide from pvp with any sort of storage(loot) for any period of time. Ships should definitely still be sinkable with weight in normal pvp zones because it would get abused.

Well, I can say with experience that isn't entirely true. We tamed an elephant and a Rhino yesterday. You do need to setup a decent sized farm but we don't have a ton of animals pooping or anything for the fertilizer. Roughly 20 plots or so. Need to make sure you have your farmer doing the harvesting, not random people who dont have the skill, and you do definitely need to use preserving bags but it's totally doable by a small company. With how taming works it's not always an easy option to just sail somewhere for turnips or wheat. Not sure how many islands you've tried to scout but most are NOT friendly to letting you go onshore and pillage things from their land. Trading is risky at best but can work if you are in alliances. Farming is currently not great, but it's far from useless. When we went hunting turnips for the rhino before we found seeds we sailed for 8 hours hitting island after island and didn't find any. Guildmate who had been looking *all weekend* finally find some on a small island a few servers over. This was after hunting for them across entire server lines. Back to OP's question, you can setup the water storage tanks (not the barrels) that will collect rain water and use irrigation pipes and it will slowly water your plots that are near them. Add more of the water storage containers the more plots you have and even more if it doesn't rain often.

There is a mortar bug right now that allows that to happen. Devs aren't going to restore anything for you or do anything for you. They will just fix the bug, soon hopefully, and that's it. Finding this stuff is the entire point of early access.

Well, it probably is going to be added in so you're most likely gunna have to figure out how to cope with your imaginary kid issues unless you want to roll a new character or find the fountain of youth (will also be added as a way to drop age). I'm guessing with how they did the breeding mechanics in Ark that your kid will be similar in this. Probably will have to "breed", have the kid, then spend some time raising it and stuff or at least keeping it from dying for a little bit of time then when it grows up you can die and switch over to it. If not the fountain of youth will be your other option but you will have to find it and I imagine it won't be easy. We die a lot in my company, most people die just to reset food and water and it seems that part of the death mechanic is not in game yet as we are all about the same age.

So this issue exists in ark as well, only because of the way ark is with just a few servers (one per map) you don't see it the same way. There is a file in your game folder (At work so I can't check for it this moment, but its an INI file) that has your character info on where you were at when you last logged out and such. This file is what tells atlas where to load you when you 'rejoin atlas'. IF it doesn't exist it assumes you have no characters. If you join the same atlas world but instead of rejoin new atlas you pick a server your character isn't actually loaded on it will prompt you to make a new character. In ark if you connected to scorched earth in a cluster, but your character was on the island map, it would also prompt you to make a new character. I think they fixed that eventually but not 100% sure as its been a long time since I played ark. Try finding and copying that file from your ome system into the folder of your laptop. If it does work you will probably have to manually copy it over from whichever system you played on last to the one you are moving to so the game knows where you are at.

Probably a video setting disabling the graphic for people. If you are playing on low or medium settings it could be turning something down required to show it.