Ban Tier

Well I totally agree with the OP. We have had some really "bad" design decisions lately. Unless Grapeshot really wants to cater offline griefing and mega-companies. The only problem I see with catering these two groups, how do the devs think, their future business modell will be ? Do they really think, a big cluster full of mega-companies and offline raiders will motivate ppl to buy the game or a future DLC ? Do they really hope, that ppl will setup private serverclusters large enough to attract a lot of new costumers ?

I would agree to the OP if there would be any sort of offline raid protection. It is really not funny to log back into the game after a full workday just to see all your stuff was destroyed by offline raiders. Until Grapeshot offers a suitable offline protection, we need to make it extremly difficult for offline-raider to destroy all property of a company. If they do not care here, the game will become a haven for griefers and all player, who are interested in some sort of "friendly" player interaction (trade or FAIR battles) will move on.

As said before, dumbest game mechanics if have seen in an MMO. Grapeshot should maybe rethinkt the position of the Lead-Game-Designer ... currently we have one shitstorm following the other ...

Well the Devs simply have no clue, what they are doing. There is no Offline-Protection in the game. As a result, you need to build layers of walls and doors to have a slight chance to keep your stuff unless you are in a Mega-Company with players from three timezones. Now they nerv stone-wall in two ways. As a result, ppl who have no access to sap will add another 2-3 layers of wood-walls to compensate for the nerv. This will ADD load to the servers instead of reduce it. In another post I stated, that I do not understand, why there are so many negative reviews against the devs. I slowly start to understand.

I was sceptical from day one against the FoY mechanics. Yesterday I got my buff and it was as exspected. I hadt to respawn a lot before I found the right way. Players were kiting mobs into entraces, playing loud music in local voice chat and even blocking the way in the cave in full-plate with a pike. I could reach the FoY ONLY due to the massive lag. I have no clue how anyone at Grapeshot can believe, that is is a fun mechanics for the majority of the playerbase. Both - the debuff and the buff after reaching FoY - are way to strong. I wounder if Grapeshot will ever make a player survey, if the here a lot of criticism about a game mechanic ...

I am really looking forward for the Player to Player trade. But you make the same mistake as with the FoY. Why the heck do you force player to show up in a few places ? Your servers can't and will never handle the load. Griefers will always try to ruin the fun of others ? Why not let players setup trade-shops in their home-towns ? Please do not mess it up again as you did (till now - still hoping for a better solution) with the aging mechanics.

Well I do not agree to all the bad technical stuff, steal my money and can't read the clock (OP you should look up the term ETA first). But two points I totally agree: Grapeshot does not give us normal players the feeling, they are listening to us. The Fountain of Youth is the crappiest game mechanic seen for a long time. And just in case, some devs are really reading this post: Me and my crew are members of a 120+ german player community and we are testing out this game. We have promoted your game within our community despite all the negactive comments on stream. I personally really don't know, why you get so much hate - I have played ARK for 1400+ hours and like it until the TEC updates. But with your current path of development decisions, most of my crew will stop promoting the game and sooner or later stop playing or leaving the official server at least. Being in the advertising business in RL for more than 20 years, loosing 50 potential new contacts does not sound much (1250 USD minus steam fees), but maybe we are not the only crew of a player community out there. So maybe you should try harder to listen to your player base, who are part of smaller and medium player groups. You need to sell fresh copies and word-of-mouth promotion can be very powerful.

please make one fountain of youth per server at different places every RL week. Spawn it in the deep sea. Make it findable by a sextant. That would make it at a bit fun.

Revert please, speaking for all members of company here. What is your design goal here ? To piss off your player base ?

I am really afraid, Grapeshot is not familiar with the term spawn-camper

Well last night, are base was visited by some offline raiders/griefers, who killed all animals, droped all our stuff on the ground and destroyed all crafting stations -> griefing and not PvP. A pirate game should cater robbing and fighting, especially on a PvP server. But there needs to be some sort of protection beside building layered, ugly bunkers, which bring a lot of load to the server. So here is a suggestion for some sort of offline protection, still allowing ppl to raid each other: Give every company one "protection-foundation" and one "protection-stearing-wheel" as well as one "contesting-box". How should they work ? The protection foundation will make all structures within a 5x5 area with the foundation in the middle undestroyable. It can be contested by a box, which has a timer of 24 hours + plus the hours left to reach the raiding time, which every company can set for themselves and a lot of hitpoints (30.000 ? per player in the contested company). When the box is droped next to a protected building (max 2 tiles away, so within a 7x7 area), the protection foundation becomes not removable for the 7 days to avoid easy relocation. If the constesting-box is not destroyed before the raiding time is reached, the contested building becomes vulnarable for the next 4 hours. After these 4 hours are gone, the box will be removed and the contesting company has a cooldown of 2 days, before they can craft another contesting-box. If the raiding timer becomes active, the 7 days demolish-timer on the protection-foundation is also removed and the company is able to relocate after the fight if they wish. The raiding time (in UTC/GMT) is shown on the contesting-box so that the attackers know, when their time for a fight has come. The prection-wheel will make all structures on a ship undestructable AFTER the ship was anchored and took not more damage than 10.000 points within the last 15 minutes. If a contesting-box is placed on a protected-ship, the same raiding timers and removable timers apply. The position of the contesting-box is always shown on the map to track the ship if it is moving. If the timer has ticked down, the ship becomes destroyable for the next 4 hours. This mechanic would not give a 100% protection against griefers, because there is limited space on one ship and the land area. But it would make their life a lot harder and normally griefers are not interested in a fight over the prey, especially not in their off-times. It would also limit the spread of mega-companies, because their raid ability is limited. Futhermore small companies and solo players have an easy means to avoid being zerged, because the hitpoints on contesting-boxes are bound to their company size.

The worst thing is, you really can not hunt anymore, because every alpha (even a rabbit) agroes when you hit a normal comrade. Lost my tiger this morning to an alpha cow. I really have no idea, what the devs intend with this spawnrate and that EVERY animal has alphas. Give us some aplha predators to keep us alert while hunting, but remove alpha sheeps, cows, rabbits etc.

I totally agree, combat is completely unbalanced. Melee and firearms are a joke, after the nerf even hardly useable against animals. I can land a swing with my sword on the head of a giant snake, just to do 30ish damage ? I can headshot a pig and it simply does not care ? So why should I spent skillpoint and time here when I can do lots of damage with just one fire-arrow shot. I really hope, they will balance this in the future, so that firearms are great for hunting and a good opener for PvP combat. But the main focus of fights should be melee and they should last longer than just one or two hits. Everything is in place for this (reload times on firearms, different armors, different melee weapons) but the bows are way out of balance even without fire-arrows. The solution to start balancing bow is simple: They need to add a timer on charging a bow to give the full damage to a shot. And during charge, you can not move. That would make a bow a ranged weapong again. And btw loading a firearm during movement should also not be possible. That would make ranged weapons really ranged and give melee some meaning.

Well maybe the reason for releasing a game in early access is, to find these nasty bugs and eleminate them, before the game will be released. If you loose your stuff due to a bug and you can not deal with it, stop playing and come back for release. After release, you can try to get your stuff back if you wish. During early access, submit a bug report and move on.

I like the ideas of the first post a lot. Pirates usually attacked trading ships or raided towns. Ofc there were wars between pirates, but most of the time, they were hunting civilians. The reputation system should be visible on the player and/or ship. The bigger the pirate flag next to his name, the more outlaw points he has or the more players with outlaw points man the ship (alternatively the more outlaw damage the ship has caused). Combined with an option, that defending NPCs would only shoot on targets with a defined outlaw level, we could see player driven lawful cities as well as pirate hideouts. Give us NPCs vendors to allow trade while ebing offline or at sea and the game will become great. I do not like the idea of insurances, would limit trade. If insurance, than only gold to rebuy stuff from traders.

These arrows are way to overpowered for PvP. Pirating PvP should be openers by guns and then close melee combat. A burning arrow should do near no harm to player in metall and plate armor and a little bit more dmg to hide and cloth armor. A burning effect on iron ? Really a joke. Also setting an area instantly to fire is a joke. Why do we have these burning effects ? I do not want to burn people, I want to shoot or hit them. Arrows should be great for hunting/taming and nearly useless in PvP. I mean this is a game about pirates and not the middle age.

@Rysz Thx that worked for me too.

Since this morning, I encounter a micro-rubberbanding on EU-PVP. If I move one step ahead and release W, my char is rubbing back a little bit. If a walk/run it starts stuttering always ending with a little rubberbanding back, whe is stop moving. I started a toon on a dedicated server and I could move without rubberbanding. Any hint what it might be ?

Well make it possible to slowly tow a ship out of an area with a grappling how. They probably could add a feature, to connect a ship to a dinghy via a zip line and let the dingy tow the ship (slowly ofc). That would be immersive and fun.

I used the same tactics to avoid ghost ships on my course. When sailing without crew, I could simply turn into the wind, wait for the ghost ship to clear my way, and pass behind it. Now it is becoming a pain in the a... to sail allone. Really a VERY BAD CHANGE, just to cater some whiners.

I would also liek to see ANY changes to Ghost ships, so that a sloop can avoid them. We tried just to sail from L11 to L12 today and FOUR ghost ship blocked our way and sunk the sloop. Ghost ships should be rare and deadly spawns.

I am not sure, if the current server crossing functionality i the final one. But we lost our sloop yesterday, because immediately after crossing the server boundary, we ran into two ghost ships who started firing at us even before we all "respawned" on the ship. The server boundary is like a hidden wall, you don't know, what is waiting behind it. This might have been ofc bad luck, but until we have a seamless server crossing (if it is planed) it would be better to have a no shooting zone at the server boundaries big enough to give the crossing shipcrew a chance to react to the situation.