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RyuujinZERO

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Everything posted by RyuujinZERO

  1. The stupid part is I'd still play the game solo, living off my boat, exploring and be quite happy about it, even with most the flaws like massive NPC spawns (Superior strategy and cheese can overcome any obstacle!), I don't need a particularly big hook, I mean, No Man's Sky is a favourite game of mine. But then they keep adding new obstacles that compound the existing ones, and other irrational choices that make it even worse, often for no obvious payoff. Like: Why are sloops the slowest ship in the game? Shouldn't their small capacity and weak hull be balanced by speed to escape threats? Every month I'm required to play geriatric-bum-rush-the-fountain, which is nigh impossible solo and adds nothing to the game. Cyclones, whales and overweight Chinese mean my ship isn't safe when I'm logged off even in PvE It's like, I try my hardest to find workarounds to enjoy the game DESPITE it's flaws, and the devs say 'Oh we can't be having THAT, you don't seem to be playing the game right. Let me find something else to discourage you doing that!'.
  2. Not personal experience, but I have seen a number of people on the PvE forums encouraging people to hide pillars/foundations in awkward places (And giving tips) to block resource spawns to "stick it to the land-owning bourgeois", even though you'd have the power to demolish them, if they are stick inside world geometry, or in really inconspicuous places it could be very difficult to resolve, which makes it risky for land owners to allow strangers to build too. Lack of trust on both sides, combined with trolls means everyone loses sadly
  3. Alternatively you leave the microphone open and force them to listen to... I dunno; you coughing and eating into the mic, or playing SANIC-version green hills theme (RIP HEADPHONES!) at max volume or... well you could have found creative ways to make them regret keeping you around "I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me!"
  4. The problem with this is that Treasure maps, largely by necessity (And FoY too if done that way) actually appear at pre-defined locations, to make sure you don't get dud locations that are under terrain geometry or stuff. This also means that if someone builds over the top of it, it's rendered inaccessible; this is already a problem on PvE especially, and if it were linked to such a crucial mechanic as the FoY you can be sure there'll be trolls out there who deliberately block access.
  5. 4) Get rid of it entirely, let us define our character's age at character creation and it never changes thereafter. I mean, really, what does the aging/fountain of youth ADD to the game? - I can tell you what it takes away; the ability to create a character that I can call my own. But I really can't see what it adds. A geriatric bum-rush for the fountain every couple of months of realtime* is definitely NOT something I have, or have ever had on my gaming wishlist. If you're still gonna keep the fountain, then make it a way of recustomising your character's appearance instead; that seems worthy of questing for * And let's clarify this is realtime. If I do the FOY, have a break, come back a couple months, whats the first thing I have to do again? - FoY... assuming my character hasn't died and lost everything due to the devs make some other dumb idea like permadeath above a certain age
  6. Nah, these clowns tell them 'You're not allowed to stand on the sofa or you'll float above it' - then you invite your friend over, he tries sit on it and gets stuck floating. Meanwhile the Chinese kids lash a rope around your sofa and pull it over, because they didn't stand on it, it wasn't against the rules ...can we just have a separate play area for them Grapeshot?
  7. I wish it worked that way, but it doesn't. Viral, word of mouth can have some astonishing results - Minecraft for example achieved success almost entirely via word of mouth as did some other indie darlings like Undertale. Others spent a long time nurturing a loyal player base who came back time and again; like Elder Scrolls (In the early days before Bethesda went full evil), or the X: Beyond the Frontier series, that have kept loyal players coming back; some even made it to the big leagues like Warframe which is now a most-played title on Steam after languishing and surviving for years on just it's most ardent fans. But these games I just listed, are all chump change to the giant publishers, the kind of profits they make wouldn't even register in an Activison earnings report. Investors don't want loyal fanbases and happy consumers, they want big money. They look at games like Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, stuff that turns over profits in the billions. The simple fact is, those mega-budget games don't sell bonkers numbers because of happy customers or word of mouth; they sell them because they spend tens of millions on marketing then monetise the shit out of it. The quality of the game is mostly irrelevant, so long as the marketing is slick and the screenshots fancy.
  8. I tried land on one an an SotD sailed out it and nearly agroed!
  9. Or, just-below-the-surfacing in the case of these pillars ...I'll see myself out.
  10. I'm not sure if dropping anchor and stopping dead at full sail is a safe thing to do; it doesn't feel it would be. I've honestly never tried, because intuitively it doesn't seem safe (A real large ship suddenly dropping anchor at full speed ahead will at best snap the anchor chain, at worst, tear the chain through several decks and breach the hull below the waterline), maybe someone else can say if that's a bug or intended and has tried stopping a big ship at full tilt like that. It may also have been a side effect of the massive swell; it is possible for high waves to allow a ship to pass over a shallow sand bar, only to be dropped back onto it in the following trough. This bouncing process can cause damage, though usually not too severe if you move back off it in the next wave unless there was rocks below, but dropping anchor may have forced the ship down onto it. The damage numbers we saw were inconsistent with a cyclone being the cause; they usually only do a couple hundred per tick tops. As for building there can be a degree of desync between item placement server and client side. Usually this can be rectified by picking up and replacing; but obviously that isn't a good option if the misplaced item demolished an existing item you can't easily replace; doubly so if that's a ship hull section. The best you can do is get close and aim clearly when placing stuff to make sure it hits the snap point you think it's hitting and there is no ambiguity. The flicker when placing in the video meant he was wobbling and the server was unsure which snap point he was targeting Building a new ship is his only recourse; hundreds if not thousands of people have lost their ships due to exploiters, hackers, bugs and other absolute bullshit they could not control or defend against (When they introduced Ships of the Damned, at least half the ships in the game got sunk overnight while people were offline!) and the GM's refuse to get involved or reimburse people their losses. By comparison this ship loss isn't even a clear-cut case of a bug
  11. For many people, aesthetic customization is a BIG part of a game. Like people in warframe joke 'Fashionframe is end-game', this is true of many MMOs. Even taking buffs and debuffs and breeding systems aside, the dynamic hair growth, aging etc, all serve to make your character's appearance a constantly moving target. Want to play an old crone or veteran pirate? - Well tough shit, you have to wait 40-50 years, then you get to do that for 10-20 years before you gotta roll a new character or pop that fountain of youth. Want a fresh faced, long haired young bishounen vagabond? - Again, tough shit, you'll only be young for a week or two before the crow's feet start to sink in. There is almost nobody for whom the aging is a positive feature. For fashionistas it's a pain in the ass, for PvP'rs it's an unnecessary diversion, for casuals who just want to play in their own time, their own way, it's nothing but a nuisance. Show me the focus group who said "Man, I hope this game has aging where every month or two I have to do a naked geriatric bum rush of some distant island, to keep my character in top condition!", that made the devs think this was a good design decision. just let us make the character we want to make and be done with it.
  12. You should probably try talk to the land owners before you commit to building a tonne of stuff on the land, figure out if they're good people, see if they have any objections to where or what you plan to build. I'm pretty cynical most the time but I don't think the majority of talkative, friendly types are going to stab you in the back and nick your stuff. That being said, if you just randomly build in a yellow flag area without contacting the owners; remember that all flags were AUTOMATICALLY set to yellow/buildable when the system was introduced. Some of those flags may belong to people who are on hiatus, and when they come back, you might find them flipped red. tl;dr - Speak to the land owners before commiting to building a base or shacking up your stuff, figure out if they are good peoples before you build, and you'll probably be fine.
  13. I haven't looked more closely at the tax system/flag system since the update, but didn't I read there was a way to grant/deny access to land? Seems like if you try pillaring someone's land they can just deny you the right to build there and go demolish your pillars, getting back half the resources in the process (GG giving him free resources). If there are other, happy residents, you're also going to be making collateral damage out of them by blocking THEM accessing resources, which makes this less the Boston Tea Party, and more the equivalent of torching all the shops on the high street to stick it to capitalism... you're not really hurting 'the man', so much as everyone else.
  14. I've only lost 1 personally; that was to a monsterous whale climbing into a shallow rocky cove to mete out his cetacean rage while I was offline. I've seen a fair number of other people's ships sunk. Most of them during the night of blood when the SotD's were introduced. I've seen a couple sloops sunk outside one guys base in my home region that seemed to have been over-weighted. The same guys tried overweight mine too while visiting that island; so must be their 'thing'. Another one was a brig that got sunk because they left a chicken aboard and a croc gnawed it's way through the hull to get it. We also encountered schooner that zoomed through the shallows near my base wayy too fast and hit this TINIEST rock, below the waterline that you'd never know was there unless you were a regular in the region, which holed it, the captain apparently beached it before it 'sank' but lacked spare planks and just abandoned it there on the shore (Finder's keepers!) Oh and I've seen several skeletal ship hulls lying abandoned in Freeports... no need to explain how THOSE got there
  15. Nonetheless a lot of this does fall on Wildcards shoulders, even ignoring well documented cultural differences (See ARK and other titles and rampancy of hack usage/winning above all else mentality seen in Chinese and Russian players) Chinese players and companies often simply show up as ☐☐ and they invariably can't speak English, so it becomes nigh impossible to tell them apart. In the real world, propagandists will try dehumanise and take away individual identity of a group they want people to hate - and here we see it baked into the system. There's no chance of interacting positively with a group you not only cannot communicate with, but cannot even tell apart it's members. So it's inevitable that people will blanket label the entire group negatively when a major portion of this anonymous group, exploit, cheat and are extremely hostile. You'd have to been blind to not see this friction coming before they even launched the game. Furthermore, judging the number of Asian players on EU and NA they could easily have created a separate Asian server region and would have still had a healthy player base on all 3 regions (Perhaps more so, given how many NA/EU players have quit after being pushed out of land and assets by Chinese zerg companies), while avoiding the inevitable toxicity and culture clash.
  16. Well I guess that answers what the patch notes meant by 'Fixed exploit' ...whatever they fixed, wasn't the boat sinking exploit that we've known about since day 2.
  17. The Western players, or the Chinese? - Because the former is currently happening, the latter the devs will almost certainly not do. Grapeshot/Wildcard is owned by Snail Games, which is a Chinese company, the cynic in me thinks that being able to go on and grief occidentals is practically a selling point for ATLAS in the home market. Best we can expect is them to eventually get around to fixing the exploits they are using to drive us out of our claims and away from the game, but they don't seem to be in any hurry to do that, maybe because players numbers aren't exactly tanking
  18. I've seen a few reports this patch of cyclones coming wayy too close to shore and hitting anchored ships. According to those reports cyclones now 'push' ships and if the ship gets pushed into too shallow water/onto rocks, it just insta-gibs.
  19. There's a lot of misinformation, or rather, creative misinterpretation, going on here Claim flags (Currently) only retain their upkeep timer for a few days after initial placement. This means the owners have to pull up and re-place each flag (A process that takes ~10 minutes per flag) if they want to keep the flag upkeep buff active. Once the upkeep buff has fallen off, players have to actively return to contest if someone tries take it from them while online, and, if someone tries contest while offline, they need to make sure they are sleeping somewhere within that claim, or they'll likely have lost it by the time they log back in. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure banks only cover the server in which they are placed. Basically, a couple of guys on a raft, on day one running across the map naked making raspberry noises while waving their hands in the air, throwing down flags left and right, are not the guys who still control the territory at this stage of the game. Such a strategy would result in a huge area of land that required constant, tedious maintenance to retain control over (Systematically returning to replace flags, emptying banks from each server separately). Our company had 4 people originally and we managed to get ourselves a couple of claims on day 2 in PvE NA. We expanded that to 6 claims over the next week as we realised most our adjoining claims WERE placed down by some mega-guild goobers who'd done just what you described, and they had no reasonable way of enforcing their claim against ours. However, we quickly realized our OWN over-claiming had now become nigh impossible to properly protect either (It didn't overlap with our actual physical base where we slept), and we lost about half our territory to a nearby Taiwanese company at night. Eventually we found another island in a nearby zone (Now a full *2 weeks* after launch), that had a bunch of claims on it, but no structures. So we abandoned our old claims to an ally, then contested and took the entire small archipelago island and this time, made sure our claim flags were structured in a rosetta so they all overlapped around our actual base/outposts, and we could actually properly secure it while we were offline. I have a few points here: 1 or 2 people cannot hold large tracts of land by themselves for an extended period without putting in some serious effort to retain it. Careful planning is required to actually create and hold down a modest space beyond a single claim. There is still LOADS of land out there to settled, that people aren't using, because they see a flag and walk away/go complain on the forums. Take the flag down and put your own up, if the owner cares he'll come contest it, or he'd have secured it!. Well, there's always 'That guy' in the latter scenario, who didn't secure their flag, but comes tell you a day or two later that he did in fact care, and he's very upset with you and/or accuses you of hacking somehow because you 'stole his land'. But, seriously, if you can't secure a flag while offline then you know you are over-claiming.
  20. If pure speed is what you want, Schooner with 1 Large speed and 1 Small speed is basically the fastest ship configuration in the game, it's absurd, you can outrun SotD even in low-wind conditions. I personally switch the small speed for handling, the speed loss is negligible but it is a noticeable improvement for handling, especially for precision maneuvering at low speeds like docking.
  21. Logged in to see if anyone'd bothered sink my sloop and to check I was still alive and protecting my claims, checked patch notes: "Fixed exploits" Checked forums to see if that exploit includes sinking boats in PvE... it did not. Logged back out and goes back to playing something else til they actually fix it... if they never do than those claims will simply be claimed and largely unused til the end of days <.<
  22. The devs simply state 'Fixed exploits' in the patch notes, but give no details. Clearly this isn't one of the exploits they fixed last patch <_< I'm literally just not playing anymore til they fix this (And havn't played for a week or two now), there is no point building boats if they're just going to get sunk while you're offline and can't even defend yourself
  23. You can't even leave a company retroactively, everything you own stays with the company; hilariously even if you were the only person in that company. ATLAS and ARK before it doesn't do much tracking beyond its current owner
  24. Until they fix the ship sinking I'm simply not playing. I chose pve so I could play casually, without worrying that somebody has smashed my stuff up while offline
  25. Waterspouts used to dissipate if they hit water shallow enough to anchor in, do they not do that anymore?
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