wandelaar

We have a single player mode. There many good tutorials out there to set up your own server on your game machine and connect to it. Search for +"dedicated server" +"single player" +Atlas This isn't even the best one, but one of earliest Youtube: SINGLE PLAYER MODE + DEDICATED SERVER - STEP BY STEP SETUP - ServerGridEditor + SteamCMD and he made follow-up videos for a few issues people had. cheers

In PVE: no. Being a landowner yourself gives you better timers in your own territory than in lawless, but that's about it. The rest is gameplay.

@CoopedUpYou might right, but it might also have the opposite effect. From my perspective what they call an additive tax is not a tax at all. The owner gets 20% state subsidie on the resources I gather. So they get rewarded for people harvesting on their island and they get rewarded for people being on their island (sleeping or harvesting). The second reward is their own tax reduction on the gold they pay. That should motivate the owner to keep the resources accessible. For the tax reduction they should want sleepers as it stands to reason most players spend more time in real life than in this game so sleeping bodys have quite the value. This should be motive to keep the island tidy for building.

If I could buy a deed on a tolerant island that would formally grant me all rights on a plot ... a deed that the next owner has to respect, then I wouldn't mind paying taxes as it would feel like my own place.

Optimist!

@Sydhart It's not about the size of the island. There is only a small window of opportunities to claim islands in the beginning. After that initial landrush it is a contesting game. The race for gold, the race for something better than a ramshackle sloop, the race for a free spot, the race to get the second load of gold and start building, ... all of that is obviously easier for larger companies. Even a group of 3 can get all of this done in half the time it takes a solo player. The point is chances of success are inherently smaller. And in the contesting game at the later stages ... it is about stamina and attrition when there is more than one contester. These things could go on for days when they first changed the timers. This being said, it is realistic to mimic the real life choice a single pirat would have. In fact a single pirate would have a lot less than what we have in game. All of the above is fine if they don't want the game to be played solo. In that case it would help their image if they stated that. I have been assuming that they also want the solo players and mini-companies as customers because that is a large part of their ARK-clientbase.

@Salty DelI'm in. I am sceptical if it will actually work, but I'm willing to go the distance. You would probably have to form a core company and then have trial alliances before adding to the core company and establish trust ... not necessarily expecting misdeeds, but some people just want to have silly fun and some players might actually be new and make more mistakes than others ... the many tribes in Ark were a bunch of lessons to be learned (speaking mostly as an admin because then you see the problematic situations). Anyway, I'm in ... in any role.

@Salty DelWhat you describe is pretty much the feedback many of us gave on th PVE PTR. The race to claims is very much in favour of organised groups, the larger the better.

tracert 37.10.126.140 (NA ex-PVE server , Southwest Tundra Freeport) tracert 46.251.238.4 (current EU PVE, Southwest Tropical Freeport) The results are a 100 ms difference and an additional hop. That could just be the way the segmented the networks or they could be in different datacenters in the same country. The difference seems too smaal to think one on American Soil and one European soil. They might both be in the Philippines .

update 1.5 Right-clicking an engram in your inventory crafts the item instead of giving you the submenu.

Looking back at the rate of our evolution at the original launch, we had to specialise in order to get all the stuff we needed and even then it took us weeks to get into claiming. We were a small company of 6 at that time. Now, as a company of 1 it seems extremely unlikely there will be anything left to claim by the time I can get a regular supply of gold going. Even though I can play daily I only have a few hours to do this, so my path of fun will have to start in the lawless zone with all it's new parking risks for the ship. The PTR showed not a single advantage for a PVE serf in a settlement. Also no risk for any existing structure when ownership changed, but a continuous risk for new structures. The language barrier is often solid. It is a shame as living in your own claim was much better than living in lawless. At least you did not _have_ to play every day.

I agree on the gold topic. Early game it is not too easy to get sufficient gold to at least get NPCs for your first ship. (In the PVE PTR I failed to get there thrice. Built schooner, collected a few treasure maps. equipped to do the battle without a tame ... and was too tired to do the fight or sail back to a freeport ... next day, ship decayed ) It is certainly true that once you have a decent tier 2 animal or any tier 3 animal treasure maps are an easy and boring routine. And I agree even more on the tax topic. Currently the type of tax feels like value add tax on resources. Property taxes on your own structures would be much more adequate as a balancing mechanic. The combination might make for a healthier dynamic that the current lording slave system.

Dear Grapeshot, Having a test environment like PTR was a good idea. Having experienced it now for a couple of days, it should be clear to you that test feedback is more valuable when it is more precise (narrow details) and more complete (broad context). Our feedback has been too dependent on our assumptions and rumours for lack of precise information on the rules-at-play, timer-settings and changes to those during the test period. It's not that there was no information, it's just that it could be done even better by being more complete and distributing it in sync with the actual changes. Please remember that playing on the PTR is not the fun we seek in a game, but a fun way to help you by playing under extreme conditions and giving you feedback. With how your current claiming-solution is evolving, it is likely we will either have a longer PTR or another PTR in the future.

It seems like 6 hours. It makes sense they want to test ship decay, but they could have been smarter about it. The stupid consequence is that every test effort has to start with two hours of shipbuilding ... which doesn't contribute to the test. I've been through that cycle 3 times now and it is too much (mostly because they could have been smarter about this).

Types of deeds: - my deed/plot -freebuild deed/plot -allied deed/plot I'm not sying this is necessary, but if the devs wanted to facilitate these quite relevanr distinctions through the deeds they could. Alternatively, they could also manage this effectively at the flag.

same issue ... parked in lawless ... dissappeared overnight ... me and the aimals were floating Ironically I parked there to get treasure to buy NPCs and do some testing .... this is not a trivial setback.

I assume that the devs have good reasons for trying a claim system in PVE that is similar to the one in PVP. It could work provided an advantage is added for people not belonging to the owning tribe to build there. And it needs a control mechanism for the owning tribe to allow and disallow buidling liberties. The purchase of deeds, in order to lease landplots would be a positive twist, a better story line than what currently feels like serfdom. Survival+ has proven that this works well in PVE.Their implementation is intended for house-a-city building rather than facilitating multiple bases on an island, but it is conceptually the same.

The way it works is that you can think it is the same on a claimed island, only to discover that that the owner can demolish whatever you build. There seem to be no advantages only additional vulnerability for now. A deed purchase mechanic like in survival + would be nice. That works for PVE.

I can confirm this. It occurs from time to time. Sometimes relogging helps. In extremis: At one time I was stuck between a shipyard portside, a sandbank at starboard and the beach in front. I could not even wiggle the schooner and going backwards would not work. As a desparate measure I set an NPC at the steering wheel and set it on an impossible course south-east, which at that point was straight backwards. Then I fast travelled to another ship and had fun for hours. When I came back to that schooner it had made the impossible turn and was floating with the sails furled.

On PVP PTR you currently can and on PVE PTR you can't build in the freeport quadrants.

Yeah, but what is the advantage for the majority of players to choose a non-lawless island? In the assumption that the vast majority of players in PVE is not part of the owning tribes. That structures in unclaimed settlements behave like in lawless is fine, but when it is claimed something should be 'added value' ...

You basically have the same decay rates as in the lawless, plus you pay taxes and we still have to find out what happens on a potential change of ownership. This does not look good at all.

There is a countdown clock suggesting it will be up in a few hours. But as their track record isn't even close to reliable when it is about sticking to promised timing I would consider that as a mere indication. https://countle.com/7j3mv62wY

Martyn, those quadrants still are still noticable different from other quadrants ... it matters in the long run: +they have the NPC shops +zero predators on the 4 islands +no SotD in their waters -faster ship decay Treating them like lawless areas with extras makes it convenient to still call them freeports so we can distinguish them.

This allows for quite a different tactic. Rather than the lawless the freeport has no enemies apart from *humans*.