Martyn

Howabout.. you rename pvp in atlas to Survivor.. and call it that instead? Survivor. No pvp involved. If someone attacks you, you fight back, if you see something you need, you take it. If someone gets in your way you kill or disable them. How you get there, doesn't matter. So long as you win, they lose. Leave PVPERS for cod like games or arena games.

I voted to leave.. therefore I do believe I was right to do so. But my point is, the "right opinion" is the truth. Nothing else matters. So I could be wrong or right.. but I don't believe I have a right to an opinion based on lies.

There are no ways around the situation if there's a hard cap and it's already occupied, it doesn't matter how big a company gets. Hardware limits are the gods here.

I don't think it can work in every situation, people will land, find no land, be told there's a 50% tax and leave. Eventually the might find someone willing to ask for 10-20% tax or they will quit the game.. Some people are more open to the idea of being taxed.. others are not. As for having pvp zones within a pve network.. that's a really bad idea if for example you must pass through the pvp zone to get to other pve areas. As that's forcing pvp on pve players. However, the reverse is fine imo. You could have pvp zones within a pve area, where you had to pass through pve zones to get to them. This is what I did. People came and stole my land and ripped up my buildings. So I went to a new land, gated it all off and put the free zones behind stone walls. Then people had to wait and ask and if I was online got to use the stuff. It wasn't the best way of doing it but at least it was the least exploitable way.

Nothing wrong with constructive complaining. The problem is, it eventually makes everyone depressed and when they get depressed emotions are easily invoked. Which is why I laugh at some of the worst jokes or sarcastic remarks I see here. You have every right to complain as everyone else does. And Danny has every right to tell you not to. Since both opinions are not mutually exclusive. I personally don't like it when people say "well we have the right to an opinion". Personally, I think we only have a "right" to the "right" opinion.

The problem with the flags wasn't so much how many one player had, but that most of them were just for holding land they never actually used. When I first started, the server network was maxed out, it took me 12 hours to leave the freeport, then I crashed my raft.. with the sudden shock of being in a lag free zone, died and respawned noob style back at the freeport.. another 10 hours later and I landed on a small island, I was on pve network, got abused for about 6 hours straight by people on said island.. found out that locked lockers weren't actually locked.. etc. Good info at the time. Moved to a new island in a different zone, settled down. Planted out 2 flags. One for my base and one for an area I intended to expand into. There were people around me placing 20-30 flags, many of them high up on the mountains, just grabbing land. Logged in a few days later dead, to people gloating in chat using my name. I responded and they gleefully responded detailing how they'd used the flag exploits to steal my base and wreck it. How they continued for the next 2 weeks, using weight exploits and flag exploits to continue to do the same elsewhere. From this we learned to use the gates to blockoff huge chunks of land, to place tamed chickens n sheep around the area kept to stop people "stealing" our land. Then.. people started arriving, calling out that there was no free land.. anywhere, on the entire map. No surprise there. The flag system is a good system, it works. But it is easily exploitable. Personally, I think players should get 1 flag each. With a limited size of about 50m diameter. If they join a company, then the company get's 1 flag with a 150m diameter. Per Zone. Upto a max of say 3 flags over the entire map. If someone leaves a company they return to having 1 flag 50m/d. If they join another company in another area or place a new flag on another island, their original flag is removed, builds start to rot rapidly, can be claimed by others. Flags would also not be able to overlap other flagged areas. Alternatively, limit flags to 1 per player or per company. Then build in a skillset for players to specialise in company management or trading allow traders a small 25m diameter outpost per zone for trading etc a tempory flag. And company manager owners can add skillpoints to either expand flag area or maybe add extra flags. If they respec, those extra flags are deleted. Buildings start to rot and can be claimed etc.

Yep. And smiling makes you feel happy. So everyone should smile. Esp when reading these forums. No that's a grimace..

Whilst there is an argument that bubba could be faking it, that's really between the Mods, Grapeshot Devs and Bubba to discuss. Perhaps a little "approved icon" could be attached to his avatar to show he is allowed to be outwith forum guidelines. But I personally feel that if someone declares they are disabled then you need to accept that and move on. I am also disabled and it is only when I walk that it is obvious. Otherwise to anyone looking at me, it would be impossible to tell. What bubba has said so far makes absolute sense and I see no reason why I can't look beyond his use of allcaps if that's his thing. I do also agree that Savicto's inital responce was ott but, again that's an issue for the forum mods to sort out. It doesn't excuse either his reaction to dilberts post or really detract from his obvious anger and disgust reading it. Something I expect everyone will feel if they also read it.

Yeh but what's stopping 2 companies turning up each with 50 people? Or 5.. if they all lived on the same island or nearby islands.? If there's a zone hard cap of roughly 300.. then only a single company could invade realistically. The alternative would be for people incharge to arrange for a "meeting" in a neutral low pop zone, to duke it out.. and bring with them a prize ship full of loot for the winners to take home. Atm we don't really know what the zone cap is and what happens if a ship with 50 people on it tries to enter a zone with only 25 capacity, do 25 not get in and end up swimming on the other side of the zone? Crew members I assume means players. Not ai crewmen? A limit on those would be interesting to see. As ships would need to be crewed by players only and sailed manually.

It's quite funny reading through this thread, people seem to be demanding the same thing overall.. the ability to gank others, but only so long as they can win. On the one hand complaining that "megas" will rule them, whilst they want to "rule" the smaller groups.. the answer seems simple to me.. if you're getting whipped, join with another group and keep adding groups until you're also a mega, made up of smaller groups, then if a "mega" comes calling, you can team up and fight them. It's all well n great to puff out hotair about who will or won't stay.. but if mega's will exist, then you need a plan to beat them, becoming a mega seems the only viable plan. As for offline protection, if people want that knowing it means they themselves cannot offline attack, that's a decision to be made. But by asking for opro, people are saying they don't want to opro themselves. So anyone arguing against it are people who would and presumbably have no issue with mega's turning up and thrashing them. All part n parcel of the game. Sometimes your team has more and better sometimes their's do.. The issue with the idea that mega's can be stopped from existing is laughable at best. The only thing that can be limited is the number of people in a given zone. If you're trying to bring in 100 people to invade an island that already has 250 people living on it.. only 50 will get in. And if those 250 islanders suddenly decide to team up.. hard luck. That's what alliances are for. Also I expect you'll all eventually see offline protection roughly 15mins after you log out. They added this into Ark, even for pve, to stop people training dinos on offline player bases. And it does work. Tames and structure are completely immune to damage. The problem with offline protection is larger groups are nearly always online in some regard.. so mega's will need to employ people from all over the world to stay on top or else put up with a degree of loss. I think what we do need, are some GM's on the networks, looking for cheaters. They could be contacted offline via a ticket system with x,y locs and or zone loc info, names etc. And the gms could spy on them invis, to see if they are indeed aimbotting etc and then ban them manually. It isn't like they couldn't afford to pay a few people to do this.

Maybe they should add heat seeking rocket launchers.. like they have in ark. I always wonder when watching videos of atlas base invasions why people don't step their defences. ie have mortors sitting back from beach to attack the beach and anything near to beach defences. Surely this is the answer to someone trying to kill a beach defensive position. I can only assume the bases are built by people who have little skill in building defences. As for a ship mounted with mortors.. sounds pretty cool. Maybe they could disable mortors on ships from shooting other ships. Instead of just not allowing mortors on ships. Then you could have a multipurpose ship. It's much like people having all the guns on one side of a ship, instead of 50/50 split. I haven't tried with cannon placments, but in ark you can place turrets on sloped ramps, can you not do this on ramp/doors in atlas? Give your cannons some elevation?

That's a good tip on sotd fire, never really thought about it. I've noticed on a few yt videos that you can also add a sort of armour plating to ships, by building out from them using angled doors, is this particularly useful or is it really just for looks?

haha.. maybe start in a snow biome and not a desert one White "boats & ships" are usually so because white gel coat is realatively cheap, most older wooden boats n ships were painted, often in quite garish colours. I'm a fan of portuguese boats, as they tend to be both awfully painted yet have some extremely fine chisel work in them, much like viking ships used to have, but much finer, I'd like to see various patterns like this for stencilling onto boats, esp for bow/stern. As well as bowsprits and figureheads. As for painting bases, I must be either colourblind or just really awful at picking out colour schemes as noone I've ever met ever liked my paintjobs in Ark or Atlas, with singular except to my flag. A union jack I made with the ingame paintshop, took me about 3 hours to do. I hope they do update the entire paint/art system it wasn't very good in ark, infact it often caused significant lag increases on servers, painting large areas was a bad idea. But for ships and small buildings it should be fine. I also hope the bring back a pve flag for your company and pennants / flags for ships. To carry same/similar design. In Atlas I painted my sloop in blue, gold and brown and it only got sighs and disparaging remarks.

It was "how" big?

Oops.. What if the Cake is in a Pie? Bakewell Tart anyone?

From what is posted prt is going live a week before the mega wipe.. so 1st april is only going to be for fools.. as far as playing the new version is concerned. I suspect we'll see ptr on 1st.. maybe. Then a week or so later, the megapatch/wipe etc.

Ever seen a discord with 10-50 people in it? It's chat chaos.. now imagine one with 2000 in it.. or 20,000 people all trying to talk at once.. even in slowmo mode it's still chaos. Discord is fine if they are talking to very small groups, otherwise they might as well use twitter. Or any other system.

From my experience: Which is to say, since the dawn of computers. (Commodore 64 and Amiga generation) Wipes I don't expect, except under extreme circumstances. Or due to map changes, which make it impossible for partial or full wipes not to happen. It is however, imo, necessary, that to test a new "patch" one should wipe anyway. Even if it isn't the server that wipes, how do you test the lower level stuff and give feedback if you never experience it after a specific patch goes through? You can't. You must reset yourself and play from being a noob again, in order to experience it, in the case where you only have 1 life. If you can save game, ie a single player game. Then you can do both. Testing an EA for Devs.. well that's exactly what we are doing. You haven't paid for a completed game, in the sense that what you're playing right now, isn't complete. You have actually paid for the completed game, you just can't play that game for x number of years. In the meantime, they add gameplay systems, textures, items, tools etc into the game and we give our feedback on how it's working along with any bugs we find. Also, we learn how developers develope games. Depending alot on how much of the actual dev side of the game the developers will show us.

I expect 10-20k for the first few days. It doesn't take long to draw a conclusion if they've messed it up. If so, it might well drop below 10k or if not and it's fun again.. could well see it go over 20k, maybe even upto full. Whatever full actually is.. on release it was full almost instantly.. oh the lag.. but I still don't know how many that actually was online.

Given you said that 25mins ago.. are you? As far as I'm aware, Eu Pve original is still up.. but it takes me too long to check. (Still Rev 24.5)

Alot of people clearly don't know what pve means then. As they seem to be filled with people too scared to play on actual pvp servers. And me.. As for Hardcore pvp or pve really.. I always thought it meant 1 life.. when you die, you start at 0. So it makes sense that fewer playing against alot would be indicative of a hardcore group. It is often said that hardcore also refers to the amount of time, someone plays. In that case I am extreme hardcore.. however, I am also extremely shit at pvp. I can just about hit a barn door at 5 meters with a cannon.. beyond that, I can't even see the barn door.. I actually prefer logistics in games, building, taming, feeding, maintaining, designing etc. I'm as happy on a pve server as I am on a pvp one. That said, I don't like people stealing my poo.. and in Ark, people used to do that alot.. and my Eggs!! Seriously, never really bothered me. (yes it did) Only thing about Pvp I don't like is awkward nastiness. People swearing at me over voice comms or laughing at their seeming impunity to play intelligently. Otherwise I hate taming stuff, only for someone else to get it killed 5 minutes later.. usually by doing something, it was never intended for. (which is why I dislike teams, groups, companies etc) Factions is alot like playing solo/small teams in a mmo type map. I've never really liked this way of playing, although it works fine for arcade pvp, ie log in, run around, shoot stuff, log out. For survival/persistant, I don't think it would work very well, unless we just had pvp arenas and you could pick your ship, armour etc maybe get put automatically into teams or possibly join as a team, which can work in a faction like game. Most often I'd find it was usually 2-3 groups playing on one team with 2-3 solo noobs. (ie me) Rather than a cohesive, balanced, trained group who knew everyone and exactly what they're doing. ie Eve, Wow etc..

Just fed my animals for the last time and set them all to aggressive. For whatever few hours they have left.. I suspect it'll be the 28th for most of us, when the network finally goes offline. It's quite funny, that the date is set by an american (chinese in the case of snail) company, to take an Eu network offline, when it'll actually be the day after for those Eu players. Or near enough. Now we need an Eta for the PTR to be online and patched.. so we can test it and start complaining all over again.

I like the idea of persistant characters, whilst I understand why people want/need to respec, I think it makes the game just too easy. They should make it so if you respec, you have a very limited timer put on you, if you don't respec close to what you had prior ie if you were a tamer and now an armoursmith.. all your tames should go wild.. even if you've given them to other people. This would force people to spec specifically down their own unique routes and keep them on them. Only allowing respec to fix mistakes or where genuine points are wasted. Or if you really need to change to a different class of character. As for BPs and requirements to wear items without the skill. I think it should be part way like this, I don't think you should need an armoursmith skill to wear armour, but you should need it to repair it. So you could make armour for an entire company.. but only the smiths could repair it. Bp's similarly, should allow single crafts of any one item, by any player. However, if you don't have the actual skill, you cannot repair it. This way a company will have a permenant staff of skilled players. People will be cooks or tamers, captains or pirates, musicians or shipbuilders etc. For EA purposes it's fine for people to respec every level or so or via a potion, but after release, the game needs to have an element of balance or everyone will just exploit it. There's no doubt that potions can also be exploited tho, doesn't take much to farm/grind the items needed in Ark. So I'd expect a bigger company to have most of the resources continually available. Again tho, this will push people to play in companies and larger groups. I know people prefer sometimes to play solo or just can't trust people to play in a group or team, but the game has to be designed around one or other it can't really be built for both and doing something with a mate is surely the reason why anyone plays mp games.. that said, a large part of pve gameplay is purely socialising, people come to pve purely to talk.. but even so, I think we need to just get to grips with a game that should be multiplayer in all aspects. And remove as much exploitability as possibly from the gameplay and if people don't like it.. hard luck. The trick is just to make a game many do like, not one everyone will never like at the same time.

Tad hypocritical.. the forum has no issues with putting our names in ALL CAPS but then they demand we don't type in them..!!? As for Bubba I for one am glad he types in all caps, as I don't need my glasses to read it. Now anychance we can stop the trolling of some disabled guy and get back to the topic of pve..

Since we've paid already, might as well see exactly what they have planned and draw conclusions then. Regardless of how bad people think it will be, I'll wait and see, it's not like I'm loosing much more than I already have.