Salty Del

Absolutely! Do you want to be the bad owner or the bad settler? We’ll need at least a few people for each company.

I seem to recall them mentioning that the PTR will be a smaller grid, not a full set of servers. I don’t believe that setting up a scenario like what I had mentioned would be an accurate simulation of what would really happen. It’s more a test of best case and worst case scenarios, finding faults with the system and ways that both island owners and settlers can be griefed, either by the island owner or a settler. To me, that’s the most useful reason to have the PTR, instead of just putting it out on the live servers. They’re only up for a week, so why wait for these situations to happen organically?

I’m thinking that if we really want to get a good idea of how the new system will work, we need four companies to work together in the same grid. Two companies each own one island. One company tries to be a good landlord, the other tries to be a bad landlord. The other two companies build on both islands. One company tries to be a good settler in both, the other tries to be a bad settler (briefer) on both islands. Reality will be a lot more middle-ground than this, but at least you get to test the system at the extremes. Any volunteers to join in this experiment?

The question is not whether you prefer cake or pie. The true question is what toppings you put on them.

Schrodinger’s Who?

TL; DR: I’m bored and get too much enjoyment out of writing silly things like that.

I think that instead of referring to it just as PvE, they should instead call the PvE variant Adventure(s).

If he didn’t understand, then you just didn’t successfully English. There is no governing body of the English language. So any failure of comprehension by the receiver is because the speaker/writer was unable to properly communicate their thoughts in a manner that the receiver could understand. Disclaimer: The previous statements were written by the author’s understanding of a bastard language with inconsistent rules that is commonly referred to as the English language, which is really just a mish-mash of regional dialects that, if you’re lucky, are at least somewhat compatible other regions dialects. This disclaimer nullifies any fault on the author’s part for any misunderstanding of the reciever as to the meaning and intention of any information stated or implied. You just didn’t make enough effort to understand me. I recommend using Google translate to go through no fewer than 7 different languages before translating back to English to ensure maximum comprehension.

Ahh. A perfect opportunity to introduce you to my thoughts on why time travel is impossible. How is this in any way related? Stay tuned to find out! If you were to just go back in time, where do you think you’ll end up? Floating in space. Why? The Earth moves very quickly. Even a time jump of just seconds would probably result in your death. Part of the patch is adding and moving islands. Where do you think structures will be? Floating In the air over the water, just waiting to smash a passing ship. Perhaps they could keep the characters during the wipe. But, with the addition of these same islands, additional discovery points will be added, and some may be removed. They may also be tweaking the skills tree, which yes, on its own is not enough to require recreating a character. But, if you had to choose between them spending the time to get the game mechanics to where they want them to be, or put the time into making it so people can retain a current character, which would you choose? “But Del, you never really said why time travel is impossible, just that it would kill you. It would still be possible if you didn’t mind dying, right?” I hear nobody asking. I think of actual time travel like this. Time itself is a construct for people to be able to measure the rate of change. The only true time travel would be to return everything in existence to it’s previous state. And you’d still have to move yourself to where you want to end up, hoping you don’t end up with your molecules merging with something else.

I honestly did not know where that saying came from. Thanks for letting me know.

“Think about how dumb the average person is, then realize that by definition half of the population is dumber than that.” - George Carlin

Depending on how expensive the upkeep for an island ends up being, land owners may find that they’re the ones doing most of the work. If there are taxes, the land owner has to balance maintenance with keeping the settlers satisfied. Setting taxes too high makes the upkeep easier, but then settlers are more likely to move on after building a ship, or harvesting resources at a nearby island with lower taxes. Land owners will also be responsible for patrolling the island to clear out any structures that negatively impact the island. What causes a negative impact is at their discretion, but if they want help paying the upkeep they need to work with the settlers. I also decided to change how I refer to each party. Instead of landlords and tenants, land owners and settlers seems more fitting. Landlords and tenants implies some kind of formal, contractual agreement, which I doubt there will be mechanics to support. And some people see the landlord/tenant relationship in some kind of negative way.

Thank you very much for putting this together, Jean. Kat and I had a great time, despite her dying to a tentacle slap right after it started. Being able to do the fight, and win, before the wipe was great

I saw this thread and my first thought was “I wonder if anybody else is having trouble with forest green.” I swear I used it a while back and it worked, but maybe not. I guess I’m somewhat glad it’s not just me? That’s a beautiful looking harbour you’ve built. I was really disappointed to find that the light colours don’t show up on the ships. I was looking forward to a white ship with green trim. I haven’t gotten to the point of painting buildings, mostly because it took so long for us to get land to actually build on, so I can’t comment on that. I’m looking forward to them eventually improving the paints. I don’t think that’s a really big priority at the moment though.

I agree, one week is not enough time to see the full impact of the claim changes. I think the dilemma they’re facing though is do they want to do the full testing on the PTR and delay the wipe for the live servers, or do a quick test on the PTR for any immediate game breaking issues and get it on live ASAP. I think that announcing the wipe as early as they did is a double-edged sword; they gave players plenty of notice so that they don’t feel like they’ve wasted time when it happens, but they’ve also given themselves a very firm, if not outright hard deadline on when the patch needs to go live to retain players.

True enough. I had originally thought of it as an instanced island. But, I believe that the same issues would still exist with instanced grids. On an instanced island, many would likely pick the same spot to build a base as that would be an ideal location. Even if there are four or five of these spots, you’re still going to have a smaller section where each point would most commonly come out of. If they took the freeport servers and converted each to a set of islands, you do increase the number of points of entry/exit some, but people would still most likely establish the same sea lanes from those maps to get to neighbouring or distant lands. Wind changes could shift these points, depending on how people deal with sailing against the wind, but there would still be the same sea lanes being used. And you’re also concentrating the entire population into these servers, which would drastically increase the likelihood of accidental collisions. Even in PvE, it’s possible to lose a ship to these accidental collisions. You also get an opportunity for griefing by having spots where a griefer can park a small fleet of boats for people to run into. What happens when your schooner or brig crosses a border directly into a wall of galleons? I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’ll test that this weekend. Another thought; how many server resources do these instances use? If an entire map grid is used as an instance, does that not require each instance to be its own server? Should they have a dedicated server for each company, including solo players, when everybody pays a onetime fee of $20 to $60? I think this is probably why my mind went to an instanced island at first. I don’t think there is a solution that everybody will approve of. But, hopefully these discussions will help the developers come to a solution that is at least acceptable to most of the players.

I thought about instanced islands, but there is a rather large issue to deal with; collision detection when entering and exiting the instance. It would be like crossing between grids, but with everybody trying to cross at the same point. You also lose out on seeing other people’s creations. Every island that you arrive at is almost devoid of life, except other players who happen to be there at the same time and do not have a private instance on that island. The world would feel even more empty than it currently does, because you’ll never see or talk to anybody, except for perhaps in passing. At least now you can wonder if people are still there. The game that came to mind for me with that description is No Man’s Sky when it first came out. Massive world where you would never meet anybody else, other than a “player x named this planet y” message. (I’m not trying to hate on No Man’s Sky, I actually enjoyed it at launch)

I can confirm the hydra’s location in C6 is where Caermortuus gave. We found it there on Saturday morning, and when we helped another group afterwards, it was in the canyons just north of that peak. And people are still sailing and adventuring because they enjoy it, regardless of the impending wipe. We’re learning how to do things we hadn’t tried before just because it doesn’t matter if we lose anything or everything. We’ve also taken on a pet project, literally, of trying to rescue all of the abandoned pets we come across. *insert In the Arms of an Angel music here*

I know it’s getting a bit late in the game for suggestions, but what if instead of claiming an entire island, each island was broken into set territories that are individually claimable? Give the owner of each territory the ability to decide if others can build in that claim or not. It would be a kind of hybrid system between the original claim flags, and the new claim system. Large companies could claim entire islands, but smaller companies can have their own piece of land as well.

I’ve thought a fair bit about this, and this is what I’ve come up with: I want a place for us to be able to play and build as we want. With what they’re currently talking about, it sounds like that means we’ll need to claim a whole island. This one claim per island may be a good or bad idea. It will depend on the players to take it in the direction thy want. I tend to view the PvE servers as cooperative, instead of competitive, so that’s how I see us playing. To that end, we’ll be looking for a small island to claim. We’ll have our own section for ourselves, a public harbour with open crafting tables, and probably a community garden. Anybody will be welcome to build on our island, with the only rules being to not build on resource spawns, and don’t grief your neighbours. I’m picturing it being like a moderated lawless island. I don’t want to rule over anybody else, but I also don’t want anybody else to rule over us. I think most players would agree.

I would appreciate it greatly if they posted the same info on the forums as they do on Twitter. Even in a locked thread just for them. It doesn’t take that much time to do both. I avoid social media, and I’m reasonably confident that I’m not the only one. Thank you for posting the tweets here.

Or should that be apocalypi? I’ve long expected there to be server wipes. If for no other reason, large changes in mechanics may force these wipes. But, there is also the addition of land masses, similar to what we’re getting with the underwater trench. What I’m thinking of though is the addition of island types. We all know that a lot of the islands right now are just cookie cutter islands. I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess that they intend to replace some, if not several, of these current islands with completely new islands. Also, you’ve probably seen that all of the artifact caves are identical, and not very long. Much shorter than the caves in ARK. This may be due to a technical limitation of Atlas, as the caves in ARK are somewhat separate from the main map, but they could also just be placeholders. Just some more food for thought.

Well now you’re just talking crazy. Nobody would eat a fruitcake.

We do have creatures considered to be mythical in our world, so the possibility of demons existing is entirely possible. I propose that we call these theoretical demons edge demons, since they exist only at the outer borders, or edges, of the world.

You may actually need three different worlds, flattened, in a triangle shape with the east-west borders touching. Travelling from north to south would be swapping positions between the inner and outer faces, and east-west would be changing to the next face. This means that there are a total of six different versions of you at any one time, doing the exact same thing, with no knowledge of the others existences. Very interesting.