Elrood

1 hour ago, MegabitTV_WrecknBall said:

This, you fucking idiots.

 

Critical thinking is your best friend

Well, then, please share with everyone where you have yours, locked as you say and see how long it will take before someone glitch through walls or doors and play havoc with your "crap locked up in your houses etc behind locked doors". 

Adding lock to stuff on PvE would shortstop quite a lot of other problems we have and should be easier than fixing all the bugs around it.

11 minutes ago, Psykonalle said:

3 claims is pretty safe to have, especially if you're more than one. I don't see any reason why any tribe would need upkeep on an area more than 10 claims on a PvE server. Keep in mind: this is just about PvE, not PvP.

Do you know how big one claim really is? 

I have right now 2 sea claims and 3 standard claims. 2 standard claims are inside one of sea claim. So I have terrain from 2 sea claims and one standard claim. I would say I know how big the claim is. 

Now with 3 standard claims and existng neighbour I probably could find a place where I could put sea claim in your neighbour (inactive or griefed) territory where this sea claim could overlap your base or shipyard or whatever. This means we have a problem with current system already.

Now, lets say this fixed. I still have many claims - 5 so according to your rules I would need to reduce and optimize. I actually need this 3 flags to be able to live without problems with space and putting buildings without removing semi rare resources form our island... So I would have 1 day of protection. And my company have like 3 people. And because we are friends in RL and we have similar schedule in RL, assuming that everyday one of us can login is actually bordering certainty that there will be gaps. Even if for most of the year we will be active every day for at least few hours. 

There are two more people with the same problem as me on my island alone and i'm aware about few other small companies holding 3-5 claims which imho they need to be able to play without restricting content for themselves. 

On 1/4/2019 at 12:01 PM, Psykonalle said:

As I've understood, the contesting timer for flag claims decreases as the total amount of flags increases. Is this accurate, and is there a table showing the rate of the decrease?

My main concern is if the timer decrease is steep enough?

If you only have one claim, the contesting timer will be 3 days. Do we know what the timer is if you have 10 claims? Without knowing what the decreasing rate is, I'd expect something like this:

1 flag: 3 days
2 flags: 2 days
3 flags: 1 day
4 flags: 12 hours
5 flags: 5 hours
...
10 flags: 9 minutes

This would encourage people not to have more claims than they can manage. It would allow bigger tribes to own larger pieces of lands, as well as the  9-5 worker to safely play on PvE with 1-2 claims. That being said, if you have people online around the clock, your territory should be safe. At the same time territory griefing would be eliminated, as you wouldn't want to risk your stuff being taken over in just a few minutes. Also, people wouldn't be directly denied owning more territory.

Comments? Ideas? Flaws?

This idea in any case is way too step. Depending on terrain you may need 3 claims to even be able to put shipyard and build base secure enough to have animals. 
You will kill big companies (lack of space for them), small companies (lack of people to protect few claims) and solo players at the same time. Only few hundred people with around the clock online guilds (with good organization) could survive and thrive. Everyone else would be evicted in no time and with current overlapping off the claims it would be nightmare for everyone -  no way to make a buffer around your base.... 
Every one else would be locked to one or two claims. 
I would agree to go with logarithmic system, but with downside of <24h from 10+ claims, not from 3 flags.... 

15 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

 So many players are reporting buggy claims, where people are able to steal them while they are actually still active on them.  I don't want to be the person that does that, so I haven't been even trying to get a claim right now.  If they ever get the bugs out of the claims, then yeah, renting some land and watching the area for lapsed claims might be an idea, although I figure the ones next to that lapsed claim would already have their eye on it.  They really need to limit the number of claims per person/company for pve.

 They've got a big decision to make about pvp/pve at some point.  Some of the mechanics they seem to really want for pvp don't work at all for pve.  SO are they going to try to keep them the same or let them diverge?

Well, yeah, I can understand your point of view - I hope i claimed fair and square (minus the guy who glitched in and put half of his claim in main - this one i removed asap) - yet tone of people are saying "its not possible" while imho it certainly is possible cause i did it successfully. You won't get prime spots this way - those are guarded, but you can get a spot. This way i started actually  . 

Well, yeah, they need to split mechanics between pve and pvp for both to work well... And i'm really curious if they will go this route. 

6 minutes ago, JackTheWack said:

With my 8th raft starts now , best way i found start in a freeport thats in the temperate zone craft bed/raft/locker . Head to lawless farm for syrup to make fur clothes and head to tundra . Every other place is claimed. Even then ive had my base stolen 2 times in the 190hr ive played , 1ns before the 3 day protection 1 after it and i even refreshed my flag before logging out base was taken over in just 8 hr .... Love these guys that are doing 0 work running around all over the place finding bases that are bugged and they could claim and demolish for materials....

 They should really change it so others cant demolish a building they havnt built even if they claimed it . And have it decay in like 2 days w/o leaving any materials behind if it wasnt demolished or reclaimed by the creator.

That would result in resources being blocked two days longer. I've claimed and demolished two buildings on my part of island which were build on or near spots with semi rare materials... So yeah, what you propose have drawbacks too

6 minutes ago, psykikk said:

in any profit oriented industry (as you of course know) you hire the right people with the right skillset.if you can get your hands on people that are better or will improve your workflow, you do it. they got the money. not dong so would be stupid. 

of course not every (technical) problem can be solved by just throwing manpower at it. I never said that, and the "trivia quote" is most often nothing more than a mockery from people not knowing anythign about proper project management. you might also know the quote "if you think a project manager manages projects, you might as well think that butterflies are flies made up of butter". 

well , sorry to wake you up: proper project management works , has been used for decades and helps you to tackle much more complex scenarios than developing a computer game. 

and while ther might be overlaps in skills in some areas (modeling and game physics, network an server performance) I can almost guarantee you that the guys setting up and finetuning servers are never ever the same guys (or better put,  shouldn´t be) worrying about coding. like I said: if zthose are the same guys, you will never get Grade A servers and never get Grade A coding. because being really, really good, requires specialisation. 

As a part of IT industry i can tell you that - project management in this industry has no idea what it is doing in general. They are fiddling in dark looking at what works and what is not working. Mostly the second. 

Edit: about fine tunning - actually both sys-admins, network guys and programmers should be involved. Admins can do a lot, you are completely right, but programmers also need to optimize code - and this is usually empiric based - so they see what is bottle-necking and fix it, see what is the next bottleneck and so on. 

Just now, Winter Thorne said:

 

Claim issues ARE big, and as you say, they've made some changes.  None of the changes have worked properly.  They've been buggy.  Sure, it's very possible to fix something and cause an unexpected bug in another part of the game, but to put out a fix for something, where the fix itself doesn't even work right means no one is testing this.  They are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.  Why do I say the claims direction is stupid before it's even tested by us?  Because

2 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

  

Claim issues ARE big, and as you say, they've made some changes.  None of the changes have worked properly.  They've been buggy.  Sure, it's very possible to fix something and cause an unexpected bug in another part of the game, but to put out a fix for something, where the fix itself doesn't even work right means no one is testing this.  They are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.  Why do I say the claims direction is stupid before it's even tested by us?  Because I'm talking about the design of it.    These guys all sit around a table or conference about this stuff, and decide how they want it to be, and this is what they decided.

 1.  To provide a claim system on a pve server where people can claim unlimited land on day 1,  no new players after day 5 will have any land to claim....ever.  Who will buy that game after a month, with no possible claims?   If you make a system designed for "haves" and "have nots", nobody is going to be happy being a permanent "have not". 

2. To design it so the landowners can allow other people to join their company and build there, then let the company kick them out and take all their stuff.  Did they imagine those people would be happy about that?

3.  To try to make those people happy not by finding some way for them to own land, but by allowing them to "rent" land from one of the people who grabbed it all at the beginning.  They have to pay taxes to keep it, but on pve they get nothing for their taxes.  They don't need protection, like on pvp.  So there you go...some other guy got here first, and now the best you can do is pay him for a little spot.  (And it's possible he can still kick you out of there and keep all your stuff)  Who will want to pay for a game where that's the best they can have?

Very bad design decisions, and they don't need us to "test" this to know that's true.  All you have to do is imagine you just heard of the game on Feb. 1st and you're looking to see if you want to buy it.    Doesn't live up to the promise of what the game is supposed to be:

 

Stake your claim in this endless open world as you conquer territory, construct ships, search for buried treasure, assemble forts, plunder settlements and hire crew to join your powerful growing armada. Start small then expand your spheres of influence from a small island, up to an unstoppable pirate empire that spans across the oceans. 

 Rent your claim from an overlord who was here from day 1, in this endless open world as you don't get to conquer territory, construct ships, which your company will steal........... Start small then stay small an you cannot expand your spheres of influence from a small island, up to an unstoppable pirate empire that spans across the oceans.   Because someone else got there first.

  

 

Add 1. I actually expanded my claims two days ago... So yeah, its possible. I know I will be opening some land after the patch. If players will be able to build even temporary base they will have much bigger chance to find their own claims - mostly because by living on the island i'm aware on which territory to look when i want to expand/claim. its kind of visible who stopped playing. 

Add 2. Yeah, that could be a problem. Will see how this works. Again, I will actually want to see how this whole stuff works cause everything I have right now is a paragraph in patch notes without much details. 

Add 3 - look at add 1 - its easier to find spot (and expand) if you are on the map more than an hour or two because you are aware which claims are running off and which are constantly active. 

But again - before i see how it works i will wait with opinion on it.

 

Just now, psykikk said:

if netcode coders and network designers, hardware and server adming etc are the same ones that look into balancing and clipping issues, model and map designs, you have serious problem on your hands because those skillsets are not even remotely the same. 

 if they were only 4 guys doing this, I would totally agree. they are not. they made enough money already to hire enough people to work on multiple fronts at the same time. 

 

As example, imho client app and server coders are needed for CDT crashes and map clipping issues so yeah, it overlap. Skill trees, number balancing nope - but instead need a lot more testing   
As for hiring - sorry, but this is wrong mentality. "12 mothers will not make a child in 1 month. 12 developers will not solve stuff 12 times faster than 1." This has become a trivia quote in industry but its close enough to truth. 
And bringing new people to existing project is always a pain. In simpler projects (than most games) it can take weeks and months before people can work reliably without supervision from old hands. And mmo are even harder to work on than most games. New project learning's curves can and often are more step than dwarf fortress for new player  
In short - if they hired a lot of people, for weeks we would not see any tangible result of such hiring. This is not my opinion, rather general consensus between people in industry. As for how viable such hires would be in long run (EA teams generally are downgraded in terms of manpower in gaming industry), thats another topic. And please remember than bulk of sails just went and they won't see big payback for years (probably until release of DLC or game). 
IMHO you made a couple of assumptions in this few short sentences that are false.

7 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

That's kinda silly.  They know the pin codes are being hacked.  (What pirate uses pin codes anyway??)  They could easily just make all containers locked on creation, but they don't.  How does this provide them any more useful information by letting it continue?  They know that people can sink boats with weight, and they know exactly how this is done.  How does not fixing this help anyone?

Sure, if they want a tame "griefer force" to find all the ways to grief, let them delay banning them till they're done with them.  But I seriously doubt that's what's happening.  If they were that sophisticated in their approach, we'd be seeing fixes for the griefing bugs already found that are causing players to quit and affecting new game sales.

At this point I'm just thinking these guys are not the sharpest knives in the block.  They are obviously making changes to claims, but every new change is also bugged, and the direction they're going for "renting land" on pve is just stupid.  It's almost like they don't want anyone to be buying this game 3 months from now.

I think you are overestimating how many things they can work in parallel.
Look at what they are patching the most - server performance in every patch and CDT fixes. A lot of balancing too but imho most of the balancing stuff they did could be done by non-coders and it looks like to me at least that their coders works on application and server stability as priority. 

Again, this is only my opinion, but I think that after they have that under control, griefing could be next on the list. 

Beside, claim issue is probably bigger than griefing because it affect every new player and at least they are doing something in this direction. 
Add to it how complex this systems get and that most "fixes" people propose has gaping holes in them - mostly because said people does not care about other who play the game differently then them. 
Than there is probably a bottleneck of only few peoples who have to agree to any mechanics changes - which add time to big remakes of multiple stuff. Still reasonable if one don't want total chaos in a project. 

As for introducing new bugs.... The speed with which they are patching stuff there has to be bugs. They don't have enough time to test it fully - no way to do it in those time frames. I don't mind cause worse issues are fixed quicker, but this is up to preferences. Imho either one or two patches a month and no new bugs (some will happen, but in much smaller number than now) or what we have right now? That is probably the choice and they already made it.

Now, I'm not sure why you say that direction with claims is stupid BEFORE its even tested by us, but hey... Maybe you are right even? I will wait and see before deciding  

As for sales - sorry, but this point for me is moot with current reviews - i highly doubt there is anything that can lower sales even more.... 

Crap... Good to know, good to know.

1 minute ago, psykikk said:

 good for you mate. I envy you. 
it really might be more rare than it feels. i gues if you live in the right areas (away from griefers) you seem to be doing ok. 
 but the fact that its even possible (in PVE nonetheless) and we dont have any official response or acknowledgement about it is very concerning. 

Actually i'm not worried. Devs didn't acknowledge anything officially, but stuff is being fixed all the time - and truth be told crashes, CDT and performance issues imho are more important than grefing at the moment. 

I will start to get worried when I will see completely new features introduced way before ixing this mess with PvE. 

Also in other topic I saw (and i think you too) info that they are aware and thinking about the solution. 

3 minutes ago, psykikk said:

its always a problem nowadays with the "vocal minority".. I agree. it might be very true that real incidents , co,mpared to player numbers, is really, really low. 

but ive been griefed, and in my company alone several others haven been as well. 

 in every sector I was in (and I spawned in several freeports to easily check out different biomes), ALL sectors had people with complains and heated discussions about  either weight griefing, or really big, abusive companies. number two topic was always clogged up claims and islands with no place to develop .

  

Truth be told.... Hard to say with griefing. Free port and lawless may be a bit different story than what i see in standard sectors. I wasn't in any of them (excluding brief visits) for a week or so... But living on my own claim i have to say i had peace (excluding some attempts to claim me) of mind for most of the time. 

As for claiming, yes, i agree, its broken like hell, but thats different story.

1 minute ago, Robotukas said:

Ok. When you say things you need think that new players wouldn’t have a clue which freeport is easy to start. It doesn’t say how difficult is that server and they will think that game is too hard or is not finished. And I am sure even wouldn’t come up with idea to change server unless someone will tell to switch to tropical freeport.

Of course the game is not finished. Thats in definition of early access. 

Any player who ever played survival game other than minecraft know that starting in "winter themed" zone is Bad Idea or a challenge run . Completely new player with no experience in the genre will have even more problems than temperature - and yes, I agree it need better communication in that regard. 

2 minutes ago, psykikk said:

like stated in my response I was writing just now: this would be "ok" if they would at least acknowledge thatthey know about the issue. 

 problem with EA is, that if they let people keep doing this for too long, normal people will just not enjoy the game and simply quit.
 what´s left is a community that is slowly dying  or made up of a toxic playerbase.
and when the game is supposedly "finished" (most EA games nowadays are not, they simply call it that and end their work on it and let the modders take over) 

 the game simply wont recover from this. 
ark without private servers with mods would be "pvp", offline rading and megatribes sealclubbing only mode. 

 and this is what Atlas is already turning into as well. The mechanics are the same so the same playerbase is attracted to it. 

Not everyone is raided and griefed in pve. Actually imho most of us is not - but with so big number of active players there is enough voices about griefers that it looks like its big problem. Maybe i'm living in bubble on my little island....? But with policy live and let live I had no problems at all and as far as i know generally people didn't have that problems too. 

There were some stupid turf wars like "you claimed our base we sunk your ship, etc." but usually both parties provoked one another.  

6 minutes ago, Robotukas said:

Did you visit E14? It is tundra with - temperature. And you health is start decrease once you start a game. Make a video how to survive in this freeport island.

Change home server to a sane free port like tropical one? Easiest solution for tundra start? 
Starting in tundra its like saying "i'm new and i want to play successfully on 'very hard' difficulty without knowing the game". 

Here is a note: We are in early access and they are generally fixing the game. 
That means they want griefers to be active now, because every grief they invent can (and probably will) be fixed before full release  Banning them (especially the more creative type) IMHO can be counterproductive during early access. 

Minus is we have to live with them for a time  

5 hours ago, Nari said:

1: Protection. The protection system may or may not be working as intended, we don't know for sure because nothing official has been posted, but as it currently stands the PvE protection system is functional. If you successfully place or steal a claim it will be protected for 3 days (again disregarding bugs/exploits as they should get patched eventually). Before those 3 days pass you must replace your flag to reset upkeep regardless of "activity." Is this intended? Only GS knows.

Sorry to say, but this looks like straight out bug. 3 days from last login i can understand. But redoing flag every 3 day? In even modestly traveled location? This is bullshit, not 10 minutes but few hours + hell lot of problems.

Yeah that. Plus some "holiday friendly" system. Like I can log out and twice the year set my claim to 3 weeks safe period. Or even 2 weeks. But something that will not make me loose all the stuff when I come back form even short trips.