Tobias

This game has declined ever since they initially changed claims and added subs...its all downhill from here folks.

Do not like the new claim system at all...may as well get rid of claims period and just have no flags and no settlements...I think the current claim system actually DOES work, the problem is you guys never removed legacy flags under a different rule set. I had neighbors with overlapped flags, 3-4 in the same area as one should be, I couldn't do that because the new ruleset assigned to my flag prevented me from placing a new flag within that flag's claim area. If you had done a simple wipe and restricted claim flags to 1 per person that would have been enough to solve those issues. Like usual though, you overcompensated and made it overly complex to solve a simple problem, you guys actually somehow managed to make your game worse which I didn't think was possible...what a shame.

@Jatheish 1 flag per island to have a settlement? pft in that case just get rid of the claim system altogether, if you are going to ax it that badly. I am not a big fan of the upkeep cost system either. I mean upkeep methods in other games do not seem to work all that well anyway. The purpose of such a system is to make sure active players are playing, now I can log on once a month, load it up and piss off the rest of the month or I can just sit by offline and come on just as a decay timer just about runs out, the point is that it solves nothing. All it does is increase the demand on resources turning a game that is essentially a sandbox into a rule-based grind fest. There really isn't a solution to the pillar spam problem other than the current claim system. The only thing bad about the current claim system is the fact that there are flags out there under 10 different iteration rulesets which break any future flags. I have neighbors who have flags overlapping 10 in the same area my one takes up. Yet I can not place a flag inside my area to extend out toward a bit of free space because it overlaps my own claim and is too close to my flag...that would be the current and new iteration of the flags whereas my neighbor's flags were put down 5 patches before that when you didn't have that pesky min distance rule on flags. Doing a server wipe, restricting claims to 1 per person and leaving everything else the way it is is more than sufficient to fix the problem. I am honestly not even sure I want to play anymore past this release because it completely destroys the intent of the game which is basically a sandbox...now its like a jail cell...no thanks guess Ill find something else to play. Good job, I didn't think you guys could make your game worse but you lot certainly succeeded.

Once again the devs overreacting to a real issue instead of fixing the underlying problem. The problem has always been bodies that are offline for extended periods to permanently. NOT people who are offline a few days to a week. Here is the overreacting part of things, when you prevent sleeping contesting, it kind of makes the notion of killing the sleeping bodies pointless. Why bother killing them off if they pose no threat to taking a claim anyway? Pick one or the other, NOT both. The way it SHOULD be is anyone who fails to log in for 4 weeks gets killed off; HOWEVER, sleeping bodies should still be able to contest, just not take a claim. The abuse here is someone throwing up a flag to take a claim and then proceeding to drag their company mates sleeping bodies or alts into the claim and let the sleepers take the claim while the one initiating the challenge takes off and does other things. So in that regard, to take a claim should require an online character, but the upkeep timer should always refresh if a sleeping company member is in the claim. As a side note, the 4 week timer is broken, bugged, or misquoted because we have company members who died sleeping for just 2 days.

Actually, it isn't...everyone expects GM/dev action when the only way to deal with griefers is to grief them back. I had a claim that was only one person in it. They were part of an alliance but had not been active for 3 weeks. I could have taken their claim but they were asleep on board their ship. So what do I do? I overload their ship, sink it, and kill them. Now I throw up my flag. Alliance leader comes over, who owns half the claims on the island mind you and I guess feels like a super cop, and tells me if I start sinking ships of their allies that we are going to have a problem. Ok, want to come to sink my ship by overloading it? Fine, I will go on a shipbuilding hiatus and sink 2 ships of your for every 1 of mine you do. He paused and asked why we did it, I explained to get rid of a 3 week corpse so I could take the land, he kindly pissed off. Stop asking devs to deal with problems for you, stop asking them to remove ways to deal with them and just to deal with them. See someone throwing up pillars, slap a damn buoy near them warning ships passing by. Blockade their coastal claims with a shit ton of sloops...grief them back too. It is the response they don't expect and usually will end up getting bored and quit playing. The more you complain about them and beg for change the more you enable them to keep doing what they are doing.

Ok, first of all, I take reviews given by gaming sites like this with a grain of salt...they are typically written by overly enthusiastic former or current gamers who like to compare shit to make their articles look good. Secondly, other sites tend to "borrow" those concepts in order to pass the word around...especially the less known sites who essentially rewrite it in their own words but keep the idea in order to get clicks on google searches. Given how successful sales were in ARK despite its bad earlier dev track record, I would expect the company to liken it more to that game than EVE in a press release. PC Gamer and sites like it writing articles like this operate 80% on gossip and 20% on fact. They like to insinuate to gain readers but keep just enough facts in to hook said readers.

I might remind you that even Blizz tried that shit and STILL has issues with server capacity. AQ40 opening anyone? How about the myriad of other wow server issues that crop up from too many people in a single server location. Even eve online had that issue for yearrrrss until they implemented TiDI so you can play the game at 1/10th speed >.> that being said this game's devs are painting a larger futuristic goal to achieve, and to expect a 500 man battle at sea or on an island is a bit unreasonable on your part for a game less than a year old still in EA status. I am not saying don't complain about the issues, because that's how problems get solved when awareness is brought forward, but this whole forum teeters on the brink of excessive complaining out of getting butthurt over being oversold on a game that let's face it is in its infancy in development. A lot of people expected a triple-A title release stability and that expectation left them feeling pissed and frustrated.

I have played EVE since 2009 and enjoy it still...I am also very much confused as to what the hell you are talking about...I have seen absolutely zero marketing as an "eve competitor" the little I have seen of ads and marketing has portrayed the game as a pvp heavier version of ark using weapons and ships instead of animals to combat with...that isnt AT ALL like eve. Sounds like you had some corp mates in eve mis-sell you on the game...which isn't a surprise you should NEVER trust anyone in eve, not even your own corp. Still not sure about the references and marketing you are talking about though, I think you got a bit confused or something. I mean OGame is closer to eve than this game...

CDs are often used in MMOs to prevent split second on the fly weapon changes which affect pvp outcome. While some say it should only affect weapons and not tools, that too is part of the pvp system. If someone catches you off guard, you have to react and the penalty for being caught off guard is waiting for the change out. Timers are a minor annoyance but I understand their purpose. As for mini-games, those are something that affects the efficiency of the task you are doing. Want to get more water out of the ground, play the game...want to reload faster or repair faster, play the game. If you want to sit there and not engage in the system and reload without it, well that's entirely up to you...you be you and continue to be inefficient; however, the rest of us will attempt it. Those aren't even annoying, although it sounds like you are just bad at them.

You are both wrong and right, it depends on the ship's purpose. An empty cargo ship can sail faster than a cruise ship only because it HAS to have that much engine power to haul all that weight in a reasonable time period. However, loaded down it will be the slowest ship on the seas. That aside, the larger ships do not sail faster....the just cover more water at a faster rate. Yet a speed boat can still outrun anything 300 x its size. Larger vs small is irrelevant, it all depends on purpose and enginers on board.

Nah, SoDs can be easily seen, as can Whale tails and waterspouts...whirlpools are a bit harder to see since they blend in well with the ocean. You would have little to no reaction time in avoiding them for having to be right up on them whereas a SoD or Spout I can see halfway across the region.

Honestly, if they wanted metal in the structure...they should introduce a new tier of building so you have Thatch<Wood<Stone<Metal...seemed to work well in Ark, why not here too?

Shouldn't the fact that an increased rate of players are moving to private servers (which can be modded to negate the age debuff) be a clue as to further prove the OP's analysis true?

I have heard rumor that they are currently looking at a redesign of the claim system, I suspect when that gets implemented we will see a server wipe to remove legacy flags that do not comply with the new format. In fact, that is part of the problem now. I have a good 1/10 of island that can be claimed, but I can't claim it because their neighbors have overlapped and no matter where in their claim they are, it renders ALL flags as contested...thats the old system when you COULD put flags in your claim and thus overlap them. The new system won't let you do it, it will tell you that you are too close to your own flag, just as the new format won't let you overlap into other's claims anymore either so we have a crap ton of land out there that can't be used because of two conflicting claim systems. Honestly for any claim system to work there are a few stipulations that will need to be made and changes to ensure great use out of it. A) Claim limit of 1/person - players have been screaming up and down about this some for and some against; however, in a game that has extremely limited land available and on servers where pvp isn't an option, you have to have a way to prevent artificial land grabbing. B) Can not place claim flag inside your own claim area, this would prevent overlaps and currently is how it is implemented anyway. C) Sleeping Dead - There should be counters to dealing with people who have quit the game but logged out in their claim. You can't take the claim because they are in it, we don't want to kill off claim sleepers either to protect offline. Sooo create a timer at the end of upkeep, once that timer has expired...say an hour, any sleeping bodies in the claim get killed and forces a respawn to allow the claim to be contested. D) Driveby Claim Interruptions - Seriously, this is probably the most frustrating part in taking a claim. Having it paused by thrid party players who are just casually passing through the claim to get from point A to B. The claim becomes contested and pauses, once they leave it resumes IF no one is in the claim for 30 seconds. If they enter at 5 seconds it pauses and resets the 30 second timer. This can cause a 4 hour claim process to turn into 12 hours just from people gathering and running by. Therefore I think it would make sense to also add a 30 second contest timer. If a third party player or anyone for that matter outside comp and alliance enters the claim, they have 30 seconds to leave the claim, failure to do so will contest and pause the capture. This makes sense as the owner isn't likely to just be running through. 30 seconds is plenty of time for them to get in and out. The capture time will run as normal until the 30 seconds has expired then it will pause. If a player triggers the timer, then leaves the claim at say 12 seconds. It resets the timer and stays that way until someone enters again restarting it. This will eliminate the majority of capture frustrations.

Honestly, I have yet to see a single Alpha since the change, I used to see 10-12 of them a day. I am glad that got nerfed. Have you considered mounting canons? I can't imagine an alpha lasting long against canon fire lol

what they should have done was implement two sets of timers, decay-demo for building in a build all claim area, this would be the first timer type and would refresh when the builder entered the claim to ensure they stay active. The second should have been a one time eviction timer that begins the moment any company sets their flags to company build only. This would be a 7 day timer that can NOT be refreshed. This would give adequate time for squatters to build a ship and load it with their stuff, or even to find other locations to build without losing their stuff. At the end of the 7 day timer any remaining objects would flip owner to the company owning the claim.

The point is you should not need tips, tricks and workarounds to enjoy a basic function in the game. Saps have the lowest stack size in the game and not a single person has offered any logical argument as to why. The stack size needs changed period. It isn't like it's asking for an entire line of code to be written or changed, its a single number on every sap item 20 to 500. I have no complaints about hunting for sap...thats the nature of the game, but the stack size needs beefing up as does the loot from the sap. You can go knock down a maple tree and get anywhere from 10-15 syrup; meanwhile, back at the base of say a 5 x 6 house you plan to build you would need around 600 sap to build just the floor alone. That means knocking down about 60 maple trees and as far as I can tell there are usually only about 5-10 per island which of course means visiting about 6 islands....and that's just for the floor, not to mention the walls, door, ceiling...and to beat it all you are competing against others needing that same low rate resource. It's too damned high. The craziest thing is the disparity between stone building versus wood and thatch. Both wood and thatch are made from commonly found items in simple formulas, stone...lets tack on other stuff. What is happening here is devs are looking for a use for organic paste since flaming arrows went the way of the ARK Dodo. Now that those arrows are basically useless no one needs organic paste for them...which is fine, adding a use for paste to have a purpose is ok, but it needs toning down. I would say about 2-3 for building pieces and stuff like pipes set to 1.

That isn't a rational reason to leave stack sizes at 20 though and it still doesn't address the low loot issues.

The largest issue I see is in stack sizing. Saps only stack up to 20, there are 45 slots in a large storage box so at most you can fill it up with 900 sap which doesn't last all that long. Take a water pipe, for instance, it requires 10 per meaning if you did a simple 6 piece garden layout you would eat up 60 saps. Not to mention their drop rates are abysmally low. If saps are going to be a cornerstone for stone pieces, there needs to be a loot increase of 5x and a stack size increase to 500. If not, then requirements should be diminished by 80%

I don't mind the difficulty of it...the part that gets me is the time sink. I mean if you develop a feature that basically requires you to sit in a stationary spot for a period of time, and then sit in same spot again immediately following to feed infants...that is just insanity at its best. I mean Taming I can understand, there is only one stage and it takes X amount of time. You don't get much downtime in taming and when you do take too much it only reverses the taming process unlike breeding which results in the death of the infant and fighting a CD on breeding again. The gestation period on a bear for instance in 4 hrs and I think its 12 on horses. So if you want to breed a horse you better hope its a day you are off from work and a day you dont expect to do anything else in the game. Its too big a time sink to invest into, especially when the animal will die so easily to an alpha or clipping anyway. Its far more efficient to just tame low level animals and go from there. There needs to be a buffer period in temps to contend with sudden temp extremities and breeding times have got to go down by 300% because they are just way to damn long.

I agree, this should be a unique crafted item that is part of the ship building tree basic skills so as to not add another skill, but incorporate it into an already existing one. Also, it should have an independent flag painting ID unlike the claim flags which all share one, this way you can customize on a ship by ship basis.

You are looking at it from a pvp perspective though...you can't exactly raid it on a pve server, about the only thing you can do is drop weight on ships till they break then raid the ship, but claims aren't on ships anyway. Claims are basically a system that allows territory to be owned, used, and built upon without someone building up in a spot nearby that you want to expand into. Ark didnt exactly solve that issue for pve servers, I mean it brought in clan wars, but honestly, who needed to go to war over land? There are no claim systems in there. Given how they have reiterated claims and even allowed building permission to be set to all, company, or ally...I think they will keep the claim system in. Which is ok, but they need an overhaul to make it functional, the ideas I listed above provides those answers. Claims are a way for pve players to engage in a sliver of territorial war without actually going to war. When you consider the nature of piracy, it makes sense from a themed perspective and it makes sense on pve servers...it just needs a few big changes to make it feasible and honestly I'd prefer they make those changes then out right gut it which lessens the complexity of the game giving you a carbon copy of ark. The point of Atlas was to differentiate itself from ARK, NOT to bring itself closer to it.

Except taxing those consumingthe resources within your build area, as well as guaranteed space a bit around where you are building to expand without someone else building there...there are good aspects of the claim system, it is just out of balance ATM. For instance, you should be able to choose between a small, medium and large claim area to be able to negotiate the pockets of empty land that can't be claimed. Some companies may be ok with a small claim and go for it while others may want a larger spot and pass it up. It would better utilize the land. Also, one of the aspects that kills me ATM is the constant contesting. We had people running through the other day contesting, not because they wanted to, but because they were simply passing through. But nevertheless it paused for the duration of their passage plus 30seconds. If someone else passed through in those 30seconds they reset. Essentially it took us an hour to go down 2 minutes and even then at one point we were under 2 hrs and the timer reversed and when the person left, 15 min was added on, I guess because they were all allies. The better solution would be to apply a 30 sec buffer to pausing the timer as well. In this instance, person A is passing through the claim in question, the flag will still capture as normal for 30 seconds, if the individual is still in the claim it paused it, and once they leave resumes it after 30 seconds. If however they don't stop and are just passing through, the timer never stops. The point of pausing during contesting is someone defending their claim by standing still in the claim, not to allow travelers to inadvertently pause the process. I mean if the attacker has to suffer a 30sec timer to resume, there should be one on the defender side as well. This would eliminate a lot of wasted time taking claims Imo. Secondly, as I pointed out in an earlier post. ALL flags should receive a decay-demolish timer at the end of their upkeep, not the claim, but the flag itself. If you do not keep upkeep on the flag, it begins a 3 Day timer toward decay-demolish. If you are not active during that 3 day window, at the end, it will demolish your flag and force kill the sleeping occupants to force a respawn and allow the land to be cleared away for others to claim. The claim system is a nice idea, it just needs some work. Finally, as much as people hate this idea, claims should be limited to 1 per person. If you need more area than a standard claim size as an individual, you are wasting land anyway. Notice I didn't say company, thus allowing larger companies to have more space.

Gold coins weigh a lot to impart the literal weight of money. It is a method by which to prevent you carrying tons and tons of coin around. From a realistic standpoint you aren't likely the be hauling 1k gold coins around. Since they chose a weight system for personal inventory instead of a limited slot system, it allows control on how much you can carry. Thus forcing you to think about what you carry to treasure hunt with.

If that were the case there should only be a single alpha in the entire region at any given time and must wait 7 game days to have a chance to spawn another...