Raine

54 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

My favorite teacher was my US history teacher in hs. She had a razor sharp wit and did not suffer fools gladly. There were 2 things you could do on any paper written for her class to earn an automatic F.  One was to misspell the word separate. The other was to fail to make a lot two separate words, ie alot. To this day I’m pretty sure I’ve never done either of those things just because of the fear of public ridicule in her class.

Godspeed Miss Wells.

Did someone ever float 'irregardless' past her?  To this day, I want to put people in a chokehold when I hear that double negative.

51 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

The teachers who set the bar high, are the ones we remember the most.  We remember them more fondly than the ones who tried to be nice, and not expect much of you.  I think this is because, as we get older, we realize that the ones who set the bar high, are the ones who actually cared about you, while the ones who want to be nice, care more about themselves...thus they sacrifice what's best for you, in order to be liked.

I figure that sounds like a  good parent, too.

Looks like the devs' solution was to give haircuts to anyone over level 100.  No matter how ya got there, you get to keep at least that much. AND a free respec.  So is THIS↓ good enough for you guys?

Plus:  

 - Reduced the maximum and minimum amount of experience which can be earned via execution
- Crafting Bonus on items is now capped at 60% on Official Servers
- Any character which was above level 100 will now be reverted to level 100.
- One time character respec for any character that had their XP reduced back to 100.
- One time destruction of all crafted items with a crafting bonus of over 60% on Official Servers.

Some kind of stone end piece to nicely finish off the sawtoothed end of a fence or wall.  Maybe a post with a finial atop it.  Imagine the devs creating bits of statuary you could buy from Freeports and place on the top of this rounded finial - a miniature hydra, mini gorgon, a springing lion, or other heraldic beasts like dragons, unicorns, basilisks, bats, manticores, mermaids, etc.  More finishing touches to spend your gold on! Who wouldn't want that?  In fact, maybe these finishing pieces could be placed on gun mount posts on ships as well instead of the skulls or lanterns I've seen on them.

Well, that makes map sorting easier.  From now on any map lower than 2.5 quality gets chucked. (I picked up a 0.5 quality map today....I mean, really?!) And I'll keep the 2.5 - 4.5 quality maps only if they're on immediately neighboring islands.   High end Fine or Journeyman quality maps may also get chucked, depending on whether I need to divide the booty amongst a whole squadron of comrades in arms in order to get it.  It may not be worth the time and trouble for a group of people to farm treasure maps together.  Used to be fun and build camaraderie, but I've seen less and less of that with the changes to the gold dynamics.

No responses?  Okay, devs, I'm pretty sure the players at large are pretty clueless about your Skills Tree design when it comes to colored lines and shaded bars.  Would you please add an explanation to the Official Wiki?  Thank you.

I find the -0.0 bug pretty common.  It was a problem before the wipe, and it continues to be a problem.

If you open your Skills tab, you find the skills delineated with various colored lines and some appear with a shaded bar on the left side of the darkened image. The bar can be of varying heights. What do these colors and bars mean?  Some lines are white, some lines are blue and some lines are yellow.  The shaded bar on the left side of the image is always yellow.  I've searched Reddit, official and unofficial wikis, and find no information on these.  They don't seem to be intuitively obvious.

Apologies for not posting a ss to clarify this, as I haven't been able to resize it to an allowable size.

3 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

...and remember kids, if you see it on the internet, it must be true.

Correction.  There are only two Oracles in the world.  Facebook and  Trump.  Not in that order.

7 hours ago, Fae Killgrave said:

I don't feel like you guys have given this a fair shot, we claimed a mid sized island for our group of about 12, people can build here,...I think this system is winning, now if only I could log in to enjoy the game

If you're one of the 1% who own an island, you always think you're winning.  Most will never own an island and are at the mercy of whomever does own it.  It's like PvP in that you can be wiped at any time without warning.  I don't see much difference between the current design and Medieval European social structure.  It doesn't sit well with most contemporary game players.  

Limiting claims to 1 flag per person, with a predetermined claim size does several  things.  It gives the individual player a stake in the game.  It incentivizes players to find like-minded players to team up with and create small groups for a little larger claim.  And cap the number of claims any one tribe can have.  

Alternatively, have certain grids use the new whole-island-claim system and alternate grids use a one-claim-per-player structure.  If I were a developer, I would want to deploy both systems and see what happens.  Would most smaller groups/solo players flock to the one-claim-flag-apiece grids?  Would larger companies grab whole islands and employ a nobility v. vassals social structure?  I don't know, but since this is about Grapeshot testing the development waters for the next year-and-a-half, why not cast the net wide and see what they fish up?

Except when he disagrees with me.  

Boomer is never wrong.  

There aren't enough protections in place.  Why would I want to invest my time and effort into a place where I can be kneecapped at the landlord's whim?

It would make me play a minimalist's game and lose interest very quickly.  Not being a stakeholder by having a claim, makes it easier to toss aside in favor of some other game.

(1) Abusive Ownership.  
    (a) kicks me off property in favor of a friend
   (b) kicks me off property because I won't farm for him, tame for him, breed for him, etc.  After all, he gets to set those rules.
   (c) destroys or takes anything of mine he wants, punitively or just because he wants it

(2) Sets limits on my building or docking of ships.  But think about this - there is no infinite space so there must be some kind of limits, but this is ripe for favoritism too.  I know I wouldn't want to be the landlord.  It's a painful and thankless job.

(3) Would not give me the opportunity to let allies build near me, which I could do if I had my own land.

In my view, there is too much hassle and griefing potential even on PvE to make this iteration of the Claiming system satisfactory for the majority.  I'd vote for our friendly devs to go back to the drawing board on this one.

What about you guys?  Anything else in the claiming system that would break the game for you?

Alright you devs!  Whose brainy idea was it to redesign the appearance of the most beautiful animal in the entire mod so that it now looks like a cross between a zebra and something with Michael Jackson's skin disease?  Ugh.  Please change it back again!  At least something in the mod should be gorgeous even if they're not all that useful.  

On 4/9/2019 at 4:36 AM, travis843 said:

Lmao the course is set to down the drain.

Sounds like you're having a rough time of it with the disappearing ships.  Can't blame you for feeling salty.

After reading the PTR bug reports, I have a strong feeling it will be longer than one week before the 1.5 patch drops.  Seems like there are some major gamebreaking issues they need to overcome.  I know they're working on it, but one week of coding and testing won't fix what's gone wonky.  They're gonna need more time for sure.  

Devs: If the claim's owner destroys a tenant's property, please make sure it's noted as such in the Company's Log.

I understand where you're coming from.  But what does the "E" in ETA stand for?  Estimated.  It's just an estimate.  A guess, based on the information available at the time it was made.  A 'deadline' is not the same thing as an ETA.   As a journalist, I have deadlines to meet or my stories won't make it to press in time.  So if Grapeshot gives us an ETA, it means they are just making their best guess and if unforeseen circumstances push that estimate out further, then que sera, sera.

Oh, and by the way, in case you guys have game development skills both Studio Wildcard and Grapeshot Games are hiring.  

20 hours ago, trev2000 said:

Short answer... its no... its WildCard, never take ther ETA as granted anyways...  "it will be done, when its done" ...

It's not exactly Wildcard, it's Grapeshot Games, but they have to answer to the same owner.  That's the Chinese company Snail Games, last I knew.  As for Ark being done, I think they're still working on it, as you might surmise  if you follow Jen or Captain Cuda on Twitter.  So it's not exactly done yet either.   If Grapeshot wants to delay the ETA of the re-introduction, it probably means they're still making major changes which should result in less aggravation for us....we hope.

To quote Captain Yoda, "Patience you must have, my young padawan." 

Damn, never thought of that!    But yeah, it's *the* most functionally useless artifact in the game.  Unless you can think of something more useless?  Hmm...

What, exactly, do you use this on?  I've tried various animals and it's accepted by none that I know of.  If it's not used even as a decorative prop, let's remove it from the tannery, please.  I thought it might be used as a cosmetic for pigs, which don't require a saddle to be ridden.  However, there's no option to place even a cosmetic no-armor saddle on them.  So Grapeshot guys, what is it for?

Right.  They're dropping patches like confetti at your mother's wedding.  It was v23.2 per the login screen when I posted.  It's now v.24, and they just corrected the Patch Notes thread.   I'm putting my money on v. 24.2 by some time tomorrow afternoon.  

The current version is officially listed as 23.1.  That is inaccurate.  According to the game we're on v.23.2 already.  Please update to reflect actual current version.

C'mon, guys - wilds shouldn't count as crew.   Right now, if a wild seagull or wild parrot lands on your deck, it counts as crew and your ship starts sinking if you're already at your limit.  Or suddenly extra crewmembers cannot bed in to help in a fight or with whaling or getting discovery points because  their places are filled with some random derelict bird alighting on your ship.  I suggest two corrections:

• disallow wilds counting as 'crew' ( <if wild then crew = false>)
• and fwiw, make any wilds count as zero weight until tamed.  That would prevent people from trying to kite heavyweight wilds onto your ship to sink it.  Might be more of a PvP issue, if it's one at all.  Although as Lotus has posted somewhere already, PvE-ers are not above using malicious exploits if it suits their purposes.
 

7 hours ago, Spyrit said:

You can't solo treasure maps, so your leveling will be hindered. You can't solo kracken, power stones and even FoY would be hell.

Solo treasure maps all the time.  Where there's a will, there's a way.   And I also do FoY solo every single time.   Done it about what....five, six times now?  It's not a piece of cake, but it's a LOT better now than it was at first.  No worries, mate.  Solo is peachy keen, it just takes more smarts to .... uh.....git 'er dun.