Raine

I wonder why they used it in the first place. In our case, we actively encouraged use of our claimed resources. It didn't benefit us as much as it allowed others to access the resources easily. Not having it would not have made much difference to us - although in other cases with other Companies, it might have made the difference between a decision to gate off resources or allow access to others, especially on PvP(?)

I'd try it. Seems like a good compromise. Just one alteration, though. Might make the no-build island buildable only for animal traps with a very accelerated decay rate. Like 1-day or even 5-hour decay. Or even a dev-built unlockable permanent trap.

Yes, exploits did create a large exodus. They have been trying to correct those, and some of those corrections created their own special problems. But part of the purpose of a beta game is exactly that, to find the exploits and fix them. As for the wipe, I can understand a limited wipe. If you're changing up the claiming process and you want to see how that works, you need to clear the board and start over. However, I don't agree with wiping the characters. I don't really see the point of that. Is it possible it has to do with Company redesign?

Waterworld. That would be an interesting development for sure.

Perhaps so, but in that case we are talking about a n=1 situation. To be fair, that's the same in my own case or in the case of anyone replying to this thread. We can speak only from our own experience. But the preponderance of n=1 experiences stated on these threads seems more supportive of the claimable experience than of the global lawless experience.

I also said "IF". We also saw tundra and desert with active populations as well. But of the ones with a bit less activity, I'd have to say those were tundra/desert. That might mean the devs could encourage better participation if the desert/tundra areas were changed up a bit. Or some might be changed from desert/tundra to more attractive environments. In concept development, I think Grapeshot devs figured the playerbase would all spawn in to Freeports, radiate from there to Lawless where they could develop their resources and build ships to explore and claim their own properties on claimable islands, leaving Lawless to the next generation of playerbase. In theory, it could work. In practice, it didn't. Lawless rules gave rise to as many problems as claimable islands. Why have Lawless areas at all? With a preset claiming grid, you could make claimable islands work better than they do now and decrease the foundation and pillar spam as well as the griefing it allowed.

That was not our experience. Of the claim islands we visited, there were hearty populations of active players. If there were any exceptions, it was the tundra/polar and desert areas. Those areas are predictably less attractive to people so I wasn't surprised. But no, there were always far more than 1 or 2 players on most claimable islands.

Reskinning is part of their island-making process from what I understand. They have a basic inventory of island shapes and they can add separate mineral and flora features on top of it, as well as rock, pillar and ledge features to customize each. I don't see why they couldn't add a standard hexagonal shape to claim areas, but I'm not a programmer so I can't say how difficult it might be. No doubt it involves a lot of complicated maths but I suspect those formulae have already been developed for GIS applications.

What if the devs reskinned the PvE islands with a honeycomb pattern of claimable spots, visible only when you activated your claim flag? There would be no awkward holes or overlaps, the size of the claims would be immediately visible with the claim flag activation, the number of claims easily countable for determining island's points/status. Hard cap the number of claims per Company or per player using a reasonable metric. The islands aren't flat, so there will be some visual distortion of the honeycomb pattern. Something like this:

But Travis, you get a hat. What's not to like? </sarcasm>

So back to Archsenex's suggestion of limiting each player to a total of five ships. Can we prevent that from being gamed? Do all the ships belong to the player or to the company? Company governance would cover that. If to the Company, then 5 ships per player wouldn't work well. Recruit heavily, retain a large Company roster even if 80% of your players abandoned the game, keep their ships all over your island claims by doing bed hopping rounds every 3 - 4 days. It's also a good way to keep large amounts of claims, since you don't have to correlate those to any kind of an active player base.

Alright, I'll go with awkward phraseology then. So one only needs to enter the render range of ship in order to refresh its timer. No different from the original dynamic on the claim flags on either PvE or PvP.

Hmm. In general I knew this already. But why then did Jat explicitly state the player or company was required to enter the stasis number on any particular ship, if its value is already a known default?

Fast travel should be the only option. Why enter some kind of render distance? Seems unnecessary. Or am I missing something?

Ah...so, if your base is on the opposite side of the island from your ship, all you have to do is input some kind of distance measurement from your base to the other side of the island and you're golden? Somehow, that seems sketchy to me.

↑ That's what's in the newest Captain's Log re ship demo timers. I'm partly cloudy on how the above bit in yellow is supposed to work. We'll probably have to wait for a more detailed explanation from Jat.

You may be right about the 0.01%, but it's all unproven conjecture either way. There may or may not be plenty of coast on which to rebuild; it depends on how the land rush goes, how many people are actively playing, how bases and related structures are built, and most of all, the decay timers on existing ships. As you've experienced, in the present iteration there are far too many rafts and ships of all sizes which are sailed to landfall and then abandoned forever, whether their original owners continued to play or not. I really hope those are given an expiry date for non-use.

You might need to replace a galleon or brig which was destroyed, so without a base a ramshackle sloop (unleveled for weight) might have to hold all parts for the galleon and its superstructure as well as the upgraded (and mat-heavy?) upgraded shipyard. Perhaps it will be possible. We don't know til the devs reveal more of their shipyard revamp. As for the hellscapes, those are real. The most barren one I described was quite pristine when we first built on it at the Break of Atlas's Dawn. Months later, it has become a wasteland barren of all life except inert foundations, pillars and broken structures. That's what will happen globally on PvE over time if all servers become Lawless. Still not convinced lawless is a better choice.

Regarding the 4-hour demolishable shipyard, we've used our existing shipyards multiple times to build replacement ships for those which were destroyed. They're also not a bad place to dock your ship, because at least then you might be able to dock fairly close to your small lawless base to offload other mats or animals you've acquired elsewhere. It seems reasonable to me. On a strictly Lawless server, you might have to dock on the other side of your island, far from your base (which could be in a very hostile environment with many apex predator spawns). Sure, it's a survival game, so some is to be expected. But I think it enhances gameplay if you can dock with some relief that you are finally in a safe zone close to "home" and might actually be able to get your hard-won valuables back to base in order to use them.

On Lawless, you might be able to drop a foundation and a resource box to collect your week's worth of mats, not a bad idea. I'm not a ship builder, but I don't think all the mat requirements are revealed at the start, so you can't be sure you have what you need to achieve your next ship within a 4-hour demolishable shipyard timeframe. Of course, you could rely on Wiki IF the mats are posted, but then you have to cross your fingers that whoever posted them was correct, and that the devs haven't switched it up in the meantime. Ramshackle sloops aren't a terrible idea, but will they hold the mats required for a brig or a galleon PLUS the corresponding shipyard if that's what you decide you're building? I suspect not, but I haven't done the math. As for pillaring the ships in, the pillars were topped with rambling stone platforms and we tested whether the collision on them had been removed from the game. I can confirm that at least on PvE, it has not. Collision on pillars and platforms placed in the water is still a thing. It still allows malicious gameplay on a PvE server.

No, they did NOT turn off clipping of ships and pillars on PvE. We had this happen to us only this past week. Problem with pre-building your ship is that it may take you time to gather the mats over several days or a week or so, depending on how much time you can devote to it from your real life demands. And if you don't have a base or another ship, where do you put the mats? In the meantime, someone has seen your shipyard and they don't like you or they're trollish and they decide to pillar it in, before you even start building. If your shipyard has a 4-hour non-refreshable timer then again, you can't even put your mats in a Ship's Resource Box on the shipyard whilst you go collect yet more...this would be incredibly difficult for a solo player or small Company to achieve at 1x normal rates.

We must not have been close to one another. Of the PvE Lawless I'm familiar with, one was so heavily spammed with pillars, buildings and foundations that only seagulls spawned there anymore, and that was because they flew in off the ocean. Others were people maliciously pillaring around one anothers' small bases, and in other cases viciously pillaring in ships in harbors or ships in shipyards. That's a problem that needs correction, because people are NOT going to police themselves. Edit to say: Been there, done that, and got the bloody handcuffs to prove it.

The devs probably don't play, but we don't know that for sure. They may have undercover dedicated testers for all we know. I've seen the claim system bantered back and forth on one of the kernel mods for Atlas, but nothing was ever resolved on it. Personally, I believe some kind of claim system could enhance gameplay, but right now it's in Gordian Knot stage. Ockham's Razor is the best way to slice that knot. But global Lawless? Nah...might as well dump the idea of PvE entirely because otherwise what we'd have is PvP on one hand and PvPvE on the other. No true PvE server. L story S: not a fan for global Lawless.

In this case, I'm glad Grapeshot is flexible. Maybe it shows they're listening to player feedback.

I agree. Don't let entire islands be claimed, unless they are infinitesimally small. However, all a company has to do to game the system is massively recruit new players - the ones who won't be able to have a claim because after all, they're just solo or small groups. It doesn't matter if these players quit the game and Grapeshot kills them off after 4 weeks of inactivity (per Patch Note v.16.33), they're still on the company roster. So you could end up with a 3-5 active-player Company owning a whole island with all their tenants paying their taxes for upkeep. That would be feel like a very poor gaming dynamic to me.