arzosah

It's suppose to be an MMO, not a solo game, so reliance on a company of at least moderate size is expected. The skill system alone is testament to this. You have some members that focus on combat(weapon trees), other focus on crafting(shipwright, construction), and gathering resources can be done by anyone, but the beastmasters that have access to farming animals can do it much faster. Having at least one person in the pirate tree per treasure hunting squad make gold income easier and faster. As you explore and get discoveries your max level increases allowing you to spec into additional trees which reduces your reliance on company members for everything.

Add and inclusion/exclusion list for cannons and swivel cannons when maned by an npc. I love having auto turrets defending my land, but it's a bit of a waste of ammo when they shoot at everything in sight, when all I really want it to kill are the predator that are killing all my tames.

Normal wolves can be taken out with a couple arrow head shots, in most cases I can kill them before they reach me or take a few hits. Alphas I just lure into a pen and light them up with flame arrows.

Remove exploits first, then worry about balance and claims.

people need to take as much space as possible to attempt to control resources, and tax. Without a taxation bank the incentive to claim entire grids would likely diminish to some degree. It wouldn't completely stop it since people would still likely want to reduce the number of people on an island taking the resources.

I can see it now, everyone starts playing mini games, a ship of the damned comes out and ruins your whole day.

Yes There are a number of frustrating aspects of the game right now(Alphas, high spawn rates of hyper aggressive predators, exploits, bugs, etc.....) but for the most part I'm having an enjoyable experience. It's clear to me that they are constantly trying to improve the game. They still have a ways to go but I think they are moving in the right direction.

@Jatheish Any update on when we can see Linux server binaries for dedicated servers?

I"m not at all surprised by the drop in players, especially on the official servers players are toxic and when there are exploits that allow dicks to destroy ships in PvE that would put a damper on people will to play the game. But I don't see the drop in players since launch to be a death knell for the game or anything close. And once they finally release the Linux binaries I'll get my server set up and get off the Official servers forever just like I did in ARK.

Found a land whale.

No, that's steam metrics which would include unofficial servers, since you're still playing through steam.

funny how it falls in non peak times, and then climbs back up to 37k during peak times, pretty much every day. sure 37k is well below 58k, but as people have said before that's not all that surprising for an early access title with a number of game breaking exploits. Though there are still many issue with the game, it's clear to me that the devs are hard at work fixing issues, we have server side patches almost daily and larger client patches as they're available.

If they limit claims to one per character they would also have to increase the size, one land claim circle isn't nearly big enough for ambition building projects. Additionally you would still run into issues where you may not be able to find a claim spot near the water which would prevent you from building a shipyard.

If you have the resources for it, you can place a swivel cannon on your structures/boat and have an NPC man it. Doing this function like an auto turret and makes quick work of animals.