Archsenex

Yeah. Dollie's most recent video is basically giving a shout out to somebody who made a video about how atlas pvp is all about offline raiding and how much people get upset by it. The finishing touch was calling people who enjoy the game atlas nerds in her post. It's at the bottom of the official tweets thread

You missed one from Dollie

They don't actually have to make all the grids the same size. They could make the instances much smaller than a full grid. Part of the way the system handles load is the stasis system. Already, if nobody is near a part of an island, it goes into stasis. Stuff that isn't in use uses almost no resources, and they could completely spool down the private grid for offline players. Ultimately, the purpose of the proposal is to just consider it as an option. I do agree, no plan will make everybody happy. After all, there were people in the first round that got to claims first, and had unlimited forever invincible control of multiple islands at a very high tax rate. Many of them probably are not happy. Ultimately, it's about coming up with what's best, or at least what's least worst. There may need to be sacrifices from the pure design to just make the game work. I don't think players will concentrate as much as you think either. Very quickly, getting just plain generic materials will start to burn anybody who wants to progress. If you want to do anything OTHER than just building, you'd have to come out of your hole. The private home zones would quickly become mostly for people who JUST want to build, or to be a refuge and storage point that players could use. There's actually other reasons why, from a processor standpoint, it's a good idea. Ships and Tames that are parked in your private instance will go into stasis much more readily than those that are parked around other islands. Our primary bases were on Lawless islands, but most of their purpose was just to hold a bunch of tames. the server had to pull them out of stasis and process them every time ANYBODY walked by our base, and for a short period after. The way the game is architectured, with Stasis and that each map is really only processing when there's a player nearby, means that in terms of resources, private instances that are small, say the size of current freeports, isn't a huge system resource argument.

They have to solve the pillar spam problem pretty much regardless. Even one claim flag per person doesn't stop a group from using their claim flags to plug up the rest of an island. And what's to stop a person from putting their claim on resources and just building on it without it being spam. Same with needing to expand, unless you get way more space than you need, you'll run into that issue regardless if other people choose to set up next to you. Shared spaces for things like shops work better in a non free style setup, such as if free ports have 50 shops and you have to rent one. There are just a lot of problems with the inherent goal of wanting people to have personal....shared space. This proposal is to at least try and give you a slice to work with and not force you out while you're getting started etc.

I think theres some assumptions about the instancing. It would be more like instanced freeports than instancing every island. You'd still have shared claim space etc where people would build their communal structures etc. You just wouldn't be forced to compete for a claim to get any land at all.

At that point youd probably want to also change how freeports worl, in that they'd no longer double as home servers and should be more trading hub ports

Yup. Youd want to have the islands drop generic resources. They'd mostly be a home and for people who want to "just build" as many have stated. You could even level clamp them to encourage leaving but not force it.

Only the home islands would be instanced

It solves a LOT of problems though. A personal island makes almost every complaint about the flag system no longer really an issue. At that point, either new system is probably fine.

There are no client mods in Atlas/Ark, they're all server. Also, isn't there already an offline protection setting in the server INI? It's something that was in Ark from early on, you just literally turn it on.

If it wasn't likely WAY too off current design, I would agree. Just give everybody a private island that they can build on in a phased manner, and it would resolve a lot of the problems. then, the ruleset for the shared space could be truly optimized for shared space.

Yes. Yes it is.

I mean, at this point they're more or less encouraging greifing and trolling https://twitter.com/NotDollie/status/1104918422578577408

A lot of the confusion on the part of the devs quite possibly comes from the fact that they gave people what they asked for, not what they wanted. People asked for "a claim system" which to the devs means taxes and land ownership and management and the tenant system they proposed. They specifically have said several times in the past that "we want the claim system to include other people building on the claimers land" What people WANTED was "the ability to deny others the right to build on a piece of land" which is the exact opposite of the claim system. So they weren't asking for what they wanted (insert conjecture as to why). However, it's abundantly clear that people HATE the idea of taxes. You know where was great for not paying taxes? Lawless. Make everything lawless AND FIX LAWLESS Increase build deny range, not decrease it Make structures rapidly decay based on the number of conjoined structures. 1 piece = 1 minute. 20 pieces = 1 day. Go up from there. Either raise the cap on demolish to 14 days, or allow companies 2 "vacation modes" a year that pop their buildings to 14 days.

... you know other than intellectual property. Law does kinda have a few things to say about that.

Yeah. And for the people who claim it wont completely fix the problem, maybe it isn't a perfect solution but it's better. Ther number of people who insist things should not get better until they can be perfect is frustrating

I've been suggesting that for a month, apparently they won't do it. Maybe we need to STOP offering the good suggestions since they seem hell bent on not using community solutions for this stuff

They aren't on official, it's on my private server. I'd leave all the stupid of official behind if all the people I invited didn't all respond "there won't be enough people." All like 20 of them. I may still at this point. A 5x5 all to myself sounds nice. G portal just needs to work out the kinks with backups. Grapeshot makes a great game but they're terrible at running a game. Wtb publisher.

Yup. There's only about 20 or so base templates. They then built further templates off those base templates. The most frequently used second level template was then copied 24 times. Most were only copied 2 to 4 times. Each base shows up maybe 30 times. Very, very few base templates were only used once. I think 4

My understanding it that, for now, lawless will not change. They are only proposing new systems for the claim areas.

I want them to remove the need to have land to play the game Let me farm on my ship Let me store resources at a freeport Let me kennel my tames

I'm all for this. On my private I installed the evaporative cooler. It's totally an in genre ac. Breeding should be easier, BUT the cooldown between breeds should be longer to make up for it.

Basically, except without the generic resources and decay rates that prevent anybody from going there. And hostile creatures Basically, forced shared spaces that arent designed to be useless for progression.

We avoided foundations in most cases. They seemed more trouble than they were worth. Hence all the stilts. At the end bear breeding was ok. You just had to find the tiny portions of the island you could breed in. Turns out, every island has like 4 or 5 sub biomes and many of them suck for breeding because the temp is too variable. So you gotta walk around the island for days to find an area that doesn't fall outside perfect. And if you didnt find that area you could not breed (it was literally impossible). Or use a private server and slomo to find the spots faster. Was what I did.

I dont quite see how resource islands spread through the map doesnt fit with resource diversity. It's literally just an island like any other without stuff built on it. The resources would be the same as other islands in the grid.