MeatSammich

Thanks, I'm glad to see at least a few of the originals have stuck around. I took a few months off after the wipe, in the hopes that the devs would make some of the positive changes that people were asking for, then decided to play for a month before coming back to the forums to get a fresh perspective on things. Unfortunately, it looks like its still SSDD with most of the most requested changes, and most glaring bugs going unanswered, while the players get changes that only a couple people asked for shoved down their throats. (I must have missed the posts complaining that AoD shouldn't be killable by anything other than tames/melee/handheld firearms, too.) I'm still confused by the people defending this as 'cleaning up the island'. Yeah, pillars/foundation spam sucks, but thats not what the people who are complaining are complaining about - its the fact that unless you own the island - and there are a lot of 'casual' players who don't want the hassle of doing constant gold runs with their limited play time to pay for a whole island - your active buildings can get nuked for any, or no reason, if the island you've been on for 3 months gets claimed, or changes ownership for any reason. We're pissed that the EXACT problem we're facing was mentioned dozens, if not hundreds of times when they revealed the post wipe plans, and the concerns were shot down - landlords will keep it clean, they said...hell, they claimed they were hiring some in-game CSRs to help with extreme cases...and when people said they would still rather build in lawless, the devs pushed everyone off of lawless with the talk of accelerated structure decay there and promises that once the 24hrs was up on someone elses land, your structures would be safe. Now that people have 3 months worth of building done, it has turned into 'just kidding...nukes incoming,

One of the biggest disconnects I see is that landowners feel that tenants don't contribute much of anything to the island itself. Which, with the current gold upkeep cost is pretty much true. Lets face the fact that a lot of us aren't landowners because we don't want to have to worry about the gold grind. If the cost was changed to X amount of each of the 3 basic resources per day, then the tax on harvesting would actually be a useful contribution to the island's upkeep, and more settlers would equal less time grinding for resources to pay the upkeep cost for the owner. If the dev team is completely married to the idea of wanting to give the landowners the ability to raze the island, what about giving each tenant company a small number of sub-claim flags - 3-5 or so on each island - that are about the side of the original claim flags, and can be placed on the island, with similar rules to building now, with the landlord having the ability to quash the claim within 24 hours of it being placed, to prevent people from blocking resources and doing other stupidity, and the landowner sould still demo structures within the claim for 24 hrs, etc...but if the island gets razed, only the objects outside claim flags get poofed? That way, you get the landowner having the joy and power of island ownership, while the tenants get some measure of protection.

In addition, even if there is a way for settlers to pay for someone else's claim, a lot of us are settlers because we don't want the hassle of having to do treasure maps to get the gold to pay the island upkeep - even more so after the changes to the AoD being invulnerable to half the damn weapons in the game. This was one of the original things brought up back when they gold cost was introduced. Why wasn't it made so that the upkeep cost was set up as X amount of resources per day, that way the settlers taxed harvesting would automatically pay for the island, without the owner having to win the lottery of having a good treasure map spawn or two on their island.

So, first, we have unlimited claim flags - which sucked and resulted in a few companies eating up half the map, and people clamored for limiting claim flags...so they gave us whole island claiming with a gold sink instead. Then everyone said the hell with it, we'll set up in lawless, since the whole world is basically lawless - so they started talking about setting up accelerated structure decay in lawless to make bases there unfeasible. Then we decide to move to claimable islands, without claiming them, since after 24 hours your stuff was safe, even if someone claimed the island afterwards - so they give anyone with a half days worth of treasure maps the ability to completely level an island in 72 hrs. I know that we on PVE generally feel shat upon by most changes, as they seem to mostly address PVP specific problems, but this one is...special. There's no PVP related issue, other than people having to manually go around and demo structures there. - This is purely the devs looking at a uniquely PVE related issue and saying the hell with it, scorched earth it is - kinda like when they couldn't figure out a way to stop overweight griefing and turned our ships into glue traps. I feel bad for anyone living on any claimable islands, because there is a 100% chance of people with hundreds of thousands of gold in the banks already, whose sole purpose in life for the next few weeks will be to go around to every unclaimed island, claim it, wait 3 days, level it, and unclaim it/let the claim expire to free up their points...rinse, and repeat. And all the while, those of us who were content to be settlers, and didn't want to spend all our time doing treasure maps to pay for upkeep get 3 choices - Hope our landlords pay the rent, Move back to lawless and hope the structure decay doesnt happen, or Bend over and take it with a smile.

The 'login every 12 hours' part is the sticking point for a lot of people. Spam clearing is not going to be a '30s job'. To delete one, yeah, thats fine, but you're going to have to run damn near every inch of your island, including underwater, to make sure that no one is screwing with the island. How long is that going to take? People have jobs, they have lives. If you work a normal 8-5, and play from 6-midnight every night, get up at 7 to go to work, when the hell are you supposed to clear the spam? Midnight-6pm is 18 hours that you're not able to be on, sorry, the foundations are now permanent. If you increase the destruction time to 24 hours, then its almost the same. You're not allowed to ever not play for a day, otherwise, your island will be an indestructible mess when you get back on. If you increase the time to 48 hours, its more reasonable, but now you're going the other way, where no one wants to settle on an owned island due to hearing that some landlord somewhere demo'd all the tenants stuff one day. Plus, even if you're a great landlord, guess what, that means no long weekends away for you, let alone taking an actual vacation. It was reported that the guys from Wildcard regretted some of their design decisions around taming and breeding that forced their players to have an unhealthy gaming/life balance to get ahead, but, now, they've just gone and turned it into "Can't sleep, pillars will eat me."

So, a couple questions that I have, that have been brought up and no answers given: With this 'point system', how many points will each island type cost? How many of each island type will be there? What constitutes small, medium, large, etc.? What are the cutoffs going to be for points allocated to companies, as related to company size, or is it going to be directly tied to the number of people in the company? ie: 1 point per member? What are the claim flag limits going to be to stop the bigger companies from just claiming all the small islands, so that no small/solo companies will be able to claim anything, since they won't have the points for bigger islands? It would be nice if Jat and Dollie would set aside an hour or two one day soon, to do an AMA-type thread, to allow the players to get some answers to questions like these, and bring up some of the pitfalls they see, instead of waiting, and dreading, each Captain's Log, and the inevitable backlash each week.

Aye, that was before the Captains Log that put in the latest iteration of "Hey, this is the opposite of what you guys want, but, have it anyway" These latest changes were their interpretation of what we were asking for from their "actively reading the threads,...etc"/

Aye, that everyone would just stay solo and collect their 5, or 10 claims, was something I had considered. But, in the end I figured that the benefits of being in a small company (shared resources, shared tames, shared ships, etc) would mitigate the amount of people that would go pure solo.

They don't even have to go as far as reskinning anything. Just a full hex grid overlay on each sector, ocean and all. With limited claims, no one would bother claiming the ocean in the middle of nowhere. If tracking each grid would take up too much server overhead, you could just go through and delete all the grid more than 2 or 3 sectors offshore, to ensure that people could claim water deep enough for shipyards, etc.

Part of the problem is the fact that the player base can't come to a consensus on what number of claims is reasonable, so everything is all over the board. In the past few weeks, I've seen everything from 1 claim per company, to 5 claims per person. Any cap would have to ensure that : A: There is enough room to build the necessities, and doesn't completely screw over the solo players, which eliminates 1 claim per company, and 1 claim per person. B: That there is enough land for everyone, which eliminates the highs like 5 claims per person, since a 250 person company would have 1250 claims again. The system should be based on company size, but not directly tied to the exact number of people in the company which both inhibits small/solo companies, as well as allowing large companies to control vast swaths of the map again. I know most of you have seen the math breakdowns that I've thrown in a this and a couple other threads, (10 claims for companies under 25 members, 25 claims for companies 25-100 members, 50 claims for companies over 100 members) and I've gone over it a few times, and it still makes the most sense, and leaves the most land free for new players. With a bit more tweaking like 10 claims for under 50 members, 25 claims for companies 50-125 members, and 50 claims for companies 125-250 members, so that every breakdown has a max of 5 company members per claim...or halving the original numbers to 5/15/25 claims per company size, the system could stay balanced, not overly penalize any company size, and leave huge amounts of land open for anyone who wants it, without needing to rent. But, all this is academic, as it seems that Grapeshot is unwilling, or unable, to implement something along these lines. I have no idea which is the case, I just know that the past few weeks of the cycle of Player Complaints / Grapeshot Acknowledgement of Complaint / Player Excitement that Our Voices Are Being Heard / Captains Log with Complete Opposite of Expectations of Fix / Cycle Starts Again...has damn near completely killed any enthusiasm that I, and judging from the dwindling number of different people posting, and the overall tone of the posts, a whole lot of other people had for Atlas.

Part of the problem is the fact that the player base can't come to a consensus on what number of claims is reasonable, so everything is all over the board. In the past few weeks, I've seen everything from 1 claim per company, to 5 claims per person. Any cap would have to ensure that : A: There is enough room to build the necessities, and doesn't completely screw over the solo players, which eliminates 1 claim per company, and 1 claim per person. B: That there is enough land for everyone, which eliminates the highs like 5 claims per person, since a 250 person company would have 1250 claims again. The system should be based on company size, but not directly tied to the exact number of people in the company which both inhibits small/solo companies, as well as allowing large companies to control vast swaths of the map again. I know most of you have seen the math breakdowns that I've thrown in a couple other threads, (10 claims for companies under 25 members, 25 claims for companies 25-100 members, 50 claims for companies over 100 members) and I've gone over it a few times, and it still makes the most sense, and leaves the most land free for new players. With a bit more tweaking like 10 claims for under 50 members, 25 claims for companies 50-125 members, and 50 claims for companies 125-250 members, so that every breakdown has a max of 5 company members per claim...or halving the original numbers to 5/15/25 claims per company size, the system could stay balanced, not overly penalize any company size, and leave huge amounts of land open for anyone who wants it, without needing to rent. But, all this is academic, as it seems that Grapeshot is unwilling, or unable, to implement something along these lines. I have no idea which is the case, I just know that the past few weeks of the cycle of Player Complaints / Grapeshot Acknowledgement of Complaint / Player Excitement that Our Voices Are Being Heard / Captains Log with Complete Opposite of Expectations of Fix / Cycle Starts Again...has damn near completely killed any enthusiasm that I, and judging from the dwindling number of different people posting, and the overall tone of the posts, a whole lot of other people had for Atlas.

Where? I found 1 post on reddit about shipwrecks, 2 posts on these forums since the announcement of the changes (1 saying they're not merging servers, and another about adding PvE content), and the only thing on his twitter since the captains log was a retweet of some Ark stuff.

One thing I'd ask for is to at least make sure that bps have at least *some* stat increase. Nothing like getting kicked in the teeth by finding a masterwork carbine bp that has the same damage and durability as the default craft.

New New Claim Changes: Okay, once again, Grapeshot manages to take what the players are saying, and mange to almost, but not quite, do the exact opposite. The first (couple) times, I was willing to chalk it up to misunderstanding, but, at this point its becoming apparent that it it pretty much just pure disdain for the playerbase, and malice in doing things that completely go against what their playerbase is asking for. Its pretty much turned into a 5 step cycle of 1: Players complain about something and start leaving the game. 2: Tell everyone you heard the complaints, and are going to make changes. 3: Playerbase suggests a metric asston of viable solutions. 4: Decide that the players don't know what they want and announce some changes completely different from what the players want that solve NONE of the issues in the original complaint...and throw in some minor cosmetic object for them to play with. 5: Go to step 1. There have been numerous threads, with an ungodly amount of posts, all asking for the same thing. We want claim flags as exist. We want the number of those flags limited to a reasonable amount. 5-10 per company base, up to 50 for large companies. Yay. You limited them. 1 per solo, up to 10(?) or so for large companies. But wait, they now claim entire islands? There have been less than 10 posts out of hundreds, if not a thousand, saying "Oooh, I shore do likes the way PvP sounds, I wants to own me an is-land." How in the bloody hell is island claiming supposed to help people "own" more land? How is this supposed to prevent griefing? By relying on a landlord? A landlord who may or may not bother deleting the offending objects in the alloted time frame, supposing that they're not the one griefing in the first place, pissed off that they didn't delete your stuff within the timer limit. Playing a rousing game of "Is this island considered small or not", trying to find one that your company can claim. on launch day is going to suck. Its going to be lovely when mid and larger companies realize that "Hey, we can claim multiple small islands, and no one else is big enough to claim the bigger islands..." and now there is no islands for smaller/solos to claim. Variable tax rates - whats to stop an island owner from waiting until multiple companies have built up good sized bases, then jacking the tax up to 30%? What percentage of companies are actually going to go to another island and start building all over again? Just set it to a flat 10% and be done with it. Whats to stop 50 or so people from banding together on launch day under 1 company name, claiming a large island, then the other 49 people leave the company and form a new company, and repeat this, over and over, to get around the company size for claim points? I'm starting to think that Atlas isn't a game, but more of a social experiment in how much garbage can be shoveled down player's throats, (or shoved up other orifices, if you'd rather) before they give up and quit completely.

Limiting building is definitely not the answer. Why would you think that limiting creativity is the best solution for an open world game where building is a huge part of what to do? To give you an idea of how small 150 piece is, a 10x10 house with 2 walls high is 100 foundations for the floor. 100 ceiling tiles for the roof, and 80 walls, so, 280 pieces for a square block of a building, and thats without an animal pen, or dock, or garden, or taming pens.