MeatSammich

Any word on when we can expect to see an update to allow us to clean up the abandoned ships? I'm guessing rendering a bunch of sloops, rafts, and dinghys isnt doing the server/clients any favors. Something like Freeport/Out of Territory 4 day decay timers, if people park it outside their claim, and don't return to it, would be plenty. Whatever solution is come up with needs to also address the fact that there are a good amount of sloops that were "claimable", but it only claimed the hull, and whoever claimed it isnt able to do anything with the ship or anything on it, but now it shows as belonging to whatever company quasi-claimed it.

Let me add my agreement to this. Annoying to have to find someone outside your company or alliance to check your timers for you. (In reference to being able to see your own claim timers)

You can have your 5%, but you have to turn around and roll it all back into the loot boxes...but you'd then earn 5% off of each one you bought. Never ending riches!

Thats the stupidest thing I've ever read. You can't just sell Organic Paste to the people for real money, where's the adventure in that? It needs to be 10000 doubloons for a loot box, that has a chance of having between 1-1000 of a random resource, or a treasure map, or a random (most likely common) blueprint.

Some of the other sounds seem loudly out of place, too. Resource chest seems louder than the other boxes, and the other weird one is the rattlesnake death collapse sounds like an animal 10x larger hitting the ground.

At the same time, anyone can contest you declaiming, at any time, just by existing in the area, not people affiliated with the person you're trying to take land from, or people trying to take the land themselves. Twice so far this morning, I've had a claim I was trying to take over under 30 minutes left on the declaim, and someone has rolled up on their ship, parked about an inch inside the claim circle, and stopped, then reset my claim progress. Whats stupid is that they have no idea they're doing it, they were just looking for somewhere to anchor. Claims are an exercise in frustration - 6 hrs completely wasted today alone...and counting.

The three day protection isn't from when you made the claim, its from the last time you were active in the area. Having to demolish and replace the claim was a glitch from before a few patches ago. What may, or may not, be a glitch is all overlapping claims being reset when you are active in any 1 of them. If you are seeing an island with multiple companies claims consistently being 15000+ seconds to claim, it sounds like its an island with pretty active players.

Trading posts should be built on your claims. SWG was amazing (pre-cu, of course) with player run shops and cities. There was nothing like wandering around and finding the merchant's row for each area, with everyone setting their own prices. Hopefully being able to set a price for items, not just in gold, but in barter, will also be possible. It would be nice to sell gems, for example, with a seperate price for gold, wood, stone, etc.

With a few exceptions, no one is hating on the game. People are just getting frustrated with the lack of communication around, well, damn near anything. Fixes for exploits, fixes for severe balance issues, the majority of the 'fixes' being half-assed implementations like the boat-skating issue that just bring about more issues, or fire arrows being nerfed into absolute uselessness. We are Early Access players, essentially Alpha testers. our feedback is to be expected, and it would be nice if it was at least acknowledged. We're the people who say Hey guys, this is broke, or this isn't working as intended, or this mechanic makes no sense as implemented. Its a whole helluva lot easier to implement a lot of fixes to basic stuff early on, than 6-12 months farther into development, when there are other systems that are implemented on top of broken systems and everything needs a complete overhaul. People need to stop getting so defensive over anyone bringing up things that need to be fixed. Very few people post just to bitch and whine, they want to bring issues to the dev's attention. Some of them huge issues, some of them minor issues, but imo, any issue that can be fixed now is better in the long run. The issue with the lack of dev communication is whats causing the multiple posts about the same issues, over and over. No one sees that any of the previous 30 posts on the topic have ever been acknowledged, so they decided to post another thread about it, because maybe -this- will be the one that gets a response. Hell, with the elephant weight reduction on wood, it took 1 guy talking to one of the devs on discord, to find out both -why- it was happening, and for them to offer a suggestion for the across the board carry weight buff. Everyone won, after a dozen posts in 20 minutes complaining about the nerf. Communication saves time, and a whole lot of anger.

Thats the one thing I can't purely put on the PVP players. The devs pushed it as a game about conquest, and have leaderboards for most land controlled, which makes sense to an extent on PVP. The limitation of the number of people in a company makes it a bit greedy, as you'll end up with 500 people controlling 10% of a map intended for 40000 people, 10 companies of 500 each controlling 10% is 5000 people controlling half the map. Where do the other 35000 people go at that point? It doesn't translate quite as well to the PVE side, unfortunately. Slaughter your enemies and take their land is a bit better mechanic than waiting for someone to get bored and not log in long enough that their body starves and take their land! You know, the pirate way!

While I agree with the sentiment of fixing whats in game already, before adding new stuff, its a bit disingenuous to blame it all on lowly PVErs. The fire arrow nerf happened because PVP raids were nothing but naked fire arrow spam, not because PVErs wanted to get rid of the only weapon that was worth a damn against the hordes of Alphas swarming our bases. PVP at least has the option of breaking down buildings and slaughtering sleepers to be able to claim. PVE has...uh...wait until they eventually possibly die. 99% of what has been posted about in the PVE forums has been complaints about the land claim system, SotD armadas taking over grids, overweight sinking, and just general griefing. There might be a couple of posts scattered here and there about basic QoL improvements, but I can't think of a single person saying that they wanted submarines, or new armor, especially not before the more glaring issues were fixed.

Ark was never wiped, but instead they left the original servers as 'Legacy Servers' and took away all GM support from them. You couldn't transfer from them to any other server, except for other Legacy Servers, and once the playerbase suffered enough attrition due to glitches happening - stuck in the mesh, constant falling, etc - then they wiped the servers and took away the Legacy designation.

Tames should be a means to an end, helping you harvest more mats faster, to build your ships, bases, etc. The problem is, most of them are barely more efficient than doing it by hand. The carry weight buff was a big step in the right direction, but they still need to increase their harvesting rates. The big draw with Ark tames, at least for me, was the utility of them. High end ankys, mammoths, a bronto, etc, were worth their weight in gold, just for the time saved harvesting the mats. It was comparatively rare that we'd take off on the giga or the rexes to just nom everything in the area, unless there was an alpha nearby. As is stands right now, taming is an annoyance, with the only upside being the carry weight. Alphas still gangbang your tames instantly, and they still spawn -way- too frequently. I logged on earlier, and within sight of my base, were 2 alpha cobras, an alpha tiger, and an alpha croc. What it feels like Atlas is getting wrong is pigeonholing everyone into playing one particular way. They've created an amazingly badass world, massive in scope, but it feels like you have to play it on rails to succeed at all. Let us be crafters, pirates, traders, tamers, or builders. Let anyone ride the tames without the tree, let people use weapons and tools of higher rarity without needing to spec into them. I understand that it is very early in EA, but, as someone who was there for Ark EA, it feels like the game is going backwards in many respects, whereas with Ark, with few exceptions, it felt like every patch gave more and more flexibility. The other big thing, is that it feels like there has been much less communication, then there was with Ark. Granted, a good portion of that probably has to do with it seeming like a large portion of the playerbase losing their minds about any changes, or lack of changes, depending. I think a big part of that perceived toxicity is due to the lack of communication as to what their actual vision is, and their reasoning for changes, etc, so the players feel ignored, which just sets up a negative feedback loop.

Yeah, it seems that they pop up in the same spots for a lot of people, but not everyone can see them. There's one north of Nokomon in D9 that I see every couple trips through the area. The weirdest part is when you sail through it, it stutter lags, and you'll get the ship running aground noise some of the time, but doesn't seem to cause damage.

The issue I'm running into, is that if head of the elephant sticks through the wall of the pen at all, you can't feed it, even from inside the pen with it. I was trying to tame one earlier, and it did the low-health run-away as I was bola-ing it. It went down with its head about 2/3 through the wall. Outside the pen, you get a press E to feed...and nothing happens. Inside the pen with it, there's a TINY spot right against the wall I would get press E to feed...and nothing would happen then, either. You just have to hope that it goes down in the center of the pit, without its head sticking into a wall. Was doorway feeding really that overpowered? You would still get hit, but had a clear indication of where to feed, plus, now, cobras happily wander in through any doorway or window and eat you, and your tame, and your children.

Yeah, its kind of disheartening. Tames gathering was nerfed. Now carrying, and they still die stupid fast to even lvl 1 predators. Fire arrow gets another nerf, and guns are still unfeasible for PvE. The ship weight 'fix' still is a half-assed mess. I had 3 seagulls stuck on the lower deck of my half-build schooner in drydock. I was like watching the most macabre game of air hockey ever, and I got stuck on a neighbors brig in drydock while bringing him some extra planks. Why do ships in drydock also act like glue traps? Still nothing about abandoned claims taking 6 hours to take over, if, by some miracle, no random runs through it harvesting, or unallied people just logging off on a third partys claim. People want to be able to survive against even the lowest level predators. People want a reason to tame, and actually use those tames for, well, anything. People want to be able to take over abandoned claims, instead of just having pointlessly dead areas while so many people have no land. Naaaaaaaw, what we get is literally the opposite of that, with each and every patch. It feels like every single change made with the last few patches has taken more and more away from the players, and nothing has been 'balanced', just more and more tedium added, and handcuffing of what people can do. You play on PvE? Get on your boat and go get powerstones, because if you want to do anything else, its going to be a miserable slog and you'll probably die a dozen times while gathering basic mats to do anything. There's a reason why their 'showcase' builds are all private servers, while on official, we're stuck doing the most utilitarian builds to use the stuff we do collect efficiently.

Oh, a couple that I forgot... -Predators should attack other predators. Watching a giant snake, a tiger and a crocodile stand around my body together with a scorpion and rattlesnake cheering them on is kinda annoying. - Containers that accept items they can't use. My arrows ending up on the grill, or my meat ending up on the smithy when I transfer all is annoying. Ship resource boxes only accept what they can use, which is so nice.

Just some ideas for small quality of life improvements that I've wished for over the past 150 hours. -Being able to sort by material type. ie: All thatch listed together, all wood, etc. -Selectable material containers that you could set to only take thatch, or fiber, or wood, etc. -The folder system not working, saving, and having to have the item to set up a folder in the first place. -Lanterns breaking and having to be taken to the smithy to repair, but instead they should be able to be filled with oil in place to repair. -Crafting giving XP. As the designated cook and builder for the crew, its annoying to not get any xp for building everything, while the gatherers and hunters get it. -Being able to build things that are build out of personal inventory, on the smithy. Its just annoying to have to pull the resources off the smithy to build a bow, or arrows, then put them back. -Dyes not showing up worth anything on stone. A good portion of the dyes don't show up accurately on stone. Reds are almost not noticeable. -Those cluster of stupid spiky 'straw' plants on tropical that cover a stupid amount of ground, are annoying to harvest unless you hit the center stalk of the bunch, and give hemp instead of straw...and not even much of it for how much area they cover. -Being unable to anchor in anything but the shallowest of waters. -Resource blocking distance from lighthouses, shipyards and anchored ships is way too far of an area. I know everyone has other issues with griefing, balance, etc, that are being theoretically worked on, I was just wondering if people had any other wishes for basic quality of life things.

The bigger shipyard does the same. Its not a claim flag in size, though, else you wouldn't have any resources in the claim that a shipyard was in. It is definitely much farther than the radius of a foundation. Realistically, the resource-blocking for most objects should be about halved in distance, especially shipyards, lighthouses, and anchored boats. There's a random dinghy up against my shoreline from a tribe that I've never seen play since I got to this island about 2 weeks ago, and it blocks about a 10 foundation deep semicircle on the shoreline. It also doesn't decay, and isn't claimable like rafts are after a time.

I don't think they would necessarily need to wipe to increase the land mass. Theres a lot of empty ocean that could have islands plopped down in it. That being said, everything I do is with the expectation that it will be wiped at any time. I played Ark on Xbox from launch until almost the official release, and was disappointed in how they handled the 'Legacy Server" issue. For those who didnt experience it, we were assured that they weren't going to wipe the servers, as long as population stayed tenable, but then disallowed character/dino transfers from the Legacy servers to the new server clusters, due to the duping/cheating/glitching that happened during the early parts of EA, and also discontinued GM support for the Legacy servers, so if you got screwed over by falling through the mesh, or anything else that rendered your character unplayable, you were on your own. So the 50 or so people who logged on regularly on my server (NA PVE 226 Represent!) slowly stopped logging in as glitches happened, and when the daily population dropped far enough, THEN they decided to wipe and pull 226 from the Legacy cluster. Unfortunately, by that time, everyone had drifted away. If they would have just wiped at the start, at least 2/3 of the people would have continued and restarted, instead of watching the slow painful demise. So, I hope, and expect, that there will be at least one wipe before Official release, but hopefully not anytime soon, to give enough time to find all the glitches at the higher levels.

The problem with 1 claim per person is that there are a lot of spots that are pretty pointless to claim due to terrain and resources. My first claim spot is literally a section of beach about 20 foundations wide, with a mountain behind it and ankle-deep water extending out past the edge of the claim. Before I built on it, the sum of the resources available on that plot was 4 trees and 3 rocks, with the usual scattering of fruit/veg plants in a cluster. If as a (mostly) solo company, I could only claim 1 spot, it would have been impossible to build a shipyard, or have any resources to harvest to even build anything. Luckily I was able to get 2 adjoining plots, 1 with trees/rocks and 1 in deeper water, when the person next to my plot quit. 1 plot per person would solve absolutely nothing, as there are plenty of spots like this that I've come across, where both deeper water and resource access are impossible with 1 claim. Nothing like having your own plot of land with no shipyard. Only owning a freeport sloop would be the new version of living in lawless. "But, there would be more areas freed up by limiting people to 1 claim, so you could find a better spot!" Not really, there are plenty of 20-40 member companies that own and live comfortably on 5 plots. If there was a glut of unclaimed areas, many of those people would go from owning 5 plots, to 20+ plots, simply because it is there, and we'd be right back where we are now. I wonder the feasibility of once they get the server performance tweaked to somewhere they;re happy with, if they're considering adding 1-2 more islands to each region, or at least the ones with consistently low pop. Each grid is roughly 9 times larger than the Island on Ark, but all the land total in each grid is about the quarter of the landmass of the Island, and there is a huge amount of nothingness that could have islands added and still be a 10+ minute sail from the closest land.

While blockading might - ok, definitely will - be an issue, one of the biggest positives is that you can actively see who is griefing. It sucked waking up in the morning and finding your boats gone, with no indication of who did it, just other island mates saying they saw Some Dude fro RandomCompany running around the island, who may or may not have just been some guy wandering and exploring/farming. Now, its kinda hard to deny that Douchebag Company is griefing, when a flotilla of rafts is surrounding your boat, and if the GMs choose to take action against the griefers, its alot easier to show.

Along the same lines as why randoms running through can reset the claim timer, why does a random's sleeping body in the claim area keep it contested? If I can't claim while I'm asleep and someone comes in, why should some uninvolved 3rd party parking their ship offshore and passing out below decks block my active claiming...usually without them even realizing they're in a contested claim area? Another issue that could be circumvented by making people need to actively attempt to contest the claim, and not just exist.

You can claim while sleeping/offline, as well as while not in the claim area, if, and only if, no one contests the area while you're not in it or in it and sleeping. If someone enters the claim area while you're not there, or are offline, after a really short time, it fails the claim. I've been trying to claim a small extension to have a spot to place a bigger shipyard (since the shallows are ridiculously large on our main spot) for 2 days, and even though the pop on our sector averages about 15 people, enough people wander through - even though there are no resources to even gather there - to reset the timer. 6 Hours is entirely too long to take over a claim from someone who quit the game over a week ago. Not being able to claim these dead spots, and tighten up the claim circles, since theres unclaimed space almost a half claim area wide on either side of this plot, is hurting the land claim system as well. Additionally, 6 hours to claim - 1 hour idle to timeout - You either stand in a claim doing absolutely nothing of use, for 6 hours, or hope that you're unbelievably lucky in no one running through, because in the time it takes them to cross the claim area, it adds over an hour back to the timer. People liked the idea of the more flags you have, the quicker the claim time - when it was 40 minutes. They were expecting that the people with huge quantities of flags would be able to be declaimed in 10-15 minutes, not that 40 was the new baseline for a company with 200 flags, and everyone elses time goes up from then. The claim time needs to be about 1-2 hours for a small company capture, if they haven't played in long enough that it is claimable, and its their only claim, they're probably not coming back soon. Possibly implement a system where every day that they don't reactivate the spot drops the timer by 30 minutes to an hour? Also, people - not the claim owner - just being in the claim area, shouldn't reset, or even contest, the timer. They should have to place a flag, and whoevers flag get to 0 first claims it.

I had a similar problem after the last patch. I couldn't make bows, or almost anything that was crafted direct in my inventory. Things on the smithy were fine, tho. Even stranger, I had another copy of myself sleeping in the corner of my base. The only way to fix it was to go die twice. The first time I died, I had absolutely no inventory, not even the compass, but the second copy of my body disappeared. The next time I died, my body had all the resources that should have been dropped the first time, and I found I was able to craft out of my inventory again.