MeatSammich

19 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

It's good to see you posting again.  

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.

3 minutes ago, Dollie said:

I'm reading over the threads on this topic and taking the various opinions on board. As always, we're open to feedback.

I'm a little confused on one specific aspect in relation to PvE brought up by a couple of posters though. I've seen examples of an island owner leaving or going awol and thus leaving settlers open to being wiped. Wouldn't those settlers just continue to pay the upkeep on the claim to keep it secure in that case? (aside from waiting to jump and claim it themselves of course). I'm not quite understanding how people can just "lose" a claim. 

1 minute ago, Archsenex said:

How are we supposed to pay for the claim?  We have access to the owner's flag?  We can prevent them from unclaiming when they decide to move to another island or quit?

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.

2 hours ago, Raven Knight said:

RE: The devs not caring or paying attention

 

Posted Monday at 05:20 PM

Just wanted to chime in here to let you guys know we are actively reading the threads, our discord servers, tweets, reddit posts, etc. We consume feedback from every where and not one place takes a priority over another. Typically we tend to do our big announcement/changes over our Captain's Log, as we're able to funnel people into one location where they can see what we're planning.

As for the PvE specific feedback, we are discussing as a team, based on the feedback and suggestions you've provided about our initial proposal and we're open to making changes. So certainly keep it coming as we do appreciate it

Edit: Dollie beat me to the punch . I am hoping that we'll be able to share more info with you guys soon, based on what we decide to do but you have all certainly raised some valid concerns over the past few days.

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"/

28 minutes ago, Daemon Cross said:

 You know I’ve seen your post and honestly you always seem to be thinking and I appreciate that and the suggestions you’ve made.

The claim system is the largest issue the game has at the moment, there are countless other issues that people are dealing with but the land issues are at the top.  With your lastest thoughts, people would be ahead to stay solo in order to accumulate the most claims, “5 per small company of 10 members or less” a solo player would still be considered a small company.  So along the same lines as I said.  In fact by joining a large company the group is hindering themselves on how much land they could have if they were solo or 10 and less then just met on discord to do group content.  I don’t know how many claims are available on the beach around each island, I had two claims and was comfortable with that to build a base, taming pen and have a little room to each side, however I also had two claims in the water in front of my base to stop griefers from buildingand to allow building of my docks and shipyard and one sea claim in front of that. For the just in case they come up with something else.

  And your also right, they are killing off the pve player base, they are listening to pvp players trying to decide what would work for pve and they have no idea.

We all keep repeating ourselves until most of us have just gave up, we’ve been beat and admit defeat. Just take out the pve side of the game and let those dedicated to pve just go on to another game.

  I’m sailing around looking at peoples bases, checking out the ships and just thinking how sad it is that a game with such potential died so early. On a positive note, I’m able to claim all kinds of tames and land now. I don’t have to do any work at all on the tames

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.

15 hours ago, Raine said:

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: 

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 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.

10 minutes ago, Raven Knight said:

You should really read the posts that Jat has been making recently.

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.

32 minutes ago, krazmuze said:

hexes have long been used in mini wargames because they are much better at pathing along natural features than squares/rectangles.

I live on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by unuseable harbor with a narrow L shaped strip of resource land in front of the cliffs with a little bit of beach for a base.  I need multiple claims to be able to reach out to dock and shipyards.  The problem with the predefined grid is what if it stops right at the shoreline - you need multiple claims to cover a sea/land base.

 

My current spot is very similar to yours. I have a claim flag on the edge of the waterline, and it still didn't reach out far enough to hit water deep enough for a large shipyard, I had to place a second one on the bottom out in the water.

If the hypothetical hex grid was set up before there were any claims present, it would allow you to make an informed decision as to what the best claim spot would be for you. You could look and see that if you take the claim that stops at the shoreline, you're going to need to use a second claim to take the water, but over on the east side of the island is a claim spot that is half land/half water, but isn't as nice of a spot. Is it worth saving the extra claim for something else? Remember, the hypothetical hex grid wouldn't be applied to your current build, but post-wipe.

35 minutes ago, Skinner NA PVE said:

The idea of non-adjacent would make it impossible for an individual to monopolize a single area. To solve grieving your claim extends say 15x15 foudations but you can only build on the 12x12 center. This would prevent walled off gardens blocking everything.

The claim limit would limit how much you can monopolize. I would much rather have everything adjacent then running around everywhere for no reason. Okay, my base is on the south edge of the island, my shipyard is on the northwest side of the island, but on the other side of a harbor, my resource plot is on the far east side, but I can't get there without going all the way around this mountain because someone blocked off this choke point, etc... Whats the difference? I'd still have 3 claims on that island, regardless if they were near one another or spread out all over BFE. Just adds in a stupid amount of running, and stops you from developing your base as a complete, cohesive design.

3 hours ago, Skinner NA PVE said:

How bad would it break the current system if the claim flag cool down (to place a new flag after one has capped) to 1 week.

It seems it’s already in the code and would just need to be adjusted.

also If possible a grid underlay that defines claims, no overlap allowed, I guess it would make claims square or rectangular.

Also as a fun kicker, no one can claim adjacent claims.

while we are at it claims are personally owned and travel with you, too many good people playing solo/small group cause they don’t want to lose their stuff. I agree totally.

The grid system with a hex grid overlay to prevent gaps/ovelaps is something that a few of us have been requesting for a good while. It makes perfect sense.

Personally owned, eh, I claim some land, join a company who builds a badass base on that land, then I leave the company and take their base with me?

No adjacent claims would leave too much land unclaimable. The idea of the hex grid is to tighten up everything, so that there are no gaps or overlaps. What happens if Company A claims a spot, and Company B claims a spot 2 spaces over. Now there would be space unclaimable by anyone.

edit: Unless what you are saying is that no one can claim 2 spaces together, which would suck too. Unable to have your water claim built and connected to the stuff in your base claim? Unable to build a big intricate base that is larger than 1 claim in size, unable to protect the resources closest to your base, etc

A buildable shop building would be okay. In a perfect scenario, it would be a purchaseable NPC that you could place wherever you wanted in your base, that way you could build a shop for them that fits the aesthetic of the rest of your base, or hire multiple of them to sell different types of goods.

7 hours ago, zottel said:

It is intended that not everybody gets their own Land. In many cases the landowner was more the Problem than the actual System. Saw Islands owned by a Single Person but no allowence to Build there. Our Company got 8 Flags And we Build Big And left some Space for Tannents And to keep Ressourcen safe

Yeah, this was one of the secondary causes of the land issue. They severely underestimated the amount of land people would claim, and severely overestimated the number of people who would tenant on other people's land. The fact that the tenant system was pretty broken in the landowner's favor, and tenants had 0 protections, and tenants structures still had 4 day demolish timers did absolutely no favors to the planned system.

A system where you had to set a percentage of your land over a certain amount as buildable, once someone had built there the land was the tenants in everything but taxes and flag reset, the tenant couldn't be kicked off for anything other than non-logon, no tertiary group would be allowed to build there, and if the claim timer went to 0, it would become the tenant's automatically, would have mitigated the situation a lot.

9 hours ago, Percieval said:

Good that you said it yourself. The tames are way too OP. Building gally’s in a day, brigs 2 hours. Not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of ship parts already laying about. Your ship needs to be the 2nd biggest character in the game. Now it’s just mayham, ship spam, nobody cares. Sea battles are not the way they were before. Now it’s full kamikaze mode because ‘I’ll make another gally before I go to bed’, not to mention that 1 day is from scratch. If you pick the items already in storage, you have a new full out gally within 1 hour. They have completely taken away enjoyment out of sea battles, land battles.. when there’s a gally at our base, why bother chasing it? Before we return to our base they have a new one built. Your ship and your base needs to be an achievement. People crying ‘risk vs reward’ is not worth it. Well then don’t make the damn animals gods in this game but change the risk/reward system. And until now I’m only talking about the harvesting animals. Don’t get me started on the bears that made our gold storage go up from 400K to approx 2M within a few days. It’s so stupid, and it’s even sad since the devs didn’t want the tames to play a big role at all, but here we are. 

 

I do find it funny the devs think significant upkeep costs in the upcoming patch are gonna do it. There’s literally 0 challenge in keeping an settlement up if you have god animals. If they nerf the animals, that’s when you get a good game with a working system. Now it’s all just boo ha boo hoo. 

Gotcha. I read your statement as 'most of the unbalanced changes' as opposed to 'the most unbalanced change' came from PvE.

I'd suggest changing tame gather rates on PvP servers, but at the same time, there were more than a few PvPers complaining about having to farm up a ship every morning due to offliners, which has possibly been addressed.

Its a hard balance to strike. Ships need to be accessible enough that losing your brig doesn't mean that you'll be doing damn near nothing but farming for a week to be able to get back out on the water, but not disposable.

As far as the bears and the treasure maps, I don't see that as being completely the animals' fault. They made it a bit quicker to get to the spot to dig, and kill the guardians, but a couple of smart players could have done it almost as efficiently. The sailing time is still the biggest time-sink in map hunting. I think that that complaint speaks more to the effect x2 weekends have on treasure maps. What level/how much gold were the maps you were getting, anyway? The masterworks that I've seen are 4-6k gold each, if we average it out to 10k on double weekends, that would be 160 maps?

42 minutes ago, Dreadmill said:

Baby Boomers.....sorry 

THIS is why we can't have nice things!

3 minutes ago, Warspectre said:

Yeah but they're not very aerodynamic and wouldn't put a dent in the hull of an enemy ship so as munitions go they wouldn't be my first choice, unless we're just talking punishment for capital crimes, in which case that could work. They're mostly just lazy layabouts and lack the gumption to get up to that level of no good, so I don't see it coming up that often. 

I was thinking more to paint bases from afar, but, unfortunately, you only get one color choice.

It works much better if you imagine it with sound effects added,

2 hours ago, Warspectre said:

Yep, I can see it now: "Baby demands 8 gold or it will mutiny in 3:31:23!" Swab the deck, baby, or it'll be the plank for ye! Get back ta work! 1 gold an hour, I'll be puttin the little buggers on duty straight from the womb. Manning the guns, the sails, or swabbing the deck, I don't care which. 

Baby will fit in the cannon...just saying...

11 hours ago, Percieval said:

I disagree since some of the most unbalanced changes made to this game, come from pve players. I don’t mind it since we all just gotta adjust. But if I must point to a group for screwing up this game, it’s the pve’ers. 

I'm curious, what changes are you thinking of? Most of the ones that I can think of are PvP related that trickled down to PvE:

Gun Nerf

Stone Nerf

Fire Arrow Nerf

Not being able to mount NPCs on bear carts.

The other big changes were either PvE specific and didn't hit PvP servers. Like the overweight sinking exploit.

The only thing that comes to mind that was more PvE than PvP specific request were tames. People on both sides complained about the tame nerf, PvE more than PvP, true, in all honestly, I'm not sure why they didn't just up player damage against tames. Wouldn't have affected us on PvE, and PvP could 1-2 shot animals.

2 hours ago, Vorxius said:

My single biggest issue is spamming.  Flag spamming, then foundation & shipyard spam in lawless.

There isn't a solution for either.

Will have to see what happens post update / during beta.  

Also on any island I visited, lawless and claimed land equally, people were just trolling others and building over treasure spawn points, and hutting off metal nodes.  One company walled off an entire portion of island, no way in.  I think when people behave like that, it's not the games fault, it's the games problem.  We're not kindergarten kids, we know what is, and not in the spirit of the game, so why do people act like buffoons?  You answer that and you have the solution.

 

A game is just a microcosm of the population at large, where some people want to help others every chance they get, the majority just want to be left alone to do their own thing, but some people just want to watch the world burn. Anonymity and lack of repercussions allows a certain percentage of the population turn into flaming assholes, and it doesn't take many of them to ruin things for the greater population as a whole.

Boredom is another reason, some people are playing, and didn't find the game entertaining, but didn't have anything better to do, so they decided that if they weren't happy while playing, then no one around them could be happy.

Because they can, is what I'm trying to say, I guess.