Lotus

On 6/17/2019 at 2:24 AM, Elena said:

Are you kidding? 
Kraken 1.0 can easily be taken down with 3 brigs or 1 brig+galleon.
Kraken 2.0 we did with 2 galleons. All official. All documented.
With nice preparation organization and skilled captains there is nothing hard there.
And the reward is beautifull:
Kraken 1.0 Submarine
Kraken 2.0 Perks cooldown halved
Snowman - harvesting activated perk that gives you 10 minutes x2 on all resourses. In weekends it's smth.

Hunters.

 

So the encounter was hella bugged. Basically the encounter would randomly hit your crew for damage that was intended for your boat. The damage that it did also had the decimal place in the wrong spot so it would 1 shot a brig. I think it was tied to the tentacle slam. The tentacle slam would also do a stupid knockback and if you didn't have a brig there to bail out your galleys you hated life. The tentacles were also physical entities so if you hit one when getting knocked out of the middle you sunk. The ships of the damned were labeled as players so PvE players could not kill them.

The reward when this post was made was actually the CDR. It was also going to give access to the polar and the polar was going to give you an ability that dropped aggro.

Here's some clips

2 hours ago, Chucksteak said:

He is immune to math. Those funny non letters mean nothing to him. 

For @Lotus the math is and should always be;

Bigger = better

Don't even mention scaling or proportional ratios. You will just recieve a picture of his favorite actor 

I've never posted a picture of Sasha Grey on these forums...

~Lotus

16 hours ago, UDO said:

there is zero skill involved when sailing in this game , drop sails ,turn sails for best wind and go ,turn to avoid sotd if u meet any on your journey , thats the extent of sailing in this game ,  

More like level a boat to 300%+ resistance put an NPC on the wheel tell it go this way. AFK and watch anime, read forums, blame things on Jat.

~Lotus

1 hour ago, Fix this said:

Cant believe people havent tried this. I farmed nearly 700k mythos with a schooner and a carbine to pull them with. I put a ballista on the front group to hold aggro till they're in the water and then let them have the cannons. Ezpz. If you're too poor for this use a puckle guy and a tiger. No cost. 

I'ma need to see a video of that cause I imagine they would just turn and blast the crew off your boat if you don't insta kill it

~Lotus

1 minute ago, Willard said:

Man, we have no problem crafting mythical BPs either nor problem with organisation. That´s not the problem. It´s just about how time consuming it is. If smt is time consuming it does not mean it´s hard, there is nothing hard about sailing 3 hours somewhere, get material and sail back. It´s simply boring.

Difficult to attack someone further away? Again it´s not difficult, just time consuming. 

If something is time consuming you consider it difficult, that´s a mistake. 

I love ship fights in this game. Problem is the game doesn´t allow me to do that more than 3 grids away because it takes insane amount of time to even GET TO SHIPFIGHT. 

 

mythic sail bps? I was told they do nothing. I think that would help but I am pretty sure they don't want to turn on the sails because a guy cruising up on somebody with +30% on all large speed sails would be insane. Just hit and run all day long. Intercept everybody everywhere! I don't know how you would balance something like that to people that don't have access to that level of BP.

~Lotus

I want them to make it so if you have a lighthouse up on a friendly island NPC's will auto sail to it. Basically it will disappear and then appear near the lighthouse X time later. That way you can prepare attacks and send resources to areas you have some control under. lighthouses would have to be built in anchorable water. you would set up anchor points and be like go to this anchor spot. The lighthouse would be like a larder resource chest holding food and gold for boats and could be set to feed all your ships on the island or just the ones coming to the island. In PvP you blow up a lighthouse and it sinks the boats going to it. This would create wrecks in the area where they roughly would have been. Sailing was meant to feel kinda epic and it does give you a sense of a massive world but once you are used to it sailing does not give challenge or anything it's crap work to go here get X go here get Y sail for an hour bringing it back.

~Lotus

56 minutes ago, Realist said:

So basically if you aren’t competent enough to do those 3 things then You should join a mega? Yeah I pretty much figured that already.

If you can't do those you still struggle soloing the game. A group of 5 makes the PvE simple 15 people can just zerg the content. It also depends on what mega means to people now though. If you perform at 1/2 the level you say you do you will solo the game and be bored of PvE in no more than a week.

~Lotus

41 minutes ago, Sinappia said:

Lotus - you take everything personal and meassure the entire world in your own meassurement. There are other people in this world as well, people with diffrent lifes and exp, ppl from diffrent countries and diffrent cultures. The same word does not always have the same meaning for 2 people (just look at british english and american english). Stop forcing your own narrowed view onto others - because frankly, this is what makes our world being how it is now. Try for once to actually understand what people are saying and what it could mean for THEM and not what you decide it means.

There is no absolute truth when it comes to social interactions. And yet you keep claiming that only your pov is the one true one.

On a note - when they wrote about settler-server, they changed their phrasing as well after a while to: Solo- & small-companys. They removed even the mid-size wording. You can go and look it up here on the forum. I payed speciall attention to this because during the PTR it was 50 and there was heated discussions going on about this. There was clear feedback that this is not solo or small-company-size.

Also - u claim 75 is small based on a mega having 500 ppl. Don't you see that exactly this is the problem? You base your entire argument on ONE SINGLE pov: the mega. From the POV of let's say a group of 5 friends - 75 is not small. It's the big fish. From the POV of a solo or duo-player - 75 is not small.

These POVs are as accurate as yours.

Decided to bring in some math here because maybe some ppl can deal with math better:

500 = 100%
75 = 15% (decrease to a bit less than 1/5th, compared to 500 ppl you are outnumberd 1 to 6.67)

5 = 100%
75 = 15 times bigger (you are outnumberd 1 to 15)

2 = 100%
75 = 37.5 times bigger ( you are outnumberd 1 to 37.5)

Looking at the raw numbers there is a huge diffrence on fighting 75 vs 500 than your average 5 vs 75 (which is the current state).

I don't take it personal?

So what I said is a mega is composed of multiple 500 man companies. This was not my PoV though I thought a mega was a big tribe I was corrected by multiple sources, multiple times, The way it was explained is why would they not just call it a large tribe and I was like oh I see. Megas are actually an alliance of multiple large tribes. So I will use CSTG as an example at one point they were rumored to have 2500-3500 people. That dwarfs a company of 500. I think you need to learn to read better because you have problems comprehending what I write. You also keep trying to point out my PoV is this and that, like you know anything about my PoV. I believe you don't even know your own PoV... I pointed that out in a post already though... now you have a post of... well I fail to see a point you are making, it's just you trying to like puff your chest out at me cause I hurt your feelings or something finished off with some ratios... I got a good laugh out of it though

My goal is to see that the game is challenging for people. All content currently can be completed in a 3 day weekend as a solo player if you know what to do. That is 0-100% being the only person in your tribe. This game really only requires 3 skills to make it easy.

1) Ability to perform the tasks required. (more people in your tribe diminishes this.)

2) Ability to find information to achieve a goal. (more people diminish this because they can explain it)

3) Ability to network with other people. (more people will make it so you need less people... duh...)

Those things right there make this game way too easy even as a solo. If you are missing 1 of those 3 then this game can be challenging.

Time for math so 2500 to 500 is a 5:1. The servers cap around 150 though... so 1/2 of 150 should be the limit to have 2 capped tribes fight... so the limit should be 75... wait a minute.... (This is an actual PoV I have) The tribe limits have nothing to do with what people want but are based on server performance and limitations to hardware.

2 hours ago, Martyn said:

Makes our company of 25 look like a small group of solo players.

Dude I thought we big with 100 members and I thought we were wealthy prewipe... then I saw the way Dynasty was throwing resources around like they were nothing. It was a humbling experience.

Now as a group of 25 how do you feel about the difficulty of the game?

~Lotus

3 hours ago, Sulfurblade said:

I don't know maybe the Email I got saying 

Come back and Enjoy the new Mega Patch with a New Server Designed for Small groups and Cooperative game play!!!!  <----  Thats what the damned email said.

I came back and they did a freaking BAIT and SWITCH

 

Also right here in this Official New Update!

Colonies PvP: Freeform building, with more progress-protecting and time-enforced PvP rules creating a cooperative atmosphere, and limits to ensure the game is more oriented towards single players and small to mid-sized groups. We’ll have two official networks available for this mode, one in Europe and one in North America. 

It says it's designed for small to mid-sized groups. When that was released your tribe limit was 500 and the megas were multiple 500 man tribes. So a tribe with 75 is still small based on that. So we got what was promised delivered.

The economy in this game doesn't work because there's nothing that is really hard to get. They made everything so easy for everybody. When tames could only be tamed by 1 type of food they were worth a lot more time and energy so you had something that was a precious commodity. You also could not grow everything everywhere which made them even harder to get. The game has nothing that is so hard that you need anything beyond basic weapons/armor in PvE. This makes it so you have no reason to make the crafted gear. 1 week after the wipe we had 100k ready to spend on anything good that came out. The problem is there's nothing hard to get for crafting so you can't really farm things to sell that are specialized. So basically the market in this game is nothing but supply, no demand, no economy. This post is about making it even easier to get stuff which I'm just like this game is already a pinata how much easier do people want it?

~Lotus

2 minutes ago, Ichor said:

I wouldn't mind invulnerable buildings, but it would need a limiting mechanic so you can't just foundation spam an island. One such way would potentially having like a radius (more people, bigger area) where the structures wouldn't take damage or at the very least massively reduced damage, but structures outside of the area would be fair game. 

But I do think raiding should be a thing, so why not have doors and gates remain destructible. As for looting, the storage boxes could be accessed either through destruction or some form of lock picking. as for boats maybe have some sort of docking structure that keeps them relatively safe. Unsinkable maybe, but definitely open for some form of vandalism looting, or sabotage. Just an idea.

What happens when it's like oh I'm getting raided. *rips down door puts up wall* Phew that was close.

~Lotus

3 minutes ago, Realist said:

People would just hop the wall. Believe me if people want to attack you they will find a way.

Unless it changed you can make walls not climbable. Believe me invulnerable buildings would not be something you would get into.

~Lotus

3 minutes ago, Realist said:

All good ideas. I am giving the invulnerable bases idea because it is a lot more simple for them to do that.

i wish they would add in everything you said, I just don’t think they will.

not arguing with you, just keeping it simple for them.

bot saying the game is dead. I don’t like using that word because everyone else uses it. I am very concerned about the numbers dropping the way they are though. It is fine to be optimistic but I don’t see all 58k coming back regardless 

No, I will not drop it. It is probably the only thing that would work. 

Just like at lotus said walking off an island? Why wall off the island if the base is invulnerable? 

You could actually get rid of the need to wall off an island which would also get rid of the eyesores of walled off islands. Yet another perk 

I can wall in all my boats, tames, players and attack people but they can't attack me, everybody would then wall in and then there would be no reward to PvP which would cost a huge amount of players.

~Lotus

11 minutes ago, Realist said:

Nope nothing like pve. Ships, tames and players can be killed pvp just not buildings, very simple 

*Walls off whole island* So I win right?

~Lotus

On 6/13/2019 at 5:51 AM, Salty Jack said:

You are right Ivan..... not everything has to be a fight.... we were playing peacefully in the area we chose to claim as our base.... William whom we did not know existed runs up and starts threatening my crew mate with blocking our ships (which he has admitted doing 2 times now (which behavior is also against the TOS)).... We were IN THE WRONG for retaliating by foundation spamming his building.... That is why we quickly removed them....

I am not being sarcastic when I say that if you are reading a construction element with my name on it you are in my base.....That is how I feel about it....

Answer me this.... A ticket was submitted.... Devs investigated (they certainly came and talked to me avatar to avatar).... I am not banned and my BASE has not been deleted..... now tell me again what I am doing wrong ?.... 

This game has another year and a half of development left to go.... You think there is no possibility of another claim system being implemented?.... It is my belief that the majority of PVE wants the old system back with the exception of water flags.... and a limit of the number of flags you can place.... 5 flags per being what I heard the most.... The way I see it  my crew mate and I each have 2 flags left for tameing pens....

I am done with you people.... I will respond no more.... All you haters in this thread are dismissed....

I don't believe many want that old system back it was awful. 

31 minutes ago, fonias said:

WIDOWMAKER I understand you have a problem with NWO and you did well that they could not build their island after what they did to you but now no longer reside on this island leaving the Foundation believe you have a problem with me and you do not let me build my base and you do to me that the WNO did to you I want to believe that there will be a solution to this issue and that the problem is not on GM but it is to the players.

Which island?

~Lotus

9 minutes ago, Sydhart said:

From patch notes.

-Fire Elemental now takes 50% more damage from Shotguns and 100% more damage from Ballista

 

I assume they mean blunderbuss when they say shotgun but it's payback time you flaming arseholes! 

Let me know how it goes cause from my understanding it's a small area on the back that is vulnerable kinda like the cyclops eye. Rest takes major reduced damage. If they are killable now though

~Lotus

6 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

You keep talking about what you know about the game while I'm talking about what our average new player encountering the game on Steam knows about the game.  This is not about you.   Statements that a dev throws out during an interview are not communications to the community or potential buyers and they're not design specs.

The stuff about civilizations, etc. on the steam page is very general but it sounds great.  So a new player sees that, expects that, gets in the game and where is it?  It's all full island claims and mega companies.  Maybe they wait through 3 Mega Updates for news on it and nope...taming and end game bosses.  Where's the communication on the design direction for what should be a major feature?  My **opinion** is that they consider they've already given us this with companies and claims, and if they do expand it, it'll all be based on companies anyway so it won't be much different.  Still..who knows?  They say nothing about it.

 

That's exactly my point.  If they communicated their vision, people wouldn't be wasting time and having arguments over things that aren't in it.  The noise level would go way down, which would help everyone.  Until they do that, people are going to complain and suggest all kinds of things.  (Also, taming whales isn't really part of some "vision". It's a tid bit detail in a game. Vision is an overall plan for a game..taming is part of the vision.  Taming ants is a detail.)

Oh, so the cats may apply to pve then.  In a terrible way.  Great.  If what you say is true, for people who don't like taming it's another mandatory taming task and another addition that's all stick and no carrot.  Cripes.  Note to devs:  If everything added to the game is going to be endgame bosses and taming, please let us know right now.  Some of us had hopes of other stuff.

 

(Joke) I want my laws! I will make a law that everybody must have a monkey with a hat or they will be hung by the neck until dead!

(Serious face, might also be a joke ) The problem is the viewpoint. We are basically unpaid beta testers. ( @JatheishI wouldn't mind being a paid internal tester I am in Washington ) I look at the game as being a few years for development and the Kraken is the boss for level 1 not some endgame stuff but currently because the game is like 10-20% done it is the endgame for now. Or they could just be the Leeroy Jenkins of gaming companies just like YOLO and see how things turn out

(Real serious face) Games have stages and so one department might be ahead of another so they go work on another project. Stabilizing the server is not something a graphic artist would do so they have that guy work on something else. Which is why we can get tames but not boats because right now the boats have a lot of problems the problem isn't the boat itself it's the interaction with the foundation of the game. Which is the same guy that would fix the tiles deleting themselves I think.

~Lotus

19 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

Please name the game you've played where the development team removed a major component of the game, one representing significant investment of development resources, from the game altogether at a minority of it's playerbases behest? 

You don't like tames, we get it. Plenty of folks here do.

Demanding they remove them is neither realistic nor considerate of your fellow players, many of whom enjoy this aspect of the game.

Should tames be the focus of Atlas?  The answer is subjective, but I would tend to argue they should not.

But there is a big difference between making something not the focus and removing it completely.

Stop table flipping like a child and be realistic.

Diablo 3... and look at how amazing that game is now... and it's release... .... I made myself sad

Tames should be a feature that people can pursue if they want. That is the point of a sandbox game to do things they want with no THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY!!!

2 hours ago, user1 said:

So. Tames are the only thing they know how to do, and so we have no choice but to deal with this shit?

Get rid of the fkin tames altogether already.

Also, i think they might be taking the wrong approach to handle UE4 (to say something other than that they're too stupid to do it right).

Why do you think the game runs like shit on a high end modern gaming PC?

Is it because some brilliant genius started meddling with the shaders instead of using UE4's material approach (like the UE4 creators intended)?

I say yes, yes it is.

Are the players running away in droves because nobody on the team has any idea on how to do proper game design and balance?

That's a strong possibility right there.

Are tames and NPC disappearing from ships because they are using the physics engine to do things that physics engines were never meant to do?

Probably.

 

So, to sum it up, it is not the UE4 that is incapable of doing what the devs want.

It is the devs lacking the required competence to do the things they want in UE4.

Or just the devs outright wanting all the wrong things to begin with.

I also forgot to add this earlier.

~Lotus

Just now, Chucksteak said:

This isnt a bad idea. 

I actually want them to make it so if you die you can't gain exp for 5 minutes or if you use a bed. This will make it so people are less likely to just die to reset vitals. It's a survival game and has turned into oh my vitamin X is low time to go drown myself or punch an elephant in the face to get it back. The bed thing makes it so you don't just port to a food room .

~Lotus

10 minutes ago, user1 said:

https://www.earnest.com/blog/the-demographics-of-video-gaming/

check on that, kid.

dont miss school tomorrow, though.

So your source is just a broad article on statistics about gaming? Nothing specific to Atlas yet you speak like you are talking on behalf of a large playerbase within the Atlas community. You realize demographics are attracted to different genre's right?

Do you have a relevant source of information? I am always looking for new lines of information to add to my list.

~Lotus

19 minutes ago, user1 said:

So. Tames are the only thing they know how to do, and so we have no choice but to deal with this shit?

Get rid of the fkin tames altogether already.

Also, i think they might be taking the wrong approach to handle UE4 (to say something other than that they're too stupid to do it right).

Why do you think the game runs like shit on a high end modern gaming PC?

Is it because some brilliant genius started meddling with the shaders instead of using UE4's material approach (like the UE4 creators intended)?

I say yes, yes it is.

Are the players running away in droves because nobody on the team has any idea on how to do proper game design and balance?

That's a strong possibility right there.

Are tames and NPC disappearing from ships because they are using the physics engine to do things that physics engines were never meant to do?

Probably.

 

So, to sum it up, it is not the UE4 that is incapable of doing what the devs want.

It is the devs lacking the required competence to do the things they want in UE4.

Or just the devs outright wanting all the wrong things to begin with.

The game is still early access so where should they learn to play with the different settings?

Also players are leaving for different reasons. We currently have no content so we are doing different games again.

~Lotus

6 minutes ago, user1 said:

I assume that you are aware that with every boat you build, the server performance becomes worse and worse for everyone else, right?

So you cannot and should not reward people building ships like crazy.

In fact, there needs to be a strong incentive for players NOT to build more ships than absolutely necessary.

People also shouldn't be rewarded just for playing twice as much per day as everyone else.

There should be a strong mechanism of diminishing returns there, too, if you want to keep player numbers healthy.

Most people simply can't afford to play 15hrs per day, and if a game allows for some welfare king to run loops around the average player because he can spend much more time in the game, you are likely going to lose that part of the community: The vast majority.

Why should i even bother playing if there is no possibility of keeping up with the no-lifers who play 24/7?

I don't need this game more than the game needs me.

 

But most importantly: If you can't manage to visit a ship before it despawns, you almost certainly didn't really need the ship at all in the first place.

Ship point system incoming. Like island points but for boats and NPC's. Each player is worth 10 points. Raft =1, Sloop = 2, Schooner = 4, Brig = 8, Galley = 15. Each NPC crew is 1 point.. Small tames are also 1 point, medium tames 2 points, large tames 5 points.

Lets also add a cannon and storage point system aswell. Each person is allowed to store 100 things so you can have 100 stacks of 1 thing of 1, or 1 stack of 100 things. Each artillery is 5 points.

Building point system! Every person is allowed to have 1 floor, 4 walls, 1 door, 1 ceiling. A roof is worth 2 walls.

Bed point system! You are allowed to use .5 beds a day. They will accrue so you can use a bed once every other day.

Armor point system, you are allowed to wear 2 pieces of armor at any time. It will still count against your storage though.

Alright enough sarcasm or is it?

In all fairness we are limited to 300 boats and a render of 15,000ish tiles in render distance. 1,600 tames per grid. It is limited by grapeshot already

There's no reward for building a crapload of ships.

As for the vast majority... where do you get your statistics from? I would like to check your sources against mine

~Lotus

4 minutes ago, [GP] Guybrush Threepwood said:

It's the fact that it was not (from what I can tell) public knowledge that you had to physically step on a ship to reset timers. Unless I missed somewhere that clearly states that, then it was assumed that render was the reset of timers just like building structures.

Did you know that your tames claim timer expires even if you are online standing next to it if you haven't interacted with it for 2 weeks? They aren't based on render either, but that is not stated anywhere.

So it's not about whether it is hard to do or not, it is about GS making these mechanics clear from the start.

Did they confirm you have to interact with it?

~Lotus

1 minute ago, Winter Thorne said:

That's a great example of how the game marketing means something different to everyone and is not specific enough for players to know if it has the elements they want to see in a game.  Everyone who buys it has an expectation colored by their own background and what they'd like to see.

 The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever

There's nothing in there about claims or Ark or pillar spam or raids or tames.  These are the things YOU expect because your frame of reference includes Ark and "reliable sources". Your average player cruising Steam for something interesting to play won't assume the same things about the game.  If their background is ESO and LiF, they're going to assume something different.   You've taken your assumptions about the game and driven them pretty far down the road, imagining exactly how claims need to work and colonies need to work, and everyone one else does that too, all in their own directions, leading to people stating with an air of authority that "this game is not for you" or that this game "is meant to have something or other" and if someone else doesn't like it, they should just leave.  But none of that is true, really.  

So they cast a wide net and scoop up all these different people for EA with different expectations, and they never really tell any of them what the grand design is and what it's not, and we find out a few bits of things along the way, some of which are true and some that aren't.

Jat says tames aren't going to be important in the game.  The game makes tames a feature of mega releases and they become the meta for maps and mats.

Sailing and ships, which were one of the more reasonable expectations, don't get a lot of focus.

A mega update is billed as having a focus on small groups and solos, but it doesn't.

These are the things that confuse the community and convince them that the devs are leaving the design up to the players and the squeaky wheels are getting the grease.    (Along with constant hints from some players of having secret personal meetings with the developers that no one else is privy to)  Everyone either leaves or becomes a squeaky wheel.    And the community gets blamed for squeaking.

It's not a good environment.  There's always going to be discussion and disagreement over game features, but the more specific that gets, the more productive it gets.  If the devs had provided a basic framework for the design saying that there would eventually be cities with governments, the whole claim discussion would have been different...and better, knowing it needed to fit into that.  But still...until the whole government design comes out in a Captain's log, it's just something some player is saying, no matter how much authority they project in saying it.    They need to tell everyone where the game is going and get our feedback on the details of how that gets accomplished, rather than letting us continue to squabble over what kind of game it's supposed to be.

 

I like cats.  I don't like cats whose only function is to allow plague rats for pvp servers because it's just another example of expectations being unmet.  (If you put up pve servers, pve players expect to be better than 2nd class citizens)  How many mega updates have to go by before a casual small group pve player gets something interesting in one?  The cargo racks were exciting until we found out how they worked.  

@Winter Thorne

The government system has been declared in 2 instances. The first time I encountered it was with an interview of the lead game designer or something like that can't remember his title basically he explained how you get land and write laws or you build on land and follow them, I especially liked the part if you don't follow the laws you become an outlaw and then live in lawless (Which at that time was an actual penalty). The second time I encountered it is when I read the WHOLE steam page. Basically it's saying you get to build a city and be governor of your territory eventually it evolves into being part of a player ran civilization or they will have some NPC crap we have to follow it's open ended at that point. I am going to trust both those documents as what is officially planned.

(Here is some opinion) Tames are something that Wildcard/Grapeshot teams understand more than programming water. They are the safety zone for content when they can't push meaningful content out. Why can't they do that? I believe the unreal engine is not able to handle what they want to do. This puts a huge problem on the table for grapeshot because changing the game from unreal could fix a lot of problems but at that point they are basically scrapping all the work they have done. How do they announce that to the players/employees/shareholders without causing everybody to just bail? Here's content it's a turtle that doubles as a submarine! I mean if the camelphant could bail water out of your boat it would be useful like a super bucket, but then we are focusing on tames which was not supposed to be the point. -_-

(Here is more opinion) Grapeshot does infact listen to ideas from it's playerbase (They just don't respond to everything). Listening and doing something is entirely different. There was a guy that wanted us to be able to tame whales... They could do that easily. That does not line up with the vision or does it?

(Opinion again) The cats also catch mice that will protect you and I believe animals from the plague. I hate using Ark as a reference but it's basically going to be a machops getting you leeches to prevent swamp fever.

~Lotus

7 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

I'm talking about bigger picture stuff than whether there's a cat in the June update.  Some details about what elements of mmorpgs they want to include and what aspects of survival they want to include.  Crafting -  important and a big deal or no?  Taming important and a big deal or no?   Their sales pitch didn't include any mention of it being a territorial conquering game, and yet that was their first real emphasis.  If I know a game doesn't contain the elements I like, I don't play it, and vice versa.  I bought this game because it looked like it might contain some of the elements I like.  It's been out 6 months and I STILL don't know if those are supposed to be in the game or not.  Would be nice if someone provided some direction, but I suspect they can't because they are making it up as they go along.

You don't see people jumping on the Civ forums complaining that there are no dungeons, because they know it's not part of that game.  This game?  From the description and some of the things that have implemented/unimplemented we have no idea what it's intended to be, so everyone complains about everything they don't like.  Direction and information dials down the noise.  Cats?  Not so much.

The game is marketed as a sandbox where you claim land and then work to keep it. Which removes Ark's crap pillar spam system. The claims are a stepping stone for the other content.

So from what I read this game is basically going to be build a colony. They want you to essentially team up with people and work on making a sandbox colony with pirate themes. If you can't maintain it then your colony dies. Your colony will be part of a civilization. Your colony has a government with it's own set of rules people that break the rules get exiled

We will have raid content to go farm for loot. We will have exploration treasure types as well as extremely rare resources. We can go get all kinds of special tames. The game also has survival aspects you have to respect while you are doing all this. Major sea encounters that they will set grids under special rules while this massive event happens (I imagined for PvE and PvP). We will get dailies that we can do for some lucrative rewards.

That is what I can think of off the top of my head that I heard of from what I consider a reliable source.

So when I see some of the changes I look at what was promised and then look how it would play out. I will use the claim system as an example. If you tried to have a city set up on the old claim system you would run into problems of people taking a piece of the island then it just gets complex on how to sort things out especially if you want events to happen in the city. So with the whole island claim you now have a governed island that you can binary say this is where this island sits as far as a colony that you can then have it be part of a more major form of government system. Not well half the island wants this the other wants it this way. This leads to each island having laws made by players which could add a cool dynamic to the game.

Also is that a no on cats?

~Lotus

20 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

I read that article too.  They did it to themselves, most of them.    Game development used to be funded with the expectation that player sales would give a return on investment,  By the time a game is presented to paying players, it should have a business plan, a project plan, a defined theme and some structure in place for support and communications.  Many of them don't.   In an attempt to get as many bucks as possible, they've made the players the investors and pitch the game to as wide a market as possible to get the dollars flowing in.

When you charge people for a game, you can scream EA all you want, but if you haven't even defined your genre fully, have little to no support, and show no signs of any real plan to develop the game, then sure players are going to jump into that arguing for what's most important to them to try to influence direction and get attention to bugs and cheats.  Hell, sometimes we know so little about how elements in this game are actually supposed to work we can't tell if it's bad code or bad design we want to complain about.  There's no spec.  But we do complain and push our ideas about how the game should be.  I do it.  You do it too.  We're all Joffrey.  So if you're tempted to put his picture up, be sure to apply that to yourself as well.

Some companies don't do this.  If you buy Resident Evil, Civilization, or Grand Theft Auto, you know what those games are about and what the major features will be.  OTOH, if some company bills a game as

 The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever

So that's going to mean 100 different things to 100 different players.  And when some of them come in here wondering why the hell there's no piracy or roleplaying, or civilization building in the game,  and why people keep saying that  statement means the game is built specifically for mega guilds,  it's pretty unfair in that context to say the players are acting like King Joffrey.  The problem is that the development is acting like they're flying by the seat of their pants, and it's pretty clear by now that there is not some grand design that handles all this, because nobody has ever said so in any coherent and formal way to the playerbase.      Gaming communities are normally pretty rambunctious, but when you try to pull something like this on them they get crazed.  They don't have to give every individual person exactly what they want, but they DO have to spell out what it is they are going to give and how they expect it to work.

If you don't want to deal with King Joffrey,  a dev team acting like responsible professional adults who communicate fully with the players goes a long way toward preventing that.

We still meme about the Polar Dungeon being released in the February update, that was named the March Megaupdate, that was released in April, that didn't have the Polar Dungeon. That was May... The Kraken 2.0 was lackluster it looked cool but was trivial. Polar Dungeon looked awesome but was really underwhelming. We did Polar with 12-15 people on our first kill.

When the announce anything they get criticized by the community. So if they announce something then they change their mind they get criticized for no reason. I would release information as little as possible. June update for instance... people are like yay cat or oh stupid cat... so lets say they don't release the cat because people thought it was stupid. Now the people that were excited are mad. I don't forsee them not putting the cat in but they had that bank flag repairhouse that was going to replace claims at one point which some people still think is the best idea ever but because they didn't put it in the people are now like...

~Lotus