Lotus

1 minute ago, Abysian said:

Same here, i helped so many people because of alliances, met a lot of people and was able to talk with them etc. They just take that all away 

Its a sense of community that I will miss. It was a way to play with people and get a feel for them as potential tribe members. It let me see how they interact with the culture of Lotus.

~Lotus

1 minute ago, Amy3 said:

On PVE, "big tribes" make up a single digit percentage of the playerbase. Not even a high single digit, either. Orion regularly hit #1 for months and at their height only had like, 20 regular dudes.

I don't know where you got that statistic. All of PvE is around 11% of the total playerbase. Before the "Big Tribes" stopped playing because we literally ran out of stuff to do (Mid Feb) the average daily player base (NA-PvE) was roughly 1.5-2k total players (depending on the day). 20 = 1% of 2000, with 10 tribes you would have 10% right there (Lotus, Atlas Shrugged, Paragon are also substantially bigger than them in terms of member count) .

~Lotus

23 minutes ago, Abysian said:

Could be a 50/50 then. But it doesn't take away the fact that pve, again, didn't get a lot of info. Nothing even about the alliance system.

Alliances are getting removed from PvE. Which annoys the hell out of me.

~Lotus

9 minutes ago, Sysca said:

"One person's freedom ends where another's begins"

 

How do you satisfy this kind of request with a claim system on a PvE serv?

The way it was explained is each island has a member requirement. The smaller islands will have a member requirement of 1 and go up from there. So a tribe will take islands based on their company size. The islands will have an upkeep cost that will be fed into the claim which will also be determined by the size of the island. This prevents tribes with 3 members from having 80+ land claims (I've seen it). Which 1 claim per person but opens a lot of doors for griefing.

~Lotus

5 minutes ago, Abysian said:

I think most pve players already stated that they don't want those changes. So we're getting those stupid islands in pve, even after so many players already stated they don't want that ! We want a claim flag, that is limited per player. Again pve gets almost no info. 
You're destroying pve, and all you had to do was limit claim flags, so many people have been asking for that, yet you fail to listen.
As a pve player i really feel kinda screwed, we never get enough info, changes are made while most of the pve players don't want that those changes,
they take away stuff from pve, they're just making it worse and worse for pve.

To the other pve players, am i the only one that feels this way ?

To my understanding more players want the whole island system. Big tribes wanted 1 island claims, the smaller tribes wanted 1 claim per person. What was unanimous was no freebuild on claims.

~Lotus

4 minutes ago, Amy3 said:

This Captain's Log is so lacking in actual substantive information that I've really gotta question why it was four days late.

The future of Atlas currently has a very serious problem where there are too many unanswered questions and too few concrete answers. And since this Captain's Log actually reduced the number of concrete answers we had, and raised plenty of new questions, it actually makes the current problems worse, not better.

To my understanding it's not late it is early. They didn't do one last week for... reasons?

~Lotus

1 minute ago, [GP] Guybrush Threepwood said:

Clearly they've delayed PTR because they have yet again changed their plans, which will require further work prior to launching the PTR.

They don't have any big changes announced that would actually warrant a delay though. They planned the new 1 flag system a while ago and announced they will keep another set of servers that don't follow that. No drastic changes are announced.

~Lotus

3 minutes ago, [GP] Guybrush Threepwood said:

Part of the issue here is not just the repeated delays, but the fact that changes are constantly being made based on feedback from the community, feedback that is being given before even testing the proposed changes. By doing this it makes it look like the Developers have no clue how they want their game to be.

The delay to the PTR is not good, but it's not the end of the world, but there's too much of a focus to make everyone happy and making constant changes based on pre-testing feedback.

I could see a delay on a patch because bad coding but to delay a PTR means the raw coding isn't really functional.

~Lotus

Christmas has been delayed this year!

~Lotus

-_-

2 hours ago, Enki Anunnaki said:

you are so welcome. i hope the devs see that face in their dreams if they delay shit again, too lol. 

Me, im gonna have nightmares of waking up every day and playing alone in the mmo called atlas, the only player on for swaths of servers around... oh wait

Atlas has evolved into a forum game now.

1 minute ago, Talono said:

We have to check if devs sleep took place during the allowed 9 hour time window.

If not we have to deactivate devs beds or demolish them with the wheel.

Alternatively devs can buy a sleep token for 7 million € each.

I don't have any €  but I have some bolas and a giraffe.

7 minutes ago, Daemon Cross said:

I’ll give it a watch later, your definition of short is about like your forums post.

I did my best but it's just so many things that have happened in this game. Then I got to reefbo and was like THIS IS THE VISION!!!

~Lotus

1 hour ago, Daemon Cross said:

 I’ll watch it if you post it, I’ll do that much but try to keep it short,  I am limited on my time.

It might have taken 2 hours

~Lotus

28 minutes ago, Daemon Cross said:

Lotus you like like to type, I’ll give you that much- when I was referring to the pirates I was referring to not being under someone, when you said that my npc is paid slaves I just completely lost on that. I’m basically just a employer who has hired them, it’s no different than any work anywhere, if I don’t pay and feed them they quit. 

  In the video you stated that the shooting of the Galleon was offlineing, which is frowned upon, I’m sorry but is that not the same as griefing, destroying someone’s property while it’s not being used for what it was intended.  I mean I didn’t see it at sea in a battle, I seen it anchored at shore.

   If Dollie is supporting the video is she as well not supporting the actions in the video ? I mean she did post it and give the link out then defended against the actions saying he was caught.  Any way you look at it, destroying someone’s property in a way that it wasn’t intended to be destroyed in is griefing.  If I park my truck and my ex  comes up with a baseball bat and destroys it, am I not being griefed because that truck was fine sitting there, I wasn’t in the vehicle out playing in the woods, jumping water breaks with it.  Do you get my meaning ?

   When I said “we” I was referring to others who have posted along the same lines in different threads, you already knew that so now who is trolling.

 I do apologize when I was referring to you, I didn’t realize your company name was lotus as well. I don’t know who the top 10 companies are to be honest without looking them up. I know they held claims they didn’t use, tried to rent claims out and basically didn’t care if people couldn’t find land.  

   No I don’t know how much land your company had. I’m guessing it was more than you used though?

  I know you said you had what 60 to 80 people who would get online through a weeks time ? ( trying to remember because I don’t feel like scrolling back up to see) so how much land did your company end up acquiring with your mergers vs the 60 to 80 members you had ?  You brought it up so now I’m curious ?

  No I don’t just say things to be saying them, do you ?

I have to apologize, I’m normally on my phone at work during a break when I check the forums and try to reply or post so at times things seem messed up it’s because of me trying to hurry before I run out of time.

I will show you my claims in a video. It will also tell the history of Lotus

~Lotus

8 hours ago, John Profit said:

Good decent people that want to play PVE instead of PVP, Don't want the PVP in their game. They are there to have fun, relax, And not have all the Politic's in their game. Having these big organizations taking the Inlands and making the pay TRIBUTES (TAXES)  No matter how good the games is they don't have to put up with that (THAT IS PVP GAME PLAY NOT PVE PERIOD. i ENJOY THE GAME, BUT I AM TIRED OF ALL THE PVP BULL SHIT IN THE PVE MAKE IT NO LONGER PVE (SAME OLD BULL SHIT PEOPLE WANT TO  GET AWAY FROM 

 

That is why keeping tribes on their own island is so perfect. People can have their own island and do whatever they want on it.

13 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

I can’t comment on what has happened to the pvp side of the game, I won’t assume that I know anything about it. I know your pain though when it comes to players leaving.

 Lotus - you were one of the top companies and the game mechanics encourage that. I understand but that still does not make it right,  as a solo player I was able to find claims and then gave them away to help others. You took claims in order to hold rank. With as many people complaining in the forums about not being able to find land, you felt holding a rank was more important then having a player base. By holding land you didn’t need is that not a form of causing grief to someone who held no land ?  The issue was that there wasn’t a place to build, the issue was that no one wanted to build on someone elses land. Which is the same system that is currently being implemented just in a different form. 

 You may own the island, your company may push smaller players out so you can have what they got. That is the system now and the system that is coming, so explain how the new system is going to bring players back to stay ?

 You stated that you had a lot of people who signed in on a weekly basis but that number dwindled, without players to have other players to interact with you don’t have a mmo. You stated that the game got to a point that you switched to pvp a couple weeks before the announcement of the wipe.  You switched because companies like yours pushed so many people out of the game or pve side on official that it was no longer fun, there are a few of us still playing the pve side on official and it’s not because we have rank or more claims then we need it’s because we only have a few claims and made our homes on them. There is enough of us in different companies that we’ve become a little community and it’s not because of rank or how much land land we have, it’s because we would rather help someone then see them quit the game.

  I hope you are starting to understand why I said you were part of the problem whether you played by the encouragement of the game design or not.

 TPG is a group that goes up to small tribes and says join or die. If you resist they use their numbers to smash everything you have. They go up to people they allied with and say give us your flags or we wipe you. Ham and Pig (The group from the video) is an RP group. I was on the same grid as them when we went to PvP. They are literally fighting oppression in that video. When they talk to the guy like why are you with TPG you can hear it in his voice that he doesn't want to be there but he is afraid to resist them because he doesn't want to lose everything his tribe owns and start over. What he was doing though was considered offlining which is frowned on but is not against the rules. The new patch makes it so you can't do that to protect the bigger tribes from nakeds and the smaller tribes from offline raids. It has not been taken the best by some players it's going to be tested.

So if I have the story straight you stated that Grapeshot for a FACT supports griefing. I asked for proof you provided no proof just gossip. I asked where the proof was. You tried to dodge the fact that it wasn't proof. You then admitted you had no clue what you were talking about. My face was like this -_-

You are now talking about Lotus like you know about us. With that same matter of fact idea. A huge chunk of the land we got (about 50-75%) came from mergers. Which I already stated. They merged because I cultivate an environment that people want to be in. So somebody joins with us and I should go kick their house down and give away the claims they brought in to make you happy? That is basically what you are telling me to do. We wanted to stay on the top 10 so we did something to maintain that spot. This is again something you were talking about but you don't know anything about. If a land claim is worth 1 point a sea claim is worth 1/2 point. Go look at us on the map. Again my face is like this -_-

I believe they want this game to have land owners and tenants. The actions of the developers have shown that is what they want. If you get land it needs to be difficult. My first claim was 14 hours of sailing on a raft. This was before they made sailing so much easier with the always having wind.

As for the whole why we went to PvP. We did all current PvE content. Killing the kraken 3-4 times is enough for most people but I wanted to make sure that everybody that was at the world first got credit for a kraken kill. Of the 170-180 people only 3-4 got credit. So I spent 2 weeks setting up runs. Over 1k players got their kraken kill with me. I didn't do it alone it was a team effort and it's fun to meet people. To get to share the super exciting experience with them. After there was no content left though some groups decided to go see how much land they could get. This is when some groups went from 80-200 claims to over 1k. Rather than play claim games because as a tribe we had all the land we needed we went to PvP to play around there. 1/4 of my tribe is ex-pvpers that got tired of the constant state of alert you had to be in and wanted to just experience things like the powerstones. Other players went to other games. So a huge influx happened from what me and my brother have coined the abyss. Think of the game as a mountain and we climbed that mountain and looked to the horizon. Instead of a view of exciting things we saw miles and miles of nothing.

10 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

Not sure who you are referring to that didn’t have claims, not sure you even read through the recent comments.

  I’ll catch you up - one person says they suggested what is coming to the developers saying that since him and a few others were the top 10 companies in the game because they held the most land claims that this is a single owner of a island should be a good idea. They can be landlords having 15 members of their company to each large island as a reward for holding land in the current system and becoming one of the top 10 companies. They will police everyone else by basically saying if you follow our rules you can build here if you don’t we will force you out.

  I think that sums up that part, now the other half you missed is where those of us who done as you done had land, not much but 1 to 3 claims is against their idea and were saying they are the reason people couldn’t find land with the original system.

Now that you are caught up you can choose to be with the large companies who will control everything or against them. Most of us are against them 

I kinda want to show you the map of Lotus and explain how every area came into the tribe.

I think it will be even more fun to just make things up cause I have no doubt you have no clue what you are talking about or just trolling.

What was actually said is the devs went to the 40 companies that comprise of the 4 servers. We were each given a triforce. If we come together as 3 leaders we can unlock admin for 1 hour. We are able to generate anything we want but not give it to people. We are also allowed to put a ban token on a players account. If a player gets 3 ban tokens their account is banned from atlas. Every account we ban gives us a soul token. If we collect 1,000 soul tokens our tribe will be granted immortality and be unkillable, never have to go to the fountain of youth, fly, and most importantly be able to generate and throw a bola with E so in a way the immortals can hit you with the E-bola!

-_-

8 hours ago, Jack Shandy said:

That's probably because they don't want everyone to have land.

All pirate tales tell of island governors, good and bad. - is it bad to try and replicate this?

All communities need a leader, is every member of your company a leader? if not you are already in your eye's a slave or a slaver.

I am 95% sure they pitched this idea to the angel investor as a lords and peasants game and are trying to keep it that way.

8 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

I’m neither a slave or a slaver that’s what we are trying to get across to you all, solo players are neither the slaves or the slavers, we can have a community without having a leader, we don’t need someone to give us directions because we are able think on our own. You should try it sometime, not everyone is a follower and wants someone to lead them, some of us travel our own paths and meet people along the way.  

The last tale of pirates I heard of was called Black Sails and I do believe they fought for freedom there to, there was a community but it was there as a trade city where pirates could trade stolen goods, Blackbeard lived on a island with his crew, my crew and I’m sure yours are as well are npc so they can live on the ships. So in our game I guess Freeport’s are the trade towns and everyone else should live on their own claim, not under someone else.

   I bet you were referring to Peter Pans tribe of misfits and we are all going to live happily under one person who tells us what to do.  Let’s see - Ah yes Pirates of the Caribbean- I don’t think they had little groups where they all cozy up and told bedtime stories either, they had a port they all went to though.

   I’m sorry I can think of several other pirates, Redbeard, Davey Jones and some others but you know I don’t think any of them would ever live under someone else.

None of them were followers and neither is your company leader. We don’t need dictators in the game, we need FREEDOM!!!

You are preaching anarchy and trying rally people with you it's just funny.

Who is this "we" you are talking about? It's mainly just you -_-

Who are you telling to try to think on their own? I literally just pointed out that you followed the whole Dollie torchmob and they were wrong and you tried to point at it then you were like I have no idea what hell I am talking about. In blacksails you have the leader and the higher up crew as the players and the NPC's would be the guys doing things like sails. I have a member that likes to shoot the cannons he tends to miss alot but if he is having fun go for it.

As for the NPC are they crew or are they actually slaves and you are renting them? Just wanted to point that out.

This is again going to show you don't know what you are talking about. Davey Jones's locker is a place sailors would go when they would drown. Davey Jones was basically a sea devil. Redbeard could refer to a few different people. The most common for piracy would be a pirate that had a fairly large fleet. Would capture people then sell them as slaves.

I have a serious question for you at this point. Do you just say things but have no actual facts behind what you say?

~Lotus

21 minutes ago, Daemon Cross said:

Is that not the system we have now ? Your saying you decide who can build and who can’t ? What made you God, Jury and Executioner ?  In case you didn’t notice you repeated yourself a lot in the items you had around the island, I also had a storage box for each material , BP’s and musical notes, armor, leftover building structures,  I can guarantee you don’t need a whole island. 

Your a griefer trying to justify your actions, keep letting us in on more of how you played the game.  You can’t justify having more land than you need, you can’t justify saying who can and can’t build and you can’t justify how I play the game vs how you play it. 

 Just give it up, the more you let be known is not winning any awards from a solo players POV 

The fact that it's our land should allow us to determine who does and doesn't build on our land.

For items though you didn't have bolas, maps, and don't forget bolas.  @Larsque Tell him about bolas!

How am I griefer?

You just became incredibly amusing to me at this point. How much land do you think we have? Do you know how much land each of the Top 10 companies on NA-PvE has? You realize that the developers want us to take as much as we can and gives us rewards to take as much as we can right? To my knowledge I'm the only tribe in the top 10 that as a leader I said "DO NOT GO ABOVE THIS MANY LAND CLAIMS." Then I removed some of our older claims when people merged which people thought meant I will remove the claims they bring in when it was actually lesser used land.

The new claim a whole island system's top 10 is going to be based on taking and holding as many islands as possible.

As for justification of things you seem to just be lashing out because... reasons?...

~Lotus

30 minutes ago, Daemon Cross said:

Oh btw “@NotDollie 

I mean, if I weren't doing Community Manager things, I'd likely be trolling nerds in ATLAS too. 

 

youtube.com/watch?v=BfxB3l…

 

@KOSDFF ”

 

I’ve got the screenshot to, I’ll try to post the link but in the video you can see a guy taking down a anchored Galleon from shore using a cannon.

he does other things that are considered griefing but Dollie justifies it saying he was captured in her comments and held captive but let go because he was so annoying.

 

Where is the exploit?

~Lotus

41 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

What I see is increasingly complicated justifications for having the game developed in a way that each player doesn't get to own their own base.

Removal of a motive -  the motive for griefing is griefing.  Plenty of griefers are not in that very specific example you're using, of a company owning all but one or two claims and wanting the island.  To pretend that giving them the whole island solves the problem doesn't address griefing in general, and it's just bribing bad players and hoping they behave themselves. What about the company with enough points to own 3 islands, and they've got 2, and now they want mine?  There's lots of them, and only me and maybe a couple of my friends to defend it.  And now it's build everywhere and I get to do some useless "treasure hunt" every morning trying to find where they hid all the crap.  And that's just one other example of a motive for griefing.  What about the guys who just want to be jerks?

 

Your solution to this problem is - give those guys islands and let them build on anyone else's islands they want and maybe they'll stop.

My solution to this problem is -  The game is run on ()*#ing computers!  Computers can do this job quite easily you know.  Computers already keep a log about what happened in your company, they surely know what killed a player or what killed a tame, and can be made to know even more about what happened.  This kind of thing does not take a CS person a whole day with the proper tools.  Takes an hour maybe.  If a gaming company gives a rat's ass about customer support they have tools to do these things.

You're right, it's better to prevent it in the first place in the game code.  This new update does nothing at all to prevent it, and in fact opens even more holes to abuse in the "build everywhere" logic.  We both agree that build anywhere is bad.  But if they get rid of it, we are right back where we are now, with having to beg permission from some company to get a place to build.  The players didn't like that on the last two iterations, but let's just keep trying it until they do.

If the choice is between giving more and more to griefers trying to keep them happy enough to not annoy other players (and then just ignoring all the complaints because "the design of the game allows that, so it's not a hack") , or giving everyone a claim that nobody else can build on, and then using a CS tool to investigate someone hacking and doing it anyway, I pick the second option.

They've gotten rid of the griefing by designing a solution that encourages griefing so now it's an accepted tactic.

It's a question of what is allowed vs, what is not allowed in the game.  If you start out by telling griefers they can build anywhere, and they do that, you've fixed the griefing problem by changing the definition so it's no longer griefing.   And at the end of the day, you still have players on pve wrecking other players' games in a situation where they can't fight back.

 

 

We will have to see what happens when the island claim system comes out. Only company build with allowed certain company ID's makes it a big step in the right direction. The lawless thing is not.

Removing players wanting to complete their island does remove some of the reasons to grief. Greifing to grief is actually rare in terms of griefing. The new whole island claim should put a type of protection on your claim vs how a designated claim area works and hopefully will remove the way people just delete claim flags that are current on upkeep.

As far as this game's protection... Battle eye watches for 3rd party programs and certain suspicious macros. Battleye also kinda sucks at doing that. Aimbotting, duping, rollbacks, speedhacks, stat hacks, ESP exist on PvP and have for a while. Battle eye is not even close the Blizzard's Warden or whatever you are used to playing with. To my knowledge they have nothing that monitors something like who was around when this boat sunk. When it sinks it just says it sinks. This is why when you report something they want clear physical evidence of what happened. Basically you need a video of them griefing you. Even with that the griefing still happened and it's been clearly stated they are not restoring things unless it's an extreme case. (Like when the dragons were in freeports for 6ish? hours).

The amount of funding this game is pretty limited. So every solution has a cost. The highest cost for Grapeshot is labor hours. To fix the way people grief could take months. Changing how a flag works is a much faster way to prevent the griefing while the engine coding is fixed.

~Lotus

1 hour ago, Daemon Cross said:

But your contradicting yourself, you stated that a solo player had 2 claims and a large company griefed him for those two claims so they could own the entire island, there is no difference in one person owning a island or a large company, if for example I own the island and a large company settles on it and they decide they want ownership and ask me for the claim but I deny it. They can grief me until I give in, vice versa - your company makes the claim but I build there and you say we want this island for our members only, you will need to join or leave, if I refuse they can grief me until I give in one way or another.   

The only solution is to fix the exploits, have instant based bases or claims per account that doesn’t allow others to build on your claim.

Furthermore your saying 15 people per large island, have you seen how many claims it takes to go around the outside of a large island ? With that thinking right there is why we  are in the situation that we are in now, companies with that same mind frame controlled all the land and no one had a place to build. I mean what in the hell would 15 people do with a large island that could hold 150 to 200 claims with the current claim flags.

 As you being a large company then you may be entitled to 5 claims, that’s room to build a base for storage, a pen to hold your tames and several shipyards to build your ships. Figuring you can get what, 8 shipyards within a single claim now, 5 claims is plenty for a large company.

Afterall you are a company, you should stick together not fan out and take up space that you’ll never use.

   You are no different than the griefers who were causing people to leave, you want people to be part of a large company so it looks good, if people don’t want to be part of a large company then you frown upon them because this is a mmo after all and it’s supposed to be team based, so there is no room for solo players.

  Aside from raids in WoW ( that scenario ) where you had to group up to do the content there was no benefit to being in a guild. Even World of Warcraft adapted the frame of mind that solo players could join in by joining a random queue to find a group, ESO had public dungeons that solo players could enter and join in with other solo players to do the content. This game is no different, this is not a instanced based game, if your large company is fighting the Kraken and I show up to get a hit on it I’ll bet I get credit for the battle.  I really don’t know for sure because I’ve had no interest in doing end game content.

    So explain to me again why I need to join a large company or where the difference is in griefing between a solo and large company, I mean afterall whether it’s a large company or solo players that’s griefing someone they are still considered assholes.

Having claims that arn't entire islands at this point is highly unlikely. PvP accounts for 2x our population the game will be made to cater to them and then be PvE will be an adaptation of their foundation.

I've never said I want people to be able to build anywhere that needs to get changed. What I have said is they need to make it so I can allow company ID to the island so they can build. The other thing I am pushing for is the island owner can drop a flag that another company can claim and it becomes their land to do whatever with. If they don't follow the rules the owner can pull the flag. I posted it on the post I made in the suggestion thread.

I don't know if you care about being able to play the whole game but in the next patch- Kraken is a 33% cooldown reduction buff (already in game). It also gates the submarine which is access to the new trenches and generated shipwrecks. Trenches will house the new crab tame which is supposed to be able to carry a lot of things. The dungeons are also gated behind 9 powerstones or the kraken. They are adding 8 more powerstones and a new difficulty level kraken which has an unknown reward. PvE progression will also unlock your tarot skill tree.

https://gyazo.com/3e2553d4e44cb3872970702069085e94

This tree is the "Magic" of this game.

I believe that content should not be for a select few so when I schedule my runs I allow anybody to come. Rules are don't be toxic and follow directions. If the content is really hard I require discord.

https://gyazo.com/8e8b659b968a83e540964996327ae817

That is after we sank 50 of them for... reasons

5 claims doesn't even fit 1/2 our boats. Our primary barn is a 30x30x2 levels. It was home to about 1/10 our total animals. I am not counting breedstock either. We actually only used 2 large, 1 small, and 1 tiny (for lawls) in terms of shipyards. We had a room for each specific crafting branch. (After wipe we are not doing this I want just a box with all the stuff). Around the base we had about 150-200 boxes of armor, weapons, bolas, maps, ship weapons, bolas, planks, sails, maps, blueprints, bolas, maps, climbing picks, maps, tools, glide suits, bolas, maps, mythos, bolas, seeds, musical instruments, fertilizer, gunpowder, and I have 2 boxes dedicated to spyglasses for when I need to hit @Larsque. We stopped playing before the bookshelf was a thing so we might only need 100 boxes. This does not include preserving bags for taming foods. This is just our primary base which is 5-6 claims.

~Lotus

4 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

Your also wrong, making islands owned by one person will not fix griefing, mega companies will still troll people in hopes to make them quit or give up the area they are on. The only way to stop griefing is to make claims only build able to the people who own them.  If I own a claim and you can’t build there then there is no way to grief me.  Unless you use a exploit which I would take a video of and you’d be banned.  The developers may choose not to ban and they already admitted to liking the fact people use exploits but they are in the business to make money and if they continue to show favoritism towards griefing then I can pretty much bet they will be jobless because the financial backing they have will pull funding if they can’t bring in a player base.

 Players will not tolerate others using exploits anymore then the 40000 players who have already left. The only reason this game is still floating is because it is in early access and they have convinced the financial backing that they could turn it around and bring players back to the game.

 I will guarantee you that without a player base to pay for the servers it requires to run this game, the game won’t last.

   You are for the large companies but you’ve never once stated why my idea wouldn’t work.  You stated because large companies will grief you until you leave, I got news for you, large companies can grief each other as well so being part of one has no benefit.    I’m not going to troll another player in this game but I won’t tolerate bullshit from another player either. I have no desire to be part of a large company and be subjected to the mouth of its members. 

  If you truly believe that my idea won’t work then point out the ways it will fail and I’ll show the ways it will succeed. 

I already posted what happened to a solo player when a group next to them wanted their land. The group knew his schedule so knew when he would be asleep to ruin the game for him. No proof, no ban. There's also a way around the ban thing if it does come to that.

I want to see this developer liking people that exploit and the favoritism of griefing.

Large companies do grief each other, there was a grief war between 2 of them at one point. Being a part of a larger company has major benefits in terms of progression. I am level 87 on PvE and hit level 40 in 2 days on PvP. I also killed the Kraken first week I was on PvP so yeah...

This game has no way to get money after a player pays for it to my knowledge so active player base =/= income.

You described personal ownership which was already in the game. It was removed because people would join drop a claim and if they left there would be a weird claim in the middle of your territory that nobody really owned the areas you could build were patchy and screwed up. There was also problems with do you want this boat the player would say no so I put legendary sails and weapons on it. You decide to leave and now the legendary stuff on it goes with you. That idea was tried already.

2 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

The only way we can make it work is to keep making suggestions and hope that the majority of pvers will all agree on one of them and grapeshot will move in that direction. 

 The current system that is going to be implemented isn’t designed right, solo players can own small islands and large companies can own large islands, with 800 + islands that will be in the game, at max server load how many players are going to complain because they can’t own land ? It’s going to be a repeat of the same issues we started with, only differences are that we may not see the rush of players after the wipe as we did when it 1st released. So who plays now will have land possibly and those who start later will not.

I don't see this happening. I already stated for my 60 guys I think us having 4 islands is fair that is 15 per island, 12,000 total players could fit on 800 islands with every tribe having their own land. On the 4 servers this would be 48,000 players and that is just running PvE numbers. PvP actually has 2-4x the number of players per island.

~Lotus

6 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

I already know it exists.  Not the specific details you gave, but in general, I know that stuff happens.  Where we differ is in what to do about it.

Your solution looks like putting the fox in charge of the hen house to me.  You know this specifically about some of the bigger tribes, yet you want this solution to let them own the most land, be landlords who get to tell people what to do, and make them GMs with a hotline to Grapeshot.

I don't see the sense in it.

What I see is removal of motive to do such a thing. So lets say there's an aggressive tribe starts expanding because somebody stopped playing upkeep fell and now they can take more of an island they get the claims and their borders expand to the point that they have a most of an island. They expand to the point that they have all but your 2 claims on an island. They approach you and say they want the whole island you can live there as a tenant but they want the claims so they can build a highway. These are your claims, you have,had them since the first week, you tell them you will let them build on them but you are going to keep your claims. They respond with we'll see. The next day you log on and your base, tames, and ships are all gone. You have no proof who did it but you are pretty sure you know. What do you do at this point?

I don't know what happened to that player. I heard this story from a guy and that was his reason for joining Lotus because he didn't want to be a part of a group that did stuff like that, he just wanted to fight ships of the damned or maybe do some powerstones. On that tile I have a tribe I am allied with and I was like tell me about this group and he basically confirmed that in global they say things like that then people's stuff disappears.

You like to talk about perspective so now that you see that player that just wanted to play the game lose everything. I want you to think of it as a customer in the eyes of a dev and you get multiples of these daily. You need to find a solution to prevent the problem. You could investigate each incident 1 by 1 but that takes 1 day per case and you get 1-5 cases a day. So if you investigate a case and it's fake then what do you do? Waste a whole day with no results. You need to make solutions that prevent the problems rather than deal with the problems that have already happened.

So currently from the devs we have the claim a whole island. This prevents a tribe from wanting to expand their claims to have a "whole" island. I see that fixing so many problems.

(After typing that I realized something)

Did you know there's a group in the top 10 that in their prime had 8 active core members? (they had about 30 total members but they weren't super active)

So an 8 man team was able to claim enough land to be top 10. Do you consider that to be a big company?

In our prime we had 15-25 online daily, 30 on for Kraken, and 50-60 on weekly, 85 total. Do you consider that to be a big company?

I believe for our tribe 1 large, 1 medium, and 1-2 small is fair. That is 4 islands with 15 people on each island. If people want to live on our island cool, if they don't there should be plenty of islands to go claim. This system will make it so they have a decision.

~Lotus

1 hour ago, Winter Thorne said:

Not fixed.  1.  They haven't broken the land down into small enough chunks for anyone who wants to own land to have it.  The larger chunks also make it so the upkeep will be too high for smaller groups and solos to have land.  There won't be enough claims for smaller groups and solos anyway.  These are  things that many players said they wanted.  They aren't getting it.  So....not fixed.

 

Anyone interested in game design has to drop the "to me" and consider "to everybody".    There are a ton of players who didn't consider that a good solution.  Someone needs to consider them.  You post a lot about what would make you happy, but it would be interesting to see you take a few of these earlier complaint posts and work out what would make them happy.

Here's a question for you -  What if each island of medium or larger size had to be at least 50% non-company tenants, or you lose the claim?  And what if every island had a vote of the tenants each week, where if they were unhappy with the landlord, the landlord had 7 days to pack up and get out?  It shifts/equalizes the power dynamic.  Wouldn't appease the players who just wanted to own land because they wanted to own land, but might help the ones that just didn't want to be at the mercy of overlords.

I'm afraid you're right.  They can only make such a major change so many times before it's just too late and ridiculous to change it again.

It'll end up being a job of how to mitigate all the problems and complaints that's going to bring.  I'm not sure that's possible, or how many players would stick with it through that whole exercise.

I am gonna give you some of the darker side of this game. The land claims need to be divided on a per island basis. The reason for this is that some of the bigger tribes got to their size from not nice means. I haven't played PvE since about 2 weeks before they announced the wipe. I haven't seen it patched yet but there's 4 ways to sink another person's boats, 2 ways to kill tames (in most barns), 1 way to kill players without hacking. There's also 2 ways to remove claims with upkeep. In the top 10 NA-PvE I know 2 tribes actively used some of these to get land from players. The devs can only slow down the tribes that do this they can't stop them. You have a claim that they want they will grief you and force you off of your land by either making the game unplayable or by just removing your claim. The whole island claim is a PvP thing it prevents offlining and naked spam. It does however also solve the trick to breaking PvE flags or atleast make it a lot harder to do if it would still be possible. It's not just those 2 megas either there's 4 smaller tribes I know for a fact do this stuff. I've also heard dozens of other reports of this which really didn't help the game.

They most likely won't chop islands up that will be the job of the landlords. They can't because if they mark it as claimed what happens if other people quit do they delete just their stuff or the whole island? Who determines who goes where cause no way in hell are they going to be equal value pieces. If they really want to have a big island that bad they can form into 1 tribe.

There's more islands that are claimable than people that play this game at this point. A big island might only be 5 people at this rate

When I say to me I am saying I can't find anything wrong with it. I've read a lot of posts on this and other forums for this game and I push forward what I believe would benefit the game as a whole. There's a guy that wants Sundays to be PvP on PvE and he actually had about 50 people agree it would be a good idea. To me that isn't PvE but it worked in Conan why not bring it to Atlas

As for 50% non-company tenants I achieved that about when they made it so you could flip flags to allies can build. I was actually talking to my tribe about how we could get more people on the grid if we gave up the coast flags then we just hold the inner island so people couldn't scum it up. This was actually a suggestion from a guy about a week ago for how the PvE should be made but the problem with that is who determines what should and should not be buildable. As for tenant approval my tenants would actually find more tenants. Then most tenants actually merged into Lotus. So for approval rating I'm not afraid. A system like that can be abused though I can just split half my tribe into tenants then never worry about the vote. As a bigger tribe I can go in as a tenant then just vote the current landlord out.

The trick is to make an unbreakable system

2 hours ago, Daemon Cross said:

 See here lies the problem, 

  This is my personal opinion as a solo player.  

Do you want to have your own land - yes

Do you want to have a whole island - no

Do you want to rent from someone - no

Do you want someone to police you - no

Do you want to be part of a mega company - no

Do you want to have an upkeep - not really but if it means owning land and no one can build on my couple claims then it’s fine.

How much land do you need - Enough for storage areas, taming pens and 4 shipyards.

Why - because I want what’s fair for one to be fair for all.  

Explain - just because you play the game as a solo player you should be treated no different than someone who plays with 20 of their friends.

What about mega companies - If a person joins a company then what they own becomes part of that company, if that person leaves a company then what they own leaves as well.

 So you think this would solve the claim issues - yes 

Explain- by limiting claims per account then that stops flag spamming, that stops pillar spamming and that stops foundations spamming because you can only build within your claim or on someone else’s claim that is set to public building 

Unless I read it wrong they are making it so smaller islands can be claimed by solo players.

1 hour ago, Dangergirl Forever said:

I really thought when I saw the landlord/tenant thing it would be IDK something like the game Wurm Unlimited where you got a settlement token and could expand depending on finances. I am NOT interested in being a tenant or a slave. Also I am a solo player and I will NEVER join a company I want to do my own thing whenever and however I want. Why does it seem like this is all more complicated than it needs to be? I'm not interested in hoarding land or resources or taxing people to collect resources. I just want a nice spot of land thats mine and maybe if I have a few extra coins or some other criteria and the need to I can expand it. I want  my own settlement where I can have parking for people who want to trade and shops and a tavern-all kinds of stuff. It just feels that because of the way I choose to play I'm being pushed out.  I will just have to wait and see how everything is implemented. If its how I think it will be (solo players getting the shaft) I just won't play anymore.

*sigh* I looked it up

https://gyazo.com/2512744f0b75dfc018b26d6453145cf2

~Lotus

7 minutes ago, MisterMyztik said:

4-5 days prior to the PTR release on what has been a 30 day + development push?

Unlikely. 

 

I think we're pretty much set in stone at this stage that it will be some flavour of one claim per island with the settlement situation.  How the islands are taken/managed/maintained will be the things to be influenced at this point.  

I'm 99% sure it will be 1 claim per island the amount of people in your tribe determines how big of an island you can claim. The PTS will determine upkeep cost. I don't think PTS should even really do anything at this point just wipe the server and test it on live. Not like anybody does much on live now anyway -_-

~Lotus

26 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

I think things have gotten overly complex and out of hand.  It might be a good idea to remember what started all this and go back to the beginning.

I think it's great to have a place to talk about overall game ideas and feature expansion, but not a great idea to combine that with this first critical issue that needs to be addressed.  

Players were complaining that they couldn't find a piece of land to claim.  They also complained about griefing and pillar/foundation spam.  Nearly all of them just wanted a cap on claims to free up enough land for everyone to find a claim.  

That solution is more efficient for Grapeshot than implementing some complex system of a cap with owners, renters, build-everywhere, discourage lawless.  (And then having to deal with the fact that this does not eliminate the complaints about griefing and spam or the complaints about people not being able to own land)

That solution is also more fair for everybody than setting up a system with owners/renters and leaving the policing to the players themselves.  What could be more fair than letting everyone own a claim?

Fun to play?  The players complained that they weren't having fun if they couldn't claim land and the spam wasn't fun either.  Any solution that doesn't fix those is still not going to be fun for those players.

A lot of these future design ideas hang off the claims structure.  Doesn't mean it's bad to blue sky some of this stuff, but until the claims structure is really fixed, it's not so productive to plan out the rest.  We don't agree on the solution for that yet, so it's hard to participate in a larger design exercise.

There's no perfect solution to the problem because everybody wants something different. The claim a whole island seems really good. The problem I have noticed is people think every person is going to get an island. It should be every tribe will get 1 maybe 2 islands and if they are really big tribes 3 maybe 4 islands. To me 4 islands seems like a pain but it's doable and might be required for the highest progression.

One of the problems I see is some players are trying to make it so the ability to share land with other players just becomes a hassle. There's players that don't want to deal with owning land. This puts them in a tough spot.

The basics from the patch are do you want to own land-

Yes- Ok you pay upkeep if you don't you lose your land. You also need enough people to own the island.

No- Find somebody that will let you build on their land.

So to me the owning land thing is fixed with the patch. I am looking for what will the next set of problems be then fix them before they happen. Which talking to you has given me some ideas

~Lotus

4 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

I don't know if they intended it to go that far, but who knows?  (Unless you have some information about it that I don't)  It's kind of a leap from having a landlord in charge of an island to having mega-landlords policing other companies with a direct line to Grapeshot CS.  I mentioned in another post that companies really need to be careful with even employee GMs, and that volunteer GMs are incredibly tricky to set up right.  The possibilities for favoritism and abuse are huge.  And, you know, you may be the perfect kind of person for that, but you can't base a game on one guy.  All those people need to be vetted and you've got to have strong policies in place for them.   The bigger companies are being held up as the current "winners" of the game, and to have them policing the rest of the players ...you can imagine how people will feel about that.

That application idea was put up sort of tongue-in-cheek.   It IS very close to what's already in place, where players have to go around looking for already claimed spots and checking to see if the flag is set to build or no-build.  It just adds a communication element to that.  But people aren't happy with that idea in general, so it wasn't meant as a real solution to the claims problem.  I still think people just need to be able to have a spot that they own, and they won't be happy until they get one.

I keep trying to run my suggestions through a filter of "how would I feel about this as a big company?  a small company?  a solo?  A new player starting on a full server?   What would the experience be like?" , etc. 

I like the idea of apply like you put an app in. I really like that like I could work that into my idea post as a hey this area is an area I want somebody to build on. 

So that's the view from one of the bigger companies.  I think the view is different for some of those other groups.

Ultimately I'm trying to figure out a way to make it so that it is efficient for the Grapeshot team, fair for everybody, and fun to play. This land thing has been a problem since launch and I want to find a fix that will become what defines the game. I am going to add more to my post you've added more to the vision I have

I also want a list of Pirate Jokes told by the GM's like in WoW.

Why did Illidan not eat dinner? It was not prepared!

Why don't pirates shower before they walk the plank? Cause they will just wash up on shore.

~Lotus