Lotus

Where is the exploit? ~Lotus

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

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

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. 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

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

If your parameters weight/crew are fine (make sure they are still on the sails) try replacing your steeringwheel. Sometimes the game thinks the boat is still anchored when you unanchor it.

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 Unless I read it wrong they are making it so smaller islands can be claimed by solo players. *sigh* I looked it up https://gyazo.com/2512744f0b75dfc018b26d6453145cf2 ~Lotus

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

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

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

The tribe to my knowledge suffered no consequences. The player I think ended up joining another tribe or quitting. What will a GM do at that point though? Tell the bigger tribe they need to not block people from things then they have to tell everybody that and they can't. There was a post about hackers. They don't fly around invulnerable anymore cause they get banned too quick they have to stay in that area where you don't know for sure. What the tribe did is unethical but it's in an area where a GM can't just say you are breaking the rules cause technically they didn't. It's just a bad situation created by the dynamic of this game which is something I am looking at preventing. The bigger tribes can't get too big for their britches. I am going to lean for this system cause it's fair for all I'm gonna fabricate some tribe examples to show the way I see it. Tribe A will be the greedy large tribe that only has 100 members pads to 200 claims 2x more land then they should have. Tribe B will be the cheap large tribe that has 100 members but takes 1/2 the land they should. Tribe C will do it how it should be 100 members and the correct amount of land. Week 1 Tribe A has all the land woohoo. They look for tenants to help with upkeep spend a large chunk of time farming like hell. Tribe B has their land and they made upkeep for the next 2 weeks. They look for tenants but don't have good land for them. Begins progression PvE. Tribe C has their land farms their upkeep for the week and gets some tenants. Week 2 Tribe A farming upkeep to keep their flag and looks for tenants. Tribe B Works on progression which takes all their farming because they don't have the land to sustain good progression. (At this point they can get more islands but won't have a cluster it will be spread and kinda random) Tribe C will have their upkeep under control and go into progression (Should bring tenants imo ) Week 3 Tribe A looking have some tenants still farming like hell does a little progression then back to farming. Drama over farming all day vs doing content. Tribe B upkeep is good no tenants. They get more land but it is like 4 grids away so it's time consuming to operate out of both bases. Tribe C Upkeep is good the tenants are happy (some even join the tribe they do everything together anyway). Moves to #1 for progression. Week 4 Tribe A more drama and starts to split. Upkeep is bad which makes more stress. Tribe B Can take some of the members from Tribe A but has fallen behind on progression. They would need more land so they spread further. Tribe C Takes some of the members from Tribe A. Can take more land but doesn't need to they are established and completed all the current content. Some players go to PvP which creates a space for the Tribe A refugees. Week 5 Tribe A starts to lose land and more members. Tribe B clears all current content cause they are good but will never be as good as Tribe C Tribe C Doing good and the core remains strong. Preparing for next tier of content. Week 6 WIPE!!! Tribe A Dead Tribe B Merged into Tribe C Tribe C 250 members! Takes 250 members worth of land. You get the vision For instances the point is to just have a spot so people have a "personal base" but it has 0 effect over the actual server in terms of resources or advantages. For building blocks yeah the game needs to get it's basics down. One of the reasons I am also leaning on endgame content is because the game was also losing people from lack of content. ~Lotus

For access you have an option for just players and admins then you have an option for access levels, you then have to set every level and what it can do then you need to set everybody to the desired level, you then need to set items to have the access level desired. It takes a while and you will miss some spots. We had a base in the artic that an admin set up and he didn't want people to run out and lose his fur gear so he put everything to access 5. Sometimes people would join and teleport to the place to get the discovery and get trapped cause the bed was not useable. It was polar though so you would die real quick. The name of the bed was don't teleport here. For finding a company I would recommend you talk to them and ask what their goals are and how they handle certain situations. You can also ask their neighbors to see if they are toxic. Be careful though cause Lotus is apparently a tyrant with 200+ members, that extorts people on our 2000+ flags, and if you arn't chinese we sink your boats and steal your flags. I can't remember what other crazy stuff I've heard about the tribe. Should announce intentions. I was running around one day and I watched a guy die to an elephant, his buddy started running I was like oh crap these guys are getting wrecked so I killed the elephant with my bear. After killing it I noticed the little microphone icon was lighting up so I was like hold on I can't hear you. So I muted discord and stopped my music and tabbed back in. They were like why would you do that we were trying to tame that I was like oh my bad. This elephant was level 7 or something I was like ehhhhh I guess it's better than nothing. So I was gonna go back to our stable and just give them one of ours I had a 28 base that tamed to like 40 so they could have a "good" elephant. Then this guy starts screaming all kinds of profanity at me through the mic cause I killed his level 7 elephant. Now this was in the time of the sleepers and they had found an area that was set to all build but those guys were long gone. They put a trap up on it this was a ghetto trap, F11 is desert with a vulture problem so you want a wall of gates around your taming pen which I had a public use one for people an arrows distance from their trap which they could have used if they weren't being rude. I told him he should announce what he is doing when he arrives because I have a pen he could have used and I would have given him whatever he needed to tame (Wheat, bolas, bows, arrows, sickle, and even a public water fountain inside the pen cause F11 has wicked heatwaves and dying from dehydration while taming sucks for taming %) This dude goes off even harder calling me all kinds of things but then... then he says it... "You don't own this island" which I responded not the whole island just 90% of this grid. At that point he got even more pissed but talking to him wasn't worth my time so I went back to farming paste and looking for good tames. I got 2 rhinos and 1 elephant with a nice chunk of paste. They got a teen elephant the others they were getting died to the vultures. I could see it from the luxury of my taming pen. They left said more profanity at me in global before leaving. So yeah announcing what you are doing on an island When I am looking for something and know it's in a grid I start talking in global the people usually tell me where to find it. If I am lucky they will just sell it to me for some gold. The way it looks though is they want bigger tribes to act as admins for the smaller tribes to keep them happy. So if somebody does something a bigger tribe with demo rights can fix it will take workload off of grapeshot. So if you are admin of the island and you see somebody exploiting and ruining my good time you would know how to get a grapeshot employee to come take care of it. You will also know how to get the proof they will want after you get a few of them deleted. Which is again you doing the job for the GM so they don't need as many of them. For finding a spot to build you will have the ability to take a smaller island as a solo player. For the bigger islands it might be tricky but I have players all over the world so usually have somebody on. As do most bigger tribes. 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. The area would be marked with a lighthouse and the lighthouse could be a flag that flag is your area if approved then the tribe that owns the island can't delete your stuff only the flag. Then it's 4 day decay so people have time to get their stuff out. I kinda just brainstormed on the post XD ~Lotus

From my understanding they are reworking the islands. If they rework them and change the discovery points that will create a problem if they don't wipe the characters. The other thing is my char is 87 so for people that are coming back to try and get land I will have a huge advantage over somebody that is level 50. As for the hat I would like them to fix the hat we got for killing the kraken cause there was no reasonable way to keep it. I also want to put my kraken hat on a penguin but for now I would have liked it to just work. As for all the people talking about the wipe and nobody playing if stuff gets deleted. I like seasons on Diablo 3, I also don't like playing it for more than 1-2 months at a time . At the highest tier of that game for solo farming you go into the rift and if it isn't a certain map/monster set you like you just leave the rift and start a new one. It gets tedious real quick. This I grind against it until the game just becomes stress then I play a new game. For this game I wouldn't mind seeing a level ladder of how fast can you get to level 120 (max level possible?) Then they reset it every 3 months or so as a season. This kind of play isn't for everybody though so yeah. ~Lotus

I know but I think the original release for the patch on live was supposed to be the 20th. Kinda like that polar dungeon in Feb ~Lotus

The most landowners are happy to have people live on their islands. The thing is with the current state of the game I am going to say 50% of islands won't be claimed in the first month. Living on somebody's land will be more of a you can take that vacation. Wood/Fiber/Thatch/Stone/Flint is not something most landlords would care bout. I say most because I knew a guy that had all the wood on his island built on it made me laugh. If you build on metal though I would be more than a little upset. Lawless is going to have a damaging decay if I read it correctly. This means every few days you need to take resources and go to every piece of structure and hit "E" or whatever the hotkey to repair a structure is. As for the recruit thing. Lotus has 5 levels of access. The patch will increase it to 10. You don't need to admin lock boats (ours are rank 4 and 5 for fleet and most the personals are rank 2 and 3). It was really rough setting all that up but eventually we did and it was worth it to have a layer of protection. A group that just admin locks is lazy imo... then again I had it that way though for a little while but I was lazy... but we won't get into that . If a new recruit did sink your boats I would make sure they are replaced anyway. I guess most companies don't do that though ~Lotus We wouldn't need restrictions if everybody could just play nice ~Lotus

He knows what is up because he will talk before building. It was also stated it's 12 hours on PvP longer on PvE (I would guess 72 hours). The reason they should talk is because it is proper etiquette. Showing up to an island without announcing your intentions is rude, this includes taming, maps, farming, RP party . I believe they are going to convert it to the allow company ID to build on the island with the removal of alliances. I put it in my suggestion post XD ~Lotus

I'll talk to you. As long as you arn't building on top of the harder to get resources I won't demo your stuff. If you don't speak English I have a lot of bi-lingual people mainly @Larsque cause she speaks like 5 languages fluently. The way it works currently though I have flags set to Allies and Company in most places. ~Lotus

I am pretty sure the patch was supposed to be released on the 20th and PTS before then. I think it got delayed again so they are like 20th is PTS. Game is bleeding itself dry for a playerbase at this point. ~Lotus

This is why I want the upkeep to be kinda harsh. 500k wood, thatch, and fiber with 50k metal and 10k sap, crystal, gems a week would be fair for a big island imo. So you have people wanting to trade and people wanting to have as much as possible for the taxes. The other thing I want changed though is no taxes just bonus I put it in the article how I would change it to make it more of a working together thing. If they put that change in the game I would say double the previous numbers. For medium islands half that and for small islands a quarter. Taxes are a PvP thing. If they did not have Taxes you would have no reason to let anybody near any of your stuff. Sink them take their stuff. On PvE it will help with upkeep. I want things put in place that will pull the groups together and build a sense of community. The removal of alliances from PvE is going to be a huge headache. ~Lotus Also if you ever encounter somebody that does toxic things to their tenants let me know, videos and screenshots if possible. I will blacklist them from anything my group runs aswell as our allies (we can have allies without alliances ) ~Lotus

This is a PvE thread. To get land you wait for upkeep to expire and then drop a flag. If you are unsure you are going to get it you stay in the flag until theirs declaims and yours claims. I don't quite know what you mean about getting goodies from other players, only thing I can think of would be if they sink their ship you can take it or if they are lawless and you demo their stuff. For nonlegit things you can basically take everything from somebody we won't talk about that though cause it's bannable The new PvP system has a lot of interest from a lot of people I know. For living under somebody's thumb I don't quite understand what you mean. This guy knows what's up. People would come to F11 and be like hey is there a place I can build. I would ask what they wanted to build. They would say _____ for _____. I would say for something like that I have spots here, here, and here show them the spots. Explain the rules to them (Don't build on resources and don't be toxic). It worked out great IMO. If we were doing something the people living on the land were invited to come too. It would build bonds and created experiences. ~Lotus

Myztik knows what's up How do you feel about high end PvE content early on? I'm LFM that have the will/ability to hold their own for the new content. What about the game does appeal to you then? The new system removes a lot of griefing potential IMO. It will improve the game more than it hurts it which means it's a good thing. ~Lotus

We see the game from different perspectives. I can only imagine what it is like to be a solo player. When I look at things I look at how can somebody use this to hurt my tribe. When a boat is moveable it is really easy to sink very quickly. The reason I want to stay away from personal instance island is people could join then take boats, tames, and all kinds of stuff to their personal island sink them and take all the stuff. Once it's there nobody can recover it. I am trying to avoid those situations. My idea was based on WoW's garrison for your own little area but then people could just build there and not interact which is not the direction I believe an MMO should go. I do however want people to have something that they can call their own. In Lotus I just let people have their own area they could do whatever in and then have a general tribe use area. ~Lotus

Her post is like poetry to me, I don't know if she intended it or not. The name of the video is trolling mega-nerds on atlas. Her statement is saying if I wasn't working this is what I would be doing. I imagine she works a lot and doesn't get to really enjoy the game she is helping to build. So again I see nothing wrong with what she said. For Grapeshot's response to the post is nobody's business but Dollie and her supervisor(s). Which is the professional thing to do. ~Lotus

This "big patch" is going to have dailies, atleast 1 dungeon, 8 more powerstones, and a kraken level 2 (like ark had for higher level bosses). For us this game was dying about 2 weeks before the wipe was announced we were working on materials for highest BP possible for the polar dungeon but with hundreds of thousands of each resource banked we had nothing to do besides breeding but that was still awful at this point. We went to PvP but after the wipe was announced that died too. ~Lotus

Limiting it runs into problems. If a big tribe can only claim 1 island then they can't take extra space it's not possible for them but trying to figure out how much space a certain tribe needs is kinda hard. 1 flag per person can be used to kick smaller people out. lawless foundation spam happens. 1 claim per island is limiting but also amazing. It basically gives a limit but also a safety of control. ~Lotus