Lotus

I posted how I feel the claims should be changed for PvE. Everybody wins imo. ~Lotus

I made a post about how the landlord thing should work and basically everything I believe for claims. ~Lotus

I don't know where the best place to have discussions for this to explain what I feel is the best way to keep as many players as possible happy. I will use my stream as a faster way to talk to people as I write this massive suggestion thread. I am going to cover what I feel are the current problems of this game as well as what I feel could be done better. I will constantly be updating it. Currently the "hot topic" is claims which I will talk about the directions the game could take and what I feel would be best. I also will talk about things I feel are just poorly designed. Claims: Currently the PvE is in a lawless vs claim flag state. They have pros and cons I will talk about each system and how I believe it will play out. Current System: This system was good on paper but in execution is awful. Some people could not get land, some could not hold it, some people have more land then they should. The solution they came up was switch to lawless. This idea is terrible in my opinion. The amount of griefing that will take place will make the game unplayable. I have seen galleys with gates under them in lawless. I have heard of people that box in tames while people are farming. I've seen resources walled off. It's just going to be terrible. One person could literally grief a whole tribe. If you stop your boat somewhere for the night you could wake up with a box around it. The argument is the box will decay the solution to griefing it would be to repair the box then. If somebody doesn't like you they just wall your base in. It's so many possible kinds of grief you would need to watch out for the game would just be unplayable. (look at official on Ark) -->Idea Make a PvE server for lawless and for claimable (by server I mean NA-PvE-Lawless and a NA-PvE-Claims). Everybody wins... Kinda. I personally don't like the idea of lawless but some people want it so let them have it. // 3/14 update Claims per person: The idea of limiting the amount of claims a person can have has come up but it opens to a type of grief some of the bigger tribes used to kick out smaller ones. They would claim around them then make a box preventing the person from using their claim. The point was to they make you not want to be around the island and you quit or leave then they get your land. It was dirty and I would prefer people don't have to deal with this. It's why I lean towards 1 company in control of 1 island. --> Solution: The announcement on the last captains log was that they are going to use the PvP system of 1 flag per island. The size of the island your tribe can claim is based on the size of your tribe. (Bigger tribe = bigger islands) This made some people angry. I believe with no changes to how the flags work this would be a huge headache. With balance changes I think this is going to be the system that defines Atlas as a game. The problems I have seen are- -Anybody can build anywhere --> The island owner's job is to keep it clean. When the changes to the claim flag came out a lot of people came to F11 and built taming pens all over the place without us knowing. Some of them are still there undemolishable. The lawless griefing will happen if the owner can't say who can and can't build on the island. If somebody allowed to build on the island decides to grief their neighbor then the owner needs the ability to fix it. (Basically the owner is an unpaid GM for the game it's a kind of civil service for this dying game). Some people hate the idea of taxes. -Taxes // 3/14 update- So if we claim the land and it has metal on it and we notice that other people keep taking the metal on our claim our solution is put a wall up and keep others out so we can get the metal on our land. The tax bank is to deter people from keeping others out of their resources because they are losing out on potential resources. // (Note I frown on walling people out types of behavior) --> This is a touchy subject for a lot of people. People don't want to pay taxes to their overlords. When the tax bank first came out you could set it to whatever and it would not effect the person harvesting. So 10% taxes would make 110% item the harvester got 100% and the bank would make 10%, at 30% it would make 130% item and give the bank 30% while giving the harvester 100%. I guess they fixed it at some point. This is an MMO and should be played with a bunch of people so lets turn this problem into a solution that makes the game better. The way I would do this is going to get mathematical but all in all I feel it will make the game better. --> Lets make the "Tax rate" not change what happens when people harvest on the island it just makes the bonus and they get 100% of what they farm. So the "mega" tribe goes and puts their "Claim tickets" into their bank so they can claim an island. Each claim ticket is worth .5% tax. So an island that takes 20 tickets will have a tax base of 10%. Another tribe approaches them and would like to build their base on this island but they are not big enough to have actually taken the island (tax tribe). The mega tribe is like no problem they set it so the tax tribe can build. The tax tribe then can put their claim tickets into the tax bank (they have to put at least 1 in). Lets say they put in 10 tickets the bonus for the mega on everybody that harvests on the island goes up to 15%. This is the mutualism. This is the meat that is going to make this beautiful for everybody. So far it helps the tax tribe a little and the mega quite a bit. The tax tribe gets to put down a resource chest on land that can be flagged as the "Primary chest" this chest will get what they give to the mega. So that tribe that put 10 tickets in gets a 5% bonus from what the mega farms on the island. They help each other out. So the mega can get a tax rate of something super high lets raise the cap to like 50% (That is 100 people living on the island) The tax tribe max 25% (Don't want 2 megas to just share a huge island and abuse the farm bonus). Perks for all. -Random boats --> Logging in and there's a random boat parked in our harbor just blocking everything has got to be one of the most annoying things ever. This is a big advantage can come from a tribe that claims the island. A safe spot for people to anchor is something that is important in the game but people being able to anchor anywhere is also a problem cause you can grief with it. I think the lighthouse should be the solution. I people should not be allowed to anchor on a claimed island except around where a lighthouse is placed. I think the lighthouse should act as a parking meter though charging an increasing gold per hour. So lets say you are just parking for the night would be 50 gold. The time would increase it though so the longer you are there the more it becomes. So if you leave it there for 3 nights it's 500 gold in total. If you leave it there for a week it's 5k. This might seem steep but leaving your boat in somebodies area is rude IMO. This would create a problem for people trying to do maps. So I believe you should be able to anchor anywhere for a 2 hour window. After that time your ship would just unachor. The mechanic of the time flex would be based off of if you unanchor in an area it then takes that long for it to come off cooldown. This prevents you from just going out and coming back in real quick to reset cooldowns. So if you park for 8 hours at a lighthouse in 8 hours it will be back to 0 total. -Instanced islands The instanced island does 2 things. Basically it's the single player mode for the game. Trying to have a regular computer run this game without a server would be nuts because of the optimization issues. So to fix that people could have their own little island (it would actually be a medium island) with all the biomes and whatever they could just hermit to and build whatever crazy stuff they want with access to all the plants and tames and whatever. The only thing you wouldn't have would be boats the reason is because you would have a bed to teleport you to and from the island because it would be more like a solo/creative area for the game. The tutorial island is not intended to have any bearing on the outside world. Some people state they just want an area to build and don't want to play with others this is the area that they can do that on. This also will free up some land. This area would also replace the tutorial zone (freeport). I really like the freeport but it makes the game too easy IMO. (500k fiber/hour solo) etc. What I would want them to do would be change the freeport so only the NPC town part is not buildable then lawless area for the rest of the island. The lawless area would give the generic resources and have the damage decay of 100% damage over 3 days so people didn't use it as a primary base location. People learn to play on the personal island then adventure out of the freeport to lawless and build their first boat. This is what the lawless zones original intentions were so now people launch from freeports. (new players atleast) This will make it so the grids that are currently marked as lawless will become obsolete. So they can make them claimable. This leads to a huge amount of claimable islands. The idea is to make it so theirs more land than needed. I personally want the land to be held by your desire to log on and farm to keep the bank filled. -Finding claimable land //Changed 3/16 If the island is not claimed its name will be Blue if it is Claimed with no space it will be red, if it is claimed but has spots you can on build it will be yellow. What does spots you can build on mean? I tossed the idea around in my head about if I could change the game how would I limit where people can build. I talked to Winter Thorne and he mentioned putting an app in to the lighthouse. This set off a lightbulb. So a Mega tribe comes in and claims the island but wants tenants. As the tribe that controls the island the owner can drop a flag. They can go up to the flag and set a number on it this number determines how many tickets it will cost. They can also write in a note that says this is the rules for living on the island. This new flag now shows up on the map and basically says ROOM FOR RENT! Which will clean up spam and stuff on the forum. You can also put a note on it that describes resources around it how to get to them etc. So a player/tribe that is looking for an area because they don't want the responsibility of owning an island can go there and be like yes or no. If they want it they can click the flag and hit they are interested. This will put a message in the owner tribe's chat that says "Player is interested in area X/Y" the flag on the island symbol will also change color for the tribe. They come over talk to the person if needed and then they transfer the flag to them. This will transfer ownership of the land in the flag to the tenant. The owner tribe can no longer build in that area. The buildings they had in that area decay and delete in 4 days. So the tenant has complete control over that area. This fixes the i'm afraid the land owner will come delete my stuff. A new problem could arise that the tenant is toxic or stops playing or whatever. The tribe owner from the owner tribe can come over and remove the flag. If that happens it will go into a demo mode and 4 days later the land will go back to the island owner and deletes anything there (so they can't do it to steal it). This gives the tenant tribe time to get their stuff out. An exploit could be to wall off the flag so the owner can't click it. This is fixed by just needing the owner to drop another flag in the circle of the tenant flag, instead of dropping a new flag it just deletes the current one. The land also can't be claimed while the tenant's stuff is still there. Another rule for flags will be no overlap. This makes it so people get some space when they get space. Some people might not like the idea of having people put claim tickets into the flag. This does 2 things it would do synergy with that tax bonus idea and it also prevents a solo player from having a base on every single island. Which if the land owner doesn't mind they can set the flag to a different setting. Freebuild! which basically turns the area into lawless with no decay. //Added 3/16 --Reworked island resources A possible problem with a tribe claiming a whole island is the big tribes take all the small islands and the smaller tribes have nothing. I personally would not like this because this means I now have to maintain more tames and banks and then sail all over the place. I do see how it could be used by bigger tribes as a way to have the spread of resources needed for the blueprints controlled inside the tribe. I posted this in another thread but I believe the resources should be changed the higher the tier of island. The biggest islands should have 4-5 different wood/thatch/fiber/metal/stone/flint they should also have gems/crystal/honey/sap/salt/coal and they should be able to grow any crop and breed any animal. This will make the bigger islands way more lucrative than a bunch of little islands. Looking at high end progression I want to have the resource spread for blueprints and the best tames possible. This might seem extreme I see why people would be afraid of the big tribes taking smaller islands. If there's a small, a medium, and a large island with the same exact resources and next grid over is a little island that has a resource I can't get in the current grid then I am going to be using 2 islands anyway so it becomes an efficiency especially if I already have tickets put into another island somewhere else and now it becomes 2 smalls with the resources I need vs another medium/large that offers the same as a small. Another thing this would fix is that small tropical paradise with the waterfalls in the multiple tiers (B6/7 has one I think) could have a really neat base on it. It also has massive amounts of oil on it so I could see it being claimed just for the use of the like 20+ oil spawns it has (Like 200-500 a node). This could be turned into a favoritism for megas which I could see being argued either way. The way I look at it is that big island the mega has will be even nicer for the tenants to have with a resource spread. By having the tenant tribes put tickets in for the claims they have on these bigger islands that have more resources you are also going to free up more space for solo/smaller tribes that want to do their own thing. The people congregating will also help strengthen the community (it's an MMO). The complaint could be taxes which I strongly recommend you turn into a bonus not a tax. The only problem I could see would be people congregating on certain grids and then nobody in most of the map. However it will free up a ton of land doing that which will make a lot of space for growth. """ I copy pasted this from what I would do as a designer for changes to tames As a designer I would scrap how animals are at this point. Currently this game is turning into an Ark expansion. I would decide to stop living in Ark's shadow. Currently I've done all PvE material so my day consists of riding around on a level 70 bear with elephants behind me harvesting X resource with hopes of actually needing blue print weapons to complete the next PvE tier. Currently riding is basically a requirement for things to do effectively either everything else needs to be brought up or beastmastery needs to be brought down. I would change the tree to crew. It would allow you to get animals but the animals would have something they bring to the table and not be rideable. The shoulder mount thing would be fine but cruising around on (current meta tame) is basically Ark. So I now have a blank slate and need to make it so I can get tames. I would want it to be a low chance from mate boosted animals when you harvest their bodies or a high chance from an alpha. Could also put a vendor in the game that sells the babies. So now my players have a baby X. This whole temperature thing currently is silly and the way to fix it going to require a lot of resources from my company (grapeshot) so the cost would be too great to keep this. The concept is cool but the creation and implementation creates a poor user interaction with it so I would scrap it. The concept of feeding animals something special is a good one so I could fill up a bear with honey and it would mature faster or just use berries cause they are easy but longer time until they are grown. So now I have a way for players to get tames so I now need to make them useful. This would be the bottom tiers of the crew tree. Different animals would have a function that fall into combat or utility. For this I would think of how I envision an amazing creature of the type. Bear- Combat- Taunt enemies around the player acting as a tank. Chicken- Utility- When on wander produces eggs Cow- Utility- Produces milk (more on wander) Bull- Utility- when on wander fertilizes nearby crops Crow- Shoulder- When you die acts as a bed. Razortooth- Combat- nerfs alphas. Shieldhorn- Combat- Produces a shield that deflects projectiles. (Currently elementals have little counter play) Elephant- Utility- When on wander collects wood. Giant Pig- Utility- When on wander finds buried items. Giraffe- Utility- When on wander gathers thatch. Horse- Utility- Rideable, pulls carriage and cargo which helps tranports large amounts of people or heavy amounts of resources great distances (we need something that makes unloading a galley not horrible) Lion- Combat- grabs smaller creatures. Monkey- Shoulder- barehanded becomes climbing picks at a much higher stam use rate. Ostrich- Utility- Harvests seeds when on wander. Parrot- Shoulder- Makes musical instruments easier to play and buffs the buff radius. Penguin- shoulder- fortitude buff. Rabbit- Shoulder- When on shoulder provides a movement speed. Rhino- Utility- When on wander gathers stone. Seagull- Shoulder- When on shoulder reduces/removes fog debuff Sheep- Utility- When on wander gathers fiber Tiger- Combat- reduces movement speed of enemies. Vulture- Utility- When on shoulder decreases vitamin depletion. Wolf- Combat- has a howl that increases damage. Turtle- Make tameable- Shoulder- Increase swimspeed, decreases oxygen use, and reduces deep diving debuff. Rattlesnake- Utility- When on wander produces venom, venom is used for anti-venom which reduces torpidity. So now that I have all these super cool animals I need to transport them and the current bug is they fall off (scavenging tames in the ocean is super lucrative I know a guy that got a Razortooth) I would make it so boats have a animal attachment that is basically a cage and when you send the animal to it the animal gets turned into more of an item that is placed inside the cage instead of being on the boat (no more lost at sea tames yay). We now need somewhere to put all these wandering tames. I would make it so tames on wander don't leave your territory. I would also make it so you can apply a filter on the map to see where certain tames are. Now for the meaty part of the new tree. I would make it so NPC's you get from SotD have a type of suffix like Bob. Bob would be a builder. You would need points in crew to hire Bob and then you can put him on a smithy. If you have skills in construction you would be able to make things like stone at a reduced cost. The points in crew would only be to get Bob, the points in construction would make it so you can get the discounted building from Bob. This would make Bob your righthand man when it comes to construction of things. You would still need the recipe to make it though. So getting NPC's and keeping them alive would have benefits beyond "I need guys on my sails" which you would want to keep around because sailor NPC's would make your sails better. This would lead into reworks of the other skill trees, I would make farming capable of making the large crop plots grow fiber,thatch, and wood that the NPC's can harvest at a drastically reduced rate. The rate they harvest can be modified by giving them higher end tools. Artillery tree would also get access to alchemists that can be put on a mortar and pestle that will make it so you can stack unlimited resources inside it and queue up organic paste for more than 220 at a time... it would also make it faster to give the QoL that is missing from the chemistry station. I could keep talking about how I would change it but the TL:DR is make animals more companion rather than a requirement but still have meaning. Make NPC's more than a parasite when you arn't sailing. As a designer I would change a lot of things but for creatures this is what I would do. """ End copy paste for tames changes (Some of that is out dated but you get the idea) So lets take the changes for the game so far you get land and have tames and make the NPCs do work you could build a city have traders and basically you build a functioning city that other players come in and interact with. (Which would be so cool imo) Here is where stuff gets crazy though. this goes under new content. --Player Cities In PvE Getting Invaded-- // 3/14 Updated and added more So you have a city that is making money. This would attract pirates in the real world and I believe it would attract them in the game too. (It would in PVP) so they decide to come loot and plunder. This is where it gets rough to program (GOOD LUCK GRAPESHOT!) Only the highest tier islands would be targeted to have this though. The tax bank can only be dropped at a predetermined location and the tax bank determines where the city can be built. Once you have put enough resources into the tax banks. An NPC pirate invasion would trigger. The tax bank would get an item that you can place that starts a 30 minute countdown. The pirate boats would come and start a big invasion. You would have to fight your way from the town center towards the pirate boat then board it to fight and kill the captain. The Pirate faction would send waves at your beacon and try to bombard it. This would also make it so PvE players could use things like puckles, swivels, and my favorite MORTARS! If the pirate faction kills the beacon you lose, the bank loses everything in it and taxes can't be collected for a few days. Killing the captain will win the event for the players. When you win everybody gets discovery points and maybe a special type of vendor for the city. (Like a crew vendor that sells crew? ) This would build on my idea that the player cities should actually become the centers for trade instead of freeports. This would also play into another idea I have. -New pirate faction The PvPers will attack and sink your stuff to steal it but in PvE we don't have things like that.You just run from SotD and kinda afk for an hour to go do maps. We use a speed schooner or brig with no cannons. Lets change this. With the addition of NPC wrecks I want to see something else. An NPC pirate that has an aggro range based on the amount of resources you are carrying. It will be a fast boat that attacks with cannons and bar shot. (Which is what happens in PvP) The NPC pirates will come onto your boat and try to kill your guys. You could sink their boat and get some gold/ammo/resources/guns/BP's/Maps? I would make it so in order to get masterwork/legendary maps you can only get them from high end pirate ships instead of I want to do maps lets see how lucky I am running around on this bear. --Int as a stat I went full int once... It was awful. I try things just to get a feel for what they do. I want the best items I can get for my crew. Somebody else bit the bullet and went super high int so we can get that extra 5% bonus. The idea that somebody gets to just craft is stupid in my opinion. I think this stat could be removed from players and baked into NPC's that can craft (Bob the builder). The level of the NPC would determine his rolls on the stuff he makes. This would make it so you want to get your NPC's leveled up as high as possible. Also with crafting I would have the station interact with the bank/resource chest so I don't need to move thousands of pounds of materials around to try and make things. (New content will now go here) ~Lotus //Update Log 3/14 Clarity on instanced island. + Claims per person + Tax bank | Responded to Awakatanka + Winter Thorne + Daemon Cross + trqfreak350 + Eldred 3/16 I talked to Winter Thorne in another thread and came up with ideas. Finding land + Reworked islands idea.

The idea would be to take an island and change it to an instanced island that only you could build on visit. You could have it be your starting area and just port to it from a guy at the freeport so there's no change to the actual map and remove the collision of boats from server hopping. It could also just replace the freeports make a lawless area where the freeports are. You could put the city in lawless and have people just port from their island to their. This would also make all the lawless areas claimable. ~Lotus

This poll is biased btw. You have the first 2 worded negatively so they are less appealing. I could Do the same thing and say who wants to be a landlord, control an island and ensuring a fair experience for all. Be a tenant, helping the landlord keep the island you call home a great place to have your base. Then spin the negative I want 1 flag per person and if I settle near a toxic group they will grief me so my claim is useless until I leave or quit the game because the GM's have too much to take care of. I want people to have multiple claims so that casuals can't find land and if they run the risk of a larger group griefing them. (current system). I have a classification system for different tribes. You can be either white pirates, blue pirates, or black pirates. White pirates play the game and wait for griefers to go away. Blue pirates play the game but if you grief them they will grief you back. Black pirates will try to take what you have, these are the griefers. In the top 10, 2 were white, 2 were blue (1 was Lotus, If you throw the first punch well..), 3 were black confirmed (proudly told me how they griefed). From what I heard another was also black (I never had direct interaction for confirmation). The other 2 ??? The point though is that the problem currently has no good solution just a solution that will create less problems. I'm probably going to end up doing what I don't want to do which is write a huge wall of text. (Some of the people I recognize and know I write walls) This wall is going to dwarf those walls. I'm gonna write the wall and make grapeshot pay for it (I'm bored but what am I going to do play atlas ) ~Lotus

I'm debating on writing a post about how I would fix all this crap. The best solution is everybody has a personal island that is instanced to them. (Basically the garrison in WoW). Then they have a tribe island that they can do stuff with the tribe. If you leave the grid it takes you into the lawless world. I couldn't find a huge problem with this except that it basically turns official into a private server so you cut off interactions with people and the biomes would make it wonky. ~Lotus

Sometimes I think it's a madlibs that determines things -_- on a more serious note The point I was making about the PvPers is when people say hey change this, the devs have no clue any stats about the player. A hardcore gamer to me by definition schedules life around gaming. A good example of this would be when we used to set alarms when claims would come off upkeep at 3:00AM . Softcore would be if you have free time you play the game. A casual would be like... (This is not meant to be negative but I can't word it humbly)... a primitive schooner is a substantial investment . With that in mind when I say it's not that bad to find land and somebody else is like it's impossible the devs will get mixed signals. I will throw some pretty rough stats out there. (This is before the wipe was announced) On Official PvP had 2x PvE for online players most of the time. So all the PvP changes that come through and nerf things like explosive barrels which is the best way to kill a rock elemental to my knowledge. Here's where the real fun is... PvP + PvE official is 1/3 the player base... so the majority isn't on official so claims changing for official will also change private. So official PvE is 1/9 or 11% the total player base and we arn't united on the change we want. So roughly 5-6% is arguing on the forums with the other 5-6% over lawless vs claims. Both have pros and cons and neither is clearly preferred. I need to meme at this point I'm gonna pull this all together it's gonna be magic need full immersion for this magic though so as you read this take off your headset, close netflix, remove all distractions. Lets go to imagination land. Clear your thoughts... and pretend You are Jat's boss. You have your degree in management. You did hard work and now here you are living your dream. You have a whiteboard with all kinds of diagrams and sticky notes on it. Inspirational phrases all over the walls. On your desk is several monitors. You have read the forums and could respond but that is Jat's job, your job is to guide Jat so that he can achieve his potential. You go back to working on the schedule knowing that you are going to put in another 60 hour week as a leader though you want to set the example of putting in the hard work you want to see from your team. As you continue planning out team building exercises you hear a knock on your door. You look up to see Jat with a worried expression on his face. You invite him in and he takes the seat in front of your desk. Hastily he expresses, "I don't know what to do." Inquisitively you ask, "What do you mean?" with a raised eyebrow. His face changes to panic. "They are upset about the claims being announced for PvE!" he exclaims. You've heard this before from him. His passion for his job causes his emotions to get the best of him. You stand and face the poster to your left. Slowly you walk towards it. "Tell me more about the problem they have with the announcement." you say as you turn to face him. Jat takes a deep breath to compose himself before explaining the situation. "The plan was to remove claims so that the PvE players did not have to worry about flags anymore. They wanted the claims removed so we announced we were taking them out. This made others angry because they want claims. So after an overwhelming amount of people protested the removal of claims we announced we were going to make it how the PvP system will be." Jat explains as tears begin to well up in his eyes. You slowly walk towards him. "They are now arguing on the forums." he says as he breaks into a full sob. You kneel down and place your hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "Hey. What is done is done." you say calmly. He stops sobbing and makes eye contact. "You can't make everybody happy. Is there an easy solution to this problem?" You ask firmly. "No." he says in a saddened tone. "What is the most valuable resource you have to make this game extraordinary?" you ask in an empowering manner. "My time." He responds plainly. You smile rising to your feet. "That's right now go use it on something worth using it on." You tell him with encouragement. holding out your fist. Jat's eyes become large and proud as his face lights up with a smile. He bumps fists with you as he leaves to go work on projects with a definite solution. You return to your seat and continue working on the schedule. You know you lead your people to becoming the best. Alright enough story time. So now with that perspective of being that boss. How do you make it so everybody is happy? The person I have in mind is a tenant we had. She plays every other weekend because her kids go with their father. She could not find land. Lawless her base would disappear. Being a tenant was perfect for her because she knew she could come back and have her stuff where she left it. (Minus tames they would starve to death and she would need more wheat/turnips ) I offered for her to join but she wanted to remain solo which I had no problem with. So what kind of system works for her that both 1.) Protects her stuff while she is gone for 2 weeks. 2.) Does not require her to farm for an incredible amount of time to maintain her stuff between play times. She paid for the game, does she not get to enjoy it? The current claim system does the same thing to a lot of people. The new one to me fixes it so the more softcore tribes can have land too. To me it is the current meta solution. The way for everybody to win would be super expensive for the game because they will have to rewrite a lot of coding but it would make it so everybody wins. ~Lotus

What if roughly 40% of the server population wanted the single claim and like 15% wanted the lawless? So they hear you but more people want the 1 claim. What if they took the PvPers into account for this vote and they wanted to remove PvE and make all servers PvP and so then the 2-3x population of PvP got taken into account and now even 100% of the PvE population then gets turned into 25% of the game population. So at some point they have to look at other things. Claims with landlords work for Hardcore + casual. It does not appeal to softcore. Which is another thing that gets taken into account for decision making. ~Lotus

Everybody has a system they think should be based on how they play. I believe 1 flag per company in certain zones. When you get a powerstone your company unlocks another area they can drop another flag. Eventually leading up to the areas around the Kraken only being claimable by people that have all the powerstones. The islands that are only for companies with the powerstones would damage boats and do damage (like being too hot/cold) if you didn't have the powerstone that matches the area it is too much for you to be there and your ship sinks and you die. So why would you want to progress into these zones.Mats would stack like a resource chest and remove the different types of mats needed for BP's and make them stupid expensive (legendary plank 50k wood each). Every further powerstone area would have more mats dropping and make it so you can carry more. The island outside the Kraken would be like 10x resources. The levels of monsters would scale crazy like. So you would progress further and actually have meaningful progression... This isn't how the game is though... (I'd play the hell out of that game though .) This is also just how I would want the game to be. Somebody that doesn't care about PvE progression would be like that is a terrible idea, people from my company would be like oh hell yeah no stones = no land. The thing is everybody thinks they are right and in a way everybody is right they get pissed cause they are right and by proxy the other people are wrong... That is where the problem is. This makes people like @Jatheish and @Dollie have a job that is impossible with how things are currently. Land is just 1 of many problems with this game they are trying to address. ~Lotus

Like a freeport? ~Lotus

We had a bunch of people stop playing because we ran out of content. We first pulled Kraken at the end of January and would have killed on the 23rd if it wasn't bugged for 2 weeks. We killed it 15-20 the month after waiting for the Feb update. Feb update was delayed which created a void for a lot of people. This caused a rather large chunk of the PvE players to stop playing because we ran out of content. ~Lotus

From what I read the islands will have a tier value, the higher the tier the more it will cost to claim it which mean you need more people to be in the company to claim it. They will also have an upkeep cost which will make it so if you try to pad with fake members you will lose your claim because the upkeep will become to much to maintain. ~Lotus

So what do you do when somebody Shipyard spams an island? ~Lotus

I need a better definition of original claim. To me the original claims lasted like 2 hours before they were claimable and took 30 minutes to declaim or something crazy so you always had to have somebody on to maintain your flags. That is neither here nor there. I made this post originally on reddit for how I would change it. I called it use it or lose it. COPY PASTA Hello :D, I am Lotus from Lotus :D. I am going to try to make a post that shows direction that I expected the game to have but was disappointed to find it didn't have. I bought this game and didn't know much about it except it was made by the company that made ark. So the first day was just a laggy hell of falling through the waves and all kinds of just trash. As I sailed for 12ish hours looking for an area to claim as my own I had fantasies about what I would find on islands and wondered how the game would work. I was... disappointed :(. Here is how I feel the game should work for a new player. You spawn in at the freeport. This area should be pretty safe because it's basically your tutorial zone so you learn that the printer cartridge on the right is actually your vitamins and how to replenish them. After about an hour of getting it figured out you make your first boat and sail away. Yay sailing. (I hate sailing BTW :D) now you come to your next zone... the lawless region... which should basically be a staging point to find your first actual claim area (not somewhere you live forever). So you go and encounter some lower level hostile mobs. Start to encounter the elements. Make your first box (Yay box bases) and sail away. You sail and encounter an area you can drop your claim flag at (Yay land). So now you have a patch of land to call your own. The way you maintain this land should be simple you do things on the grid. So if you are out farming trees or whatever your claim should start to gain time towards it's upkeep because you are doing things on that grid. Actions if farming or building would increase the amount of time as long as it is done on that grid. Lets say you farm up about 48 hours worth of time on your claim but you also decide you want a bigger settlement because now your buddy Bob wants to play with you and he joins your tribe. So you go and drop your second claim flag instead of having 1 flag with 48 hours you now have 2 flags with 24 hours because the time your grid has banked now gets divided by 2 and ticks down for 2 flags. This means you now need to do more work to maintain those flags. This is ok you have 2 people and bob is pretty active so you get to 72 hours in no time. Then bob goes and decides he wants to have the metal node and gems and drops 6 more flags. So now you have 8 claims at 18 hours but you need to do 8x the farm to maintain them as opposed to just the 1 flag. So you go and farm like hell for the night and go to bed with 24 hours on each flag. You wake up go to work and come back home with 10 hours on each flag. So you and Bob put up a tax bank and get your 20% tax on those gems and metal. So you and Bob farm like hell again and end up with 16 hours on each flag. This is a problem because you guys are behind where you were yesterday but you have work and need to go to sleep. So next day you get on with 2 hours left on each flag. You now realize that you can't keep those claims for the gems and metal because trying to farm that much time to maintain upkeep is too much for your 2 man crew. So you kick down to 3 flags and go to bed with 24 hours again. Your neighbors decide they want to go further from the freeport because they hear it is better farming there but it is also harder. You are sad because you like them but wonder what the bigger challenges yield in terms of reward. Over the next few days their claims run out of time and flip deleting everything they had on the land but it is now claimable for the next player to come through and work on their journey. You and Bob farm up and build your first schooner. You picked up some NPC's from a freeport and sailed to the next tile up from yours. You land in an area drop a claim and continue your journey. This new land is harder and has more aggressive creatures that are higher level. The weather is also not as friendly so you have to start wearing clothing :D. You find your old neighbors and they arn't doing too well. You and your neighbor work together and it becomes easier. After a few days of working side by side with your neighbor and talking with them you realize they are interested in going to the next area like you and Bob and merge. This merge makes it so this area is much easier and maintaining the claims is simpler when you have more hands working on it. You go to the next area and it is challenging but as a group of 8 it is much easier. The resources come at higher density but the monsters are also much stronger. Each time you guys leave a base behind you either have to go back to it and maintain the timer or let it go. So that story ended up taking a lot longer but it was to give you a feel for how I believe the game should work and not just spit out the mechanics (Which is basically what I am going to do here). So the Freeports should be easy to survive but you can't build. (middle of the map) The lawless zones should make you chilly or warm but not extreme waves. Some hostiles for you to fight but mostly neutral mobs. Your buildings desolve after a few days and that keeps the zone fresh. They should also drop basic resources like freeports. (generic great value fiber etc) (1 over from freeport) The claim zones should have tiers based on how far from the freeport you are. The monster levels increase the farther you get and the climate becomes more extreme with hot and cold and the heat/cold waves you get. The resources should also increase in density and variety . (2-3 different metals an island in the hard zone with level 60ish mobs that can't be tamed, more alphas, etc) The world should not connect North to South. (Or East to West because of how a sphere actually would work) North should be cold, South should be hot. The Polar/Volcanic region should be really hard to live in so trying to farm there regularly would make it so you don't claim as much land there because the upkeep would be too much. Also the idea is to prevent players from taking from players, neglect kills their flags. Just how I think it should work because the amount of griefing that will happen will kill this game imo. End Copy Pasta! (I feel more people read reddit than this forum XD) ~Lotus

They are capping claims. You need to have X amount of people to claim certain islands. If you let anybody drop a claim anywhere then stupid stuff can happen though. We had a group put 2 claims down and put a shack on top of a large metal spawn then quit the game. We had to wait for the sleepers to get deleted to fix it. So as a solo player if you claim near the beach to build a boat and then some guy wants to put an RP castle on your only metal spawn on the island you don't get screwed. The megas will get their desired islands at the cost of losing their outposts all over the world (Unless we have a landlord) XD. Which I am totally fine with. ~Lotus

I would offer the lands to make it so people were not stuck in lawless. I actually had a 100 land claim rule. I would knock down claim flags that were once outposts to maintain that rule. It was a luxury that a lot of people didn't get to have. I don't want them to keep the old system it is flawed. I made a post to Jat about it around a month ago what I believe is fair for a tribe of my size. Claims need to be reworked I've posted how I would change it to make it a use it or lose it system but I guess people don't want that. To remove claims though is just to remove the way for people to defend against griefing. ~Lotus

I don't think PvE has any megas that are that big. ~Lotus

The problem I see is that there's groups of 3 people that have half a grid (50 + flags) and now they can't do that. To me that is an improvement. They can keep tuning to make it better and better. ~Lotus

Flags don't merge in cause that could be exploited. You could toss your stuff to the side and go for a bigger island though. ~Lotus

That would be a risk but a bigger group should never lose control of an island. If the group is under one vision then changing leaders wouldn't matter. If a leader did do that then the group would probably fall apart. ~Lotus

I see more negative to breaking up a mega to try and get more land than positive. Boat use alone would be a super big headache. Tames would be another headache. We only have currently 83 total members. Before the wipe was announced about 20 active every day about 50 active weekly and the rest would play when they could with weird IRL schedules. Most of the other top 10 were about the same. PvP is where the groups of like 500 active members are. I am planning on having 1 big island with the potential of 1-3 medium islands depending on how politics play out. (Some groups have talked about joining us now that everything will be fresh). If other groups want to snatch up a bunch of stuff I would tell them good luck managing all that. We plan on killing the Kraken day 2 and all current content within a week. (ASSUMING IT IS NOT A BUGGY POS THAT TAKES TWO WEEKS TO GET FIXED #SALTY). Some people are pretty happy being tenants (for me atleast) I give basically whatever you need to get started. Tools, taming mats, access points to hard to get resources, hell sometimes ever tames. The way I look at tenants are they could and most of the time would just end up joining the tribe. A lot of my calculation is based on speculation of the state of the game in 2 weeks. We won't know until we are there but I believe the changes will be an improvement to the current game. ~Lotus To me the point system to buy an island makes it so they are limiting the number of flags a player has but makes it so you don't just claim the good areas. ~Lotus

Hello Forums I keep basically posting the same thing over and over so I figured I would just make my own thread. A lot of people I have talked to were basically done with Atlas when the announcement of claims being removed from PvE. Some looked to PvP some to other games. The fundamental problem PvE land claims was the system in place not claims themselves. The new system will make it so the whole island will be claimed and maintained by 1 group based on the island size. This is copy pasted from my response to another thread. I'ma just pull out some numbers here for the sake of example. Lets say there's 5 types of islands and the resources are more than enough for the number of people it takes to claim it. level 1 = 1 points (1-4 players) level 2 = 3 points (3-8 players) Level 3 = 5 points (5-12 players) Level 4 = 10 points (10-20 players) Level 5 = 15 points (This is one of those big bastard islands with like 2-3 kinds of metal, wood, thatch, fiber, it's got some saps, oils, animals, maybe fresh water.) So you have 15 people minimum for one of the huge islands. Lets say the cost of having your second claim doubles the number of points. So to have 2 level 5 islands you need 45 members atleast and that doesn't account for whatever the upkeep cost is. Currently the game has like 800ish? islands (I'm not counting them all) 500ish are claimable. Add 200 new islands you have 700. (Currently more islands than players XD) Lets really get crazy with the math and say 25 islands can hold 150 people (that is 6 people per island) So 6 people on 700 islands is 4,200 people (which is more than I have ever seen on PvE). Which this system isn't perfect but if this is what they implement (Really want a PTR) I think it will be way better than what is in place now. The lawless idea will just lead to people griefing each other off islands. End cut and paste A lot of people have had some really bad trolling done in lawless because people can build everywhere. So if somebody builds a gate at your legendary shipyard (cause I heard caliber of shipyard is going to make your boats level higher basically like a higher level tame) and now your full blueprint galley is at the mercy of 1 group of trolls that just keeps repairing their building. We also feared somebody building their house on top of the metal nodes where we decide to make our base (metal is super important for PvE progression when deciding a main manufacturing location). I've heard of a guy that followed another guy and built a shack around a guys bear so he could claim it in 7 days. I could go on and on. I could go on and on with all the stories I have heard. The point I am making is the game doesn't have enough GM staff. By having the players look out for the land as landlords they take some of the pressure off of the GM staff. The only way I could see around that would be more paid GM's which would mean they need a source of income, the game is still early access (small player base) so micro transactions won't be able to support that so it would have to be a monthly fee. I am not opposed to paying $10 a month to have active GM's (and by active I mean I want my problem resolved within an hour) to fix issues I am having. If they remove claims then 2-3 people with enough effort can cause a lot of problems for a tribe of any size. ~Lotus

I guess I could be known as the kraken guy. I didn't play enough PvP to have an educated opinion. To me it seems appealing. I agree that having players act as GM's in terms of being a landlord is what the new system will accomplish. I have no problem with that though we have been doing that for about 2 months now anyway since before they changed the alliance build system. I replied to a post that explains in more detail why I think it's such a good idea I will copy paste it and make it a thread. We don't pay monthly for this game and they have no source of income to pay for GM's to fix all our problems ~Lotus

What do you do when somebody puts a building under your full BP galley as then demands resources to demolish the building cause you can't defend your stuff? (Which I have heard happens a lot in lawless, I have seen it twice) ~Lotus

I'ma just pull out some numbers here for the sake of example. Lets say there's 5 types of islands and the resources are more than enough for the number of people it takes to claim it. level 1 = 1 points (1-4 players) level 2 = 3 points (3-8 players) Level 3 = 5 points (5-12 players) Level 4 = 10 points (10-20 players) Level 5 = 15 points (This is one of those big bastard islands with like 2-3 kinds of metal, wood, thatch, fiber, it's got some saps, oils, animals, maybe fresh water.) So you have 15 people minimum for one of the huge islands. Lets say the cost of having your second claim doubles the number of points. So to have 2 level 5 islands you need 45 members atleast and that doesn't account for whatever the upkeep cost is. Currently the game has like 800ish? islands (I'm not counting them all) 500ish are claimable. Add 200 new islands you have 700. (Currently more islands than players XD) Lets really get crazy with the math and say 25 islands can hold 150 people (that is 6 people per island) So 6 people on 700 islands is 4,200 people (which is more than I have ever seen on PvE). Which this system isn't perfect but if this is what they implement (Really want a PTR) I think it will be way better than what is in place now. The lawless idea will just lead to people griefing each other off islands. ~Lotus